NEO-KANTIANISM

"Neo-Kantianism" is a term used to designate a group of somewhat similar movements that prevailed in Germany between 1870 and 1920 but had little in common beyond a strong reaction against irrationalism and speculative naturalism and a conviction that philosophy could be a "science" only if it returned to the method and spirit of Immanuel Kant. These movements were the fulfillment of Kant's prophecy that in a hundred years his philosophy would come into its own.

Because of the complexity and internal tensions in Kant's philosophy, not all the Neo-Kantians brought the same message from the Sage of Königsberg, and the diversity of their teachings was as great as their quarrels were notorious. At the end of the nineteenth century the Neo-Kantians were as widely separated as the first-generation Kantians had been at its beginning, and the various Neo-Kantian movements developed in directions further characterized by such terms as Neo-Hegelian and Neo-Fichtean. But whereas G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and others had used the words of Kant while being alien to their spirit, the Neo-Kantians were, on the whole, faithful to the spirit while being revisionists with respect to the letter. Attempting to legitimize their revisions by the ipsissima verba of Kant, they established the craft of "Kant-philology" and began an analysis of Kant's texts that had not been equaled in microscopic punctiliousness except in the exegesis of the Bible and of a few classical authors. Hans Vaihinger's immense commentary on the first seventy pages of the Critique of Pure Reason (Commentar zu Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft, " 2 vols., Berlin and Leipzig, 1881–1893) is an exemplar of this craft and industry.

Neo-Kantianism grew out of the peculiar social-cultural situation of German science and philosophy, and in turn it constituted a new academic situation with many characteristics of a long intellectual fad. Most of the groups of Neo-Kantians had their own journals—the Philosophische Arbeiten at Marburg, Logos at Heidelberg, the Annalen der Philosophie und philosophischer Kritik of Vaihinger, and the Philosophische Abhandlungen at Göttingen. (Kant-Studien, like the Kant Gesellschaft, was open to all.) Doctrines were known by the names of the universities where they originated; men entered and left the movement as if it were a church or political party; members of one school blocked the appointments and promotions of members of the others; eminent Kant scholars and philosophers who did not found their own schools or accommodate themselves to one of the established schools tended to be neglected as outsiders and contemned as amateurs. As many as seven distinct schools have been described by historians, but they do not agree on the programs, heresies, and bona fide membership of each school.

The Beginnings

So far as an intellectual movement can be said to have a beginning at a specific moment of time, Neo-Kantianism began with the publication at Stuttgart in 1865 of Otto Liebmann's Kant und die Epigonen, whose motto—"Back to Kant!"—has become famous. German philosophy was generally weak toward the middle of the nineteenth century; there was less interest in it, and less ability among its practitioners, than at perhaps any other time in modern German history. Earlier in the century, when Kant's philosophy had been submerged first in the great idealistic systems and then in those of nature-philosophy, there had been modest calls for a return to Kant (for instance, by I. H. Fichte, the son of J. G. Fichte, and by Ernst Reinhold, the son of K. L. Reinhold) as a means of escape from the kinds of philosophy that Kant would have held to be impossible and that seemed more and more to offer nothing of value to German cultural life as a counterbalance to the materialism attendant upon the flourishing of natural science, technology, and national economy. However, in the decade preceding Liebmann's book there had been signs of change.

zeller and fischer

Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), in his Heidelberg lecture, Ueber Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie (published Heidelberg, 1862), called for a return to epistemology; and this, he spelled out explicitly, meant a return to Kant. Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), the greatest historian of philosophy at that time and the teacher of Liebmann, Johannes Volkelt, and Wilhelm Windelband, in 1860 published a monumental book on Kant (Kants Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre, Mannheim and Heidelberg) that presented, in a form still useful although outmoded in details, a picture of Kant that could not but excite interest in and study of Kant. In 1865 Fischer initiated a great controversy with Adolf Trendelenburg on the proper interpretation of Kant's theory of space; this controversy mobilized most of the philosophical public in Germany on one side or the other, including Trendelenburg's pupil Hermann Cohen, who had hitherto concentrated mostly on Plato.

helmholtz and lange

Two other men, Hermann von Helmholtz and F. A. Lange, almost simultaneously with Liebmann made their spiritual pilgrimage to Königsberg.

