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Kohnke, Klaus Christian The rise of neo-Kantianism: German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism. - (Ideas in context). J. German philosophy, 1770-1800 I. Title II. Series III. [Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. English] 193 Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Kohnke, Klaus Christian. [Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. English] The rise of neo-Kantianism: German academic philosophy between idealism and positivism / Klaus Christian Kohnke: translated by R. J. Hollingdale. p. cm. - (Ideas in context) Translation of: Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-37338-0 J. Neo-Kantianism. 2. Philosophy, German - 19th century. 3. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 4. Philosophy - Study and teaching (Graduate) Germany - 19th century. I. Title. II. Series. B3 19 2. K6 413 199 1 J42'·3'0943-dc20 90-22938 CIP ISBN 0 521 373360 hardback
FOREWORD Lewis White Beck
A hundred years ago there was a saying in German academic circles: 'You can philosophize with I<.ant, or against I<.ant; you cannot philosophize without him.' How near this was to being literally true becomes evident in Dr I<.ohnke's history of the rise and spread of neo-Kantianism. This and his other ventures into cliometrics - itself something new in the historiography of philosophy - are especially suited to treatments of a movement as amorphous and ill-defined as neo-I<.antianism. In an earlier account of neo-I<'antianism I wrote that 'the neo-I<.antians 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 I<.ant'.l I<.ohnke goes even farther in deconstructing neo-Kantianism. He says that it was' a phenomenon in the history of philosophy whose common denominator was at most an alleged recourse to I<.ant, but which never represented an individual, definable philosophical tendency. There was no work, no originator, no occurrence and certainly no design or plan that could have called it into existence' (pp. 207-8). No great neo-Kantian book (with the possible exception of Lange's History of Materialism), no great neo-I<.antian thinker (with the possible exception of Helmholtz), few historical events like the Fichte and Schiller centenary celebrations give narrative structure to the rise and spread of neo-Kantianism. Instead, we must understand the usual parameters of the sociology of knowledge adapted to a professional intellectual community. We have information on the numbers of Privatdozenten, professors, seminars and lecture-courses concerned with I<.ant. There are details about the average age at whichPrivatdozenten married a canny way of measuring academic prosperity. We see shifts in interests reflected in enrolments in the various faculties as effects of political and economic events and conditions. We find statistics on curriculum changes called for by the two attempts to assassinate the Emperor in 1878 - which show that there was increasing emphasis upon practical philosophy and the duties owed to the sovereign. 1
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 5 (1973), 468.
ix
x
FOrellJord
These topics had been neglected in earlier neo-Kantian studies, which were generally confined to theoretical philosophy. But statistics and political history do not answer all questions. How far back in the century should one go to find the first neo-Kantian (Schleiermacher? Jiirgen Bona Meyer?)? Were there Kantians who were not neo-Kantians (Paulsen? Vaihinger?)? Were there neo-Kantians who were not even Kantians (Cohen? Windelband?)? How did it come about that, more than other philosophers, the neo-Kantians formed themselves into' schools' attached to different universities, imbuing the masters and students with intellectual enthusiasms and rivalries of a kind almost unknown outside Germany? Can this explain the party loyalties engendered in young Assistenten which often lasted their whole lives, like the religion into which they were born? Can this explain one of the most distressing features of the neo-Kantians: the fierceness and bitterness of their polemics, the nastiness of their ad hominem arguments, which destroyed personal friendships and decent collegial relations? Heinrich Rickert (Heidelberg) wrote to Paul Natorp (Marburg): 'Just because we critical idealists agree on fundamentals, we have to take knives to each other. ,2 Many historians of philosophy preface their books with promises that they will portray philosophy against a background of Zeitgeist; they will almost agree with Hegel that philosophy is the self-consciousness of a culture, and that what is going on in art, religion, politics,3 and science is more important to the content of philosophy than what is involved in the intellectual intercourse of professional philosophers among themselves. They do not, of course, go as far as Hegel did in the Phenomen%gy ofSpirit; in fact, they seldom go much beyond a little idle talk about the Renaissance or the French Revolution or Darwin. This is a fault that cannot be charged against Kohnke; rather, one might say there may be too much political history and not enough philosophical analysis - but this is mostly a matter of taste in books. Kohnke gives full credit, as necessary conditions of 'school' philosophy, to socioeconomic and political events, without claiming that they are sufficient to explain the substantive content of conflicting philosophical interests. Most historical accounts tell us about conflicts of ideas and forget that the real conflicts are between men with ideas. An earlier historian of neo-Kantianism 4 wittily remarked that battles between idealism and materialism and between empiricism and rationalism are less suitable subjects for histories of philosophy than they are for heroic mural paintings. Yet both Campo and Kohnke use the organizing function of the principles of various 'isms' in order to lift the 2 Quoted from Materialien z"r NellkalltiallismllsdisktlJSioll, ed. H.-L. Ollig (Darmstadt, 1987) p. 20. a Unless the philosophical reader is rho roughly at home in German political history, he will probably learn more about the political context and philosophy of rhe neo-Kantians from Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kallt, the revival of Kalltiallism ill German social and historical thollght, JS60-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 1978). 4 Mariano Campo, SchiZZo storico della exegesi e Cl'itica Kantialla (Varese, 1959) p. 87.
Foreword
Xl
history of philosophy above the level of sociology of knowledge, and to superimpose an intellectual plot on an historical sequence. But the historian who does this must be a philosopher as well as a student of the disciplines in other realms of culture. Kohnke's book is exemplary for this kind of necessary synthesis; it is a philosophical substantiation of Fritz Ringer's The Rise of the German Mandarins (1969)' But one must not claim too much for the statistical basis of Kohnke's history. Cliometrics do not make history an exact science. Usually, since the nineteenth century, and indeed largely because of the work of the Heidelberg neo-Kantians, the active role of the historian in organizing the res gestae has been recognized as essential, but also as not betraying the ideal of historical objectivity. Since the organizing role assigned to a principle often reflects the philosophical aporiai of the historian and not those of the participants in his history, the neo-Kantian methodology of history often produces a Whiggish intellectual history. Kohnke repeatedly insists that his interpretation is based on the principles which motivated the neo-Kantian philosophers themselves, who did not know the whole story. That is a large claim which must be tested in detail by the critical scholarly reader. Let it suffice here to say that one can imagine, even remember, credible histories of neo-Kantianism with a somewhat different cast of characters and very different value-judgments. The complex story Kohnke tells is in three parts. In the period before the Revolution of 1848 (Vormarz, he often calls it) there was, even at the zenith of German idealism, dissatisfaction with its lack of fruitful contact with the natural sciences, its belief in the sufficiency of pure logic for ontology, its extravagant Weltanschauung which transcended the limits of possible experience, its over-emphasis on systematic wholeness, and its political conservatism. Though perhaps not under the direct inspiration of Kant, those who were dissatisfied developed a new discipline in philosophy: Erkenntnistheorie, i.e., epistemology. The lineaments of this' new' philosophical science were largely, even if perhaps fortuitously, parallel to the Kantian attempts to secure scientific objectivity in knowledge of objects of experience and to declare theoretical knowledge of what transcended experience to be impossible. The most important participants in this earliest return to Kant were Schleiermacher, Trendelenburg, Immanual Hermann Fichte, Friedrich Beneke, and their pupils and immediate disciples, e.g. Ueberweg and Prant!' The failure of the Revolution brought constraints on philosophers because conservative ministries of education assumed that it was philosophy that had brought on the Revolution. Professors were dismissed, enrolments diminished, and what was left in the universities was the dry, useless philosophy criticized and satirized by Schopenhauer. The political harmlessness of this kind of philosophy, however, gave it a freedom it would not otherwise have had, and Kohnke thinks that this brought about the 'epoch of modern
xii
Foreword
philosophy ... the epoch in which it becan1e a mere" branch of learning" in the universities'. During this period of lessened political tension efforts were made by academic philosophers to establish fruitful relations with the natural sciences without falling into n1aterialism or positivism, and this in turn led back to Kant, to a Kant interpreted physiologically (by von Helmholtz) or psychologically (by Jiirgen Bona Meyer), By about 186o things had changed for the better. The celebrations of the anniversaries of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Schiller involved widespread group participation, journalistic coverage, and royal patronage; high culture and patriotism supported each other. The situation in the universities improved, philosophical congresses were held, new journals established, enrolments increased, academic careers 'open to talent' were pursued (especially in the new Alsatian university established after the victory of 1870)' In 1865 there appeared Otto Liebmann's Kant und die Epigonen, each chapter of which ended with the refrain: Also muss nach Kant zuruckgegangen werden. This author (whom I
Foreword
xiii
Heidelbergian. Not so I<:'ohnke's. He considers Cohen and Windelband to be neo-1<:'antians who hardly deserve to be called even I<:'antians; the idealism of both Marburg and Heidelberg seems to him to be antithetical to genuine Kantian criticism, and, in fact, the later careers of both Cohen and Windelband show little sign of a continuing development along I<:'antian lines. (His interpretation of the later career of Windelband has been severely criticized. 5) It is to be hoped that I<:'ohnke will someday continue his fascinating narrative another thirty years. One would like to see the same historical and philosophical skills applied to the history of the great twentieth-century battle between neo- I<:'antians and phenomenologists, and between Nicolai Hartmann and his Marburg commilitones. 5
By Friedrich Tenbruck, in Philosophische Rundschau 35 (19 88) p. 9.
Introduction
The object of the present work is not to render topical the ideas and theories of neo-I
2
Introduction
of past contemporaries avoid the inherent sterility of the topicalizing view of history, which in the end amounts to a mere confirmation of the thought of the present day through a judicious selection of historical material - a practice, moreover, of which the way the neo-I(antians treated I(ant offers an egregious example. Their topicalizations of I(ant would in fact have become no more than wastepaper when the conditions that created this topicality had ceased to exist if the misconceptions of subsequent I(antian scholars and renevled attempts at reviving them at the expense of fidelity to historical truth had not saved them from this fate. The task of philosophical historiography is thus to reconstruct the conditions that produced this earlier reality, and it must therefore build upon the science of history. Not, to be sure, in the way in which the former is reduced to the latter one-sidedly and usually in a merely politicizing sense: the point is rather that, approaching from the evolution of philosophy, from the hypothetical assumption of an autonomous philosophical evolution, one should wherever possible enter into a dialogue with other historiographies with the object of enriching, and perhaps deepening and modifying, the total picture of an age through one's knowledge of the evolution of philosophy during this age. For in precisely the case of philosophical historiography it is of decisive consequence whether, in the interests of commonplace, crudely wholesale or ideologically freighted historical conceptions one introduces philosophy merely for the purpose of underpinning, illustrating or confirming these conceptions, or whether, starting from a cultural domain such as philosophy, one seeks to discover what historical connections there are between this domain and those realms of historical evolution lying outside philosophy. Equally decisive is the question of the extent to which one thinks that the evolution of philosophy is in fact autonomous, and it goes aln10st without saying that it is the answer to precisely this question that is subject to the greatest variations: the 'ideas of 19 14' stand in a different relationship to history than does the emergence of a distinct philosophical discipline called theory of knowledge. That is why generalizing assertions in this domain are senseless and useless, for an answer to the question as to the relationship between philosophy and history can be given, not in principle, but only in regard to a distinct and definite place and time. But an insight into this relationship is precisely what is at issue if the history of philosophy and above all of modern philosophy - is henceforth to be viewed, not predominantly merely from standpoints of value (topicality, critique and affirmation), but from a genuinely historical viewpoint. The former attitude is especially well illustrated precisely in regard to neo-I(antianism: almost all the evaluations of and opinions about it still current today originally date from the first third of the century, or are even older, and they either merely take over the claims of the neo-I(antians and uncritically propagate the
Introduction way they represented and interpreted themselves, or their theories and even their existence are subjected to a somewhat undiscriminating critique which, as in IZarl Lowith's Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, regards neo-Kantianism as a mere symptom of decline, or, as with Georg Lukacs, IZarl IZorsch and Ernst Bloch, misunderstands it as a social ideology. Whereas neo-IZantianism maintained that its essential achievement was to have restored a collaboration between philosophy and the individual sciences and, in theory and critique of knowledge, to have surmounted' the metaphysical standpoint' of the age of systems, IZarl Lowith dismisses it by explaining the 'apparently so unmotivated return to IZant' as an outcome of the fact' that the bourgeois intelligentsia had in practice ceased to be an historically active class, and had therefore also lost initiative and impetus in its thinking'. Since Lowith's 'real' history of the philosophy of the nineteenth century desired to 'circumscribe' history 'within the horizon of the present' and interpret it 'anew', it goes without saying that it had to sacrifice the actual course of events to a naive topicality and present-day perspective - it had to nullify what had really happened so as to provide space for the expression of its own interests, all of which in turn have less to do with the nineteenth century than with the interests of the twentieth. But this is not the only road by which a judgment and verdict remote from historical reality leads to an unbridgeable antithesis between the actual event and the' historical' exposition: an exaggerated politicalism can also distort the real course of historical development past recognition: 'And a school which totally dominated all the German universities distorted IZant, not yet into a proto-fascist, but to such an extent into a National Liberal that the philosopher of the German Enlightenment looked like a Bismarckian drawing-room philistine. This particular falsification is called neo-IZantianism' is also, for example, the view of Ernst Bloch, who had graduated with IZulpe and plainly saw in the central concern of all the neo-IZantians, the solution of the problem of knowledge, nothing but an emanation of National-Liberal party interests. The Philosophisches Wiirterbuch of the DDR also expresses itself in the same terms: 'Neo-IZantianism emerged and developed in the 1860s and the r870s', it says, 'in the closest association with the alliance established between feudal reaction and the German bourgeoisie against the strengthened and resolute German and international proletariat. In this period of heightened class conflict - and in almost exactly the same year as the Paris Commune - German bourgeois philosophy had recourse to IZant ... ' - 'Neo-IZantianism - ideology or science?' is the question raised by those ,pho desire to evaluate its emergence, dissemination and development without making the slightest inquiry into its historical legitimacy. Inasmuch as they confront two incompatible historical accounts with one another they remain caught in an unfruitful choice of alternatives, which in any event reveal clearly enough that
4
Introduction
neither party - neither the neo-I<'antians nor their critics - is concerned with clarifying the historical facts but are both employing certain selected historical details merely for the purpose of presenting their own claims the more effectively: only this supposition can make it comprehensible why, in the fourth volume of his History of the Problem of Knowledge, which comprises the era from the death of Hegel to the present (1932), Ernst Cassirer, as though as a matter of course, discusses the development of philosophy within an exposition of the scientific-theoretical problems of different groups of individual sciences and, in doing so, is able to start from an inseparable unity of philosophy and science, while the critics of neo-I<'antianism seek to discredit precisely this conception of philosophy by pointing ceaselessly to what they regard as the disastrous political evolution of Germany. The latter evidence a certain tendency to relate the evolution of neo-I<'antianism to political and economic history, to be sure, but they do it so superficially and dilettantically, and in so prejudiced and summary a fashion, we are compelled to ask what a 'historically active class' could possibly be and how it could or should display its 'in1petus and initiative' - whether Friedrich Albert Lange and other neo-I<'antian socialists were really no more than' Bismarckian philistines' and whether their collaboration in the 'Allgemeine Ausschuss deutscher Arbeitervereine' must really be regarded as a hostile act of war against the 'resolute German and international proletariat'. We might also ask whether Manfred Buhr, who went so far as to propound this last thesis, might not have consulted Mottek's or I<.uczynski's handbooks of economic history more carefully before dating the 'alliance between feudal reaction and the bourgeoisie' at the' year of the Paris Commune' rather than at the end of the 1870s. What is involved, in any event, is in fact nothing more than a merely partisan understanding of history which nowhere gets beyond a flat reduction of the history of philosophy to political history. If, on the other hand, avoiding both the neo-I<.antians' glorification of their own history and the posture of their critics, we try to answer the two simple questions as to how neo-I<'antianism emerged and how it was disseminated, there would in the last resort seem to be no other way of doing so than to go back to the sources and straightforwardly inquire firstly after the What - the simple facts of the case - and then the How what determined and sustained its evolution - without allowing the interests of rendering systematic positions topical, of criticism, or of the usual propagation of how the neo-I<.antians understood themselves to stand in the foreground, in the way they can be observed to do in almost all the specialized secondary literature on early neoI<.antianism. For in the case of this literature, too, pursuit of a 'historical' subject is by no means a guarantee of the possession of historical knowledge: what emerges, in fact, is that only a real historical inquiry into these secondary authors themselves could contribute anything to the history of the origin of
Introduction
neo-I<.antianism. It is true that almost every neo-I<'antian has been the subject of several monographs and dissertations, occasional essays and more or less accurate expositions in the pertinent reference books: but they, too, are - with very rare exceptions - mainly of interest more with regard to the time in which they were written than with regard to that of their ostensible 'historical' subject. Sustained by a fixed and finished image of how neo-I<'antianism evolved and was differentiated into schools, they subsist on the fiction that there exists a fixed and secured stock of neo-I(antian thinkers and sources: yet they have hitherto failed so much as to identify even the stages in the development of the neo-I<'antian movement or to demarcate an even approximately reliable area of source material. It is because this secondary literature has adhered so slavishly to this neoKantian mystification that the element of continuity in the evolution from German idealism to neo-I<'antianism has also become increasingly forgotten: the significance of Trendelenburg in this transitional era in regard to a reorientation of logic by the individual sciences through the concepts of synthesizing idealism and empirical realism he inaugurated, the entire epistemological programmata of the 1820S and 18 30S deriving from Schleiermacher and in conflict with the claim to presuppositionlessness advanced by idealist pure thought - all this has so far been cited at most only in explanatory footnotes. That, further, the demand for a 'criticalism' first appeared within the situation of an external and internal limitation and circumscription of academic philosophy that characterized the post-March period as a demand for the renunciation of weltanschaulich philosophizing; that, because of the political and social conditions obtaining in a Germany splintered into small states, empiricism, positivism and psychologism were under constant attack on account of the' materialist tendency' inherent in them and therefore had, until the founding of the Reich, to live a shadow existence in Germany - all this is as little known as is the fact that it was only the Kulturkampf, defensiveness against the pessimism of the Grunderzeit and finally the crisis of liberalism of 1878-79 that brought about a definitive decision in favour of a so-called 'critical' idealism and against a positivism in the last resort regarded as perilous politically. But it is not only en gros but also en detail that investigation of neoI<'antianism exhibits the most grievous gaps: Jiirgen Bona Meyer, the first neo-I<'antian of all, is - presumably for lack of' topicality' - virtually ignored by the secondary literature; the influence of the supposed 'Hegelian' Kuno Fischer, rather than being related to the rise of liberalism from the beginning of the New Era and thus to the enthusiasm for Fichte, is misconceived as influence in favour of' criticalism ' ; that the young Windelband was originally a pragmatist and formulated his 'philosophy of values', together with the theory of' normative evidentiality', only as a consequence of thy events of the
6
Introduction
crisis of 1878-79, has eluded the neo-I(antianist secondary literature as completely as has the entire positivist phase in the development of early neoI(antianism during the 18 70S, because the sources are not listed in the relevant reference aids even purely bibliographically. Several hundred texts, from the 1830S to the 1870s, had thus to be newly evaluated and, rather than merely to criticize distorted conceptions of neo-I(antianism through new, equally abstract counter-conceptions, it seems advisable in general to allow the texts to speak for themselves wherever possible. I thus found that, together with handbooks of the history of philosophy, a minimum of the genuinely historical secondary literature available, and a maximum of sources bearing on our subject, all that was really of assistance were two recent expositions of neo- I(antianism which were likewise little concerned with developing or settling neo-I(antian controversies: Thomas E. Willey's Back to Kant: the Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, I860-I9I4 (Detroit 1978), and Hans-Ludwig Ollig's brief survey, Der Neukantianismus (Stuttgart 1979), both of which, however, unfortunately also rely chiefly on the neo-I(antians' own expositions of their own history and thus could not obviate the necessity for a critical resifting of the material. But to them, too - as to the general expositions of the history of nineteenthcentury philosophy mentioned above, in especial to Hermann Liibbe's Politische Philosophie in Deutschland, Georg Lukacs' Die Zerstiirung der Vernunft and Erich Rothacker's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, all of which I constantly consulted, and hopefully to the present work as well - there apply what Liibbe expressed so clearly when he wrote: 'It is the usual fate of historical and philosophical works to put those that profit from them in a position to know better. ' The following exposition is divided into three parts, the first of which discusses the prehistory of neo-I(antianism within the framework of the variously motivated renunciation of German idealism on the part of academic philosophy and the reassessment of I(ant that arose from it. This phase extends to 1848 and constitutes a 'prehistory' as a quite distinct and literally 'prehistoric' phase in the evolution of neo-I(antianism (Chapters I and 2). The second part contains an exposition of what is already specifically 'neo'I(antian programmata which, beginning in the 185 os and extending to 1865, arose out of various attempts at a theoretical re-establishment of philosophy and assertion of its autonomy or from drafts and outlines of syntheses designed to unite old idealism with new materialism or with the new thinking of the natural sciences (Chapters 3 and 4). This is then followed by the third phase: that of the actual dissemination of neo-I(antianism, in which we can recognize on one hand a still largely undifferentiated and in part very variously motivated expansion of the movement as a whole, but on the other also the beginnings of a dividing up into schools. Only from the early I 880s does neo-
Introduction
7
Kantianism then go on to assume the form in which it has come down to us to the present day and on which all expositions of its theories are - ignoring its internal evolution and early history - tacitly based (Chapters 5 to 7). It was in these three phases that the transition from German idealism to the golden age of neo-I<'antianism was effected. What is essential is to understand the existence and nature of this transition, and this presupposes first and foremost that we free ourselves of the current idea that any I<'antian or neoI<.antian theorizer of the pre- or post-March period ever evoked, let alone 'produced' the emergence of neo-I<'antianism through the wearisomely familiar' cry': 'Back to I<'ant! ' The reasons for the esteem in which I<'ant was held differed in each of these periods, and even if several motifs of the preMarch period do recur in the 185 os or in early neo-I<'antianism there is still no recognizable direct development from the various forms of renunciation of German idealisn1, as represented by Trendelenburg, Beneke, the epistemological programmata and the speculative theism of 1. H. Fichte and C. H. Weisse, to later neo-I<'antianism. Indeed, the neo-I<'antians themselves would have been the last to see in them their' precursors' in this sense, let alone desire to trace their I<'antianism back to them. What in retrospect seems preparation for neo-I<'antianism is not therefore necessarily the' cause' of or 'reason' for its emergence. Conversely, that which constituted itself a new movement and maintained it derived only from I<'ant and not from post-I
8
Introduction
188 I - thus run roughly parallel to the general periodization of history, and every attempt to regard the philosophical programmes of the post-idealist age as a sufficient explanation of the fact that in the 18 70S I<'ant became the most frequently read of the classics in Germany's universities, or even to seek to relate them to this fact, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem involved in comprehending and explaining such transitions from one era to another. Here it seemed imperative to have recourse to, among other things, the inquisitional and descriptive procedures of sociology and the social sciences, since, as the expression' neo-I<'antian movement' itself sufficiently makes plain, quantitative relations and processes of growth are everywhere also involved in describing the emergence and dissemination of neoI<'antianism. Perhaps I may be permitted to add, in persona, that Dr J urgen Rollwage, with whom I first discussed the present work, and Prof Dr Michael Landmann, who was my constant adviser and fatherly friend, have since died, so that I can no longer thank them. I should, however, like to thank Prof Dr I<.arlfried Grunder and Frau Prof Dr Margherita von Brentano for their interest in this work and Helmut Allischewski and Johannes Ziegler, of the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer I<'ulturbesitz Berlin, and Rudiger Haase, for the encouragement and assistance they gave me.
