Neo-Kantianism is one of the dominant currents in philosophical thought in Germany in the second half of the 19th – first quarter of the 20th century. Its emergence can be roughly attributed to the mid-fifties of the 19th century, when Otto Liebmann proclaimed the slogan “Back to Kant!”
There are three main periods in the evolution of neo-Kantianism: 1) early; 2) classical; 3) late. The representatives of early, or physiological, neo-Kantianism include, first of all, Friedrich Albert Lange and Otto Liebmann. Classical neo-Kantianism dates back to the seventies of the 18th century until the First World War. The most influential trends of neo-Kantianism belong to this period: the Marburg School (G. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer) and the Baden School (or Freiburg – W. Windelband, G. Rickert, G. Kohn, E. Lask). Late neo-Kantianism is characterized by a departure from the original ideological principles.
From the 1880s until the beginning of World War I, neo-Kantianism increasingly influenced cultural and political processes in Germany and other countries, becoming the philosophical foundation of the revisionism of the ideologists of the Second International (M. Adler, E. Bernstein, K. Forlender, etc.) and the political parties and groups associated with it.
Otto Liebmann (1840-1912) was one of the initiators of the neo-Kantian movement. In 1865, his work “Kant and the Epigones” was published, each chapter of which ended with a conclusion-call “Back to Kant!” Kant’s main mistake, according to Liebmann, was his recognition of the “thing in itself”. Analyzing the systems of philosophers after Kant, Liebmann came to the conclusion that all of them (even denying the “thing in itself” in words) in fact could not get rid of this “obsession”. From this, Liebmann concluded that it was necessary to return to Kant and try to re-develop the transcendental method, trying to avoid the contradictions and inconsistencies that Kant allowed.
After Liebman, the careful and painstaking work of studying Kant’s legacy and its critical analysis began. Within the framework of the expanding neo-Kantian movement, two different directions of interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy began to differentiate.
1) “Transcendental-psychological”: from Kant’s point of view, the consciousness of the cognizing subject has a certain structure, organization, certain forms, its own regularity; from this it was concluded that human knowledge depends on the organization of the consciousness of the cognizing subject. Depending on how this organization was interpreted, two directions can be distinguished within this first tendency:
a) if the structure of consciousness was derived from the organization of the psychophysical organism of man, then the study of this structure should be carried out by the physiology of sensory cognition. Helmholtz and Lange belonged to this so-called “physiological” direction of neo-Kantianism;
b) if the organization of consciousness is considered at the psychological level, then we are dealing with a transcendental-psychological, in the narrow sense of the word, interpretation of Kant. This interpretation was developed primarily by the Baden school of neo-Kantianism, headed by Windelband and Rickert.
2) Another direction in the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy was the “transcendental-logical” interpretation: in this case, we are talking about scientific knowledge as it exists in the form of sciences (“in written books”). The task of theoretical philosophy from this point of view is to clarify the logical foundations, the deepest premises of this knowledge.
Marburg School
The first relatively formal “school” within the neo-Kantian movement can be traced back to the publication in 1871 of Hermann Cohen’s major work “Kant’s Theory of Experience”. The task of the Marburgers was to cleanse Kant’s teaching of dogmatism and the transcendental-psychological tendency and, developing the transcendental-logical tendency, to reveal in pure form the transcendental principles of “all knowledge”, which, from their point of view, was expressed in the system of sciences.
Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was the founder and main theorist of the Marburg School. Like other neo-Kantians, he saw the main error of Kant’s theory of knowledge in the recognition of the reality of “things in themselves.”
Firstly, according to Cohen, Kant’s “thing in itself” is a contradictory concept:
a) the “thing in itself” supposedly exists outside of consciousness; but consciousness is not a spatial category, therefore existence outside of consciousness is spatially unthinkable;
b) Kant attributed to the “thing in itself” the function of affecting sensibility. But this affecting is unthinkable as a causal effect, because the thing in itself lies entirely beyond the plane of phenomena; every phenomenon is causally justified only from other phenomena;
c) “reality” itself in Kant is a category of reason, and therefore is not applicable to things in themselves, because they are not included in the sphere of applicability of concepts of reason – in the plane of phenomena.