Helmholtz

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), then Germany's greatest scientist, had been arguing for years for a view whose origin he found in Kant. The doctrine of specific energies of sensory nerves had led him to a theory of the subjectivity of sensory qualities, which he regarded as signs of unknown objects interacting with our sense organs; he then extended this commonly held view to the conclusion that space itself is dependent upon our bodily constitution. This theory made it possible for Helmholtz to argue that there could be alternative spaces and geometries, each appropriate to a particular kind of nervous apparatus and necessary to the being so constituted, but none of them picturing the real structure of the world. Thus, while Helmholtz gave up Kant's theory of the unique status of Euclidean geometry, he held that his own theory of space was in keeping both with Kant's theory and with the most modern work in mathematics, physics, and physiology. Moreover, in his theory of unconscious inferences he accepted the Kantian theory that perception involves judgment. The guiding principle in such unconscious inference is the a priori principle of causation, which extends our knowledge no further than possible experience, but gives us the right to posit unknown causes of our sensations. Helmholtz vigorously rejected metaphysics but extolled philosophy as an ancilla to science. Both the strengths and the obvious weaknesses of Helmholtz's Kantianism were effective in making a return to Kant seem fruitful to science, for it meant that the greatest of German thinkers could be used on the side of science, against metaphysics.

Lange

The year 1866 saw the publication of Friedrich Albert Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (Iserlohn and Leipzig; translated by E. C. Thomas as History of Materialism, 3 vols., London, 1877–1879). Lange, who was born in 1828 and died, while professor of philosophy at Marburg, in 1875, wrote his massive but readable book to point out the metaphysical mysteries and pretensions of materialism, which traditionally claimed to be only a courageous but unspeculative extension of the results of science into regions previously occupied only by theology and superstition. Like Helmholtz, Lange held that the sensible world is a product of the interaction between the human organism and an unknown reality. The world of experience is determined by this interaction, but the organism itself is only an object of experience, and it is to be understood by psychology and physiology. Causality, needed in all such sciences, is a mode of thought necessary to a mind constituted like ours; processes and principles of thought have physiological bases. Thus, materialism (although a phenomenal materialism, since matter itself is only a phenomenon) is the most likely truth about reality so far as it can be known. But what of Kant's intelligible world? Lange completely rejected Kant's teaching of the rational necessity of the structure of an intelligible but unknowable world; he held that our views of it are only products of poetic fancy (Dichtung ). While Lange defended materialism as a doctrine of reality (phenomena) that serves as a bulwark against theology and metaphysics, he held that because knowledge is not man's whole goal, Dichtung is also important. "Man needs to supplement reality [about which materialism is the best truth we know] with an ideal world of his own creation," and this is a world of value "against which neither logic nor touch of hand nor sight of eye can prevail" (History of Materialism, Vol. III, pp. 342 and 347).

Two things stand out in the works of these precursors—if not direct progenitors—of Neo-Kantianism. Their Kantianism was exclusively theoretical, oriented entirely around the Critique of Pure Reason and neglectful or disdainful of Kant's practical philosophy. This puts them in the line of development of German positivism, a line that goes from them through Alois Riehl and the fictionalist Hans Vaihinger to Ernst Mach and Moritz Schlick. Their Kantianism was also psychological and even physiological—the a priori elements they acknowledged were dependent upon the human constitution; the transcendental and logical aspects of Kant's work were neglected or rejected. In this respect they were followed by Hans Cornelius (1863–1947) and by Richard Hönigswald (1875–1947), a pupil of Riehl.