PART
I
~
The abandonment of German idealism (1830-1848)
~
1
<j===========================================================[> Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg as mediator between idealism and neo-I<:'antianism
I
THE ROMANTIC ORIGIN OF THE' ORGANIC CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD'
In the history of nineteenth-century philosophy there exists a Great Unknown. His critique of Hegel was incontestably epoch-making; together with the anticritiques of I(uno Fischer, his critique of I
12
The abandonment of German idealism
At the Gymnasium at Eutin, where a quarter of a century before Johann Heinrich Voss, the younger Boie and Friedrich Carl Wolf had been enthusiastic Kantians, Trendelenburg was introduced to the study of IZant by the Rector of the Gymnasium, Georg Ludwig IZonig, who had translated IZant's 'Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Rechtswissenschaft' into Latin and to whom Trendelenburg was later to dedicate his dissertation. In an age in which it was already thought in philosophical circles in Germany that a Jacobi, Reinhold or Schiller, indeed even IZant, Fichte and Schelling, could safely be laid to rest in philosophical pigeonholes, a coming to terms with IZantian philosophy could nonetheless still flourish in a provincial Residenz town such as Eutin, in IZiel through Reinhold and von Berger, in Jena through Fries, in Gottingen through Herbart, and through the widely scattered pupils of this first generation of IZantians. 'Nowadays, to be sure, mediocrity does not blush to denigrate IZant's greatness, to speak in a superior tone of the lowly position he occupied, to impudently assert that you cannot read IZant's works without smiling', Reinhold's son wrote in 1825. But it was not only mediocrity but subsequent philosophical historiography, too, which propagated the cliche that - what Schopenhauer found it hard to forgive his contemporaries - everyone in fact looked down on IZant. As early as his second semester, in addition to attending a private class of Reinhold's, Trendelenburg is also said to have attended a lecture by von Berger on the' Principle of IZnowledge ' in which the latter expressly conferred on philosophy the task of becoming' the common bond of all the individual sciences'. According to Trendelenburg's pupil and biographer Ernst Bratuscheck, who is the only student to have traced the decisive influence exercised by von Berger in Trendelenburg's conception of philosophy, von Berger decreed in his lecture that philosophy's principal object of interest must be the questions pertaining to the foundations of the sciences. In contrast to all other interpreters - who, through the simple formula that philosophy should be the' science of principles', had let themselves be misled into a hasty assertion that this accorded with Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling's experiments in natural philosophy - Bratuscheck recognized that von Berger had pointed in a completely new direction: what von Berger meant was not a 'philosophy derived from a principle' (as the formula had been since Rein~old's Elementarphilosophie) whose task was to prescribe their principles to the individual sciences, but a philosophical analysis and understanding of the principles of the sciences that actually exist. This conception of science also constituted a variation on the IZantian conception, for a normative understanding of science was replaced by the unconditional recognition of the individual disciplines that had in fact historically evolved: science was understood as the acts performed by different individual scientists, and
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator legitimation of these acts was much more likely to derive from the facts of the science itself and from its traditions than from philosophical principles. It is true that von Berger, too, had at first continued to adhere to the idealist conception of a fundamental discipline that provided the basis and explanation of everything; on the other hand, however, we already see the beginnings of an 'organic conception of the world' prepared to concede the first and highest place in the sciences to the empirical. Here it is the concept of motion which - first in the case of von Berger, then reinforced by Trendelenburg - has to mediate between the multiplicity of individual areas of knowledge and that 'philosophy derived from a principle'. The contemplative religious temper and perception of the multiplicity of things that lies behind the 'organic conception of the world' increasingly drives the claims of the early Romantic philosophy of sensibility and doctrine of principles into the background. For what now ensues is an ascent, progressing gradually and through a hierarchy of human capacities, from the physical forces of the sphere of life up to the realm of the intelligence and finally to that of faith: attempts to establish the foundations of a moral world have now been replaced by a description of the actual world. The great task of science, Bratuscheck says in summing up von Berger's and Trendelenburg's philosophical outlook, is to perceive the connection between becoming in nature and ideal becoming, to unite in thought the first beginning of things with the highest aim and goal of the spirit-world. Thus do we come more and more to recognize in the totality of the world the counterpart of the divine design, and thereby continually draw closer to a knowledge of the Timeless that lies behind the whole evolution. 'Natural' and' ideal' becoming, two variants of constructive purposive motion, seek to mediate both the unification of theoretical and practical philosophy and that of reason and judgment in an act of intellectual contemplation. In so doing they at the same time describe, with the expression 'the Timeless that lies behind the whole evolution', a certain experience of God characteristic of the contemplative philosophy of 'objective idealism' sketched out by Dilthey. Erich von Berger and Trendelenburg no longer desire - as Reinhold, Fichte, the young Schelling and Hegel still did - to found through the idea of identical subject-object a claim to a complete theoretical comprehension of totality: they are satisfied, rather, with possessing in the concept of motion a universally applicable descriptive formula for reality. The problem of sense perception as posed by I<'antian philosophy is overcome by the concept of motion: 'time can be nothing other than the internal momentum of motion, while space is its external appearance'. All philosophical proofs now rest on the conviction that, since thought must be capable of expressing the truth about things, it must also be able to attain - out of itself and beyond all temporality and external appearance - to a correspondence with the empirical experiences of the sciences. Only through
The abandonment of German idealism
the internal motion of thought as von Berger at first still Ron1antically misunderstood Hegel's logic - can the thinker, by means of the pure selfknowledge of thought, also attain to knowledge of the external world. The , substance of all science' that no experience can ever contradict is quite simply that 'the principle of the evolution and coherence of our thoughts must also be that of the evolution and coherence of things'. The forms of thought are grounded, firm and imperishable, in themselves, and are capable of an absolute knowledge of being; but those of the materials to be cultivated by the various branches of science which this thought then proposes to itself are of a quite different kind. Von Berger's understanding of Hegel was among the influences which produced the unity of logic and metaphysics in the Logische Untersuchungen, and this goes back to the Romantic exchange of transcendental philosophy for the philosophy of identity: 'Since, however, knowledge itself is in a state of becoming, itself belongs as a phenomenon within the unending cycle of the evolution of the universe, being and thought cannot be absolutely separated. ' As regards IZant's conception of teleology as possessing only a regulative value in the sciences, the point of view now changes: precisely because the ego had ordered the world, it was out of the' unending cycle of the evolution of the universe' that one now sought to comprehend purpose in the world, and the absolute separation of subject and object seemed to have been overcome in the concept of ' constructive motion'. But it did not remain at that: for a quite contrary impression is produced when Trendelenburg, who all his life gratefully acknowledged von Berger's fundamental importance to his own philosophical outlook, asserts that his teacher's greatest n1erit was to have been the first again to break through' the constructive standpoint' through his' preliminary analysis of consciousness'. Notwithstanding von Berger's point of departure in an unproblematic mediation and reconciliation between thought and being, metaphysics and logic, in the first part of the Allgemeine Grundziige zur Wissenschaft, this system already includes the idea of the disciplines of theory of knowledge and theory of science: in the mere ten years that lay between the first and fourth parts of his system (18 I 7-27) von Berger had in an unexampled fashion traced a path from a 'pure thought' essentially derived from Hegel to a dualism of the methods of the empirical and the philosophical sciences. It was true he had at all times adhered to the idea that one function of philosophy was to establish unity, but in the fourth and last volume of his Allgemeine Grundziige his system had quite unmistakably broken apart and taken at least three different directions. FirstlY, in regard to the unification of the natural sciences and natural philosophy, von Berger quite definitely professes an 'inductive inquiry' which only 'in the end' cannot get on without the naturalphilosophical vie"Tpoint of the unity of nature in an 'organic conception of the
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator world'. SecondlY, his system breaks apart because the problem of the faculty of knowledge, which he had treated in the first part wholly in the sense of the Romantic psychology in which vague and obscure sensations rise through sensual and rational perception to an understanding and discernment of the highest sacred ideas, reappears in the third volume, under the rubric of a 'theory of thought and knowledge', as an analysis of the faculty of knowledge, which now, however, consists of an assemblage of logical and empiricalpsychological facts. He is plainly so vexed by the prohlems of epistemology that at the end of his third part he so to speak founds his system anew and starts again from the beginning, to arrive, thirdlY, at the position that systemthinking is possible merely, and only superficially and by pretension, as an attempt at a complete presentation of the knowledge possessed by philosophy and no longer in the sense of a comprehension of a totality. Rather than deny this insight he is ready to be called a sceptic or an eclectic. To belong to any school or system is repugnant to him, and progress in the development of philosophy is fronl now on to be expected, not through the isolated genius, but only from the community of philosophical scholars and inquirers. It is in this breakdown of a system expressly conceived in the spirit of Hegel that Trendelenburg's idea that all system-thinking must be replaced by 'logical investigations' animated by the spirit of inquiry has its birth. Since von Berger sets aside the problems of philosophical proof partly in favour of a theory in the material spheres of philosophy, partly in favour of logical and epistemological inquiry, his' miscarried' system can be regarded as a valid guide as to which problems were capable of breaking up the abstract formalisms of the early Romantic philosophical systems - and this not least because Erich von Berger traversed perhaps more completely than anyone else the entire evolution from Reinhold and Fichte, whom he heard lecture, via Schelling and Steffans, whose pupil or friend he became, to Hegel, only finally to tend more and more, in the last volume of his system, in the direction of empiricism (Herbart). This esteenl for the empirical, embedded in the' organic philosophy of life', was to be reproduced in the Logische Untersuchungen of his pupil Trendelenburg, and it constitutes the connecting link between German idealism and the' scientific philosophy' of the neo-I
16
The abandonment of German idealisJJl
reduction of all philosophical argument and proof to a basic content, assumed to exist in every philosophical tendency, which he believed he had discovered in the 'fact of consciousness' and the fact that everything proceeds from the , idea'. With Fichte, this basic model was then developed more and more for the purposes of a self-liberation of man, and the whole point of theoretically guaranteeing a 'moral world' was the eventual establishment of a 'society of free men' - which was in fact tbe name adopted by a circle of students at Jena who sat at the feet, firstly of Reinhold, and then, after he was called to I<:'iel, of Fichte. Among them was von Berger as were Hulsen, Herbart and !<:'oppen, to n1ention only the most famous. Yet the movement did not stop at ethical liberation, with the ego (never truly understood as being purely transcendental) desiring to create a moral world for itself - with Schelling's experiments in natural philosophy a profound shift of meaning away from Fichte's philosophy was very soon introduced: to reconstruct nature intellectually, to proceed purely speculatively from the phenomena of nature to an interpretation of the whole universe, became the new fashion, and it was a fashion one could pursue - not, to be sure, without yielding to the pressure of public opinion in the era of the Napoleonic occupation - with much greater assurance than one could Fichte's utopian proposals for a rational change in society. The origins of Trendelenburg's teleological conception of the world go back to this new natural philosophy of Schelling, which was at first directed against Fichte's conception of nature a conception in which nature is seen as being wholly soulless. Henrik Steffans, whom Trendelenburg had heard lecture during his time in Berlin, comments in his memoirs on this event and the motives of the new direction Romanticism had therewith taken: If I am to say what I owe to Schelling ... I believe I shall describe this gift conferred upon me most clearly if I characterize it as an intuitive knowledge of all existence as an organic whole. Just as in any organic structure any member, even the humblest, can be comprehended only through its unity with the whole, so the universe, even considered historically, had become for me an organic evolution, but one which received its completion only through its highest member, through man. In this way, to be sure, a teleology had arisen which, grounded more deeply, replaced the earlier disdained and rejected teleology. For existence can be comprehended as something that has evolved itself organically only if the future of this evolution already hovers before us as something completed; it is only when viewed in this finished completion that its earlier moments receive a living significance.
This new natural-philosophical teleology, which replaces I<:'ant's and Fichte's idea of a moral world with a wholly contemplative Weltanschauung, is an exemplary consummation of the conversion from the social engagement of the Enlightenment to an intensified and internalized world and an intellectual contemplation of one's own genius. It is 'the play of love with itself', as Hegel maliciously called this new attitude, which attaches itself to the
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator early Romantic philosophy of the J ena of Reinhold and Fichte. In regard to the questions of proof in philosophy and the sciences, it signifies that from now on a teleology sustained by a divine principle will concede to scientific rationality only a secondary place: 'For what is theology', von Berger asked, , if it is not inspired and accompanied by a profound love of truth? And what is worldly philosophy if it, too, does not in the end lead us to God?' In Romanticism that which may still bear the appearance of being a philosophical system is in fact sustained by a conviction of a much higher kind. The concept of the system now denotes neither the method of rational argumentation and proof, nor the construction of an encyclopaedic whole: beside the deductive"aprioric type of system in the tradition of Reinhold and Fichte and the 'panlogical', i.e. methodistic-encyclopaedic, system of Hegel, there now appears a third type of system, the Romantic-weltanschaulich. This third type, to be sure, henceforth calls into question the concept of the system as such and its claim to comprehend totality, for not only is there all too often a lack of rationality in individual performances, but above all its proofs and conclusions acquire through our being referred to a 'divine principle' a wholly irrational character comprehensible only in an extra-scientific sense. It was precisely this so-called' irrationalism' in Romanticism, so frequently condemned politically - the' paradox that speculative idealism paved the way to the nineteenth century's love of facts and therewith also to positivism' (Karl Joel) by overcoming rigorous prescriptive thinking and mathematicizing, together with the mechanistic conception of the world and logical deductionism - that was decisively responsible for the fact that co-operation between philosophy and the individual sciences was not only restored but even enhanced. This third system was precisely that design for a system the lack of which Erich Rothacker so much regretted in the historical school: von Berger, Trendelenburg and not a few of the latter's pupils had given expression to precisely that programme of the historical school of which Rothacker asserted that part of it had produced no system and part was incapable of producing one. This non-system, or abandonment of system, of von Berger and Trendelenburg is the Romantic system. It is the system of emphasizing the scientific value of individual phenomena as opposed to any kind of establishment of principles - it is the system of positivist natural-scientific, historical, philological and philosophical-historical knowledge. It pronounces that systematic construction must be replaced by the collection of individual facts, by 'immersion' and by engagement with the multiplicity of things. The history of philosophy has certainly not failed to record every philosophical position, but this position could not be recognized for what it was so long as all one had in n1ind was the discovery of an actual system. In the realm of practical philosophy, too, Ernst Bratuscheck records that Trendelenburg was in agreement with von Berger in principle: 'It is from self-awareness ... that there proceeds our awareness of our destiny and from
18
The abandonment of Gertnan idealism
that the free act the contemplation of which is the object of practical philosophy. ' The situation of man in the universe and in relation to God is performed by the primarily autonomous ego: History, as the temporal image of the act, of the spiritual life in general, here has to underlie inquiry, and the highest summit of historical evolution is philosophy, which is in all its cognitions a spiritual act. Practical philosophy, accordingly, cannot comprise abstract ethical formulas: it has to exhibit the intrinsic laws of human action in all their bearings and relations.
Theory of action is applied to the sphere of the drives, of the desires, and to the natural organization of n1an quite generally as it is encountered in the individual. All philosophy of history and every possible contemplation of an 'objective spirit' in Hegel's sense of the term is therewith excluded: 'Proceeding from psychological observation,' Bratuscheck says of the basic conception of practical philosophy in the' organic conception of the world', it first of all projects 'a conception of the world of desires and feelings, the inner world of the knowing and ordering and thus practical reason, which is free in that it dominates these subordinate impulses and thereby itself always remains tied to its own law, to its destiny in the universe. From this destiny there proceed all duties and, as their perfect realization, all virtues, and out of this there evolves the moral community.' This psychological-anthropological interest within Romantic philosophy seems to point ahead to naturalism, but at this time the emphasis was still more on apprehensions and presentiments of an organic world-totality. Henrik Steffans explained the difference between Fichte and Schelling, the transition from Fichte's moral philosophy to Schelling's natural philosophy, in these words: But it was not merely this presentiment of a deeper divine existence that severed me from Fichte ... What my innermost soul found repugnant was, I believe, I
In a similar way as with Steffans and Schelling the identity of theoretical and practical philosophy is guaranteed weltanschaulich, with Trendelenburg, too, there appears the tendency to trace the relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences back to a divine source. Bratuscheck records: In that the spirit aims more and more at the ideal, the unity of the ideal, the divine, constitutes the focus of its endeavour; the innermost core of all morality is religion, and the philosophy of religion is thus the flower of practical philosophy. If, consequently,
Friedrich Trendeienburg as mediator science is always theoretically engaged in contemplation of unending nature, either directly or through self-awareness or as a practical task, and if, again, all knowledge proceeds in a practical sense out of the highest goal of life, then an intrinsic connection must exist between all the sciences; thus the philosophy which is to establish this connection is not a mere propaedeutic for the individual branches of science, it must permeate them in all their parts; the encyclopaedia of every discipline can be drafted out of the whole. But this also means that philosophy as a science cannot possess a particular method of its own; all knowledge has to be erected by induction from external and inner experience and completed by deduction from principles.
The task and programme of this system of knowledge is that the inductive sciences should be 'con1pleted deductively' by a n10re universal court of .philosophy: but this formulation had ceased to be understood even as neoI<:.antianism was coming into being, and had instead given rise to the question 'how we could attain to the supreme principles, to the beginnings of the deductive path '. The subsequent readers of the Logische Untersuchungen or the Aiiegemeine Grundzuge zur Wissenschaft never experienced any difficulty in understanding the meaning of the demand for an inductive method of procedure in the sciences: what they found far harder to understand, however, was the assertion that philosophy was a distinct and independent discipline by virtue of its function of 'deductive completion'. Alois Riehl, who in the year of Trendelenburg's death posed the question quoted above, makes clear in an exemplary way why neo-I<:'antianism could no longer follow Trendelenburg's line of thinking, and at the same time suggests a fundamental reason why the latter was to be so quickly forgotten: We can attain to them [the principles from which deduction can take its start] either by recourse to the inductive methods of natural science or through direct inspiration. There is no third way. In the former case philosophy would only have the task of traversing once again the path trodden by empirical science, but in the opposite direction; it would be empirical science in reverse. Whether it would then possess the exalted significance ascribed to it, however, must remain at least questionable. In the latter case we would again be presented with the intrinsically unaccomplishable philosophy of intellectual intuition.
That was the state of things, with von Berger just as much as in Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchungen. A self-engendered ego now no longer constitutes the foundation of this system-structure: the emphasis has, within the framework of the late Romantic movement, shifted over to philosophy of religion, which not only constitutes the crowning conclusions of the system but at the same time determines, in the concept and experience of God, the fundamental attitude of this species of philosophizing. A novel element, however, which co-exists with it is a heightened interest in the multiplicity of reality and the inductive investigation of it. A second novel element, finally, exists in the nota bene subsequent
The abandonmmt oj German idealism
20
deduction, which, proceeding from that' organic conception of the world' that is proof against all empiricism, positivism and scepticism, conceives the intrinsic nature of all experience to be the intrinsic nature of God. The 'organic conception of the world' which sets at its apex the idea of God has - in von Berger's case as part of his system, in Trendelenburg's even without his having constructed a system - made its peace with the existing world. Between the state and findings of the individual sciences and that divine instance there exists as yet a very loose connection limited in fact only to an apprehension of this unity. Science and Weltanschauung are, to be sure, intimately related to each other, but this relationship as such can no longer be comprehended rationally.