Secondly, the thing-in-itself, according to Cohen, is an ambiguous concept, which has different meanings in each of the three parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, not connected by a common basis: “affecting principle”, “borderline concept”, and “transcendental object”.
By eliminating the thing-in-itself from Kant’s theory of knowledge, Cohen traces all the consequences that follow from this. The main one is that without the thing-in-itself, the distinction between intuition (contemplation, Anschauung) and thinking becomes meaningless; accordingly, space and time, which were Kant’s “a priori forms of contemplation,” receive the status of categories. In this case, sensuality cannot be, as Kant believed, the source of the content of thinking. Cohen subjects the cognitive value of feelings to destructive criticism. Traditionally, since ancient times, sensuality has been considered an “organ” for comprehending the individual, along with reason, which is intended to grasp the general. According to Cohen, the sensation of feelings cannot even give us knowledge of the individual: “How can sensation guarantee the individual, when sensuality itself is divided into 5 different feelings?” “Sensation cannot provide objective content, if only because a certain organ responds to every stimulus with the same content, according to the law of the specific energy of sensation” (14, 464-465). Cohen considers the example of electricity and magnetism, which do not correspond to any human sensation, to be the “decisive authority”, which does not prevent the sciences from placing these concepts at the foundation of a scientific picture of the world. How then can reality be based on sensation? “Stars do not exist in the sky, but in astronomy textbooks.”
The main task that Cohen sets for the theory of knowledge is to investigate scientific knowledge (as it exists “in written books”) and to identify the elements of cognitive consciousness that underlie the necessary prerequisites of science.
But the denial of the cognitive value of the senses confronts Cohen with a most acute problem – the problem of substantiating the objectivity of our knowledge. Although there was no longer any talk of the correspondence of thought to the “object” in the usual sense, the problem did not disappear, but only took on a different form – what makes our judgments necessary? “This is the strongest suspicion that one can encounter in the experience of nature: that it, with all the necessity contained in its foundations, is in itself accidental” (ibid.). Cohen makes repeated attempts to substantiate this necessity, in particular, introducing into the theory of knowledge, along with the synthetic unity of the judgments of the natural sciences, also the systematic unity of the biological sciences, but he himself is aware that he did not succeed in finally eliminating the element of chance and subjectivity. The final result of these searches was Cohen’s advancement of the principle of the “First Principle”, which is the simplest act of connection carried out by consciousness. This origin remains inexplicable and in this sense “random”, but all the content of knowledge follows from it with necessity. In form and in essence, this Origin is already close to the act of Divine arbitrariness. At the end of his life, Cohen really comes to the realization that without the concept of God it is impossible to think of nature as a whole, as well as the moral law of human life, in a consistent manner.
Paul Natorp (1854-1924) was a student and later a colleague of G. Cohen at the University of Marburg. Compared to other neo-Kantians, Natorp devoted more attention to explaining and, if you like, propagating the teachings of neo-Kantianism. Along with philosophy, he worked in the field of psychology and social pedagogy. For the neo-Kantian movement, his works “Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas” (1903) and “Logical Foundations of the Exact Sciences” (1910) are of greatest importance. When speaking of neo-Kantianism, one usually means the version of it that Natorp gave in his explanatory works (such as “Philosophical Propaedeutics”), reports and articles.
The main subject of Natorp’s explanations is the dual problem posed by Cohen: how to justify the necessity and objectivity of our knowledge without a thing-in-itself and, on the other hand, what is the epistemological value of sensations. According to Natorp, the subject of knowledge in science, in contrast to “natural knowledge”, is not things as substances (“things in themselves”), but “changes and relations”. For Natorp, science is not a collection of “written books”, as for Cohen, but a method, and accordingly, a process of limiting the unlimited. “The subject that establishes scientific knowledge is resolved in the flow of becoming” (15:12). In contrast to the classical point of view, dating back to Aristotle, “transcendental philosophy, denying any given, considers the subject to be given, it is X, something indefinite that must be determined: it is indefinite, but definable.” Absolute knowledge of an object, i.e., complete definition of the indefinite, is the unattainable ideal of scientific knowledge, the ultimate goal of science. This goal is the “thing in itself.”
