Ludwig Büchner

BÜCHNER, Ludwig Friedrich Karl Christian (Ludwig Büchner, 1824–99), one of the most prominent materialists of the 19th century. He was born in Darmstadt into a physician's family. In 1843, he entered the University of Giessen, where he studied general philosophical sciences at first, and then, at his father's wish, although feeling no inclination for it, medicine. In 1848, he defended his dissertation "Beiträge zur Hallschen Lehre von einem exzimotorischen Nervensystem" (Giessen, 1848). He received further training in Würzburg, where Virchow was teaching at the time, and in Vienna, which at that time was alluringly drawing people with such names as Skoda, Dumreicher, Hebra, Rokitansky, and others. Upon returning from Vienna, Büchner engaged in medical practice and, in part, in forensic medical work. The articles that appeared as a result of this work in "Vereinte deutsche Zeitschrift für Staatsarzneikunde" proved to be so valuable and made such an impression that the Union of Baden Physicians elected Büchner as its honorary member in 1855 and awarded him a silver medal in 1860. In 1852, Büchner took the position of assistant in a medical clinic and privatdozent at the department of forensic medicine in Tübingen. But the publication of his book "Kraft und Stoff" (Leipzig, 1855), which subsequently became famous, cost Büchner his professorship, and he returned to his native city, where he again engaged in practical medical activity. As a physician, he took an active part in the wars of 1866 and 1871. In 1881, Büchner became the head of the German Freethinkers League, being one of its organizers. Büchner's numerous popularizing works significantly contributed to the dissemination of natural science knowledge, materialism, and atheism among the broad working masses. Büchner was not, however, an original thinker or researcher. Together with Vogt and Moleschott, he repeated the basic tenets of the mechanical materialism of the 18th century. He incorrectly extended the ideas of Darwin on natural selection, which he had warmly accepted, to human society as well. The distinction between the non-living and the living appeared to him only as a distinction between the simple and the complex, and he completely failed to notice the specific features of the living. He had a very weak understanding of 19th-century philosophy and, in particular, of dialectics. Thought, in his view, reduces to material motion, while he sometimes considers it a property of all matter, and at other times a result of brain activity. Marx and Engels sharply criticized Büchner, but this criticism, it goes without saying, refers not to his materialism, but to his ignorance and disregard of dialectics. Büchner had, in his time, a great influence on Russian social thought as well. Pisarev, among others, was fascinated by him; Russian "nihilism" was nourished by his philosophy. His "Force and Matter," due to censorship conditions, could not be printed at the time, but was widely distributed in lithographed form. Besides this book (Russian translation, St. Petersburg, 1907), his main works are: "Natur und Geist" (Leipzig, 1857), "Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur" (Leipzig, 1869), "Physiologische Bilder" (Leipzig, 1861, Russian translation, Moscow, 1862), "Aus dem Geistesleben der Tiere" (Berlin, 1876, Russian translation, St. Petersburg, 1902), "Aus Natur und Wissenschaft" (Leipzig, 1862), "Sechs Vorlesungen über die Darwinsche Theorie" (Leipzig, 1868), "Darwinismus und Sozialismus" (Leipzig, 1894, Russian translation in the collection "Darwinism and Marxism," Kharkov, 1923), "Der Gottesbegriff" (Leipzig, 1874), "Am Sterbelager des Jahrhunderts" (Giessen, 1898).