2
LOGIC'S NEW OBJECT OF INTEREST AND THE IDEA OF THEORY OF SCIENCE
'The SClences go happily along their own particular paths', Trendelenburg wrote in r 840 in the foreword to the Logische Untersuchungen, and, formulating his own views, added critically: but they do so in part without any closer account of their method, since their eyes are fixed on their objecr of interest and not on their procedure. Logic would here have the task of observing and comparing, of elevating what is unconscious into consciousness, and of comprehending diversity in a common origin. If it did not apply itself painstakingly to the method employed by the individual sciences logic would miss its goal, because it would then have no definite object of interest by which it could orientate itself in its theories. This philosophical situation is obviously characterized by a wholly peculiar relationship between logic and the sciences, for the fact is quite clearly recognized as demonstrated and justified that the individual sciences should pursue their own path, while in regard to logical theory the situation has arisen that one has to look around for new criteria, spheres of interest and objectives if one is 'to continue to orientate oneself at all in these theories'. 'Logic and metaphysics as the foundation science [singular!]' is the title Trendelenburg gives the new synoptic first chapter he inserted into the second edition (r862) of the Logische Untersuchungen, and he says: We may, indeed, speak of the specific methods employed by the individual sciences, of the method of logic, of mathematics, of natural science, of jurisprudence. But these various different procedures are only an expression of a single mode of thought which, assuming many shapes, clings and conforms to its object in order to lay hold of and comprehend it. In the sciences all that happens is that this single mode of thought is given different kinds of stimulus to the invention of ever new skills and artifices to which the object has to submit as though made captive ... When we call the procedure
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator
21
necessary production, or call it the knowledge of how to approximate to what is necessary, and call the knowledge of how to estimate the degree of approximation to what is necessary method, then method is what makes the science a science. And when the methods appear in the object of interest of the sciences but are not given by it but have their universal and common foundation in the thought that is working through the object of interest, this leads us to the task of seeking out their origin in the nature of thought. Though Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchungen certainly shares with the logics of Schleiermacher's pupils Ritter, Twesten, Braniss, Vorlander and George their high estimation of empiricism and their interest in methods, principles and concepts, it differs from them completely in its evaluation of the results that can be achieved by speculative thought: although they never desire to anticipate or encroach upon the empirical, the latter, proceeding from the self-aware mind, evolve their logical categories either wholly formally or by speculative deduction which occasionally even approaches Hegel, while Trendelenburg's objective is to learn from the sciences rather than seek to instruct them. If the latter can still clearly be seen to have originated in Fichte's WissenschaftsJehre, Trendelenburg has altogether abandoned the methods of autonomous philosophy and replaced them with a 'theory of science' or science of science which derives from particular individual problems. In so far as the individual sciences constitute themselves sciences through possessing their own distinct objects of interest Trendelenburg recognizes them all as such, and only then does he trace the apparently autonomous methods employed by these disciplines back to the 'single mode of thought', to 'logic, to the investigation of the thought that produces cognitive sciences'. Whereas Heinrich Ritter, for example, criticized Schleiermacher because the latter's' dialectics' failed to set up any truly positive rules for scientific work but' merely' practised critique of knowledge, Trendelenburg's transformation of logic tends towards an investigation of' thought' as it is actually practised in the sciences: 'Logic has to become a metaphysics of the actual [I] sciences to the extent that it has to comprehend their real principles so as to understand the act of thought within their spheres of interest and thereby become true logic. ' The autonomizing of logic in relation to the sciences, and even also in relation to knowledge as such, with which Trendelenburg reproaches the Hegelians, is to be counteracted with a restoration of the ties between logical theory and scientific practice. That all the sciences - including those called the 'humanities', as opposed to the previous orientation of logic towards mathematics and the natural sciences - are to become the object of interest of logical reflection already specifically anticipates Dilthey's 'logic of the Geisteswissenschaften', which was decisively influenced both by Trendelenburg and by Schleiermacher's concept of a 'central science' that philosophy is to become, and yet is at the same time presented as only a partial aspect of a more
22
The abandonment of German idealism
comprehensive programme for a new scientific discipline: 'theory of science' as that tribunal whose object of interest is to be the logical and metaphysical bases of the sciences: if the sciences now all point to logic, now to metaphysics, as to the univetsalized form of knowledge which they presuppose, then that form of knowledge which desires to understand the nature of science as such and to be theory of science (Trendelenburg's italics] will have to embrace both logic and metaphysics. It is only by referring to both that we can understand the intrinsic feasibility of knowledge and comprehend thought in its striving to know.
'Theory of science', 'logic in a broader sense', now becomes a new 'philosophia fundamentalis' (Trendelenburg), a science of 'general insights into the total state and value of the sciences and into the conditions that determine their efficacy and progress' (Diihring, 1878). Trendelenburg was in 1862 the first to cast this sense of the term' theory of science' into the philosophical debate and to determine its range of concerns. It was not, as has been assumed, his pupil Diihring who first employed it in 1878, in the contracted form' Wissenschaftstheorie'; this term, too, was current from 1875 at the latest, and it goes back to the Logische Untersuchungen. Trendelenburg, the' sober Romantic' as Rosenkranz called him, conceived a new science that would be a union of logic and metaphysics. Theory of science was initially determined - as the positivists were later unwilling to admit and Jiirgen Habermas plainly did not know when, in Erkenntnis und Interesse, he asserted that a theory of science must in principle relinquish susceptibility to the essential nature of things - by the essential nature of science and the objects of science in the unbroken unity of logic and metaphysics. It is compelled to do this because every claim to truth in the individual sciences presupposes an identity of being and thought. Only if an adequation between these is possible in principle can the knowledge they possess be understood as such. Quite to the contrary of what Habermas asserts, the concern of this theory of science is to attempt to reconcile the fundamentals of the philosophy of identity with the fact of the growing multiplicity of merely positive knowledge. And it is at the same time a specifically Romantic concern to pose the question how - as it were in spite of all merely intellectual perception - an encyclopaedic universal mode of viewing reality, and thus also of viewing the scientific tribunals which administer this reality, can be reconciled with the reduction to principles that characterizes philosophy. Knowledge and interest, reduction to principles, the multiplicity of reality and the' organic conception of the world' are in this new discipline to form a new synthesis. The integration of knowledge into philosophy is to take place at very varying levels: in the foundational disciplines, in as much as, through incorporating the problem of perception and the concepts of psychology, logic
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator expands to become theory of knowledge; in theory of the sciences, in as much as the procedures of the de facto autonomous individual sciences become an object of interest to logic; but also in the higher philosophical sciences, where a new evaluation of the empirical overcomes the previous constructionism of speculative thinking and rises to the examination of the material elements of scientific inquiry. Trendelenburg's work on the transfonnation of logic is closely associated with his Aristotelianisn1. On this matter two secondary opinions confront each other: one asserts that Trendelenburg's pupils stood aloof from all neoI(antian influence, while Werner Jaeger, in total opposition to this opinion of Rothacker's, has spoken of an 'intrinsic similarity in the historical situation' attending the rise of the I(antian critical philosophy and the elevation of philosophy to a science by Aristotle, his purpose being to indicate that the 'reanimation, eventuating in formalism' of these thinkers had also turned out to be equally unfruitful in both cases. While Rothacker is thinking of Aristotelian metaphysics and of the ethics, and may have had chiefly in mind the influence they exerted on Dilthey or Brentano and thus placed in the foreground the contrast this presented to the reanimation of the I(antian critical philosophy, Werner Jaeger observes quite correctly when he says that Aristotle was the only Greek thinker with whom I<:'ant could have held a discussion' on an equal footing'. For the Aristotelianism of the nineteenth century can be understood as an aspect of the interest which on the one hand led to the various attempts made in the 1820S and 18 30S to effect an epistemological transforn1ation of logic, while on the other hand - and, as in the case of Trendelenburg, less system-orientated - there was also a quest for the historical connection with Aristotelian logic and psychology. And in both cases it was the orbit of psychological-logical problems that occasioned such developments. Where this Aristotelianism is valued principally for its philological achievements, as it usually is today, Trendelenburg's achievements as a philosopher threaten to become forgotten; where, however, as was the case throughout the course of the nineteenth century, these philosophical achievements came to bear fruit, it was the Aristotelian psychology and logic that came to the forefront as a propaedeutic for the new systematic treatment of problen1s. And it is only in this sense that the analogy drawn by Jaeger is justified: that which in the case of I(ant was demonstrated through perception and concepts, and served as the foundation of knowledge, experience and science, possessed its Aristotelian parallels in the treatment of the preconditions of thought as a unity of linguistic, grammatical and logical elements in the logical writings of the Organon. Only an elementary level of philosophical instruction could choose to opt for I<:'ant or Aristotle, just as Trendelenburg's ,influence' on neo-I<:'antianism, too, was on the whole confined to this region.
Tbe abandonment of German idealism
The unity of the' organic conception of the world' sustained by the idea of purpose, Trendelenburg's organologic understanding of nature and conception of society, on the other hand, can no more be understood as 'Aristotelianism' than the neo-Kantian Weltanscbauung can simply be traced back to Trendelenburg. The Romantic origin of Trendelenburg's Weltanschauung was far too powerful, its theoretical working out far too incomplete, for it to be capable in this form of itself founding a tradition. In the Geschichte der Kategorienlehre, moreover, he even conducted a critique of Aristotle - or at least drew the boundary between Aristotelianism and the' organic conception of the world': 'To the philosophy of today the question would suggest itself what relation the categories bear to the divine spirit which, according to metaphysics, conceives itself and is subject to nothing outside itself. We cannot ask Aristotle this question, or at least we cannot expect an answer.' Trendelenburg's Weltanschauung remained that of Romanticism; his Aristotelianism, on the other hand, was the genuinely 'up to date' aspect of his philosophizing. Nonetheless, in this respect, too, Trendelenburg's 'speculative' (G. Stammler) - or, better, 'autochthonous empiricism' (K. Grunder) - marks the limits to which an analogy between neo-Aristotelianism and neoKantianism can be taken: while the transcendental philosophy of Kant, whose 'subjectivism' Trendelenburg was violently to attack in his contention with Kuno Fischer, appeals in its analysis of knowledge to the acts of the knowing subject (see Chapter 5, 2), the Aristotelian refers to the 'subjectless judgment', for every logical judgment always relates to a real activity or to the activity of a substance, and it cannot be understood in the absence of this counterpart in the actual world. There have been frequent attempts to define the judgment purely logically by remaining within the world of concepts; but such a definition does not suffice ... A simple example may illustrate what I mean. In language we interpret the sentence' it lightens' res blitzt] in accordance with its form as a judgment in respect of an original activity. In the concept' lightning' this activity becomes substance, and the substance is manifested in qualities. The concept discloses its character in predicates, e.g. the lightning flashes, is jagged, etc. Originally this was always the case; only now we rarely derive it from the primary activities but usually from the activity of the subjects.
The ontological tendency of Trendelenburg's logic directly conflicts with those strivings for unity in the development of this discipline which one and all- whether with the followers of Fichte, Fries, Herbart or Schleiermacher - originate in the act of synthesis by the transcendental subject and thus in the Critique of Fure Reason: Aristotelianism, on the other hand, is a preparation for positivism, and the most important positivists of the 1870S and .1880s in Germany - Duhring, Lass, Riehl, Paulsen, Vaihinger - were, moreover, without exception pupils, or at least' grand-pupils', of Trendelenburg.
Friedrich T rendelenburg as mediator
In holding the view that every concept is founded on a judgment, Trendelenburg is even directly connected with the empiricist O. F. Gruppe, who especially in his book Wendepunkt der Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert (1855), had pleaded for a new beginning for philosophy on natural-scientific lines based on Bacon. In this, too, there lies an analogy: that, though empiricism had many very different starting-points, it nonetheless always took the field against a German idealism it understood as 'scholasticism'. In this matter neoAristotelianism stands a lot closer to Bacon than to scholasticism: concepts traceable to judgments permit no 'constructions', no purely logical-formal theories of concept and judgment or those deduced from the self-aware mind, but demand that all categories shall be derived from their respective spheres of interest. That is why the alternatives presented by scientific-theoretical thinking in the nineteenth century were theory of categories or 'theory of science' - tendential empiricism or positivism or apriorism. And there is another respect in which neo-Aristotelianism and neoI(antianism can be shown to be in agreement: when Friedrich Albert Lange greeted Cohen's book Kants Theorie der Erfahrung with the observation that, after the neo-Aristotelian philology effected by Trendelenburg, it might well now come about that I(ant's philosophy would be understood and analysed in a similar fashion, he indicated the second inheritance into which, beside the new orientation given to logic, neo-I(antianism was to enter: the historicalphilological mode of approach to the problems of philosophy. Trendelenburg was not only one of the first to give seminar study courses in philosophy, he was also one of the first in the post-idealist epoch to anticipate from the intense study of a philosophical classic that stimu.lus contemporary philosophy was unable to give. His edition of Aristotle's psychology, with commentary, appeared as early as 1833; three years later there appeared the Elemente der Aristotelischen Logik, which by 1892 alone had been reprinted nine times and from 1842 together with a 'commentary' volume represented the quasi-official Prussian textbook of philosophy. Trendelenburg wrote no logic textbook in the usual sense of the word, and published no psychology or pedagogy of his own, even though these subjects constituted the principal content of his professional work and it was above all through his lectures on them that he exerted influence. It was not as a writer on philosophy but as a longstanding professor at Germany's greatest university, as its frequently reappointed rector, and above all as a Prussian cultural politician and 'guardian of education', that, as the educational reformer Peter Petersen has said, 'Trendelenburg dominated Berlin University for a whole generation' and 'was able to subject the entire Prussian educational system to his influence'. Comparatively little of all this has been transmitted to us in printed form, and that is why such inadequate descriptions of him as simply an Aristotelian or merely a critic of Hegelianism could become current; how inadequate these characterizations are may be i~~g~~
26
The abandonment oj German idealism
from the fact that he and his pupil Bratuscheck played a decisive role in the institution of the additional examination in philosophy for candidate teachers (called the 'philosophicum'); that from 1825 his Elementa Logices Aristoteleae helped to maintain in existence the academic subject 'philosophical propaedeutics'; that from 1862 every Prussian school-leaving certificate contained a note as to 'whether the recipient is proficient in the elements of psychology and logic' - and that, finally, although we possess not a single significant pedagogical publication by Trendelenburg himself, his influence nonetheless extended to Ernst Laas, who wanted to see German literary composition become a 'school of thinking' and therewith determined the method of instruction in literary composition, to Jurgen Bona Meyer, the leading liberal university and school reformer, and above all to Dilthey, who in turn originated one of the most important pedagogical movements of the twentieth century. The aim of Trendelenburg's 'theory of science' when applied to school and university was to prepare for the study of the individual sciences and thus to make possible a certain pre-orientation in this field. Theory of science was also a philosophical propaedeutic: the Elements and the Erlauterungen zur Aristotelischen Logik served in the Gymnasiums and universities as general introductions to science. If already in the case of Erich von Berger the problem of knowledge had destroyed the unity of the system, or at least rendered it very questionable, this problem had now assumed so nearly independent a status that a distinct discipline had arisen to deal with it. The multiplicity of empirical knowledge which had already discredited natural philosophy and led to a continual splitting-up of the philosophical faculty also assisted in establishing theory of science. The problem which is today discussed under the rubric of an 'inundation of stimuli' through television and the media is the same problem as that which was already being debated as early as the end of the 1820S under the rubric of an 'overburdening' of pupils through the newly arisen multiplicity of knowledge. A direct line of philosophers can be traced, from Trendelenburg's concept of theory of science back to von Berger and others, who abandoned the constructionism of idealist philosophy so as to permit positive knowledge to come wholly into its own. Theory of science became a philosophical discipline, however, precisely where philosophy's older requirement for unity encountered the new requirement for specialization and accumulation of knowledge: as an attempt at mediation between multiplicity and unity - in terms of the history of philosophy between idealist philosophy of mind and empirical science - it revised the philosophical apriories of the age of systems. In this its principle was above all the laying of a logical foundation, since it was only by proceeding from this that - beyond contention between systems - a reconstruction of the unity of knowledge seemed possible.
Friedrich Trendelenburg as lnediator
The logical movement of the nineteenth century which Trendelenburg helped to initiate also had a further, equally novel difficulty to overcome which likewise resulted from the new accumulation of knowledge: the difficulty of segregating logic from psychology; for it was precisely to the extent that logic truly sought to include within itself its new object of interest, the procedures and learning processes of the individual sciences, that it acquired a new function, that of critique of knowledge, that extended beyond the framework of traditional logic. This, too, had already been indicated in von Berger's miscaried design for a system: as early as the introduction to the second part of his system - thus, significantly, just before the presentation of the natural philosophy - he conceded that' the only possible system' was' in part not yet discovered, in part describable only as an ideal', his purpose being to explain why among other reasons 'for the sake of greater clarity' - he had chosen, not a natural-historical presentation, but one which comn1enced with the 'sphere of the physical elements'. What so far appears to be only a problem of presentation proves, however, to be a problen1 of substance: Finally I observe ... that the next, third volume will be devoted partly to anthropological inquiries, partly to a continuation of psychological inquiries ... through which I shall seek to repair the deficiencies of the first part ... and to discuss the most important questions concerning the temporal beginnings and the gradual evolution of knowledge as fully as they certainly deserve.
Psychological inquiries, too, replace constructivism. Erich von Berger, who had at first been only professor of astronomy at I<.iel, and had studied with Gauss, among others, at Gottingen, was now, as Reinhold's successor and a professor of philosophy, transported to the situation of a sceptic who could no longer place his entire trust in a philosophy whose foundation proceeded fron1 pure thought: the claim to absoluteness advanced by earlier systematic conceptions was assailed, firstly by the problem of knowledge, then by the effect anthropology and psychology had of rendering problematic the originally self-assured ego. Deductions and constructions were now replaced by the more modest claims of psychological or logical inquiry. 'Pure thought' lost its reliability as philosophy's leading principle and method to just the extent that the individual sciences began to find questionable its characterization as a 'human faculty'. It was above all anthropology and psychology which contested the meaning and truth-content of this claim, while it was at the same time precisely these sciences that offered new empirical knowledge assisting towards a better understanding of the nature of the psyche and the ego: For the history of philosophical systems teaches us that it is only too easy for the human spirit ... to lose its spiritual equilibrium, as the repeated experience of error has instructed it in the impatience of its striving and guarded it against new perils. Thus
28
The abandonment of German idealism
here it strays into a thoughtless empiricism which, itself incapable of thought, would nonetheless like to eventuate in thoughts and concepts, there into an arrogant transcendentalism and the precipitate construction of metaphysical houses of cards that the slightest breath of air can blow down.
And elsewhere, shunning both 'thoughtless empiricism' and 'arrogant transcendentalism', von Berger writes: As regards the method to be pursued in our science [i.e. psychology], however, there is, as we recalled earlier, in all the sciences in the end only one good and true method ... Thus, as a natural science (namely that of the psyche), it too will have to proceed like the rest, and thus start from pure observation and then continue in accordance with precept.
The transformation of logic into' theory of knowledge' marks the precise point at which empirical knowledge derived from psychology, physiology and general anthropology entered into the fundamental foundations of philosophy. The autonomy of deductions from the ego became untenable and, whereas it had formerly created this foundation alone and by its own power, philosophy's new ancillary sciences now compelled it to partake of knowledge acquired inductively. It opened itself to the empirical and seized hold on things, and there would have been little to remark on in this event if it had not involved someone who at the same time adhered to the idea and concept of the unity of knowledge and of the actually existing sciences: to Trendelenburg belongs the credit of having been the first to point in this direction and to have therewith opposed to the positivist replacement of philosophy with the sciences his own conception of a synthesis: As theory of science it has ... to serve as a signpost ... for the sciences ... Although philosophy ... may have originated in unity with the other sciences ... this union has long since been dissolved through division of labour, and philosophy now encounters the individual sciences dispersed and in the shape they have given themselves. It is these individual sciences that furnish logic and metaphysics with their subject matter; logic and metaphysics find methods and presupposed principles present in the individual sciences, and their task is to discover their origin and unity.
3
THE DESTRUCTION OF 'PURE THOUGHT' AND THE PROBLEM OF 'ABSENCE OF PRESUPPOSITIONS'
It was out of the critique of the concept of negation that Trendelenburg evolved his critique of pure thought. The celebrated and notorious beginning of Hegelian logic, which derives the concept of becoming from that of being and that of nothingness - which Trendelenburg called 'the most flagrant' contradiction 'of common sense' - posed the quite fundamental question whether any beginning of logic was possible at all without presuppositions.