According to Natorp, the “matter of knowledge” is not the content of knowledge coming from outside through the senses, but only the “present possibility of every determination.” “Sensation is … that which makes every moment of time and every point of space definable” (3:25). However, it remains not entirely clear where sensations get the diversity of their content from. Essentially, we have a reduction of the entire subject of knowledge to formal definitions: among them, necessary ones stand out, constituting the “form” in the old sense of the word, and accidental ones, constituting what was previously considered the “content” of knowledge. Natorp could not say anything definite about the origin of this “accidental” content, except that it does not come from outside consciousness. Before the mystery of the individual, the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg school proves powerless.
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was a younger representative of the Marburg School. In his later works, he began to develop a “philosophy of symbolic forms,” which can no longer be attributed to neo-Kantianism. Cassirer’s epistemological work “Cognition and Reality” was of the greatest importance for the neo-Kantian movement. Here, Cassirer poses the problem of the formation of concepts: by investigating how exactly general concepts of science are actually formed, it is possible to establish whether an inductive method is possible that would allow one to obtain not only probabilistic, but scientifically reliable knowledge.
The traditional concept of concept formation, which goes back to Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, assumes that the thought expressed through concepts must be consistent with things outside of us in order to be true. Concepts here correspond to objective qualities and properties of things. In neo-Kantianism, the object itself is a correlate of the cognitive act; accordingly, from Cassirer’s point of view, the concept does not reflect, but transforms reality. In the sciences, “when we begin to follow the emergence of these concepts, we find the same process of transformation of concrete sensory reality that traditional teaching is unable to explain; and here these concepts are not simply copies of our perceptions, but substitute another variety in place of the sensory diversity, satisfying certain theoretical conditions” (5:25-26). The main thing in a concept is “the relationship of necessity created by it through the law of coordination, and not the generic form.”
This “relation of necessity” is established, according to Cassirer, not by a generic form, but by the principle of a series, following the example of the formulas of mathematical induction. It is sufficient to specify the first term of the series and a formula (or algorithm) in order to obtain, with mathematical necessity, the entire set that constitutes the volume of a concept (e.g., “prime number”). Cassirer again tries to remove the problem of the objectivity of scientific knowledge, common to neo-Kantians, by declaring it “metaphysical”. Metaphysics divides and substantializes that which is separable only in thought—it divides the unified system of empirical knowledge into thinking and being, or, accordingly, “subject” and “object”. The concept of the “objective” has only a relative meaning. “…Different partial expressions of one and the same complete experience serve as a mutual standard. Each partial experience is therefore asked what meaning it has for the whole, and this meaning determines the measure of its objectivity” (5:357). “It is not the sensory vividness of the impression, but this internal richness of relationships that gives it (the content of consciousness) the sign of genuine objectivity” (5:363).
Baden School
In the second half of the 19th century, the problem of the methodological autonomy of the sciences of the spirit became particularly acute. Firstly, this was caused by the rapid development of the relatively young science of history. Secondly, the even more rapid development of the natural sciences led to attempts to extend the method of mathematical natural science to history. But the results of these studies were so unsatisfactory that they raised doubts about whether history was capable of corresponding to the “model of scientificity” at all. The task of methodological substantiation of the sciences of the spirit was taken upon itself by representatives of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism.
Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) in his speech on taking office as rector of the University of Strasbourg on May 1, 1894, published under the title “History and Natural Science”, proclaimed the “manifesto” of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism.
The division of sciences on the basis of the outdated subject principle of demarcation has, according to Windelband, caused great harm. Firstly, philosophy, with this approach, dissolves, on the one hand, in the history of philosophy, on the other, in psychology, since its entire “subject” is studied by more specific sciences.
This subject-based method of classifying sciences must be replaced by a methodological one, which is based primarily on the “formal character of the cognitive goals of science.” From this point of view, sciences are divided, firstly, into rational and empirical. Rational disciplines include philosophical and mathematical ones. The material feature common to them is that they are not aimed directly at cognition of phenomena of experience; the formal feature is that they do not base their judgments on perceptions. Empirical sciences, on the contrary, establish facts by means of perception.