Metaphysical Neo-Kantianism

Theoretical and physiological Kantianism was in the air when the twenty-five-year-old Liebmann published his manifesto. Kant und die Epigonen argued that Kant made one great mistake: believing in the existence of the thing-in-itself. This belief, however, was not an essential part of Kant's doctrine, but only a dogmatic residue that could be removed without damage to the rest of the system. However, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jakob Friedrich Fries, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Arthur Schopenhauer either did not recognize the belief that there is a thing-in-itself as an error (for instance, Schopenhauer) or, while recognizing it as an error, made analogous errors in their efforts to correct it (Fichte's transcendental ego is as unknowable and unthinkable as the thing-in-itself). The weaknesses thus introduced into their systems were fatal, since they depended upon a concept that Kant had only inadvertently admitted. Hence, none of them could be followed; one had to return to their common source, remove its error, and apply this improved Kantianism to present problems.

While Liebmann's first book showed remnants of a psychological interpretation of Kant, his next book, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit (Strasbourg, 1876) argued for a strictly transcendental "logic of facts" whose inspiration was as much Spinozistic as Kantian. In this book Liebmann stood close to the Marburg school, at least in his conclusions. However, in his later Gedanken und Tatsachen (2 vols., Strasbourg, 1882–1901) he admitted the need and argued for the possibility of a "critical metaphysics" as a "rigorous consideration of human views and hypotheses about the essence of things," growing out of "deep-rooted, ineradicable spiritual needs and intellectual duty" (ibid., 2nd ed., Vol. II, p. 113). His critical metaphysics makes hypotheses about the transcendent and the unknowable, but leaves open a field for value decisions that do not depend on claims to valid knowledge, but only on our wills as they are nurtured by culture. In this line of thought Liebmann seemed to draw closer to the Heidelberg school, but even in his earlier work there were anticipations of Windelband's famous analysis of the differences between historical and scientific knowledge.

riehl

Less openly metaphysical than Liebmann's was the realistic Neo-Kantianism of Alois Riehl (1844–1924). In contrast to Liebmann, Riehl insisted that Kant held to the real existence of things-in-themselves and that this concept is essential to Kant's—and to any sound—theory of knowledge. He asserted that Kant proved only that things-in-themselves cannot be known by pure reason, not that they are not known mediately in sense perception. Phenomena are simply their modes of appearance; they are not in a different ontological realm, but are merely actualizations of their Aristotelian potentialities in the context of a mind. The laws of the organization of phenomena are transcendentally (not psychologically) based on the activity of self-consciousness; their specific characteristics depend on the reality of that of which they are appearances. All knowledge is or can become scientific; philosophy is nothing but a theory of science; metaphysics is "an opiate of the mind."

Nevertheless, Riehl believed it both unavoidable and legitimate to reason hypothetically from phenomena to reality, for metaphysical hypotheses cannot be entirely excluded from science itself. He argued, for instance, for a double-aspect psychophysical theory of the relationship between mind and the world, for a partial duplication of phenomenal laws in the real world, and for complete determinism. The tone of his philosophy, however, was somewhat positivistic; he said he acknowledged "the metaphysical" but not "metaphysics." With wissenschaftliche (scientific) philosophy he contrasted unwissenschaftliche philosophy, or classical speculative metaphysics, which he rejected; and with both he contrasted nichtwissenschaftliche philosophy as a practical discipline for the realization of humanly created values (Wertbegung and Geistesführung ). In his later life he was most concerned with the latter.

other metaphysical interpretations

Another realistic metaphysical interpretation of Kant was given by the Kant philologist Erich Adickes (1866–1928) in his Kants Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich (Tübingen, 1929).

