Lotze's monism — or his belief in the substantial unity of everything that exists — stands opposed to Herbart's earlier pluralistic atomism. His redescription of causality likewise coheres with his prior conviction that there must exist a human soul endowed with freedom of the will. Correlatively, Lotze encourages us to think of the world as the product of the will of God, of an infinite spirit: reality is, hence, that which corresponds to self-consciousness. But is this particular self-consciousness or spirit — which we may identify with the absolute — also personal in nature? Our first impulse yields a negative response simply because personality normally is associated with the notion of fixed limits (which would, of course, be inappropriate in an infinite, unlimited being). And yet, Lotze contends that we must conceive of God as the preeminent personality and so, once again, God's own personality is “an immediate certainty,” grasped as a necessity of the human mind.

While the centrality of ‘person’ is correctly associated with Kant, the idea undergoes a number of critical developments in the various strands of post-Kantian idealism. On the one hand, Kant had relied on personality in distinguishing rational being from mere things, by reference to the former's capacity for self-government or autonomy. Further, Kant had insisted that persons have “worth” or “value” and that this serves as a critical characteristic separating them from mere things (which may be said to have only a “price”). On the other, the scientific approach, when applied directly to human beings, appear to have rendered the notion of personality incomprehensible and superfluous. (Indeed, Lotze would probably not be at all surprised by the threat posed to personal identity resulting from reflection on the quantum theory!). Also, if Christianity is re-described as an ethical religion — stressing the essential aspects of interior life and, henceforth, abandoning all claims to metaphysical or cosmological significance — then it cannot stand as a bulwark against the materialist onslaught on inessential aspects of our subjectivity.

Against these and similar considerations Lotze argued that our own subjectivity is not founded in opposition to objectivity: the ‘I’ is not opposed and formed in reaction to the ‘not-I’ but rather in its encounter with a ‘thou’ (OutRel, pp. 65ff). Consequently, personality is an ethical concept par excellance and is, qua ethical, identifiable as the “ultimate reality.” Of course we cannot identify the world with our own subjective consciousness without falling into either solipsism or subjective idealism. Hence, we arrive, instead, at the necessary conclusion of objective idealism; this view Santayana aptly expresses as follows:

The seat of the value of the world is consciousness, but of course not exclusively human consciousness. These moments that contain the sense of things, the consciousness of the cosmic law, — those in fact that contain the personality of cosmic life — contain also its value, and the happiness to which it gives rise. To us the divine life is revealed in beauty, in our own seasons of happiness, and our faith in the deep roots that good has in nature. Our consciousness, however, constitutes but an echo of that consciousness in which the purpose of the world is realized; the goal of things is the happiness of God … (Santayana, 1971, p. 223).

Reality is purposive and its contents form an ideal unity and this conclusion is fostered by an awareness of the view of the world comprised sub specie aeternitatis in the nature of supreme consciousness.

Further, Lotze's peculiar investigations into morality provide a case study in Lotzean dialectic. Moral rules cannot be understood as merely prudential maxims or as essentially self-regarding in nature: moral principles must possess an “intrinsic worth.” However, this fact should not capitulate us into either a mystical or religious position, on the one hand, or the “empty formalism” of Kantianism, on the other. For both utilitarians and egoists are so far right when they insist upon the necessary presence of pleasure and pain (as concrete content) in moral deliberation. But to escape such subjective egoism in morality is possible only “if we change our conception of our personality and its position in the world” (OutRel, p. 159). Characteristically, our untutored convictions suggest the idea that moral laws express and embody the will of God. To escape the subsequent Euthyphro-style questions and difficulties, we must identify God with the Good:

God is nothing else than that will whose purport and mode of action can be conceived of in our reflection as that which is good in itself — as a will which can only be separated by abstraction from the living form in which it exists in the real God (ibid., p. 161).

Likewise our will expresses its moral nature in the ability to freely choose between competing values, without compulsion. But this choice is always rooted in a concrete reality — our feeling, for instance, that truth is to be pursued because it is good.

The reduction of cognition, emotion and volition to values was to fit hand-in-hand with other thinkers' preoccupation with the spectre of relativism. Although Lotze himself took refuge in a quasi-Platonic account, the neo-Kantians, among others, pushed farther in the attempt to ground value in some account of the nature of consciousness itself. Windleband, for example, developed the notion of a “normal [i.e., normative] consciousness,” which is to say a consciousness that was itself productive of norms or values. The further particulars here must await another occasion. But Schnädelbach's observations of a fundamental shift from Lotze's to Windelband's position — or, from a “teleological value—relevance of reality … as a relation of transcendental constitution in which value stood to valuation” to one which emphasized “the evaluating normal consciousness … [as] the basis of both axiology and ontology” (cf. Schnädelbach, 1984, p. 182) — surely calls out for a detailed investigation. Yet, in any event, it remains clear that only by tracing the fate of his singular contribution — the very concepts of value and validity — can Lotze's continuing relevance can be spotlighted.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermann-lotze/#7