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator Citing Hegel - 'The beginning is logical in that it is to be effected in the elen1ent of thought freely existing for itself, in pure knowledge' he doubted whether it was possible to attain to pure thought, to pure being, or even to pure nothingness, without any sensory intuition, any element of materiality in the representation, independently of any thought-content gained through sensory intuition. In any event, 'becoming, that concrete perception dominating life and death', could not' all of a sudden arise out of pure being, an admitted abstraction, or out of nothingness, likewise an admitted abstraction'. In Hegel, becoming the construction of the concept - rested . solely on the principle of negation. This could mean either logical negation or actual opposition: the former possibility would, it went without saying, render the transition quite inexplicable, while actual opposition would mean instituting an antithesis of material ideas and at the same time defining this as a negation which both would have conceptually to accomplish in one and the same process. But how could such a required material antithesis be thought of in the absence of any kind of perception? How could a motion enter into this simple, actual opposition and then, as a so-called 'negation', set a process in motion? These were the doubts and objections that led Trendelenburg to the conclusion that the genesis of the concepts of Hegelian philosophy was nothing but surreptitious trickery: 'The antithetical concept (the negative instance) is acquired elsewhere through an anticipatory intervening perception ... At the decisive moments it carries pure thought away with it and takes it to where it would never arrive by itself. ' In contrast to the banal critique of Hegel which obstructs any understanding of the dialectic by dwelling on the absolute validity of the law of contradiction, Trendelenburg concentrates on the (surreptitiously introduced) 'purity' of this thought and determines to show the extent to which it has in fact already established its premises: ' Abstract thought ignores the idea of spatial motion, to be sure, but it secretly makes this concrete perception into its vehicle. ' The advice first to draw a triangle, then the apriority of the axioms will becon1e obvious, corresponds to the Hegelian advice and premise to begin with thought within the forms of the dialectic, then you will see that the dialectic is qualified for such pure thought. Trendelenburg also says in his Geschichte der Kategorienlehre: The production of pure thought first demands that it be purified of all content. The contingent is effaced; thought presupposes nothing; all it has in its power is itself. The logic which produces the categories is required in opposition to perceptions, even to the abstract sense-representations of geometry to withdraw into pure thought, to hold fast to it and to operate within it.
In the En;vklopadie of 1830, to section 78 of which Trendelenburg here refers, Hegel had equated this demand for an absence of presuppositions (' doubt
The abandonment of German idealism
everything ') with the' resolve to desire to think purely', and with this concept had furnished a catchword to those who polemicized against his own logic, the method of which was henceforth characterized not as dialectical but as 'presuppositionless ' . Yet the concept may be older than this: as early as 1829, for example, 1. H. Fichte employed the concept of' absence of presuppositions' in his Beitrage zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie in the sense in which Descartes had founded pure thought 'on an absolute absence of presuppositions' in an 'act of philosophical abstraction from everything given'. Here, as also with Hegel, the concept at first possessed a wholly positive sense, and could, as with 1. H. Fichte, even mean that Descartes had broken free from tradition and to that extent had thought 'presuppositionlessly'. In any event, however, the expression is older than that conceptual sense which made it into a philosphical term: before firstly 1. H. Fichte, then Trendelenburg, who was principally involved in its discussion, had taken it up at the end of the 18 30S in their polemics against Hegel, another Hegel critic, Friedrich Eduard Beneke, had in 1836 employed this concept in his polemic Unsere Universitaten und was ihnen Noth tut to characterize the entire epoch of German idealism. In this work Beneke criticizes a 'dominant contemporary prejudice' which had endured 'since the time of Reinhold, and even more since that of Fichte, as to the possibility and necessity of deriving everything from the presuppositionless and empty'; it was a prejudice to which even Schleiermacher had to some extent succumbed, and in another passage Beneke even speaks of an 'absence of presuppositions full of presuppositions' in Schleiermacher's 'dialectics'. The expression' absence of presuppositions' here means, in a positive sense, the same thing as 'pure thought', but towards the end of the 183 os it increasingly acquired a polemical sense, and then in the 1840S even became a slogan in the critique of speculative philosophy. As early as the pre-March period the alternatives were absence of presuppositions or theory of knowledge; two fundamentally different conceptions of philosophy collided with one another at this time, one of which was to characterize the preceding, the other the coming epoch: one which, through pure thought, proceeding from the concept of the representation or from the ego, gifted with intellectual intuition or by means of the dialectical method, relied on the self-unfolding and self-motion of the concept or the idea, or on intuition, and, opposed to this, another conception whose smallest common denominator was the inclusion of perception, observation and sense-experience. A simple example of this confrontation of conceptions, the clearest expression of which was provided by the contention between Trendelenburg on one side and Gabler and other Hegelians on the other, will therefore serve to represent it. In 1840-4 I IZarl Rosenkranz, who in his biography of Hegel was to call Trendelenburg an 'abstract empiricist', wrote in his diary:
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator Trendelenburg has published his Logische Untersuchungen. Already they are talking as though with this book he has refuted Hegel's logic ... Trendelenburg asserts that pure thought is impossible. He demands a perceptual thought. But how can he pronounce pure thought impossible if he is incapable of thinking it? If he is capable of thinking it, however, how can he pronounce it impossible? That of which I have no conception I cannot pronounce impossible.
These reflections seem at first hardly more than mere rhetoric, to be sure, but they nonetheless characterize the mutual lack of understanding very clearly: Rosenkranz says that Trendelenburg has retreated beyond I
The abandonment of Gertllan idealism
he discovered no satisfactory answer to Hegelian logic, for it contained nothing as to the relationship between observations and thoughts. It desired to be an ontological theory of totality, and in any event not a theory of knowledge, however much disguised, which treated of the question of the beginning of knowledge and philosophizing. In this Trendelenburg was mistaken, and even Rosenkranz was unable to correct him. But even if he could have done so, a unification of ontological and epistemological logic could hardly have come about, for Trendelenburg also had certain very practical motives for rejecting the dialectic: Wherever the dialectic has been put into practice the dialectical evolution hovers above the organic and genetic like a higher organisation and has no concern for them. For it seeks to represent the necessary or timeless motion of an object whose evolution consists in having necessarily to unfold the determinations that lie within it. The socalled genetic view, on the other hand, has to represent the object only as it arises from its effecting causes. An object's temporal evolution need not necessarily coincide with its timeless evolution. States, for example, are held to have originated in violent acts of suppression and depredation: they have their temporal origin in immorality; the necessity of states, however, is recognized when we regard them in their timeless evolution.
Trendelenburg objects: 'The timeless origin of the state is held to lie in the moral nature of man, its temporal origin, however, in the immorality of violent suppression. Impossible. The initial germ of the state as such, this flower of morality, must always lie in rational nature. ' The moral in the sense it possesses in Hegel's philosophy of history is misunderstood by Trendelenburg as the ethical. But his critique, too, which at first seemed to be purely theoretical, now increasingly acquires the character of a difference of Weltanschauung: the first germ of the state had to reside in the rational nature of man: 'Given that, at the beginning of things, this [i.e. rational nature] n1ade an effort to defend itself against depredations, then the inherent ground of this evolution always resides in this deed of morality', Trendelenburg says, again repeating his error of equating the necessity of the state asserted by Hegel with the 'rational nature' and ethically understood morality that is supposedly also obliged to reside in it. The only thing Trendelenburg finds thinkable is that the existence of the state must be grounded to the rational nature of man, no less than in that of the whole cosmos, and thus it also becomes increasingly clear why he dislikes the whole tendency of Hegel's philosophy of right: In the domain of human activity the profoundest concept is conviction. It is impossible to understand conviction in its ultimate and highest sense without reference to the divine. When desire surrendered to for a moment comes to govern a man, that is not conviction: it is idolatry of the animalic. Calculation of the interests of men and causes, though the elements of the accounting be never so general and universal, is not conviction: it is idolatry of finite reason, even of finite reason as the most subtilized
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator
33
form of self-interest. Conviction in a moral sense arises only where the idea of the divine standing above mankind is received into the free conscious mind as that which determines this conviction. It is only with this foundation that the moral commences. This divine can find no place in the dialectical view of ethics. Neither in the family nor in civil society, or even in the state, did Hegel's dialectic disclose any such' reference to the divine'. The architecture of the philosophical sciences that was to be typical of the nineteenth century is rounded off in the Logische Untersuchungen also in respect of practical philosophy: Trendelenburg also restored in an exemplary way the rights of ethical theory in face of philosophy of history. Not only did he exert a lasting influence on the course of the basic disciplines of theoretical philosophy in logic, theory of science and epistemology; in practical philosophy, too, there persisted the fundamental idea that had already governed his critique of Hegel's theoretical philosophy: the reinstatement of a mode of theory-construction which, proceeding from the individual, analyses his possible or desired acts and apprehends all objective forms, historical events and cultural phenomena with categories pertaining to the knowing or moral individual: logic, psychology and ethics all begin with a knowledge of the subject, and the' organic conception of the world' does the rest to limit the outcome of this philosophy to mere quietism: reference to the divine 'would ... have to appear especially in the conscience; for history demonstrates that the concept of conscience enters the ethical consciousness only where the individual within himself accounts for himself to the divine, personally to a personal God. ' The politically affirmative sense and apologetic heart of Trendelenburg's Hegel-critique - Lange would later call Trendelenburg a 'blind fanatic for legitimism' - become completely clear when he continues: The genetic view will consequently have to take account of the influence of religion on the ethical. Dialectics disdained to do so in its evolution, and the holiest remains outside its morality ... the profoundest act, man's reflection on the idea of God, is no longer within it; like a mere embellishment, it is without practical significance ... The state - taking it in its widest significance - is raised out of the concept of the spirit, but its most spiritual side, the church, finds at most only an incidental [Trendelenburg's italics] place in it. A year before Schelling was called to Berlin - with the mandate, as is well known, to 'eliminate the dragon-seed of Hegelian philosophy' - late Romanticism celebrated its first victory, and one of greater philosophical significance than any Schelling was able to gain for it, in Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchttngen, whose title led one to expect something quite different. Hegel, the so-called 'Prussian state philosopher' - though in truth, if such honorary titles have to be bestowed at all, rather the philosopher of the Stein~.: ; .TIr~'l?f ,. '".
34
The abandonment of German idealisln
Hardenberg reforms had been so thoroughly assailed and criticized on every level in the Logische Untersuchungen that he was commonly held to have been 'refuted' by that book. How greatly practical political n10tives were also at work in this can be heard in a passage which, strangely enough, is hardly ever quoted: 'We have taken care', says Trendelenburg, 'not to cloud the demonstration with such ethical considerations, even if they are well founded. We now find them confirmed, however, by the result we have obtained. ' If it was at first asserted only that' the dialectical way' distanced itself' most strikingly from the natural evolution of ethics', and the weight of criticism therewith already shifted from theoretical towards practical philosophy, the actual weight seems from now on to have been placed wholly on the side of a practical refutation. In saying that he had desired not to 'cloud' the theoretical refutation there lies at least the justified fear that his arguments might perhaps be set aside on political grounds. That, however, is at the same time to say in a positive sense that a purely theoretical refutation of Hegel is not possible. What also lies in this avowal of why the arguments are expounded in precisely this way and no other is a clear decision on Trendelenburg's part as to how he sees the relationship between theoretical and practical philosophy: either each of these domains is established autonomously or the relationship between them is itself one of the ways in which they are established. In the passage quoted it is said quite unambiguously that what is involved is a , confirmatory' critique in practical philosophy, thus that practical philosophy possesses a weight of its own. But theoretical philosophy possesses this too, and it distinguishes in principle the value of every philosophical opinion of Trendelenburg's from that of an opinion of Hegel's: while with the latter every statement has its definite place within a rationally ordered total systematic structure, with Trendelenburg a statement as such can always be revised individually without his' conception of the world' or ' Weltanschauung' being fundamentally touched upon. Detachment from system-thinking is attended by the definitive abandonment of the claim to comprehend totality, and the way in which totality is present in the individual is expressed by the term then developing into a vogue-expression, 'Weltanschauung': We confess that what we humans call a philosophical system derives from only a little piece of the universe and is contemplated only on the earth, that is to say perhaps only on a splinter of the glowing and red-hot ore of the sun thrown out into space; we feel, however, that an impulse of necessity is already declaring itself that is stronger than man and points beyond man, who is everywhere conditional. The very idea of the universe takes us beyond the realm of experience. For wherever we look we see the incomplete and fragmentary. Driven by the impulse of the spirit, however, we apprehend the whole.
Philosophy's need for unity can be satisfied only in foundation disciplines such as logic, epistemology and theory of science. Only by going back to the
Friedrich Trendelenburg as mediator
35
foundations of philosophy will human knowledge achieve more than the merely 'incomplete and fragmentary'. The 'whole', however, remains inaccessible to science, and only philosophical perception [Anschauung] can grasp it: Weltanschauung-thinking replaces systen1-thinking - philosophy possesses the character of a true science only in its foundation disciplines.
2
<J=========================================================[> The rise of an autonomous discipline called Erkenntnistheorie
Trendelenburg was the architect of the neo-I
Schleiermacher 'did not found and did not intend to found' a 'philosophical school in the stricter sense', to be sure, but the above-named could nonetheless 'be described as his pupils, in the broader sense' that they moved 'preponderantly within the range of ideas which he stimulated'. Friedrich Ueberweg, a pupil of both Beneke and Trendelenburg, is, so far as I know, the only historian of philosophy to see Friedrich Schleiermacher's central significance for modern Erkenntnistheorie. The following three sections are thus in the last resort little more than an attempt to elucidate the preceding paragraphs: firstly in the form of a history of the rise of the concept Erkenntnistheorie intended to show how and by what means it had begun to fashion itself as an independent discipline even during the age of German
The rise of an autonomous discipline
37
idealism; then in the form of an account of one of the severest critIcs of German idealism and earliest projectors of a reconsideration of I
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROGRAMMA T A 'German idealism had become bankrupt, Hegel's system had fallen to pieces, an .age of anarchy, materialism and universal philosophical decline had preceded the rise of neo-I
The abandonment of German idealism
through a refoundation of philosophy on epistemological lines was also being propagated - were not at all those during which neo-IZantianism arose: it was much earlier, and in fact during the period in which German academic philosophy was as a whole turning away from German idealism, that there arose an epistemological programme which above all attacked the presuppositionless philosophizing that supposedly characterized German idealism and pleaded for the inclusion of sense-experience in the foundations of philosophy. And as early as 1840 Fries's pupil Ernst Friedrich Apeh published a monograph which even employed the expression in a book-title: Ernst Reinhold und die Kantische Philosophie. I. HeJt: Kritik der Erkenntnistheorie nebst einer Zuschrift an ihren Verfasser (Leipzig 1840)' Only the relative neglect suffered by the history of the German academic philosophy of the post-idealist period can account for the fact that the employment by this time of the concept Erkenntnistheorie on literally thousands of occasions has been almost everywhere overlooked. The construction and successful propagation of neoIZantian myths in regard to this thematic sphere is the reverse side of this neglect of the academic tradition in philosophy on the part of philosophical historiography. Vaihinger had given 1832 as the year in which the concept originated, but shortly afterwards the Philosophische MonatsheJte published a reply to his essay which pointed out that the word had occurred prior to Reinhold's use of it in the correspondence between Christian Hermann Weisse and Immanuel Hermann Fichte on the subject of a refounding of philosophy on a nonsystematic basis; and the author of the reply, Weisse's pupil Rudolf Seydel, went on to say of this correspondence: I here see Fichte striving, as early as May 1830, to divorce his friend and comrade in the struggle against Hegelian pan-logicism even further from Hegel by asserting, contrary to the view Weisse still held at the time, that the system of philosophy should not commence from an objective metaphysical logic, but that precedence should be given, rather, to a 'fore-science', a 'science of science', whose task would be first to decide whether objective knowledge was possible to the human mind at all. From 13 September 183 I Fichte employs for this first part of his system - for this is how he wishes this' fore-science' to be regarded - the name' Theorie des Erkennens' or 'Theorie der Erkenntnis'. In his replies to Fichte's letters Weisse then - at first probably only for the sake of brevity - makes use of the contracted form' Erkenntnistheorie', and in the materials I have I do not possess Weisse's letters to Fichte - this first occurs in a quotation from Weisse's reply which Fichte incorporated into his letter of 26 April 18 32 .
As appears from his letter of 28 March 1832 (in the Landesbibliothek Stuttgart), Weisse was the first to employ the expression in this contracted form, and thus if we adhere to the conceptual history evolved by nineteenth century research - it seems that the moment of transition from the' age of
The rise of an autonomous discipline
39
systems' to the period in which theory of knowledge occupied the dominant position can as it were be dated to the precise day. But that isn't quite the case, for this concept is employed, and without any ascertainable connection with Weisse, by yet another Hegel critic, namely Friedrich Eduard Beneke, in his book on Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit. Eine ] ubeldenkschrift auf die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin, Posen and Bromberg, 1832). This earliest prospectus of the IZantian movement of the nineteenth century clearly eluded the attention of the neo-IZantian Vaihinger, for here the expression ErkenntniJtheorie even occurs in a context that again specifically connects it with IZantian theory of knowledge. That the book appeared a year after that of the anniversary it celebrated, and moreover iri painful proximity to the death of Hegel, led the 'tardy celebrant' (Rosenkranz) Beneke to affix to it a 'prelin1inary note' in which he said: To avoid any n1.isunderstanding I would state that the present book did not originate as a consequence of recent events, but was ready for the press in the August of this year, its printing being then delayed by the outbreak of cholera in our city. For the rest, this book speaks for itelf - Berlin, November 183 I.
With this, the concept has now occurred three times as a scientific term in connection with a critique of German idealism, and above all specifically with the critique of Hegel, and the question thus arises whether it had occurred at an earlier time as the name of a specific discipline or merely as a concept not yet fully invested with terminological exactitude. The latter is in fact the case, for the expression Erkenntnistheorie was, for example, employed as early as 1819 in Tennen1ann's Geschichte der Philosophie (vol. 2), though there a whole row of synonyms can be and are substituted for it: Selbsterkenntnis der Vernunft, Untersuchung or Theorie des Erkenntnisvermiigens, des Verstandes or der Vernunft. It is not by chance, either, that these expressions are already employed in connection with the philosophy of John Locke, for it was precisely Locke's philosophy that presented this historian of philosophy of the IZantian school with difficulty when he sought to give an account of it, the difficulty being that Locke's concept of knowledge embraces both senseknowledge and rational knowledge, all of which is reduced to simple or compound representations. Conceptions acquired through demonstration, conceptions in general, and, in particular, practical ideas in the IZantian sense, seemed to Tennemann to be jumbled together in confusion; so that, when he had to find an equivalent for the word 'idea', which in Locke has a quite different meaning from that which it had acquired through IZant, he had recourse to the concept Erkenntnis and called Locke's doctrine an Erkenntnistheorie. Locke had, to be sure, quite wrongly undertaken to reduce all the problems of belief, opinion and understanding to the single problem of 'knowledge' ;
The abandonment of German idealism
nonetheless he deserved credit for having at any rate drawn attention to the fundamental need 'to determine the limit of human knowledge through gauging human capacity'. Then follow a number of objections: For all that, however, this attempt at determining limits and laying the foundations of science was in itself nonetheless very incomplete and defective. For the inquiry confined itself only to the material conditions of knowledge, in so far as they are imposed by the inner and outer organs of perception in respect of which the human mind enjoys the relationship merely of a passive receiver. From this there arose a too onesided view of the content and origin of knowledge, in that one has to allow at least the possibility that the self-activity of the human mind can also provide material for the formation of conceptions, and, because it pays heed only to receptivity and thus grants to reason only the capacity for logical comparison, abstraction and connection, also a onesided Erkenntnistheorie.
This may have been the first time the expression Erkenntnistheorie was employed, but it is not hard to see that it had not yet achieved any degree of terminological exactitude; so that even in connection with Leibniz's reply to Locke's' Erkenntnistheorie' Tennemann again has recourse to the most various synonyms of the expression, and only once, where he discusses the writings of Christian Thomasius, does he employ it as a form of abbreviation. In this passage we find the same endeavour to compare one many-faceted theory with another by reducing it to a single concept or name which will furnish a synopsis of the entire thing in one word. It is in a precisely similar spirit that Ernst Reinhold then employed the concept in 1827, and subsequently, with the appearance of the second volume of his Handbuch der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie, which deals with the history of modern philosophy, made it into scholarly common property. Reinhold begins, in 1827, with a summary of the subjects with which Erkenntnistheorie is concerned in his treatise Die Logic oder die allgemeine Denkformlehre, in which he expressly singles out for attack all those' who have in view the bestowal on formal logic of a broader compass and higher significance through fusing the tenets proper to it with those of metaphysics and Erkenntnistheorie '. Nor can he 'go along with those many others to whom it no longer seems to need or be capable of any real enlargement or essential improvement', for he intends' to deterll1ine more closely the limits' of logic and to 'lead it beyond' formal logic as hitherto understood, which project demands first of all a history of logic such as he has provided in an extensive introduction to his Denkformlehre. What is especially interesting in this history is the division into periods Reinhold proposes, since it represents a direct anticipation of the subsequent customary neo-I(antian division: 'I From Aristotle to the age of Locke and Leibniz' - 'II From the age of Locke and Leibniz to I(ant' - 'III From I(ant to the present day', while within this framework the as it were 'historical' position of the concept is unerringly exposed: 'Influence of the Erkenntnistheorien of
The rise of an autonomous discipline
Malebranche, Locke and Leibniz on the state of logic' stands at the beginning of the second epoch. In the case of Ernst Reinhold, too, this concept assumes the function of an abbreviation of importance especially to the historiographer. But in this Denkformenlehre he was at the same time concerned with a problem of system which was likewise to anticipate subsequent neo-I<'antian solutions: a determination of the boundaries of the problems of logic in relation to those of other competing disciplines within the encroaching epistemological don1ain also provided the immediate occasion for comprehending the concept systematically: The following reasons for treating logic separately and excluding the ventilation of transcendental psychological matters from discussion of it ought to be decisive. Its content is simple, comprehensible in terms of itself ... sufficiently weighty and extensive for it to constitute a distinct discipline.
