Karl Vorländer

Karl Vorländer (born January 2, 1860 in Marburg , † December 6, 1928 in Münster ) was a German high school professor in Solingen. He dealt with the history of philosophy and represented the Marburg School as a Kant researcher .

Life

Vorländer's father was the philosopher Franz Vorländer . His mother was the daughter of a Hessian regional finance councilor. He grew up with two sisters.

Vorländer attended the Philippinum humanistic grammar school in Marburg . He then studied philosophy, German literature and history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin . He switched to the Philipps University of Marburg and only heard philosophy from Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp . In 1883 he was promoted to Dr. phil. PhD. In his doctoral thesis he defended Kant against the charge of formalism . From 1883 he taught at the grammar school in Neuwied and Mönchengladbach . In 1887 he became a high school professor and school inspector at the humanistic high school in Solingen . In 1903 the first edition of his history of philosophy appeared . In 1919 he received an honorary professorship in Münster . Vorländer became known for his excellent Kant studies. He worked successfully in the field of Kantian philology. In the years 1899–1906 he published most of Kant's writings in Halle (Saale) with introductions and detailed subject indexes. In 1924 he published the influential Kant biography Immanuel Kant. The man and the work. in which he presented the life and work of Kant in a detailed and knowledgeable manner.

Until 1923, Vorländer was one of the main philosophical authors of the social democratically oriented Die Neue Zeit . Before 1918 he wrote under the pseudonym Akademikus . From 1924 he became an author in the Marxist successor magazine Die Gesellschaft . With his not exclusively philosophical contributions to Die Gesellschaft , he was considered "one of the leading authors for social education".

Work in the Marburg School

Vorländer was philosophically close to the Marburg Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp . Even if - as Max Weber judged - he was “not a scholar of the very first order”, Cohen and Natorp valued his workforce and his integrity of character. The Social Democracy was his political home. Like the other neo-Kantians in Marburg, he assumed that the community of free people who were only committed to their own will could be built on the basis of the Kantian ethics , which the ideologues of the socialist movement strived for. The people of Marburg were convinced that socialism was "morally justified". Capitalism is unjust and immoral because the worker cannot act for himself but is only used as a means. The categorical imperative represented by Kant is a timeless principle on which socialism is also based. Vorländer explained this view in a lecture on Kant and Marx that he gave on April 8, 1904 in Vienna. In summary, he stated that

"Today's social philosophers whose scientific method is determined by KANT's critique of knowledge ... recognize historical materialism as a significant scientific advance."

Vorländer also counted Natorp, Franz Staudinger and Rudolf Stammler among these social philosophers .

There was no longer any joint theoretical concept development. In 1914, contrary to their promises, the Social Democrats agreed to the approval of a war loan in the Reichstag, thus making it possible to finance the war, which divided the socialist movement. In June 1919 was Vorländer delegate of Solingen majority Social Democrats on the Berlin conference of unification of MSPD and USPD . Among the Marburg Neo-Kantians, the social democratic war policy also led to conflicts and separations.

History of philosophy

Vorländer drafted his two-volume history of philosophy for students and educated laypeople. The oldest representations, such as those by the Englishman Thomas Stanley (London 1655) or the German Johann Jakob Brucker (1731 to 1737 and 1742 to 1744), he considered worthless. The following representations of the 18./19. Century he described as out of date. Some of them also have the disadvantage that their authors tend to be “addicted to construction”.

Vorländer wanted to summarize "the whole history of philosophy" and thought in a limited presentation and to limit himself to the general or the generalizable. In order to be able to meet the high standards, historiography must “scrupulously research the facts” and proceed “according to the principles of critical-historical method ”. Aspects of cultural history and the history of science had to be taken into account, as well as systematic and biographical factors. A historian of philosophy had to be a philosopher. In this way, a maximum of objectivity should be achieved. He considered the subjectivity of the presentation to be inevitable, even necessary, in order to bring history to life. His presentation thus corresponded to the scientific standards of his time. He described the character of his history of philosophy as "rational" and philosophy as a "rational world view".

“The fact that I treat Plato with greater love than Aristotle, Kant more thoroughly than Schelling or Hegel, and that I have devoted almost as many pages to Hermann Cohen as Wilhelm Wundt, is due to my philosophical view, which, despite all the striving for objectivity, no philosophical historian refuses can and should. "

Vorländer's history of philosophy was published in five editions by 1919. For some time now it has been reissued or reprinted by various publishers. In 1924 he published a Popular History of Philosophy for laypeople , which is also available as a reprint in stores.

Kant for socialists

He would be happy to show the materialists "what a solid foundation the critical method ... can give socialism", commented Vorlander in Kant und der Sozialismus on his proposal to give German socialism a unified theory. Socialism was defined as a “moral, ie ethically based, worldview”. Marx started out from the economic realities when he developed his theory of "historical materialism". Engels had made it clear that the upheaval - instead of changes in the minds through philosophy - meant changes in the mode of production and exchange. Vorländer found that Kant did not find any socio-political ideas. But Kant thought of “pure morality” or the categorical imperative as an ethical principle for all citizens of a state or for humanity. This principle is also contained in the idea of ​​socialism. In this sense, Vorländer then quoted Cohen, Kant was "the true and real originator of German socialism". Vorländer added that the connection between Kant and socialism was established through the “purely moral”.