This classification, according to Windelband, is incompatible with the generally accepted division of sciences into natural sciences and spiritual sciences. The opposition of nature and spirit does not correspond to the actual opposition of methods and goals of cognition. A particularly striking example of the invalidity of the objective principle of division is scientific psychology, which applies the methods of natural science to the study of “spiritual” phenomena. The methodological distinction, completely freed from the material principle of division, consists in the fact that “…some of them seek universal laws, others – particular historical facts…” (6:12). “…The goal of some is a general, apodictic judgment, the goal of others is a singular, assertoric proposition” (ibid.). Scientific thinking in the first disciplines has
Nomothetic (“law-making”), secondly – idiographic (“describing the individual”) character. The material division of sciences from the point of view of this principle turns out to be relative: the same subject areas allow both the Nomothetic and idiographic approaches.
In the methodology of science, according to Windelband, the Nomothetic method still reigns supreme. Meanwhile, the idiographic sciences also need a methodical theory, according to which these facts would be ordered in accordance with the general assumptions of these sciences.
The task of methodological substantiation of history requires, first of all, the formulation of such an understanding of scientificity that would include the historical sciences in their uniqueness. In Windelband’s interpretation, the principle of empirical sciences is everywhere – both in history and in natural science – the same: “the complete agreement of all elements of representation concerning one and the same object” (6:15). The difference lies in the method of cognition of the individual. A natural scientist (and a psychologist), if he examines a separate object, then only insofar as it can play the role of a representative of a certain kind of objects. The task of the historian is different – to comprehend the individual precisely as individual, in its uniqueness. To do this, he must “resurrect anew in the form of ideal reality a picture of the past, in all its individual features” (ibid.). According to Windelband, the historian performs the same task as the artist. Windelband compares the laws that express the constant nature of things with a “frame” within which “the living connection of all individual manifestations valuable to man unfolds, in which general formulas are embodied” (6:23).
But from general formulas it would never be possible to draw conclusions about a specific event. The relationship between law and event (as well as between the general and the individual) is still an unsolved problem in philosophy. “In reality, no thinking is capable of providing further clarification on these issues… Law and event continue to remain next to each other as the last, incommensurable quantities in our worldview” (6:25).
Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) was a leading theorist of the Baden School. He worked on the implementation of the methodological program outlined by Windelband. Main works: “The Subject of Knowledge. Introduction to Transcendental Philosophy” (1892); “Natural Sciences and Cultural Sciences” (1899).
In his work “Natural Sciences and Cultural Sciences” Rickert sets the task of substantiating the methodology of humanitarian knowledge. For this, like Windelband, he seeks a new definition of the nature of scientificity, which would include the humanitarian sciences with their uniqueness. In this matter, Rickert, like Cassirer, proceeds from the fact that scientific concepts do not reflect, but transform reality. The nature of scientificity consists in the fact that scientific concepts, transforming reality, highlight the essential in phenomena. The methods of sciences differ in what grounds are taken into account when highlighting the essential in phenomena. In the cultural sciences, the main ground is the possibility of carrying out the procedure of “attribution to value” for a given phenomenon. Therefore, objectivity in these sciences can only be based on the objectivity of values and cannot appeal to the physical givenness of cultural objects. Values are a special kind of objects that do not “exist,” but mean. Reality, according to Rickert, is a heterogeneous continuity: our concepts do not reflect, but actively transform, constitute “reality for us”; if concepts “interrupt continuity,” then continuous reality is logically necessary as their basis.
According to Rickert, the ordering of heterogeneous continuity can be carried out in two ways: 1) abstraction from heterogeneity and establishment of homogeneity with preservation of continuity, or 2) interruption of continuity with preservation of heterogeneity. The first method, which gives the concepts of homogeneous continuities, according to Rickert, is most effective in mathematics. The second is called upon to grasp the individual and unique in reality.
Rickert criticizes the natural scientific method of forming concepts. The content of a scientific concept “consists of so-called laws, i.e., of absolutely general judgments concerning more or less broad areas of reality” (9, 66). General laws and principles established in the sciences are as much an integral “part” of reality as an individual phenomenon. But as soon as the natural scientific method begins to be applied to comprehend individual phenomena precisely as individual ones – primarily objects of culture and history – its effectiveness immediately turns against its subject, destroying the most essential thing in it – individual significance. It was precisely this destructive effect of using the natural scientific method that caused the need to substantiate the methodological autonomy of the cultural sciences and generally raised the best minds of the Old World to “struggle for the transcendental.”
Literature
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