At the very least logic could be treated as an independent subsidiary discipline: On the other hand, research pertaining to Erkenntnistheorie and to transcendental thought in general is, at the present stage of philosophy, precisely the most complex and confused, the most difficult and the most contentious. Here, though what he has to say shows him to be an excellent thinker, a philosopher's conclusions will nonetheless be rejected by all other thinkers who are his equals in the eyes of the philosophical public ... How unsuitable it is, therefore, to combine such a variety of subjects within the boundaries of a particular philosophical discipline and to pronounce it an indivisible whole!
The concept Erkenntnistheorie at first introduced by Tennemann only as a historiographic abbreviation was in Ernst Reinhold's Denkformenlehre for the first time also claimed as a collective term for the totality of the disciplines of logic, philosophy of language, 'transcendental psychology', hermeneutics and theory of method. Then, only two years later, in the second volume of his handbook of the history of philosophy the systematic and historiographic significance of the concept already constitutes a unity, and here Reinhold himself quite consciously adopts a position in regard to the problem of the formation of the concept: The foundation or ... midpoint of every philosophical system since Plato consists of the views regarding the development, form, meaning and limits of human knowledge and will which - more or less complete, and even where they are not the subject of individual treatment - have revealed themselves to the eye of the competent expert and which their author has adopted. If these views are developed systematically there arises a science which can properly be called theory of the faculty of knowledge [Erkenntnisvermiigen] ... It is true that theory of Erkenntnisvermiigen is not be be found in the traditional catalogue of philosophical disciplines which under the guidance of Aristotle had already been adopted in the age of the scholastics and which, although individual philosophers may reject it, is still domi~~r::_~_d!J-,-~~t~_~h_e_~12<:i~1'lt~~ 5\'i1=0
_
The abandonment of German idealism the majority of modern philosophers epistemological statements are dispersed and mingled with other material and subjects ... As a specific branch of philosophical research separate from ontology and rational psychology they were first treated under various nomenclatures by Locke and Locke's successors in England and France, and in Germany by !(ant under the name 'critique of pure and practical reason and of judgment '. This is why, unlike ethics, logic, etc., theory of knowledge does not enjoy a designation sanctioned by centuries of use, and ... thus it lacks the advantage of being everywhere known and to a great extent recognized as an aspect of philosophy, at any rate by name. Nonetheless its true significance is very apparent from the history of philosophy as well as from a thoughtful consideration of the nature of the matter itself. ..
The discipline of Erkenntnistheorie, the real objective of which was to be the investigation of the limits and truth-value, the forms and possibilities of knowledge, was, with regard to the formation of this philosophical concept in 1829, described by Ernst Reinhold with sufficient completeness for its further dissemination and its establishment as a philosophical term to proceed successfully from this date. That Reinhold was responsible for the formulation of the concept is rendered more probable, moreover, not merely by the fact that, as Moriz Carriere noted in 1856 in his obituary of Reinhold, the work in question is the most successful of all his works, but rather by the circumstance that he himself furnishes a convincing reason for the attitude he has just formulated; he writes: 'It is incontestable that the demand that we should seek, through thorough research and investigation, an understanding and agreement as to the nature and capacity of human knowledge and will, how it is formed and the extent of its efficacy, has in no age been proclaimed more loudly than, with the current state of philosophy and of the philosophical elements in the other sciences, it is in ours ... The author hopes he has succeeded ... in his presentation of the history of philosophy in emphasizing with satisfactory clarity the indicated relationship between Erkenntnistheorie and the other tasks of philosophy, and through elucidation of it made clear to his readers in a way that will be fruitful to them the individual character and the scientific grounds and significance of each of the systems he has described. Jena, April 1829.' Ernst Reinhold was able to propagate and promote the concept Erkenntnistheorie more than three decades before Eduard Zeller and others were to make the term into the sign-manual of neo-IZantian philosophizing in the broadest sense because inquiry into the limits and possibilities of knowledge had become a matter of wide concern and interest even in the era of post-idealist polemics, and above all to those directed against Hegelianism. The word had already been employed by Tennemann in 1819, to be sure, but it was only through the widespread requirement of it in the 18 3os, and again in the 1860s and afterwards, that it became a kind of programn1atic formula intended to represent a complementary concept firstly to the pretension to 'presuppositionless thinking', then to a Weltanschauung grounded in meta-
The rise oj an autonomous discipline
43
physics. It is true that Reinhold almost certainly took the word directly from Tennemann, whose Grtmdriss he employed from the summer semester of 1827 as the basis of his own Vorlestmgen iiber Geschichte der Philosophie; and in his Handbuch he also referred to Tennemann as a precursor 'who can justly be credited with having founded a second period in this branch of literature [i.e. philosophical historiography] that is still continuing', so that Reinhold can be accounted a pupil of Tennemann. But Reinhold was also a pupil of Erich von Berger, and a youthful friend of Trendelenburg, and in his Darstellung der Metaphysik of 1834 professed himself, as von Berger did, an 'eclectic'. It was only towards the end of the 1840S that he drew close to speculative theism - at a time when the latter, too, declared an epistemological foundation absolutely obligatory for philosophy, so that the circle of the programmatizers of theory of knowledge is completed from this direction too.
2
THE ERKENNTNISTHEORIE, KANTIANISM AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE
Older still than the name Erkenntnistheorie is the expression Erkenntnislehre: it can be traced back to 18o I, when, in his Enf1vurj eines neuen Organons der Philosophie, Wilhelm Traugott Krug expounded his' System of theoretical philosophy' which provided the basis of his Fundamentalphilosophie of 18°3. But this expression, which Krug borrowed from the encyclopaedic system of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten as a translation of the word gnoseologia, did not yet at this time bear the meaning which was later to make it a synonym of Erkenntnistheorie. For Krug required no theory of the possibility or limits of knowledge, and only a few criteria are needed to see that the section of his system called Erkenntnislehre is not an Erkenntnistheorie: it is interested neither in the determination of the limits of knowledge nor in the methods of obtaining it; it is not a foundation discipline nor does it possess a propaedeutic function; finally, it does not even wish to conduct an epistemological examination of metaphysics so as to delimit it, give grounds for it, or demonstrate its impossibility - it in fact wants to become metaphysics itself. Krug stood very much closer to the conception of philosophy entertained by a Reinhold, Fichte or Schelling than to the phenomenology of Hegel, which in the nineteenth century was after all occasionally regarded as a 'miscarried' theory of knowledge. Pursuing the history of the word thus takes us back as far as 1801; the history of the problem, however, makes a new beginning in regard both to the employment of the concept and the discipline's actual range of concerns only with the appearance in 1820 of Friedrich Eduard Beneke's Erkenntnislehre nach dem Bewusstsein der reinen Vernunjt: for, because the word Erkenntnislehre was now supposed specifically to signify an empirical expansion of traditional logic
44
The abandonJJJent of GerJJJan idealisJJJ
and, in connection with Schleiermacher, the question of perception was therewith again included in the problem of knowledge, in this treatise the author employed the modern meaning of the expression v/hich was later to count as a synonym of the term Erkenntnistheorie. Closely orientating himself towards John Locke, Beneke for the first time defined the meaning and content of Erkenntnislehre in the signification it bears today, and it was to be understood as a counter-design to the metaphysics renewed by German idealism: 'In general, to be sure, our task is the same as that so splendidly proclaimed by I<'ant in his Kritik and by Fichte after him in his Wissenschaftslehre', the 22-year-old Beneke wrote in 1820, proudly aware of his ability to place before the philosophical public a 'new science' in this field, , but whether we shall succeed in achieving what the latter [i.e. Fichte] believed he had accomplished, namely the laying down of a single axiom from which all human knowledge can be derived ... or whether this idea is only a shimmering fiction of this we are still in complete ignorance'. This first Erkenntnislehre to be conceived as an autonomous scholarly discipline even had initially to investigate whether there could be such a thing as a principle governing all philosophy, as in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or \'vhether, in addition to analytic judgments, synthetic a priori judgments were at all possible. And even in relation to I<':ant's critique of pure reason Beneke had therewith taken a first step in the direction of an absolutely independent treatment of epistemological questions. Whereas, however, he was, in his book on I<.ant of 1832, to describe it as the very valuable basic tendency of the I<'antian philosophy that it should in principle refer concepts and perceptions to one another, in this early, programmatic work he still polemicizes against its theory of a priori judgments, which are capable of producing nothing but' fiction'. I<.:.nowledge, on the other hand and this consists of presuppositions without which the sciences could not come into existence - is fundamentally different from these mere judgments, in as much as the latter cannot be accorded any 'being' whatever: In contrast to knowledge ... judgments are mere formulas, in themselves apodictically certain and universally valid, to be sure, but only as formulas, and from themselves alone no one can judge whether anything corresponds to them in the being of things or whether they perhaps provide nothing more than the correct connection between one fiction and another equally fictitious fiction; a connection which in itself contains nothing reprehensible, to be sure, and for many purposes can even be useful and necessary, but which as soon as it unjustly claims the name of knowledge is rightly rejected as a piece of vain imagination or trickery.
Exposition of the concept of 'knowledge' - which is at the same time explanation of the expression Erkenntnislehre evolves into critique of the science of logic in so far as it is intended to solve the problem of knowledge
The rise of an autonomous discipline
45
in terms of consciousness (' idea '). The autonomy to which this new Erkenntnislehre might justly lay claim with respect to a purely forn1al logic, though with far less justice with respect to I
'The birth of this sensualist in a German city', a handbook of the history of philosophy said while Beneke was still alive, 'is plainly a mistake, for it belongs where his treasure and his heart is'. Not, at any rate, in Berlin, where Beneke was born in 1798. Beneke was two years younger than 1. H. Fichte and five years younger than Ernst Reinhold. When he was seventeen he took part in a campaign against Napoleon as a volunteer infantryman, commenced his studies with two semesters of theology at Halle, and then went to Berlin. We know hardly anything of his student years only that he secured his doctorate in 1820 with a Latin dissertation, De veris philosophiae initiis, and that, as he states in the vita attached to it, he had heard Schleiermacher lecture. Simultaneously with this dissertation there appeared his Erkenntnislehre, and in the same year a third monograph, his Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens, which he dedicated to 'Herr Doktor Schleiern1acher and Herr Pastor Wilmsen, his deeply revered teachers and benefactors'. Despite certain irregularities in connection with his doctorate Beneke at once proceeded to give lectures, though at first only until his Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten appeared in 1822 and led to the withdrawal of his venia legendi. After failing to succeed Fries at Jena, he qualified again at Gottingen and in the following years published the writings that laid the basis of his psychology: the Beitrage zu einer reinseelenwissenschaftlichen Bearbeitung der Seelenkrankheitskunde (1824), the two volumes of his P.rychologische Skizzen (1825 -7) and a treatise on Das Verhaltnis von SeeIe und Leib (1826). When in 1827 he was again permitted to teach at Berlin he had, in addition to a considerable number of publications in
The abandonment of German idealism
journals, ten volumes of his own to show, to which during the time until he obtained an unpaid assistant professorship in 1833 were added an edition of Bentham's Introduction to the Princzples of Morals and Legislation, the book on I<.ant, his Lehrbuch der Logik als Kunstlehre des Denkens and his Lehrbuch P sychologie. Why this assistant professor remained unpaid, and why the Privatdozent, by now thirty-five, found that his intense publishing activity availed him nothing, can be discovered in a memorandum I<.arl Rosenkranz composed in 1833 for the Prussian Ministry of Education (i.e. for Johannes Schulze) : Herr Beneke has worked for a long time in the department of psychology and has acquired an estimable knowledge of this domain. There is no question but that he possesses industriousness, great erudition and a penetration which for hair-splitting subtlety often contends with Herbart's. As far as such talents will take one Herr Beneke has honestly gone; but he would like to go further, he would like to change the whole of philosophy by means merely of psychology ... He has endeavoured to reduce his multifarious collection of observations to a stable system, the structure of which is, however, quite devoid of principle [!] ... He believes that everything of which we become aware in our consciousness belongs to psychology. But if this is to be the criterion, what is there that is not psychic, what limit is there to this idea?
It is supposed to have been Hegel and B6ckh who cast doubt on Beneke's initial qualification as lecturer, then Hegel who was responsible for the withdrawal of his venia and Altenstein who frustrated his call to Jena; finally, Hegel's death is supposed to have been the reason they nonetheless gave him an assistant professorship. But as early as 1822 Johannes Schulze declared in a memorandum that he regarded it as quite unavoidable that Beneke's lectures be suspended, and that he be deprived of the right to lecture at all at any Prussian university, until he shall have furnished unambiguous proof that he has renounced the dreadful error in which he is sunk and attained to the standpoint at which, precisely because it is the standpoint of the thinker, the vain assertion that there are no universally valid truths is no longer possible.
'Absence of principle' and renunciation of system-philosophy and aprjorism conjured up at first only the danger of empiricism, but then that of materialism would follow: that was what concerned the statesman Schulze, for empiricist ethics (' Physik der Sitten' 'physics of morals ') would undermine the valuesystem of society through its relativism. Unlike Schopenhauer, who qualified in Berlin in the same year as Beneke, the latter did not explain his academic failure as an outcome of academic politics, but he nonetheless did account it a consequence of the' Zeitgeist' then prevailing, which, as he said looking back in 1845, bestowed on his 'antispeculative' philosophy' not exactly a gratifying fate'. Whereas Schopenhauer felt personally offended, as early as his book on I<'ant of 1832 Beneke thought in terms of the history of science:
The rise of an autonomous discipline
47
Of philosophical truth, as fundamentally of any other, there is only one external criterion: universal agreement, evidentiality ... For the attainment of this the assent of the thinking minds of a particular time or a single nation alone will of course not suffice: for as a result of particular conjunctures of events a false combination of ideas can for a certain period have taken possession of all minds to such an extent that it will at once imperiously suppress any attempt to examine it ...
Philosophy demonstrated even in the visible fact of possessing a multiplicity of systems that it was still in its pre-scientific phase, for, as 'the enviable example of the natural sciences' demonstrated, it had not yet reached the state at which capital once accumulated is handed on from one scholar to other scholars without depreciation but increasing daily through new income: at which every discovery is at once announced from one end of the cultivated world to the other, and thus after a mere few months and perhaps a hundred miles from its birthplace it is again fruitful for the acquisition of greater knowledge or for the enhancement of the joy and well-being of life.
'Shares in philosophy are now worth less with us than they are anywhere else', Beneke writes elsewhere in 1832, 'and, unless a deus ex machina soon appears, it is more than ever to be feared that complete bankruptcy will ensue' . Since the time of I
The I
The abandonment of German idealism
could as such not be historically superseded. His basic position, 'that from mere concepts no knowledge of being or proof of the existence of that which is thought in these concepts is possible', gave his inquiries a lasting in1portance. German idealism had failed to appreciate the central significance of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Beneke is already concerned above all- as realist-positivist neo-I
The rise of an autonomous disczpline
49
with two sides at all. Being enters directly into perception or idea; and when this has happened, and as soon as the idea is thus complete, being and perception are one: being, whole and entire, is an ingredient or foundation of the idea, and without the addition of anything extraneous'. The foundation of Beneke's metaphysics, which, leaning very closely on Schleiermacher, at the same time serves as the legitimation of the basic science of psychology, keeps as great a distance from IZant's philosophy, which is understood as subjective (Trendelenburg argues similarly), as it does from the metaphysical logic of Hegel. Because, given the premise that true knowledge is possible at all, being and thought must necessarily be regarded as constituting a parallelism (Schleiermacher) or be brought closer together through a process of adequation (Beneke), the problem of knowledge becomes a problem in the domain of psychological inquiry. Psychology as the problemdimension of 'dialectics' or, as in the case of Beneke, as its own foundation discipline, replaces the former logical foundation. Rejection of idealist speculation was in both cases the decisive factor. Schleiermacher left it at a parallelism (as did von Berger and Trendelenburg), whereas Beneke posited a relationship of reduction between logical fornls and perceptions: in the system of the philosophical sciences psychology likewise appears prior to logic and metaphysics. It is the discipline that transforms Schleiermacher's 'dialectics' henceforth purified of all speculative content - into 'theory of knowledge' on the basis of a 'purely psychological' and 'purely human consciousness'. The suggestions and conjectures that have been made - always with a tendency to undermine Beneke's independence as a philosopher that would link him with HofIbauer, Platner, Jacob, IZiesewetter, Fries or Herbart are senseless and inapplicable if one takes seriously the following declaration by Beneke, which so far as I know is never quoted: 'With profound respect I call ... Schleiermacher my teacher; he is, indeed, in my study of philosophy the only one whose lectures I have attended whom I can call my teacher', he says quite unambiguously in an occasional writing which appeared two years after his teacher's death. The story of the influence of Schleiermacher's dialectics is, on account of their quite unique character, in any case hard to trace; but from a historical point of view this influence proceeded predominantly from his actual lectures and not froill their publication in 1839 after his death. Though it makes no reference at all to these lectures, Beneke's Erkenntnislehre of 1820 nonetheless demonstrates their influence, and it would not be too much to say even that when he wrote this book the 22-year-old Beneke was in fact plundering his lecture notes. On the other hand, it is only from Ueberweg that we can see what the relationship between the Romantic theologian - the 'enigma of his age' (Steffans) - and the denier of universally valid truths really appeared to be:
The abandonJJlent of German idealism Beneke agrees with Schleiermacher chiefly in holding the following logical views involving matters of principle: I in conceiving and treating logic as the 'art of thinking'; 2 in espousing the thesis that all thought, and especially also philosophical thought, occurs only on the basis of external and internal perception, that this however provides the matter of thought, the activity of the intellect, with the form of 'identity and contrariety' (Schleiermacher) or that' perception and thought have continually to promote one another through acting upon one another if empirical knowledge is to grow to a higher completeness ' (Beneke), and that so-called pure thought independent of all perception and creating as it were out of nothing is not within the province of man; 3 in espousing the thesis that through internal perception a knowledge can be attained to which full material truth can be accorded, and first of all indeed knowledge of one's own psychical being, inasmuch as in self-awareness perception and being are not outside one another but immediately within one another; that in knowledge of a being outside us the first thing is the recognition of a multiplicity of psychic entities or thinking subjects and that, in collaboration with external perception and the activity of the intellect, this will convey knowledge of the real being of other external entities.
Only in that Beneke subjected the relationship between perception and thought to his own psychological investigation, and regarded the parallelism of forms of being and thought not as given but as a goal of knowledge, did he deviate from Schleiermacher's fundamental convictions in the realm of logic. Ueberweg pointed to those deviations within the framework of logic - they are also interesting in regard to Beneke's ambivalent relationship with I(ant: on the one hand, I(ant had, in his critique of metaphysics, fundamentally only declared 'the secret to the whole world' when he made (possible) experience the condition of any kind of scientific knowledge; on the other, however, the philosophy that had taken its start from I(ant had led back to a kind of scholasticism. His apriorism had been the cause of the faulty evolution of German philosophy from Reinhold to Hegel and was to blame for the fact that it had lost contact with European philosophy. This is why Beneke's 'I(ant programme' is to be understood as being at the same time a bill of indictment against the evolution of philosophy in Germany: it is only because contemporary philosophy seems to him the outcome of a faulty evolution that he pleads for a 'return' to I(ant. This is meant to be purely didactic, and by no means a return in that positive and comprehensive sense in which the programmata of the post-March period advanced such recommendations: for natural scientists, tradesmen, in short all who deal directly with life, already regard this science with contempt ... And we cannot say they are wrong. For is not the principal purpose of all philosophy that it should provide a more distinct impression and clearer representation of that which life and nature present to us vaguely, confusedly and obscurely? How, then, can we blame them if they turn contemptuously from a science which rewards the most strenuous efforts at most with a certain vain renown for
The rise of an autonomous discipline understanding what others do not understand but otherwise with only greater obscurity and an alarming conceptual confusion?
Beneke speaks as an apostle of enlightenment in a philosophical situation in which all realists, tradesmen and natural scientists thought almost as did Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet: 'They admitted to one another that they had had enough of philosophy. All these systems merely confused then1. Metaphysics was good for nothing. You could live without it. They were, moreover, becoming increasingly hard up for cash. ' In the following year, 1833, Beneke then devoted a whole book to this theme: Die Philosophie in ihrem Verhaltnisse zur E rfahrung, zur Spekulation und zum Leben. Here he states quite unambiguously that the 'philosophical sci~nces' could procure a general validity of their teachings only by becoming 'positive sciences': Once we have generally recognized and ackno\vledged the correct methods long since in part recognized [i.e. the methods of the natural sciences], and followed them rigorously without letting ourselves be led astray by the captivating allurements of false methods, then philosophy, though its goal be unattainable, will nonetheless advance towards it with firm and uninterrupted step.