From his point of view, Vorländer showed that this connection was necessary when it came to the implementation of socialist ideals, which Vorländer interpreted as the realm of Kantian purposes . He referred, among other things, to his Neo-Kantian colleague Staudinger, who had claimed that Marxists, in pursuit of their own principle, must return to Kant as soon as they see this fact. Vorländer explained that there are indications of this from Marxist authors. He named Jean Jaurès , Eduard Bernstein , Ludwig Woltmann and S. Gunter. Jaurès considered a connection between the materialistic theory of history and the idealistic one necessary. Bernstein wrote: “The call back to Kant also applies to a certain extent to the theory of socialism.” Woltmann wanted an alliance with Kant's philosophy, because Marx's theory of history is ethical through and through. Gunter demanded - like the Neo-Kantians - "uniformity and cohesion" of the method, which Kant had described as "the way in which a certain object can be fully recognized according to the nature of a science". The socialist movement - according to Gunter - is also interested in eliminating contradictions in thinking, ethics and social policy. “Neo-Kantians can put up with such a 'Marxist'. He's working towards the same goal, only from the other side of the mountain, ”Vorländer commented.

It is not known whether and what response Vorländer's ideas had among the ideologues of the labor movement. Vorländer only mentioned that Bernstein's publications had increased the discussion. Scientific authors today assume that the “idealism of Marburg Neo-Kantianism” was understood as “competition with one's own theory”, or “defamed as an anti-socialist web of bourgeois ideologues ...”.

Honors

• Vorländerweg in Münster

Fonts

• as publisher: editions of works by Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, with Register, 1899 and others)
• The Kantian justification of the moral principle , 1889
• The formalism of the Kantian ethics in its necessity and fertility , Diss. Phil. Marburg 1893
• Goethe's relationship to Kant (Kantstudien I ff.)
• Kant and Socialism , 1900
• The Neo-Kantian Movement in Socialism , 1902
• History of philosophy . 3 volumes. 1. A. 1903 (online at textlog.de ); 3rd A. 1911; 5. A. 1919 (online at zeno.org )
• Popular history of philosophy . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1921. (= International Library 62); (2nd edition 1922; 3rd edition 1923) Hamburg 2012. 1924 edition in the Gutenberg project .
• Kant - Schiller - Goethe. Collected essays . Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1907. (2nd probably edition 1923)
• Marx and Kant , 1904; 1911
• Kant and Marx: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Socialism , 1911; 1926
• Marx, Engels and Lassalle as philosophers . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1920. (2nd edition 1921; 3rd edition 1926)
• The philosophy of our classics. Lessing - Herder - Schiller - Goethe . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1923. (= International Library 66)
• Immanuel Kant. The man and the work. Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1924. (at textlog ), 3rd exp . 1992 edition
• From Machiavelli to Lenin. Modern state and social theories . Leipzig 1926.
• Karl Marx. His life and his work. with 15 panels . Felix Meiner, Leipzig 1929.

literature

• Rudolf Eisler : Philosophers Lexicon. Lives, Works and Teachings of the Thinkers , 1912
• Karl Vorländer , in: Franz Osterroth : Biographical Lexicon of Socialism . Deceased personalities . Vol. 1. JHW Dietz Nachf., Hanover 1960, pp. 320–321.
• Kevin M. McCarron: The rise of the Marburg Phoenix: Karl Vorlaender's Kantian / Marxian synthesis as key in the debate over capitalism vs. economic democracy. University of Maine, 1996.
• Walther Killy (Ed.) Among others: Vorlaender. In: Dictionary of German Biography , Vol. I. Berlin / New York 2006.
• Walter Kinkel: Karl Vorländer in memory . Kant studies 34 (1929), pp. 1–5.

Web links

• Works at archive.org
• Works by Karl Vorländer in the Gutenberg-DE project

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dissertation: The formalism of the Kantian ethics in its necessity and fertility .
2. ↑ Digital version at Zeno.Org.
3. ^ Christa Uhlig: Reform pedagogy and school reform: Discourses in the socialist press of the Weimar Republic; Sources selected from the magazines Die Neue Zeit / Die Gesellschaft and Sozialistische Monatshefte (1919–1933). Bern 2008, p. 54.
4. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Sieg: Rise and Fall of Marburg Neo-Kantianism: The History of a Philosophical School Community , Volume 1. Würzburg 1994, 233f.
   Wolfgang Eichhorn: Effects of the practical philosophy of Kant - the Marburg neo-Kantianism. In: Meeting reports of the Leibniz Society 69 (2004) 145-163.
   Norbert Jegelka: Paul Natorp: Philosophy, Pedagogy, Politics. Würzburg 1992, p. 152 f.
5. ↑ In 1948 Hirschberger wrote about the problems of his limited presentation that one was constantly busy thinking about what to leave out. See Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg im Breisgau 1948, foreword. Nachdr. Frechen n.d., page V.
6. ^ Foreword to the 2nd edition of the History of Philosophy, Nov. 7, 1907.
7. ↑ See Vorländer: Foreword to the 1st edition 1903 and introduction.
   Matthias Neumann: German idealism as reflected in its historians: genesis and protagonists. Würzburg 2008, p. 86f.
8. ^ Kant and socialism. P. 67
9. ↑ Cf. Friedrich Engels: Mr. Eugen Dühring's revolution in science . MEW Vol. 20, pp. 248-249.
10. ↑ See "Method". In: Rudolf Eisler: Dictionary of Philosophical Terms. 1904.
11. ^ Kant and socialism. P.56.
12. ↑ Norbert Jegelka: Paul Natorp: philosophy, politics pedagogy. Würzburg 1992, p. 10.
13. ↑ Vorländerweg