Other attempts at "critical metaphysics" on a Kantian basis were made by Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930) and by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908). The former's Kants Erkenntnistheorie (Leipzig, 1879) and the latter's Entwicklungsgeschichte der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie (Leipzig, 1875) tried to show that Kant himself was an idealistic metaphysician malgré lui. Later works designed to bring out the metaphysics in Kant were by Max Wundt (Kant als Metaphysiker, Stuttgart, 1924), Heinz Heimsoeth (articles collected in Studien zur Philosophie Immanuel Kants, Cologne, 1956), and Gottfried Martin (Kant, Ontologie und Wissenschaftslehre, Cologne, 1951; translated by P. G. Lucas as Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science, Manchester, U.K., and New York, 1955). Martin Heidegger's Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Bonn, 1929; translated by J. S. Churchill as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Bloomington, IN, 1962) presented an extreme form of this view but falls outside the scope of Neo-Kantian intentions.

Marburg Neo-Kantianism

By the standards of recent philosophy Marburg Neo-Kantianism, or panlogistic transcendental philosophy, was no less metaphysical, but by the standards of the time its orientation around the "fact of science" seemed to make it at least antispeculative. In launching the journal of the Marburg school, Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp wrote: "Whoever is bound to us stands with us on the foundation of the transcendental method.… Philosophy, to us, is bound to the fact of science, as this elaborates itself. Philosophy, therefore, to us is the theory of the principles of science and therewith of all culture" (Philosophische Arbeiten, Vol. I, No. 1, 1906).

hermann cohen

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), a younger colleague of Lange's at Marburg, rejected the naturalism he believed to be inherent in the Kantianism of Helmholtz, Lange, and Liebmann. They were wrong in thinking philosophy should begin with an analysis of consciousness and should show how conscious human beings apply concepts to the data of sensation in order to produce phenomenalistic world pictures that are distinguished from things as they are. The fact to be understood is not this highly dubious psychological process; the fact is science itself and, in ethics, it is not human motives and aspirations and feelings of duty but the fact of civil society under law as constructed in the science of jurisprudence. Kant himself had tried to understand "the fact of science and culture," but he failed to separate this fact from dubious psychological and phenomenological facts he seemed to be dealing with.

Logic for Cohen is not at all psychologistic; it is not even formal. The very notion of formal logic presupposes something not formal: data drawn from some other source, be it pure intuition or perception. Logic, as Cohen saw it, is the logic of knowledge, not the logic of empty thought; it is the logic of truth, in which any assertion gains its status as true solely by virtue of its systematic position in a body of universal laws that, in turn, require each other on methodological grounds. Thought, Cohen taught, accepts nothing as given and is not true of anything independent of it—certainly not of intuitional data, as Kant believed. Thought generates content as well as form, and the content of self-contained thought is reality itself as object and goal of knowledge. This extravagant panlogism was based on Cohen's ingenious interpretation of the history of the differential calculus, which he saw as the logic of mathematical physics. Not number and not observed motion, as Kant believed, are given as raw data to science; rather, the mathematical differential, which is not given at all but is created by thought, is the necessary device for the creation of nature as object of possible experience: "This mathematical generation of motion [by integration of the derivative] and thereby nature itself is the triumph of pure thinking" (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, Berlin, 1902, p. 20). Through an interpretation of Kant's teachings concerning intensive magnitudes of sensations, Cohen saw in the method of the calculus a paradigm of the category of origin (Ursprung ) and the logical process of production (Erzeugung ) to which every fact owes its reality; that is, its position in a logically necessary scheme.

Through the work of thought on its own materials, Cohen believed he could dispense with all independent givens in knowledge. Nothing is given (gegeben ); all is problematic (aufgegeben ). Fact is that which is completely determined by thought. The thing-in-itself is not a thing at all. It does not exist, but is only a thought of a limit (Grenzbegriff ) to our approach to a complete determination of things as they are; that is, as they would fully satisfy systematic thought.

Cohen's pupil Ernst Cassirer spoke of him as "one of the most resolute Platonists that has ever appeared in the history of philosophy." When Cohen said, for example, "Thinking itself produces what is to be held to be" (ibid., p. 67; cf. p. 402), he was not speaking of thought as a process in an individual. "Thought" is not the name of a process, but refers only to the corpus of the unending history of science. To be, then, is to be thought, but not to be thought in somebody's consciousness; to be thought means to be asserted under valid and immanent a priori principles that inescapably determine the unique structure of mathematical physics. Cohen was as much of a dogmatist as Kant himself with regard to the structure of science.