No Comte or Mill was needed for the Germans to grasp the idea of positive philosophy. A decade later Beneke would probably be the first German to notice Mill's System of Logic - and Mill would write to Bain: 'I am reading a German professor's book on logic - Beneke is his name - which he has sent to me after reading mine, and which had previously been recommended to me by Austin and by Herschel as in accordance with the spirit of my doctrines. It is so in some degree, though far more psychological than entered into my plans' - but Beneke had certainly reached analogous theorems by paths wholly his own. In his book on I
To what extent these formulations were, in addition to their reliance on Schleiern1acher, also influenced by Beneke's reading of Saint-Simon, Cousin,
The abandonment of German idealism
J uoffroy and Damiron, and whether Beneke was even familiar with Comte, to whom he never refers, would be worth inquiring into on its own account: such an inquiry would above all elucidate whether he, who thought' far more psychologically' than these (see his critique of Cousin) and could see his hopes of a new age of science being realized only through progress in psychology, was inspired more by German or by European contemporary philosophy. For the second goal of all modern intellectual evolution seemed to him , psychology, and by that I mean a psychology which, excluding all materialist or metaphysical elements, is founded purely on our consciousness of ourself'. It is to be made the focus of all philosophy: the sun from which all the other philosophical sciences receive their light. Only in this way can true order and unity, only in this way can universal validity be achieved for philosophy. For all philosophical concepts are products of the human psyche; and it is thus only through knowledge of how they have come into being in this psyche that they can acquire their greatest degree of clarity.
It was partly this' psychologism', partly too the accusation of materialism that was frequently advanced on the basis of it, that was responsible for the fact that Beneke could sometimes be described, as he was for instance in the last edition of the handbook of the history of philosophy founded by his pupil Ueberweg, as 'the least significant of the better-known thinkers of the beginning of the nineteenth century'. He had failed to exert any influence on psychology (W. Wundt), while in philosophy only Ueberweg could be regarded as his pupil in the full sense, for Carl Fortlage, who had attempted a synthesis, difficult to comprehend and carry out, between Beneke and Fichte, could on account of his esoteric standpoint be called a 'Benekean' only in a very qualified sense. Yet Beneke did in fact exercise influence in the field of pedagogy even during his lifetime, and at the turn of the century (the age of naturalism!) his writings were still being read as classics and were being written about. He owed a great part of his influence to the director of the teachers' seminar at Bautzen, Johann Gottlieb Dressler, who based his own educational work on Beneke's psychology, logic and educational theories, and sought in many publications to promote this pedagogy. Thus in 1840 there appeared the first volume of a comprehensive book whose baroque title is fully informative as to \vhat it is about: Beneke, or Psychology as Natural Science. A candid elucidation of the natural laws he discovered which govern the human psyche and determine its development. Written for cultivated teachers and educators and for all Friends of Illumination [!] who want to inform themselves more closelY about a matter of the greatest consequence. As he wrote in his foreword, Dressler was convinced that the great transformation of psychology which we owe to Beneke is bringing about a total transformation of all the philosophical sciences in the widest sense of this word and will, especially in the case of education and schooling, exercise a benevolent
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influence of an extent we can as yet hardly imagine. It sounds somewhat extravagant when I assert that Beneke has procured for us a power over spiritual nature in no way inferior to that which the physicist exercises over external and material nature.
To decide the true extent of the influence exercised by this second Enlightenment proclaimed by Dressler, which was in any case closely associated with the 'Lichtfreunde' movement that was strongly supported especially in Saxony, would be a matter for a social history of pedagogy, education and the church in this region, since before the March revolution the movements in opposition to what was seen as too close a collaboration between ecclesiastical and political interests - and this by no means only in the Prussia of Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his education minister, Eichhorn - had not yet spread beyond the regions, a fact to be attributed not least to the extremely strict censorship prevailing throughout almost all Germany. In Saxony, however, this movement nonetheless seemed so vigorous that Dressler's colleague and former fellow-student, the deputy director of the Dresden-Friedrichstadt teacher training college Ernst Adolf Eduard Calinich, felt induced to launch a sharp attack on it and in doing so provoked a widely ramified controversy in journals and brochures in which such prominent educationists as Adolf Diesterweg and Otto Schulz, of the Berlin provincial board of education, participated. This controversy began in 1842 with the publication in the Allegemeine Schul-Zeitung of Calinich's essay' On Beneke's Psychology and its Introduction into Teacher Training Colleges'; he wrote, It is first and foremost the singular view of the nature of the psyche to which Beneke inclines that persuades us that his psychology is unsuited to the training college. We refer ... to Beneke's view of what is innate in the psyche and of the relationship between the psyche and the body. According to Beneke, when the psyche of man begins its life it is nothing but an entity that can see, hear, taste, smell and feel, with a certain degree of receptivity to stimuli, vigour and liveliness, an entity devoid of reason, understanding and consciousness ... Beneke must consequently consider the life of a newborn child worth not much more than the life of an animal; one is, indeed, involuntarily reminded of Hume's assertion that the life of a man possesses no greater value than that of an oyster. Then Beneke ... has definitely declared that when the laws according to which the bodily activities develop are known they can be recognized as general laws applying also to the development of the psyche, and that the entire development of man is to be seen as being regulated by a single system of law in accordance with which spiritual and physical being and becoming can be construed in exactly the same way ... We have ... frankly to confess that we ... have been unable to see how the truly spiritual could evolve out of the primitive capacities of the senses possessing the general qualities referred to and out of the stimulation of these, and that ... if it is carried through consistently Beneke's system must lead, if not directly to materialism,at least to many consequences that have hitherto usually been seen as the outcome of materialism.
If the education authorities of Saxony (and not only those of Brandenburg,
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that is to say Otto Schulz) had adopted these suspicions, Dressler would unfailingly have been suspended from his position. The writings he produced in his defence, together with the attacks of others on Calinich, which fill several thousand pages, may have prevented this injustice, which Calinich himself even had in view as a possibility (Gramzow). One thing, however, they could not prevent: that Beneke's empiricist philosophy and pedagogy were repeatedly exposed to the suspicion of materialism and were unable to gain academic recognition, and that for this reason among others Friedrich Ueberweg the' Benekean' - was for long denied academic success. Beneke's psychology remained a cause of contention - Calinich's psychology, which appeared in three printings of two revisions between 184 I and 1849 and in abbreviated form was prefixed to his Philosophische Propadeutic of 1847, led in the last-named work in the course of disparagements of Beneke and Dressler to the first classification of the sciences according to the concepts Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften - the human and the natural sciences: the subject is there introduced: The word philosophy is employed in a double sense. Sometimes it is understood to mean the sciences which, unlike the natural or mathematical sciences, apply not to something sensual or perceivable by the senses but to the inner self of man, to the world of the spirit. When the word philosophy is employed in this sense it embraces familiar sciences such as psychology, logic, aesthetics, ethics, jurisprudence and theology. These sciences are also called philosophical sciences. In contrast to the Naturwissenschaften they could also be called the Geisteswissenschaften.
Alwin Diemer correctly pointed out in 1974 that, although the expression Geisteswissenschaften had since the nineteenth century been employed in varying connections - but never terminologically! - it was in this passage that it first acquired its classificatory sense. Because this coinage occurred during the opening stages of the contention over naturalism, however, and thus to some degree in association with, though also in denigration of Beneke's system of the philosophical sciences, its ' psychologizing', and the outlines of a psychologically inspired theory of knowledge, was not clearly recognized even by Calinich himself. But who in Germany understood philosophy in a different, in a wholly 'anti-speculative' sense? Who divided the sciences simply into those founded on the senses and those founded on inner experience? And \vho called the latter the' philosophical sciences' and asserted that they could be founded only on psychology? No one but Beneke and his pupils! This anti-speculative reduction of all scientific problems to the plane of psychology was at first taken over by Calinich wholly from the materialistically suspect philosophy of Beneke, who had himself in any case already contrasted the' sciences directed to knowledge of external nature' with those that believed they could acquire' a knowledge of being merely through the dissection and clarification of concepts': this method had don1inated 'the
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science of the nlind or philosophy', which also makes it clear that it was only on this one point, his refusal to reduce this science to psychology, that Calinich differed from the Benekeans. The individual presuppositions of the classification of the sciences which he derived initially fronl Beneke, and which in this same year 1847 was more widely disseminated by the critiques it received (by, among others, Leopold George), \vere consequently as follows: The natural sciences are already excluded in principle from the orbit of the philosophical disciplines; 2 the remaining 'philosophical sciences', however, are also treated wholly unspeculatively, and in fact on the basis of a psychology which traces all the philosophical sciences back to an 'inner perception' which (since Schleiermacher) guaranteed both the being of the external world and an adequate knowledge of this being. 4 Inner and external perception thus represents the sole classificatory criterion for distinguishing between the natural and the human sciences. A specific feature of this conception is, however, a differentiation of view introduced, at this point, for, as opposed to Beneke and his pupils, Calinich posits that the mind (or the functions of the psyche) possesses laws of its own which cannot be traced back to such laws as the researches of natural science have shown can be applied to the bodily functions of man. Calinich's conception of the' mental perceptions' upon which the Geisteswissenschaften depend should not be traced back to and elucidated by the facts fundamental to the natural sciences, as they are in Beneke's psychology: inasmuch as they describe the intermediate stage in the ascent from the feelings to the ideas and ideals of the true, the good, the beautiful, etc., they are preponderantly descriptive. I
The philosophical faculties in truth 'became corporate bodies of the Geisteswissenschaften after the natural sciences had been released from their alliance to them' (J. Ritter), and to that end they had first to liberate themselves from the' method of metaphysics'. This liberation, which Beneke anticipated from a future' I<'antianism in its full purity', had, however, first gradually to prevail against the fiercest resistance. For it is also true that, because their application to the philosophical sciences or the humanities was not measured by the standards of science but seen as a danger to theoretical and practical claims to truth in philosophy, science and society, even at this early period a doctrine grounded in empiricism, psychologism or positivism possessed no prospect of a general dissemination in the world of academic philosophy. From a purely historical point of view, the concept Geisteswissenschaften and the programme implied by its being seen as an antithesis to that of the natural sciences was at first directed against materialism, a fact
The abandonment of German idealism
that was to become apparent especially in the post-March period, when the intensity of ideological and social contentions by then attained not only hindered philosophical receptivity to positivism, but above all furthered the trend towards a renewed apriorism and idealism and a correspondingly onesided appreciation of Kant.
3
KANT IN SPECULATIVE THEISM
'The change from the age of speculative systems to that of the individual sciences, from Romanticism to positivism, is hard to place historically and has still been very little clarified', Max Wundt wrote in 1932. And fundamentally nothing has changed since. Neo-Kantianism and positivism had almost as little interest in their own immediate prehistory as they had in the post-Kantian philosophy that prevailed from Reinhold to the founding of the Reich. NeoRomanticism, philosophy of life, and especially the school of Dilthey paved the way, at any rate so far as historiography is concerned, for a study of the period from Kant to the year 183 0; from the 19 20S onwards there also appeared a widespread historical interest in post-Hegelian philosophy, though it was then dissipated into two alternative courses: either the Left Hegelians, critique of religion, and materialism stood at the centre, or one turned to the speculative theists, speculative work in post-Hegelian logic and nineteenth century criticism CA. Hartmann, K. Leese, G. Lehmann, G. Stammler). A third movement we ought to notice is a phenomenological and existential tendency, the former borrowed from Feuerbach and the young Marx, the latter from Kierkegaard, with Nietzsche as its central figure. As is well known, Karl Lbwith insisted on seeing in this selection of thinkers' the true nineteenth century' - and thereby perpetrated probably the most successful blurring of history since the creation of the Marxist tradition. On the other hand, psychologism, the transformation of logic into theory of knowledge and theory of science, the intensive analysis of the history of philosophy, and an increased admission into philosophy of knowledge derived from the natural and human sciences - all of them tendencies already recognizable in the philosophy of the pre-March period which were then to come to full fruition between the 1850S and the 1870S - here and there receive attention at any rate as marginal phenomena. It was, moreover, precisely these tendencies which, in the manifold forms assumed by the critique and rejection of the speculative epoch, 'provoked' the various responses that came on the one hand from the classics Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche, and on the other from the movements within academic philosophy: the one by making a break with tradition, the other by assuming the ungrateful task of undertaking a reformatory adaptation of philosophy to the continual influx of new scholarly and extra-scholarly tasks. In the case of the latter what was new never appeared
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in a pure form; that is why it is difficult to recognize that, for example, theory of science was initiated by von Berger and Trendelenburg, and modern theory of knowledge by Schleiermacher's Dialektik. In what specific form speculative theism contributed to this, and thus likewise prepared the transition to the neo-I(antian epoch of modern philosophy, can be gathered from the evolution of this school up to the year 1847: for with the philosophers' congress held at Gotha in that year speculative system-thinking received as it were its official and final discharge. In his very first publication, the SCitze zur Vorschule der Theologie (Stuttgart, Tubingen 1826), Immanuel Hermann Fichte had projected, as others had done, a 'first basic science' which, as a 'theory of consciousness', was designed to clarify the presuppositions of philosophizing. But since all consciousness rests, in both its practical and theoretical capacities, on the presupposition of the original unity of knowledge and being in as much as, for example, an aprioristic science such as mathematics could not otherwise be sure of prescribing out of itself external laws to external nature, nor would art be capable of representing the inmost essence of things in mental reproduction so philosophy, as the supreme science, has to recognize that its task is to furnish scientific demonstration of that which elsewhere remains only presupposition; or, in other words, to dissolve that original unity upon which all knowledge rests and allow it to arise again in thought: whereby it would within itself at the same time also have furnished a scientific justification of its methods, and have thus become a circle of self-understanding clarity rounded in itself.
The legitimation of the presuppositions of what is in any case recognized as true led to a 'theory of consciousness' that would furnish a scientific justification of its own method through the accomplishment of this legitimation - this was the first formulation of the speculative-theistic circle which, as meta-theory of knowledge, proves to be in fact circular: the primary is at the same time synthetically identical being and knowledge which one has subsequently to establish as primary, and does so in that the analysis reproduces this synthetic thing in a 'theory of consciousness'. God is claimed to be at once prin1ary origin and theoretical outcome. We also encounter a little secular philosophy in the fields of theory of knowledge and ontology: 'Herr Fichte', Christian Hermann Weisse wrote in his critique of the first part of Fichte's Grundzuge zum System der Philosophie, 'insists upon the need to open the presentation of this system of a theory of knowledge with a philosophical history of consciousness in its various phases and stages of development from the simplest sense-perception up to the stage of speculative knowledge as such ... ' What is meant here is a return to the principle of reflection in the sense employed by the young Schelling, and not a phylogenetic and ontogenetic interweaving similar to that of the 'phenomenology of mind', as the term 'history of consciousness' might lead one to think: 'Repeated experience has
The abandonment of German idealism in recent times demonstrated on what illusions those absolute and wholly objective beginnings rest wherever one supposes one has discovered them, and to what disastrous misunderstandings of the whole and the essential they have led', Weisse wrote in November 1834. 'The author [i.e. 1. H. Fichte] in this sense confesses he has "returned to the honest path of Kant".' The demand for a renewed examination of the possibility of and capacity for knowledge to which in this critique Weisse for the first time publicly joined his voice was motivated in the case of 1. H. Fichte by the same considerations as applied in Schleiermacher's Diafektik: 'Instead of establishing a science of knowledge in the hope of thereby putting an end to contention 7, the latter had said, 'what we must now do is establish a technique of contention in the hope of thereby arriving at common starting-points for knowledge'. Like the entire epistemological project, the Diafektik is to be understood as a reply to the multiplicity of systems. But at the same time there also existed a historically reflective type of attempt to overcome the multiplicity of systems through a self-knowledge in the sense that' the entire historical evolution ... as a common evolution organically structured' can help to establish a 'total outcome' of all previous philosophy. This attempt was represented by Fichte's Beitrage zur Characteristik der neueren Phifosophie of 1829, in which he had set forth' his view of our capacity for knowledge and its development into philosophical science ... through comparing Locke and Leibniz, through a consideration of I<.ant, and in particular through a description of the characteristic qualities of philosophy'. In this work was to be found 'a theory of space and time' through which he had developed his' critique of I<'ant's theory' and which he recommended that his 'fellow philosophers should subject to the most searching test', because he was convinced 'that if only philosophers could agree as to the meaning of space and time ... all consistent thinkers would as a consequence have to become of one mind, at least in essentials '. In 1832 there appeared 1. H. Fichte's treatise Uber Gegensdtze, Wendepunkt und Zief heutiger Phifosophie in which he worked out in greater detail his critique of the Hegelian identity of the logical and the metaphysical, and of the overestimation of forms and the universal at the expense of the' individual' and 'personal:) which in his view proceeded from it, and on the basis of this critique he developed his' transcendental aesthetics'. In that I<'ant had in the concepts of space and time depicted the presuppositions of all experience, these concepts at the same time comprehended the metaphysical conditions of all existence: 'Life ... is necessarily the unfolding of an unendingly selfreferential (organically unified) multiplicity: consequel1tly absolute life, in that, self-begetting, it eternally fills the sphere of being, is an unending other and unendingly one: its unity is, intensively and extensively, at the same time unending multiplicity'. Jacob Bohme, and Leibniz's monadology, provided 1. H. Fichte with a partly rationalist, partly mystical conception of God on the
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basis of the categories of the individual and the universal conceived, not pantheistically as the mere immanence of God in things, but theistically as God's living creation. Living creation was to be recognized in the , multiplicity'; in the individual it was, by means of a conception borrowed from the philosophy of I<.ant, made into the subject of a philosophical theory. All the writings of speculative theism can be understood as regards their objectives, their results and the premises of the Weltanschauung that informs them - as theology, but they also allow themselves to be drawn into denominating those problems which this school shared with other contemporary philosophers. While in their book publications 1. H. Fichte and C. H. Weisse mainly presented comprehensive discussions and derivations of their Weltanschauung, their Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Spekulative Theologie, which first appeared in 1837, was in part an organ for the communication and propagation of this Weltanschauung but also in part a forum for the discussion of related endeavours. The journal contained debates on the foundations of this philosophy, on what marked it off from other philosophies, and on the development philosophy still had before it, which were naturally above all those Schelling had proclaimed in his 1834 preface to Victor Cousin's fragment On French and German Philosophy as the' great' and' so far as concerns essentials, last transformation' just ahead of it: on the one hand, Schelling says, philosophy will 'vouchsafe the positive elucidation of actuality', without, on the other, 'depriving reason of its great title to possession of the absolute prius, that indeed of the divinity; a possession it acquired for itself only tardily, which alone emancipated it from every material or personal relationship, and which bestowed on it the freedom which is required if it is to possess even positive science as a science'. In this ultimate reform of philosophy, rationalism and empiricism are to be united' in the higher sense' that empiricism will understand the 'true God not' as 'the merely universal being, but' as 'at the same time ... a particular or empirical being'. Schelling, too, made concessions to - in this case French empiricism and psychologism, without however desiring to curtail the rights of reason in relation to the empirical. Stimulated by Schelling, speculative theism, including that based on Weisse's 'system of freedom', here entered into the idea of an alliance between rational knowledge and the empirical into, if you like, the realm of problems which, denominated by the concepts of the a posteriori and the a priori, circumscribed the cosmos of knowledge of the I<'antian philosophy: as Weisse said in the essay on 'The Three Basic Questions of Contemporary Philosophy' with which he introduced his journal: We have pronounced the basic presupposition from which there proceeds philosophical knowledge addressed to reality and actuality, and not to the merely rational, a prioric form, to be as follows: that knowledge as such, a knowledge that embraces the totality
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of being, is possible. This presupposition is ... nothing other than, firstly that ... of a free act as such through which a reality, an actuality arises, secondly such an act as makes this actuality knowable.
The need for unity in philosophical thinking proves to be so strong and pronounced that the assumption that knowledge is possible is made dependent on the demonstration, or the hypothesis, that the 'totality of being' must be knowable. Without Weltanschauung a total perception - no knowledge of what is individual: only God guarantees the knowability of the world. But he does this within the' systen1 of freedom' by allowing man to establish his ego, so that this can rise up to knowledge of God: 'The act as such', Weisse therefore goes on, 'is not knowledge; it is ... the presupposition of knowledge, thus, as that which is, as the principle of all real being, the prius of knowledge '. The school of Fichte's son here connects directly with the Wissenschaftslehre of his father, and with Schelling. In speculative theism:. speculatively conducted demonstration that there exists a principle, an absolute foundation for the deductions which follow from it has not yet been made the starting-point in the realm of logic: as in the case of Descartes or Fichte, and that of German idealism in general, speculative theism searches for a source or capacity lying within the human ego by proceeding from which all a priori knowledge acquires its legitimacy. In contrast to 1. H. Fichte, who in the course of the discussion pursued during the 1840S was increasingly to develop into an opponent on principle of all systen1-thinking and of all purely deductive dispositions in philosophy, Weisse stood even at this time closer to German idealism. In starting from the concept of human freedom a rigorously hierarchical mode of proof was able to maintain itself in the face of all - in the widest sense - empiricist objections. In addition to this there is in speculative theism a second principle that might seem to some extent to anticipate the formulation of the presupposition of a 'knowledge embracing the totality of being': the pretension to a universal Weltanschauung. They, the' representatives of [this] new view of the world', as 1. H. Fichte describes Weisse and himself, had established in a sweeping epistemological and ontological demonstration that and in vJhat sense ... it would be possible to assert a completely adequate knowledge of God as he eternally is in himself, in his general nature, no less than the general nature of things ... that consequently actually to know it even speculatively would require on the part of the absolute that is to be known a free self-revelation and application of will, in short a concrete experience of God ... We had to characterize this higher kind of empirical experience, 'speculatively intuited knowledge', as the proper and highest and at the same time also the truly philosophical standpoint for which theory of knowledge and metaphysics ... are to be regarded as being in the widest sense only propaedeutics.
