Heinrich Czolbe - Philosophy

Philosophy

Czolbe's philosophy was part of the revival of materialism that took place in post-Hegelian German philosophy. This was in part brought on by the criticisms of Christian theology and supernaturalism in David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus and the criticisms of Christian theology and Hegelian idealism in the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, most famously in The Essence of Christianity. The new materialism was also given impetus by the recent successes and the increasing prestige of science. The new movement was represented by Heinrich Czolbe and his contemporaries such as Karl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, Eugen Dühring and Ludwig Büchner, all of whom explicitly took the natural sciences as their ideal.

In Neue Darstellung der Sensualismus (New Exposition of Sensationalism) (1855), Czolbe defended his own system of materialism in which everything resolves into matter and motion. He advocated a system of thought which he called sensualism or sensationalism, which excluded appeals to supra-sensible domains and emphasised the importance of empirical knowledge. In order to deny the mysterious concept of creation a place in scientific philosophy, his view of nature was strictly atemporal and ahistorical. Like Ludwig Büchner, he denied that the universe could ever end in the irreversible state of heat death but he went much farther in claiming stability to be the eternal and absolute. Not only had the earth always existed but so had organic life forms. Any beginning or end was ruled out as "a limit of time or its end somewhere in the past or the future is as unthinkable.....as a limit of space" (Neue Darstellung, p.183). In 1865 he published a work on Der Grenzen und der Ursprung des menschlichen Erkentniss (The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge).

Czolbe complains that the physiologists play right into the hands of the speculative, idealistic philosophers, because they do not think through the philosophical consequences of their physiological theories (Czolbe 1856, 27–28). The only way to defeat the speculative philosophers, Czolbe argues, is to insist that sensory qualities are mechanically propagated through the nerves without any change (Czolbe 1855, 14; 1856, 15–16, 27–28). His view appears to be that qualitative properties such as colours or sounds are transmitted directly from the outside to the inside. The suggestion is that colours and sounds exist independently of the subject. They are not generated by the nerves, rather, they are transmitted to the inside of the brain by the nerves. Of course, Czolbe was not ignorant of wave theories of light or sound, but claimed that the wave particle already is the colour or sound, which has only to be transmitted to the right spot in the brain in order for us to be conscious of it. As Friedrich Albert Lange mockingly emphasizes, the sound waves somehow involve the experience of their sound in themselves already (Lange 1873–75, 2:111). Czolbe appears to bite this bullet, and accepts Hermann Lotze's description of his view, according to which "the sensible qualities of sensation are already completely present in the external stimuli, that from a red-radiating object a ready-made redness, from a sound source a melody, detaches itself in order to penetrate into us through the portals of the sense organs" (Czolbe 1856, 14). If this were the correct view of how the sense organs work, then, Czolbe claims, we would have an empirical account of knowledge that was not self-undermining.

One immediate problem was how to defend such a view against the empirical evidence then available. Consider, for example, something Czolbe was aware of, namely, the presence of electrical currents in nerves. The worry for Czolbe is that light waves end up being converted to electrical currents in the nerves, which might lead back to the supposedly self-undermining empirical stories of the other materialists. Czolbe's response is first to point out that it is possible that both electricity and light—not just light waves but the sensations of light—could be transmitted at the same time. He then points to supposed empirical data that at the moment of excitation the electrical current in the nerve weakens. This, he thinks, is decisive evidence that the electrical current is not responsible for transmission since if it were, the electrical current would have to increase at the moment of excitation rather than decrease (Czolbe 1855: 16–17). Friedrich Albert Lange concedes that Czolbe's materialism, were it to actually be supported by empirical evidence, is in principle able to avoid undermining itself. Czolbe has to twist the empirical evidence however and so Czolbe's materialism ultimately does undermine itself. Lange accuses Czolbe of being obstinate and treating the results of scientific investigations in an unscientific manner, as mere illusions that would disappear on closer examination (Lange 1873–75, 2:291).