The original stages of Cohen's teachings are found in his three commentaries on Kant (Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Berlin, 1871; Kants Begrundung der Ethik, Berlin, 1877; Kants Begrundung der Aesthetik, Berlin, 1889), one on each Critique. They are continuous criticisms of all of Kant's "givens"; for example, experience, intuition, categories, duty, things-in-themselves. The final stages are contained in his three systematic works (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, Berlin, 1902; Ethik des reinen Willens, Berlin, 1904; Aesthetik des reinen Gefühls, 2 vols., Berlin, 1912), which parallel the three Critiques. At its midpoint Cohen's thought was close to the contemporary rejections of psychologism by Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl; at its end it would have taken only the "bathos of experience," to use Kant's words, to change it, in principle, into a kind of positivism or even historicism.

natorp

The principal thinker among the second generation of Marburg Neo-Kantians was Paul Natorp (1854–1924). It fell to him to deal with the new developments in science (especially the theory of relativity, in his Die logischen Grundlagen der exakten Wissenschaften, Leipzig, 1910) by penetrating to a deeper level of methodology than Cohen could reach in his own work, which was largely restricted to classical mathematics and physics.

More important, it was Natorp's task to introduce the whole field of psychology into the body of knowledge considered and understood in Cohen's way, and thereby to fill the lacuna Cohen left between Bewusstsein überhaupt (consciousness in general, the "fact" of science) and the limited individual human consciousness. Natorp's Einleitung in die Psychologie (Freiburg, 1888) and his Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode (Tübingen, 1912) attempted, first, to apply Cohen's transcendental method to psychology instead of leaving it exposed to the naturalistic methods of Cohen's and Natorp's rivals, such as Riehl. In this attempt Natorp came close to results like those of Wilhelm Dilthey without, he thought, having to draw his relativistic, skeptical, and historicistic conclusions. And, second, these books attempted to bridge the gap between the objective world of phenomena and the nonphenomenal, nonnatural self that possessed the knowledge of the phenomenal world. Cohen had moved so far from Kant toward Hegel that it was for him an almost insignificant accident that individual men and women know anything; Bewusstheit (known-ness), not Bewusstsein (consciousness), was important for him. Natorp had to undertake another almost Copernican revolution against objective panlogism without at the same time naturalizing the knowing subject, which would have led to relativism and skepticism.

He performed the first part of his task by the classical Kantian move of seeing empirical ego and empirical object as standing in a necessary correlation with each other, not as independent phenomena; the latter part he accomplished by insisting that the pure ego cannot be an object—it is as much a Grenzbegriff as the thing-in-itself. For Natorp the objective and the subjective were not two realms, either opposed to each other or one including the other. Rather, they were two directions of knowledge, objectification and subjectification, each starting from the same phenomenon and each employing the transcendental method of categorial constitution, resolution into Ursprung and Erzeugung. Just as Cohen's antipsychologistic panlogism had brought him close to Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, Natorp's linking of psychology and panlogism brought him close to Husserl's Ideen ; and it is easy to see how Nicolai Hartmann, Natorp's pupil, could move over into the phenomenological camp (J. Klein, "Hartmann und die Marburger Schule," in Nicolai Hartmann, der Denker und sein Werk, by Heinz Heimsoeth and Robert Heiss, Göttingen, 1952).

cassirer

The last great representative of Marburg Neo-Kantianism was Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), whose works on the philosophy of science continued the line of argument initiated by Natorp and show some close resemblances to positivism. Cassirer's most important contribution, however, was to extend the Marburg conception of Erzeugung to the whole range of human culture (language, myth, art, religion, statecraft), ending not in panlogism but in "pansymbolism."