The 'revelation of God through the empirical world' (1. H. Fichte) and
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'God as he eternally is in himself' are en1braced, united and fully comprehended in a single theory. In this process theory of knowledge officiates firstly as a propaedeutic (a fore-science), then however also as an independent discipline: 'To me theory of knowledge is certainly an introduction to metaphysics', I. H. Fichte writes in another essay of 1838, 'but it is at the same time of in1portance in itself, and in the activities it undertakes altogether independent of later parts of the philosophy'. Speculative theism, too, desires where it seeks mediation with contemporary philosophy - to create the foundations and accords which alone would make such a discipline possible. That this foundation discipline called Erkenntnistheorie was active even within the circle of Hegelianism was affirmed in the same year by Weisse in a laudatio of his friend which he incorporated into an essay' On the Scientific Beginnings of Philosophy' : I have always regarded it as one of your true merits ... to have resolutely and energetically grasped and announced your awareness of the necessity for a definite, and in fact epistemological beginning for philosophy. You are, to my knowledge, the first of the philosophers formed under the influence of Hegel to call philosophy back from the saito mortaie into pure metaphysical being it tried to perform with the logic of Hegel after he had retracted the start he had made in his phenomenology and constrained it to return again 'to the honest path of IZant'. If at the present time the insight is beginning to predominate within the school of Hegel that before the beginning of the Logik another, and in fact more epistemological, beginning is required; if, in default of another fore-science attested by a recognized authority, those who belong to that school look as if they want to return to phenomenology: then, whether they admit it or not, this is undoubtedly to be attributed in no small degree to the influence which, without knowing or desiring it, they have imbibed from your philosophical activity.
Thus far did speculative theism acquire basic principles that pointed to the future and foreshadowed the neo-I
Appreciation of I
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from the problems with which virtually all contemporary academic philosophy was engaged. Here IZant functioned as a force of integration, for it was from his philosophy that the idealist epoch had taken its start, and as a consequence it was to it that one wanted again to return at the end of this epoch: in any event, in the historical self-reflection of the late idealist period (i.e. the academic philosophy of 1830 to 1848) the various idealist schools and systems were regarded as 'consequences' or 'continuations' of the critique of reason, as a result of which the endeavour to unite these various tendencies led to IZant's being accorded a position of supremacy among the classics of modern philosophy. After Beneke, in his anniversary treatise of 1832, and in 1838 Carl Fortlage, in an essay on 'IZant's Relationship with Philosophy before and after him', had emphasized the special significance of the IZantian philosophy in this sense, Christian Hermann Weisse, in his inaugural address at Leipzig, in 1847, 'In what Sense German Philosophy now has again to Orientate itself by IZant', again devoted himself to this question from the side of speculative theism. Even the 'parties opposed to one another', he said, were united in their recognition of IZant, and, especially given the 'frame of mind dominant today', it could be seen that' the national significance' accorded his name would grow ever greater, and that not because a particular philosophical school or 'sect' venerated hin1, but because he constituted the 'common starting-point of very diverse endeavours and even of those competing with one another'. Such a historical 'orientation' was possibly 'even a necessary condition of further scientific progress' in philosophy, for at just that time' the majority of those who philosophize' were dividing 'in two directions' and creating extreme positions each of which was allowing the epoch-n1aking achievement of IZant to be forgotten: pantheism or pan-logicism, which as it were pursued 'an exaggeration of the apriorism of the pure forms of reason inherent in the IZantian principle', and an empiricism which refused' under any circumstances' to see' any reality or actuality of being' in the a priori forms of reason. It was because an epistemological inquiry had in the meantime come to be regarded as indispensable, and because the post-I
The rise of an autonomous discipline
cause to fear an ill encounter if we disturb the mineshafts of others ... ' An 'aimless isolation', a 'clumsy working in all directions', characterized the philosophical literature of the time, but however much the present may offer only the petty and narrow, what is nonetheless significant about it is that its destiny is no longer laid on the head of a single individual but can be carried forward only through the awareness of the community as a whole. The domination of exclusive schools is forever at an end in philosophy, and precisely because philosophy as such formally as critical clear-sightedness in inquiry and examination, substantially as an ever greater breadth of comtnand over empirical material - has grown too vast and comprehensive for the individual.
It was because philosophy as such had become too vast and comprehensive for the individual that to construct' systems of one's own' had come' to seem as fruitless as it is superfluous'. It is the same problem of knowledge as had made systematism seem untenable to von Berger, had caused Trendelenburg to write his 'logical investigations' instead of a system of logic, and had also found an answer in Beneke's empiricism, that now instigates 1. H. Fichte for his part to desire a new institution that shall help to overcon1e this problem. Because the ever greater breadth of the empirical material has now become too much for the individual to master there will in future no longer be any point in 'inventing a new system.' The 'terroristic exclusivity' with which 'in the acritical and anarchic ages of the identity-system ... all who thought differently were expelled from philosophy as antiquated', would have to give way to an evolution in which it could 'like the other sciences, through a thoughtful orientation by the total results already achieved and awareness of its common gains, go securely forward into the future'. Philosophy must 'recognize the objective system of things'; this system was 'the true foundation of community among those who philosophize' and at the same time that' which brings philosophy into continual reciprocal contact with the other sciences'. Consistently with this, the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Spekulative Theologie three months later changed its name it now called itself the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, and it owed this widening of its interests to this 'wholly novel tendency' which philosophy had henceforth to pursue: It therefore expressly invites all the various philosophical tendencies to participate in it. The only ones it must firmly reject are the unfree and unscientific which, proceeding from opposite principles, concur in abrogating the independence of the science, in that either they circumscribe it on behalf of the so-called prevailing state of things, or degrade it to the ancillary of a practical party interest, or finally, as the latest watchword has it, couple life and learning together, i.e. want to make learning subservient to the so-called Zeitgeist.
Certainly it would wish in future to dedicate itself with increased vigour to the task of criticism, says the foreword to the' new series' signed by Fichte and
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Ulrici, but ' its highest, all-mediating goal' nonetheless remained the 'philosophical cultivation of the Christian Weltanschauung, and that because it alone contains the principles of truth and the germs of a vigorous higher world-condition' . As surely as the germ and nature of learning is free inquiry, so just as surely must it not make itself subservient ... to any practical requirement. For practical interests do not exist for it; it has to do only with objects of inquiry ... To scientific learning as such it is a matter of complete indifference whether this or that state constitution, this or that church or religious opinion, is the dominant one. State and church, politics and religion, are to it not real practical objects, but ideas, ideal objects of its investigations.... And thus every genuine philosophical investigation of these practical questions is truly and in the profoundest sense conservative; for the ideas of the state, of freedom, of religion are the only enduring supports of what is permanent, the forces for the rescue of mankind from all aberration and corruption.
As long as sixteen rnonths before the events of March 1849 the politicization of state and society had gone so far that even philosophy and science felt compelled to insist that they were excluded from it. Another article on the congress of philosophers by I
The rise of an autonolnous discipline it shall not finally come to an outburst of fury on the part of the blind mass of the people that would prove the ruin of all human society.
This, too, pertained to the 'serious demand our age makes of philosophy in general' of which 1. H. Fichte had spoken and which the philosophers' congress was intended to help to satisfy. But it is no doubt superfluous to say that, precisely because one was' walking on a volcano', such themes could not be discussed (exclusion of social and political questions) or that nothing more of such views is to be discovered in the purely scholarly debates that took place. The congress was held in Gotha from 23 to 25 September 1847, but its antecedents are far more interesting than its proceedings or the' conclusions' it reached. The old world, the old philosophy of a still united 'Christian Weltanschauung', came together for the last time: 'The philosophers' congress, the subject of so much doubt, derision and hostility', the Zeitschrift correspondent reported, was 'pronounced by the unanimous judgment of public opinion a success'. The' dignified bearing' of the philosophers was due in part to the fact that 'the other differing philosophical tendencies, and in especial the furthest extremes', had barely been represented. The opening address was given - on the instructions of his sovereign - by Herr Hofrat Ewald of Gotha, who, though he acknowledged the' striving after the unity and completion of the philosophical Weltanschauung' that exercised them, also stressed the' necessity and justification of differing philosophical tendencies'. Of only one tendency did he desire that philosophy should not silence it, but once and for all lay aside its study; this was the materialist tendency. As a consequence of social conditions generally prevailing today this tendency had taken hold of civilized mankind, and it may have contributed more than anything else whatever to the fact that philosophy no longer enjoyed the esteem it formerly did among the German people: it disrupted the quiet composure of mind which philosophy demanded.
1. H. Fichte then again explained the meaning and purpose of calling annual conferences, and concluded his address on the 'Principles of the Philosophy of the Future' with an invitation to the assembly to elect a chairman. He proposed Minister von Wangenheim but was himself elected by acclamation. Fortlage and Carriere became secretary and recorder of the minutes. Then followed an address by Ernst Reinhold 'On Philosophical Method' - he criticized the concept of pure thought in the systems of Herbart and Hegel; on the following day U"lrici spoke' On the Nature and Concept of Logical Categories', which is reported to have evoked a lively discussion. Fortlage spoke' On the Principles of Imn1anence and Transcendence', Wirth' On the Relationship between Belief and I<.nowledge', Carriere' On the Idea of the Christian State', and finally Willm 'On Philosophy in France'. On 26 September the chairman closed the congress, after he had 'expressed his pleasure at the success of the first German congress of philosophers and, on
66
The abandonment of CertJ1an idealism
behalf of the foreign members of the society, his thanks to His Grace the Duke and the authorities and residents of Gotha for the generous welcome they had received '. All this notwithstanding, the participants in the congress had in fact produced an accurate statement of the 'principles of the philosophy of the future', and in especial those of academic philosophy: a turning towards the history of philosophy and a definitive turning away from system-philosophy: Now that riotous philosophizing in outlines and aperfus supposedly characterized by genius and constructions of the universe from the standpoint of the absolute have rightly fallen into disrepute, now that the assertion that the speculative concept coincides with the absolute divine thought has proved to be an unfounded and rash hypothesis, all independent inquirers of the present day (herein again restoring and returning to the spirit of I<.ant) agree that a systematic treatment of philosophy requires that an answer to the question of lnethod, in short a solution of the problem of knowledge, must be pursued before we can expect to arrive at any kind of metaphysical principle.
PART
II
<J==================================================C> Philosophy in the post-March period and the neoI<"antian programmata (1849-1865)
3
<J================================:=:::======================C> Philosophical trends of the post-March period and the programmata of the 'Sceptical Generation'
DIVISION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL DOMAIN IN THE PERIOD OF REACTION: SCHOPENHAUER OR HERBART?
I
Before the revolution of 1848 the schools of psychologism and the organic and Christian Weltanschauung represented by Beneke, Trendelenburg and 1. H. Fichte had already agreed in principle that the epoch of system-thinking was over and that the only progress to be expected in philosophy was one that built on an episten10logical foundation. Their wholly diverse cultural presuppositions notwithstanding, and at first undisturbed by all the ideological differences that separated them, they came close to an evaluation of the sense element in the process of knowledge which in this respect united them even with Feuerbach and n1aterialism in being related expressions of the style of the age. ' Extreme' sensualism and materialism as they put it in those days - bestowed an absoluteness on a way of thinking with which almost all contemporary thinkers were engaged to a greater or less degree. How and to what extent the empirical was to count in philosophy was still a subject of fierce controversy: but that it had to exert a greater measure of influence on the construction of philosophical theories, and perhaps even decisively determine them, was a view which distinguished virtually all post-idealist philosophers from those of the epoch of system-thinking. System-thinking had forfeited its credibility and evidentiality through two wholly different modes of argumentation: on the ground that' presuppositionless', 'pure' thought and the system derived from deduction were scientifically untenable, but also through the mere fact that a multiplicity of systems existed side by side all of which advanced the same claim to truth and absolute validity. How could a branch of scientific study such as philosophy continue to lay claim to the predicate of scientificality at all when it was obvious that the most various contradictory tendencies within it were expressions of mutually exclusive convictions? What did it mean when, in addition, these systems also pursued an extra-scientific, political or critical objective? The discrediting of system-thinking was effected by very many and sometimes very variegated arguments, but they can nonetheless be divided into two groups,
Philosophy in the post-March period which we may designate as those founded on the history of knowledge and of science and those founded on considerations of ideology and Weltanschauung. That von Berger and Trendelenburg, Ernst Reinhold, and towards the end of the 1840S finally speculative theism, too, wanted to replace system-thinking with scientific investigation, epistemological inquiry and a more encyclopaedic understanding of the claims advanced by systems belongs first of all to the history of the problem of knowledge: to have one's own system is impossible and superfluous because the individual can no longer master the ever increasing quantity of the empirical material (1. H. Fichte) because science had to apply itself to individual problems (von Berger, Trendelenburg) because, finally, only an increase in positive knowledge can bring about progress in philosophy (Beneke). It was principally through natural philosophy, it is true, that the idea that speculative and scientific thinking were incompatible was transmitted, but in fact it played a role in every domain of knowledge. From the 1840S onwards a second factor contributed to the discrediting of system-thinking: the identification of philosophical systems with ideological parties. The Zeitgeist had by now changed completely, and philosophical systems were henceforth examined above all for what they meant beyond the sphere of philosophy: 'It is no longer the informed and inquiring mind that sits in judgment on what is right and good and true: it is the will that decides the issue, poses the question, gives the answer and allots to each his place', Hermann Ulrici, the co-editor of the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, wrote in 1847: "We are in the right - we shall not listen to your objections!" the parties cry to one another, if not in words then in their hearts. Learning and science! Learning and science! resounds ... from every side. But it is always followed by a postscript: learning and science require that this or that shall happen, learning and science demonstrate that we are in the right. Learning and science are accorded respect, but not for their own sake; they have to confirm the claims of the party, procure for it new adherents, help to expose the weakness of its opponents; they have, indeed, to make common cause with so-called life, i.e. with the tendencies of the Zeitgeist, or, what is the same thing, every party wants its own learning and science whose principles and projects are the aims of the party ... The positions maintained by the votaries of learning and science are as harshly divided as are the practical parties: here a swarm of youthful sages who in the service of practical interests want to found a new religion (or abolish an old one), extend the state constitution, improve the condition of society; there another little band who in the service of the same interests would like to smother the Zeitgeist with its thirst for action, passion for reform and plenitude of needs, and seek a tout prix to defend with science the old church and religion, the old state, the old condition of things; and over there, farther away but decisively opposed to these other two nonetheless, the palisaded camp of the veterans of pure science, of the good old days when a new philosophical system counted for more than a newly invented dye.
The materialism of Feuerbach and the pantheism of the Left Hegelians on the one hand, the 'aristocratic realism' of the Herbartians and the 'idealistic
The 'Sceptical Generation' theosophic speculation' of Schelling and Stahl on the other, complemented one another as antagonistic parties through the fact that their 'practical' political interests were always visible. But the third way, the way of the champions of the old pure science, was also no longer practicable because they failed to make' practical life ' the object of' free scientific inquiry'. Just as 'the age of the dominance of a single system' was past, so was 'the age of epochmaking systems in general': 'In regard to its formal side, science is as it were striving to go beyond the monarchical constitution it has possessed hitherto and struggling to establish and construct a republican form of government'. It required no neo-IZantian programmata, or even an indirect reference to IZant, to formulate a programme for a non-speculative scientific philosophy. The majority of German academic philosophers was by 1847 united in that objective. But it required the failure of a revolution wholly to banish questions of practical politics and with them the entire political philosophy of the opposition - fron1 the life of the university: it was because Germany had not become even a constitutional monarchy, let alone a republic, that the German university could likewise not become a republic of science, as Ulrici and others had hoped it would. The ultra-conservative tendencies, the veterans of speculative philosophy, and the n10dern, epistemologically oriented philosophers remained in the universities, while those philosophical tendencies and problem areas which at that time engaged the public and which continue to the present day to dominate our picture of the mid-nineteenth century - the Left Hegelians' critique of religion, philosophical materialism, and the pessimism associated with Schopenhauer - remained relegated almost exclusively to circles outside the university. The division this situation brought about between academic philosophy and political and practical philosophy engaged in the cultural and social critique that alone interested the educated public - a division that was to characterize the closing years of the nineteenth century represents perhaps the most important outcome of the post-March period as it affected philosophy: while - as will be shown in detail - academic philosophy sought to disengage itself from every kind of political problem or attitude, as early as November 1849 an article by Julius F rauenstadt, 'Opinions on Arthur Schopenhauer', published anonymously in the Bldtter fur literarische Unterhaltung, inaugurated a hitherto unexampled campaign of disparagement against the representatives of professorial philosophy. 'It is a familiar experience that great men are rarely recognized by their contemporaries', Frauenstadt commences this legend of a misunderstood genius. 'But, since everything that happens happens necessarily, this does so too. The causes that prevent his contemporaries from recognizing a great man, a master, a genius present among them are various. But they can all be traced back to the following two: stupidity and baseness'. Frauenstadt possesses the fullest command of the litany of invective with which Schopenhauer had covered the German idealists, and especially Fichte
Philosophy in the post-March period and Hegel, and he knows how to quote it, vary it and justify it: but to account for the scandal that 'the greatest philosopher of this century' had not been universally recognized as such he can, even in the succeeding section of the essay, produce only the aforesaid' stupidity' (above all of the mob) and' the baseness, envy and vanity' of the representatives of professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer, too, had not had the slightest idea of how and why a philosophy 'works', of why it is successful, when he asserted of academic philosophers: It is in their interest that the shallow and spiritless shall count for something. But that it cannot do if the genuine, great, deep-thinking man who appears from time to time at once receives his due. To stifle this, therefore, and to allow the bad to reign unhindered, they band together, as the weak always do, form cliques and parties, get control of literary journals in which, as in their own books, they speak of one another's masterpieces with deep respect and an air of profundity, and in this way lead the shortsighted public by the nose ... 'No philosophy that is the only true philosophy!' cries the philosophasters' congress in Gotha, i.e. in German: 'No striving for objective truth! Long live mediocrity! No spiritual aristocracy, no absolute rule of those favoured by nature! Rule of the mob instead! Let each of us speak according to his lights, and each be accounted equal to the other!' But here the scoundrels have their work cut out! For they want to banish from the history of philosophy, too, the monarchical constitution hitherto prevailing and introduce a proletarian republic in its stead: but nature enters a protest; it is strictly aristocratic.