Other important Marburg Neo-Kantians were Rudolf Stammler (1856–1938) in the philosophy of law; Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), the historian of philosophy and the leading Kantian socialist (Kant und der Sozialismus, Berlin, 1900; Kant und Marx, Tübingen, 1911); Artur Buchenau (1879–1946), Albert Görland (1869–1952), and Arthur Liebert (1878–1946). A moderate form of Marburg Neo-Kantianism is represented in America by W. H. Werkmeister (The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, New York, 1948).

GÖttingen Neo-Kantianism

In strong reaction against Marburg there arose, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Neo-Friesian school in Göttingen, under the leadership of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927). Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) had interpreted Kant psychologically, not transcendentally; in this he was followed by Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829–1897) in his Kants Psychologie (Berlin, 1870). Lange and Helmholtz were psychologistic in their Kantianism, taking the results of experimental psychology as having a bearing on the a priori. Nelson, on the contrary, professed to avoid psychologism and its attendant skepticism by using psychological introspection to discover the principles of experience in the spontaneity of reason; these principles could then be deduced (in the Kantian sense) from the analysis of experience into its necessary conditions. In this, Nelson developed the views of Fries, whom he defended against the accusation of psychologism, and opposed the psychological or physiological interpretations of the experimental and empirical psychologists.

Kant's transcendental deduction was regarded by Nelson as circular if it was meant as a proof; it began with the experience (science, mathematics, morality) it was meant to justify. The circle might have been broken by Kant's subjective deduction, but this was jettisoned in the second edition of the Critique. Nelson proposed to reestablish it, or rather to put his own deduction into its place. Upon introspection, we find principles we know immediately to be true and that we hold by a Cartesian-like "principle of the self-confidence of reason." The discovery of these self-evident principles is a psychological process; the principles, however, are not psychological but metaphysical in Kant's sense; that is, as a priori synthetic truths based on concepts, not on intuition. They are shown to be the same as those uncovered by a transcendental analysis of science and ordinary experience. (In ethics Nelson followed an analogous procedure.) In this way Nelson thought he could use psychology without falling prey to either naturalism or skepticism. A good example of his method is to be found in the well-known Das Heilige (Gotha, 1917; translated by J. W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy, New York, 1958) by Nelson's colleague Rudolf Otto. Nelson never had the influence in Germany that was enjoyed by many other Neo-Kantians, although he was revered by many disciples in fields related to philosophy. There has recently been an increased interest in his work, and several English translations have appeared.

Heidelberg Neo-Kantianism

The Heidelberg school of Neo-Kantianism, led by Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, was not restricted to the University of Heidelberg, and is sometimes known as the Baden school or the Southwest German school of Neo-Kantianism. Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) was the most eminent historian of philosophy of his time, with the possible exception of Dilthey. Like Dilthey, he did not succeed in working out a complete system of philosophy, but certain of his ideas were decisive for the more systematic work of his followers in Heidelberg. His most characteristic doctrine was that the epistemological problem is really a problem in axiology; a judgment is known to be true not by comparison with an object (thing-in-itself) but by its conformity to an immediately experienced obligation to believe it. The teaching for which Windelband is chiefly remembered, however, was his distinction between natural and historical sciences as nomothetic and ideographic (law-giving and picturing the unique individual), respectively. The elaboration of these two points led to the systematic priority of axiological criteria to epistemological criteria, to the theory of the parallelism of norms and cultural consciousness, and to efforts to develop a Kantian categorization of historical and cultural experience.

rickert

The great system builder of the Heidelberg school was Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), professor in Freiburg and then Windelband's successor in Heidelberg. Rickert, like Windelband, regarded judging as a form of valuing, truth being the value intended by this act. There are two realms of objects that may be judged; that is, that are objects of knowledge—the sensible world of science (about which Rickert accepted most of Kant's views) and an intelligible world of nonsensuous objects of experience that we know not by perception but by understanding (Verstehen ). These latter are cultural objects (history, art, morality, institutions). Although not reducible to sense and thus not under the categories of nature, they are not metaphysical but are within experience and correspond, roughly, to Hegel's objective spirit. Both cultural objects and nature, as objects, require (in the Kantian manner) a correlative subject that cannot be objectified. This is "the third realm of being," which Rickert calls "pro-physical"; it is Kant's transcendental ego and Hegel's subjective spirit. There is a fourth realm of being, the metaphysical proper, which is only an object of faith (in the Kantian sense) and which we refer to in religion and in the transition from scientific philosophy to Weltanschauung.

By keeping the ethical "this side" of the division between the experiential and the metaphysical, Rickert was able to bring about a closer liaison between the theoretical and the practical than Kant had established. The primacy of practical reason does not, for Rickert, mark the supremacy of valuing over knowing, but signifies the valuational dimension of knowing itself. Autonomy is thus the basis not only of ethics but also of thought even in science. Rickert criticized the Kantian conception of experience as too thin; not only nature, but also history, must be categorized out of the heterogeneous continuum of data, and from these categorizations arise the nomothetic and ideographic disciplines. In all these points Rickert was under the influence of both Fichte and Hegel, but his conceptual framework remained Kantian: a transcendental nonobjectifiable basis (realm 3) for experience (realms 1 and 2) and an unknown realm of objects of faith (realm 4).

others

Other important Heidelberg Neo-Kantians were Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), Jonas Cohn (1869–1947), Bruno Bauch (1877–1942; Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit, Leipzig, 1923), and Richard Kroner (Von Kant bis Hegel, 2 vols., Tübingen, 1921–1924). Kroner's Kant's Weltanschauung (Tübingen, 1914, translated by J. E. Smith, Chicago and Cambridge, U.K., 1956) is the only presentation in English of the characteristic Heidelberg interpretation of the historical Kant.

Sociological Neo-Kantianism

Several philosophers close to Lebensphilosophie and concerned with the methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften were influenced by Kant's doctrine that we categorially construct the world of experience and that speculative metaphysics is impossible as science, but instead of having theories concerning the transcendental origin of the structural factors, they found the origin of the world of experience in the social situation. The most important of these philosophers were Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1912), who is not usually characterized as a Neo-Kantian although Kantian elements are present in his thought, and Georg Simmel (1858–1918).

At various times Simmel took different attitudes toward, or at least emphasized different aspects of, Kantianism—the psychologistic and pragmatic, the transcendental, and the sociohistorical. He held that categories develop in the course of history, and that the structures of Hegel's objective spirit are historical products that cannot be taken ready-made for analysis in the Marburg manner. "[Even] the kind of science humanity has at any given moment depends upon the kind of humanity it is at that moment" (Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Leipzig, 1910, Ch. 1). Because forms cannot be discerned except in the specific contents in which they appear, no categorial system is capable of structuring all experience. Different types of individuals have different styles for this structuring, and cultures are identified by their production of specific a priori forms for knowledge, the experience of values, and images of the world as a whole (systems of metaphysics).

Between the Heidelberg tradition and the Dilthey-Simmel position there were Max Weber (1864–1921) and Eduard Spranger. Neo-Kantian elements in the sociology of knowledge are especially clear in the works of Max Adler (Das Soziologische in Kants Erkenntniskritik, Vienna, 1924) and Karl Mannheim (1893–1947).

Windelband said, "To understand Kant means to go beyond Kant." Most of the philosophers dealt with here did go beyond Kant, and their later works contained little that was specifically Kantian. Even the movements as a whole were more explicitly Kantian in their early periods than in their later ones. All this was to be expected of active and creative minds and groups. By the end of World War I, Neo-Kantianism as an institution ceased to be a dominant force in German intellectual life, partly through the death of most of its leaders and partly through defection. Rapid changes in logic and natural science favored the more pragmatic systems of positivism in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna; the greater experiential resources of phenomenology favored the rival school in Freiburg, Munich, and Cologne; the German cultural crisis called for Lebensphilosophie and speculative metaphysics. None of these movements, however, was free of Kantian elements, which might not have been passed on to them but for the Neo-Kantians' rediscovery of Kant. Their Neo-Kantian heritage has given repeated confirmation of an aphorism attributed to Liebmann: "You can philosophize with Kant, or you can philosophize against Kant, but you cannot philosophize without Kant."

See also Cassirer, Ernst; Causation: Philosophy of Science; Cohen, Hermann; Dilthey, Wilhelm; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb; Fischer, Kuno; Fries, Jakob Friedrich; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Heidegger, Martin; Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig von; Herbart, Johann Friedrich; Hönigswald, Richard; Husserl, Edmund; Irrationalism; Kant, Immanuel; Kantian Ethics; Lange, Friedrich Albert; Liebert, Arthur; Liebmann, Otto; Logical Knowledge; Mach, Ernst; Mannheim, Karl; Materialism; Meinong, Alexius; Natorp, Paul; Nelson, Leonard; Otto, Rudolf; Paulsen, Friedrich; Positivism; Psychologism; Rationalism in Ethics; Reinhold, Karl Leonhard; Rickert, Heinrich; Riehl, Alois; Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von; Schlick, Moritz; Schopenhauer, Arthur; Simmel, Georg; Spranger, (Franz Ernst) Eduard; Vaihinger, Hans; Weber, Max; Windelband, Wilhelm.

Bibliography

Studies of and works by individual Neo-Kantians are listed in the respective articles. There is very little material in English on Neo-Kantianism, but see Ernst Cassirer, "Neo-Kantianism," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (1930), Vol. XVI, pp. 215–216; and R. B. Perry, Philosophy of the Recent Past (New York: Scribners, 1926), pp. 145–160. A complete history is being written by Mariano Campo; Vol. I of his Schizzo storico della esegesi e critica kantiana (Varese, 1959) covers the period up to about 1900. The most complete study, with excellent bibliographies, is K. Oesterreich in Friedrich Überwegs Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 12th ed. (Berlin, 1923), Vol. IV, pp. 410–483.

G. Lehmann reports the beginnings of the movement in "Kant im Spätidealismus und die Anfänge der neukantischen Bewegung," in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 17 (1963): 438–457; see also his "Voraussetzungen und Grenzen der systematischen Kantinterpretation," in Kant-Studien 49 (1957): 364–388.

Good comparative studies of Neo-Kantianism are included in Wolfgang Ritzel, Studien zum Wandeln der Kantauffassung (Meisenheim, 1952) and H. Levy, Die Hegel-Renaissance in der deutschen Philosophie (Charlottenburg, Germany: R. Heise, 1927). Johannes Hessen, Die Religionsphilosophie des Neukantianismus (Freiburg: Herder, 1924) gives a Catholic criticism.

Authoritative presentations of two school programs are Paul Natorp, Kant und die Marburger Schule (Berlin, 1912; also in Kant-Studien 17 [1912]: 193–221) and Heinrich Rickert, Die Heidelberger Tradition und Kants Kritizismus (Berlin, 1934). The posthumously published (and incomplete) work by H. Dussort, L'école de Marburg (Paris, 1963) is excellent on the movement up through Cohen.

other recommended sources

Adair Toteff, Christopher. "Neo-Kantianism: The German Idealism Movement." In The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, edited by Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Brandist, Craig. "Two Routes 'To Concreteness' in the Work of the Bakhtin Circle." Journal of the History of Ideas 63(3) (2002): 521–537.

Hallberg, Fred W. "Neo-Kantian Constraints on Legitimate Religious Beliefs." American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 16(3) (1995): 279–298.

Kröhnke, Klaus C. The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy Between Idealism and Positivism, translated by R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Luthe, Rudolf. "The Development of the Concept of Concrete Subjectivity from Kant to Neo-Kantianism." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13 (1982): 154–167.

Lewis White Beck (1967)