'Opinions on Arthur Schopenhauer' may sound like the title of a review of recently published writings about him, but it is in fact that of a general accounting with all those philosophers who had to that time in any way concerned themselves with Schopenhauer (Fortlage, Rosenkranz, Joseph Hillebrand) - and no less with those who had ignored him. These defamations of all professorial philosophers - in which, by the way, Feuerbach also indulged - are, equally interestingly, attended in this essay by a pseudoaristocratic disdain for the mob and rabble, to which all who think differently, i.e. all non-Schopenhauereans, are quite indiscriminately consigned. A primitive, irrational sociology of the' higher' and' lower', of the' great' and the 'incapable' - Oswald Spengler's 'Faustian' Weltanschauung - here proclaims itself. Together with the political differentiation of society, in part ideological but in part also economic, into parties and interest groups, there thus also appears an individualism resting principally - and in Frauenstadt's case quite palpably - on ressentiment. Outwardly it presents itself as cultural and social criticism and furnishes for itself the collectively guilty' masses', but at the same time it also lends to all philosophizing an entirely new meaning: twenty years before the' Schopenhauer, Rembrandt, etc, as educator' boom set in, Frauenstadt, who allowed Schopenhauer to call him his 'apostle', elevates the philosopher to the messiah of a new epoch of philosophy: 'The genuine philosopher is a seer, the sophist, on the other hand, a conjurer. Is it
The 'Sceptical Generation'
73
any wonder if the latter gains the applause of the mob, while the former is feared and avoided?' Even the comparison of his 'master' with Jesus puts in an appearance, for it was not only the materialism then enjoying its first wider dissemination that advanced' claims of a quasi-religious character'. The faith in progress that informed materialism as a result of the growth that had taken place in the natural sciences, technology and knowledge in general, was confronted by the early followers of Schopenhauer, who were at first influenced almost exclusively by the Parerga and Paralipomena of r 8 50-r, with an ascetic and sometimes masochistic cultural pessimism which Karl Rosenkranz characterized in the following words: In the whole of European literature we possess no author who has depicted nausea at existence with such intense pathos, in such glowing colours, with such thrilling e10q uence as he has ... In contempt for life, in mockery of all so-called pleasure, in acrimoniousness against all optimism, in passionate hatred of all phenomenal appearance, he is immensely magnificent. This negative pathos he expresses with an ironic sublimity whose melancholy poetry arouses in us the liveliest interest ... But Rosenkranz adds that it would be 'a frightful symptom for our current epoch if this species of speculation were in a position to make propaganda on any large scale. It would be an expression of a despair of life that had already extended to the masses'. The year r 854, in which Rosenkranz published this 'Character of Schopenhauer' and Frauenstadt's widely read Brieje iiber die Schopenhauersche Philosophie also first appeared, was too early for the wealth of Schopenhauer's world of ideas to gain any kind of currency: it had first become really known of at all through an anonymous article translated from the English by Lindner and published in the Vossische Zeitung; and here, too, the chief concern was to criticize academic philosophy and to ask how it was this great German thinker had not become universally recognized, for his method of teaching was' the most gifted, sensible and, we must add, most entertaining that can be imagined'. It goes on, however: The content of his teaching, on the other hand, is the most disheartening, repellent, and most opposed to the endeavours of the present day that even Job's most zealous comforters could have produced. Everything to which a liberal mind looks forward, if not with confidence then with hope - the extension of political rights, a gaining ground on the part of education, a greater brotherhood among nations, the discovery of new means of subduing obstinate nature - must be abandoned as an empty dream if Schopenhauer's teaching should ever gain acceptance. In those days it was simply not possible to imagine that a philosopher possessed' influence' unless he had acquired adherents or opponents - what a philosopher said had to be either true or false. That is why purely politicizing philosophical history such as that of Georg Lukacs finds it so easy to represent
74
Philosophy in the post-March period
Schopenhauer, 'the first purely bourgeois irrationalist', as an early pioneer of German fascism, and thereby wholly neglect the fact that this more or less clearly articulated political content of his philosophy was precisely not what was to make him the' philosopher the German people read most' (Mehring), but quite the contrary: it was his individualism and the literary, psychological and free-thinking qualities of his work that secured for his philosophy the greatest popular success of the nineteenth century. It was with interest in Schopenhauer that philosophy began - after its classical period - again to break out into the wider circles of the educated public. The 'passing over of interest from the problems of philosophy to the men who produce this philosophy' (J ulius Ebbinghaus) was apparent long before the advent of the 'Nietzsche cult', and it signified that, in addition to the purely academic and the oppositional, politicallY orientated types of philosophy, there had now ~merged a third type, a philosophy directed in the widest sense to the contemplation of life. The much lamented loss of standing suffered by 'philosophy' during the 185 os (what was always meant was that of the academic philosophers, for Schopenhauer and the materialists had nothing to complain of!) was a result of this differentiation between domains of philosophical theorizing. Whereas academic philosophy was on the way to an increasingly sterile scholarly scientificality, after 1848 a reading public appeared which demanded books in the widest sense political or life-contemplative which professorial philosophers were naturally unable to provide. Through the continual addition of new classes of readers of popular scientific, historical and philosophical works, through an enlargement of the market for books, magazines and newspapers made possible by new means of production, through the institution of workers' and artisans' educational associations, but also through the general tendency for opinions and information to be more often reduced to print, academic philosophy lost the importance that until the revolution it had, largely uncontestedly, been able to claim in the formation of public opinion. Without being aware of the fact, it had sustained so great an alteration in its function in relation to the public that many believed the further continuance of philosophy to be at least in doubt, if indeed it was not destined to die out altogether. Given this situation it is not to be wondered at if, beside much lamentation, there was also much formulating of programmes for its rescue. The phase began of continual apologia through appealing to the achievements of the undisputed classics; the study of the philosophy of antiquity and of the history of philosophy in particular experienced a significant impetus through this compulsion to confirm the distinctive character of the discipline and aggressively to promote it. But other paths, too, were trodden: only a few months after Frauenstadt had given the signal for the Schopenhauer vogue, for example, the Hegelian Johann Eduard Erdmann launched a campaign against resonnement, against the
The 'Sceptical Generation'
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pantheistic Zeitgeist, against materialism against, in short, everything in philosophy to which church or state could take exception - and did so with the aid of the philosophy of Herbart. It was the first time a Hegelian had accorded Herbart's philosophy any positive value at all: Whoever makes a thorough study of this philosophy finds himself compelled, at least while he is studying it, to adopt a standpoint from which antitheses are not resolved in a higher unity but avoid contradiction through separation and definition ... Study of this philosophy will be equally advantageous through the nature of its content. If they [younger contemporaries and revolutionaries] no longer speak of intellectual intuition, if they pour scorn on the expression constructions a priori, the superficial so-called 'philosophy propagated nowadays in brochures and journals is nonetheless filled with contempt for experience and for the means of appropriating it, learning.
Because, though he started from experience, Herbart did so without at the same time being an empiricist, he could' more than any other' help to restore respect for' the given' which was certainly meant also in a political sense. As a counter to the 'error of pantheism', Erdmann recommends the standpoint of Herbart, 'which ascribes reality to the individual alone' so that the individual shall not perish' in the night of the absolute'. A strict separation of philosophy as pure theory from all practical political questions, however, would in any case have the quite invaluable effect of reaccustoming us 'to applying theoretical standards to theoretical inquiries': 'If things go on as they have begun, the next thing we shall see is that a mathematical formula will be declared useful or correct only if its inventor espouses a particular political viewpoint.' And we should, moreover, become a little more cautious in at once casting 'moral' aspersions on anyone whose views we regard as erroneous. As a counter to the politicization of the present day - this is in 1850 the Hegelian Erdmann recommends reading Herbart, which is a 'medicina mentis' especially for the younger generation. Another Hegelian, too, and one who had himself played no small part in the politicization of the philosophy of the pre-March period - David Friedrich Strauss - was troubled by the intellectual consequences of the revolutionary contentions that had taken place: he wrote to Vischer: The political state of the present, incalculable as it is and immune to any influence the individual can exert, I can in any event regard only as an elephant standing beside me of which I must expect that with the next movement he makes he will trample me into the ground, together with the plantations, my own and others', in which I take pleasure in wandering. I have to turn my back on such a monster if I am to be capable of production; for even the thought of the good that will arise from the ruins of the next bout of destruction can console me as little as the thought of the beautiful vineyards that would one day grow over their graves could pacify the inhabitants of the buried towns of Vesuvius as they perished. Now all I would still know of, in any
Philosophy in the post-March period event, is critique of art and aesthetic criticism in general [he says in this letter of 13 October 1850] and, truly, art in the widest sense, including the human and biographical side of history, is the only thing that still attracts me and gives me pleasure ...
This was precisely the mood to which Schopenhauer owed his belated fame: 'the post-revolutionary disenchantment felt by the bourgeoisie, a momentary alienation from politics. The despiser of history and politics gained the benefit' (Golo Mann). This aesthetic, life-contemplative' alienation from politics' took place among the educated public (' bourgeoisie' ? !) it was accolTIpanied by a similar though less uniform 'alienation' on the part of academic philosophy: through the recommendation to study Herbart's philosophy, for example, to which in 185 2 and 1854 1. H. Fichte, too, repeatedly added his voice on the ground that Herbart's psychology 'is the one most suited to exposing monism's lack of principles in this department of philosophy too, and thus to removing the greatest obstacle that prevents those educated by Hegel from developing beyond Hegel as they should do '. Herbart's philosophy, which Erdmann had in his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie of 1853 rightly described as 'realistic individualism', seemed to him, 1. H. Fichte says, as regards content and method to belong wholly to the future; I believe, indeed, that it has before it a whole series of developments proper to it of which its principle is as capable .as it is in need ... As regards its content on account of the very fruitful and further amplifiable concept of individuation, as regards its method through its scrupulous recourse to 'what is given' as the firm foundation for working thought, and through the cautious circumspection with which each step in individual inquiries is taken, a wholly novel means of education has with this system entered the philosophy of the present.
As a counter to the monism of the philosophy of identity and to speculative philosophy and its historical and political consequences, Herbart offered assistance, in a return to 'what is given', to consideration of what is individual and to a purity of theorizing. In 'Herbart and Schopenhauer: an Antithesis' Erdmann combines in a single essay the two new discoveries of the post-March period; both had 'produced each in his own way a continuation of I
The' 5 ceptica! Generation'
77
The Atlas who bears the world of German speculation is and remains Kant. Whoever wishes to know what problems have still to be solved, what demands have still to be fulfilled, will always have to orientate himself by his works. Whoever teaches us to know Kant better thus at any rate fosters the study of philosophy. And for this one is very grateful to Herbart and even more grateful to Schopenhauer.
The standard argument that they had together contributed to an overcoming of the contest between systems through a recourse to Kant that had been applied to Beneke, Fort/age, Weisse and others, now returns in a new variant that would declare very much more direct continuators of the Kantian philosophy and at the same time highly' topical' philosophers an instigation to a renewed engagement with Kant: 'Although one has one's doubts about the fact that wherever there is any kind of interest in philosophy nowadays it manifests itself almost exclusively as an interest in its history, it does seem nonetheless as though it is precisely this discipline that is destined to become the means by which people will again become accustomed to philosophizing', Erdmann concludes his essay, which appeared in the newly re-established Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und phi!osophische Kritik. With respect to their domains of influence Schopenhauer and Herbart constituted an antithesis: the aesthetic, life-contemplative interests of the public were confronted by a programme of strictly' learned and scientific' academic philosophy whose principal care was for a rigid separation of pure theory from political and social interests so that learned and popular thinking should not mingle with one another. With respect to their historical background, however, Schopenhauer and Herbart constituted a synthesis, in that they both inspired a reinvigorated reference back to Kant: Schopenhauer predominantly to the idealist, Herbart predominantly to the realist elements of the Kantian philosophy.
INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE POST-MARCH PERIOD ( 18 52 -54)
2
Association between philosophy and the public as it had existed until 1848 was now maintained only outside the university. Academic philosophy, on the other hand, inspired scarcely any interest - as appears more clearly than from any other source in the foreword composed by I. H. Fichte, H. Ulrici and J. U. Wirth for the revived Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, which reappeared in 1852 after a four-year interruption: As is well known, since 1848 most of the learned journals which opened their columns to philosophy at least from time to time have closed. At this moment there is, so far as we know, not a single journal in which a philosophical article of a strictly learned
Philosophy in the post-March period and scientific character could hope to be accepted; only here and there are so-called popular expositions granted a little space. As a consequence philosophy not only lacks any organ through which it could be to some degree championed in the forum of the sciences against the tendencies of the age that are so hostile to it, it is also deprived of the possibility of announcing and learning of works appearing in its domain through advertisements and critiques. That 'in the given circumstances' this new beginning must be regarded only as a 'sacrifice' on the part of the editors 'hardly needs to be said'. They were making this 'sacrifice in the interests of learning and science', and were doing so in an extremely disagreeable situation for whose existence philosophy was to a great degree itself responsible: Because in doctrinaire arrogance it has involved itself in things that I·ie outside its domain - and especially in the machinery of purely practical affairs, in political, ecclesiastical and social questions of the moment, to which it could bring not enlightenment but only confusion - all philosophical inquiry is regarded as dangerous and every possible means is employed to suppress any impulse towards it. Theologians warn of the dangers the study of philosophy represents to faith and the church; the champions of the natural sciences openly express their contempt for everything that smacks of philosophical outlook and practice; jurists, historians and politicians combat every striving of the philosophical spirit as if it were the confirmed enemy of all justice and morality and the dissolute destroyer of all the foundations of human society. For this reason the editors of the Zeitschrift declared quite 'expressly' that they were not intending to found a new party organ, and that to them philosophy was 'in itself nothing other ... than the spirit of pure scientific inquiry'. Science and Weltanschauung, knowledge and interest, ought from now on to belong to two quite different worlds: 'With the ecclesiastical, political and social questions of the age which, if only as regards Jheir general principles, the 1847 programme of our journal intended to take into consideration, it will henceforth not be involved', they declared, indicating unmistakably the meaning and limits of philosophy as 'pure' science. The state of things has since then changed fundamentally ... In any event philosophy, for which a defensive rather than an offensive posture is in any case indicated now, would for its own sake do well wholly to withdraw to the domain that unquestionably belongs to it and seek with all its energy to command only this: the more narrowly and distinctly it is defined the easier it will be to defend ... In place of articles' on questions of the day we intend to include reports from correspondents on the state of the science in individual regions and places, including places abroad, on the disposition and tendency exhibited by our universities in regard to philosophical studies, on the progress of important learned and scientific undertakings, obituaries, and biographical and other notices that affect the learned and scientific interests of philosophy, occasionally also articles on the position of philosophy as a branch of learning within the great learned institutions (academies, etc.), on so-called propaedeutic instruction at the Gymnasia and the methods of teaching philosophy at universities.
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The epoch of modern philosophy - and that means the epoch in which it became within the university a mere' branch of learning', a learned discipline beside others, and itself abandoned all clain1 to be in any respect anything more - dates from March 1852. During the first three years of its refoundation not a few of the more prominent philosophers of Germany had through their collaboration with the journal participated in this' self-constraint': Carriere, Chalybaus, Drobisch, Erdmann, Fechner, 1. H. Fichte, Fortlage, Frauenstadt, Harms, Lotze, Michelet, Rosenkranz, Schaller, Ueberweg, Ulrici, Weisse, Wirth and Zimmermann were among its contributors. It was not the so-called 'breakdown' of this or that idealist systern, or the rise of positivism, n1aterialism or psychologism, but the self-constraint on the part of philosophy as regards the range of its interests and mission brought about by the postMarch political repression that inaugurated in Germany the reduction of philosophy to a learned science that was to reach its highpoint in neo-I<'antianism. But the various forms of 'self-constraint' were not all that existed in philosophy at this time: on the 27th of the same month of March 185 2 in which the editors of the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie signed their programmatic preface Carl Prantl delivered at the founder's day ceremony at the Munich Academy of Sciences an address on 'The Present Task of Philosophy' in which he showed himself to be so completely independent of all the competing Weltanschauungen it was thought fit to relieve him of his teaching duties at Munich University. Prantl had attempted to understand logic simply as a species of positive-historical science, and in this address he presented the programme of a new historicism equally distant from positivist accumulation of facts and Hegelian historicism. In this progran1me he undoubtedly stood closer to Hegel than he did to the former: he attacked all formal logic as 'simple nonsense', thought to a considerable degree in terms of historical evolution, and likewise proceeded from the conviction that the different philosophies were manifestations of on the one hand the factual and systematic, on the other the general historical and cultural conditions of various levels of culture and states. He deviated, however, in not presenting any course of gradual development through linear progress: thus - in accordance with the way Hegel was then understood - his presentation also lacked any compact 'construction' and did not envisage any possible conclusion to the creative process of history. It was this last consideration, and above all no doubt its comprehensive and detailed development in Prantl's four-volume Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (Leipzig 185 5-70), whose programme is contained in the above-mentioned address, that gave rise to the misunderstanding that this 'historicism' amounted to no more than an extremely complete collection of accounts of long-forgotten systems of logic. Its actual intention, Prantl's achievement in philosophical methodology in refounding logic as a historical science on the
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basis of Aristotle, Hegel and the linguistic philosophy of W. von HUlTlbolt, has since Dilthey no longer been fully appreciated: as a parallel to ethnopsychology Prantl sought to show 'how the objective labour of thought directed by the thing to be thought of' perforn1ed by the Greeks 'under the conditions imposed by the Greek language and the inner form of their thinking' produced the 'basic concepts of all future philosophy'. He sought to explain the origin of the categories historic-genetically and to trace their history and the modifications they underwent under changing historical conditions. This species of 'historicism' was not a 'positivism applied to the humanities' - it consisted simply in the assertion that all the categories and ideas should, from a positivist study of history and sources, be understood as the outcome of historical labour precisely in the Hegelian sense. They possessed no kind of transcendental significance or origin, but could as such be represented only through the process of history. Prantl, the pupil of Trendelenburg, shared with him the critique of Hegel's construction of history, but shared with Hegel above all the historical treatment of the problem of the categories: even the dialectic, indeed, seemed to him an indestructible acquisition of the evolution of philosophy. In addition he was strongly influenced by Feuerbach, as is revealed, even more clearly than in the first volume of the Geschichte der Logik just quoted, in the address to the Academy of Sciences, where he says that 'every future philosophy must first have passed through the portals of Feuerbach's philosophy, uncomfortably narrow though they are, ... if it is to know what it means to be able to breathe freely again'. This Prantl said in 1852 in Munich, and what he said applied both to the strict separation of belief and knowledge achieved by I
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81
but through an absolutist naturalization of everything ideal - by which he had also sacrificed the' ideality' of spiritual phenomena he had deviated from historicism and 'true anthropologism'. Prantl's anthropological conception is in this respect more ample than Feuerbach's: it includes a historical dimension and thus - precisely in the sense of Dilthey's 'only his history tells man what he is' - at first leaves the potentialities that constitute man and characterize his nature completely open. They become apparent only through a conclusion from history, and only thus do those dimensions also become visible that are not subject to variation over time. It is only these which determine what is to be comprised in the concept of the anthropological nature of man. That is why, in the view of anthropologism, belief and religion, for instance, the living religion of the people and of each individual, cannot in principle be destroyed or replaced: that 'politics should ever become the religious life of the people' is for ever excluded, because religion, which 'demonstrates its life in symbols', is an anthropological basic constant. Prantl's system - or rather sketch for a system - represents one of the last attempts at a synthesis of German idealism and post-idealist criticism which nevertheless failed either fully to develop or to receive adequate subsequent recognition. Prantl was even accounted one of the projectors of neoIZantianism and declared partly responsible for the coinages' anthropologism ' and 'historicism', but what was, it seems, completely overlooked was the extent to which the fate he suffered demonstrated how the back of grand philosophy was broken in the post-March period: Prantl speaks in a typical 'language of servility' he who had formerly expressed his views with such clarity, frankness and sometimes almost bluntly, sees himself compelled by the conditions now obtaining to plead in baroque formulations that all deviant opinions should not immediately be denounced as heretical. He who espoused no political or religious Weltanschauung pleads n1eekly not to be allowed to ' get into an uncomfortable position between the parties': ... Science does not timorously close its eyes so as not to behold for instance a storm of history (i.e. the revolution), and still less does it succumb to the delusion that a course already entered upon can be destroyed from without or annulled by any power whatever ... Thus there exists for the inquirer no 'forbidden book' as such, no frightening bugbear, no anathema; to him there exists both Daumer's religion of the future and the profound piety of the simplest countryman, and the extremest events in public life and in every branch of cultural history are all of them to him to an equal degree facta ...
'This address', his pupil von Christ wrote later, even though it was phrased very cautiously, but even more the discussion and rumour that arose over the spirit and content of his lectures, excited to the highest degree the
Philosophy in the post-March period displeasure of the personalities who set the tone of the time. It was not only the press and the writers of brochures who assailed Prantl the pantheist and denier of God: the majority of the theological faculty, too, felt called upon to remonstrate against Prantl's philosophical lectures and to propose an inquiry into them. The accusations \-vere heard in public and their outcome was that in October 1852 our Prantl lost his licence to lecture on philosophy.
As was not uncommon at that time, the details and foundations of the charges were never communicated to Prantl, but he was not excluded from the university entirely but was allowed to continue with his purely philological teaching. In 1857 he was again permitted to teach philosophy; but as a result of this experience for the next twenty-five years he avoided all topical philosophical questions and published almost exclusively as a classical philologist and historian of logic. The system of 'objective idealism' he sketched out in 185 2 and the transformation of logic on the basis of a historicist philosophy of language he had projected as early as 1849 fell victim to the post-March repression. Only eleven months after the Bavarian ministry had withdrawn from Prantl his philosophical venia I<'uno Fischer lost his licence to teach at Heidelberg. Here too, in Baden, the charge was pantheism - here, too, the politically responsible contemporaries of these philosophers failed to understand that all these new tendencies historicism, scepticism, positivism and critical philosophy, I<'antianism and realism - were completely uninterested in questions of religion but were merely concerned with helping to promote a secular philosophy: so that, while these philosophers might perhaps have been excluded from the church, there was no reason to exclude them from the university. 'Wherever conceptual comprehension extends', Fischer had written in his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie of 1852, 'the immanent coherence of things also extends, thus universal law also extends, thus pantheism also extends. A philosophy that ceases to comprehend conceptually ceases to be philosophy, and a philosophy that begins with not wishing to comprehend conceptually, and thus denies human reason, is irrational and senseless' from which Schenkel, university chaplain and head of the Heidelberg theological college, was able to conclude laconically: 'The author of the speech in question has declared that all philosophy is by its nature pantheist and all nonpantheist philosophy senseless. Thus he has derided all non-pantheist philosophy. Thus he has derided theism. Thus he has derided Christianity. Thus he has derided the Christian religious doctrine protected by the state, together with those who confess it ... '. In response to this Fischer published in 1854 an 84-page brochure, 'The Interdiction of my Lectures and Herr Schenkel's Accusations', which exhibits the same attitude towards religion as Prantl had adopted: 'It is true that I find genuine theism only in· religion; it is true that I rigidly distinguish religion
The' Sceptical Generation'
from philosophy ... '; and, without saying so directly, Fischer above all distinguished the tasks of theology from those of philosophy: religion is a divine, primeval fact in the soul of man, or it is the fact of God in the soul of man ... Just as physics cannot produce nature, so philosophy can never be in a position to produce religion. Just as physics, even if it were perfected on every last point, could never replace nature or render it superfluous, so philosophy, even if it had attained the highest peak of enlightenment, could never replace religion or render it superfluous.
, Philosophy, or rational contemplation of the world' had to proceed from an 'eternal order', and this constituted the whole meaning of the pantheism which Schenkel had interpreted as though Fischer had espoused it in the sense of Heine's saying' Pantheism is timid atheism': 'Pantheism and Christianity', Schenkel had said in his accusation, ' are not capable or in need of reconciliation, as Herr Fischer thinks; they are, rather, irreconcilable opposites', and Fischer therefore remained forbidden to teach. A second polemic appearing in the same year, 'Apologia for my Doctrine', made no difference to this, but it did contain - in addition to n1any repetitions - a clear declaration of viewpoint already adulTtbrated two years previously in Fischer's Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre: If my doctrine has been described with the ill-famed and not easily explicable expression ' Young Hegelian pantheism', the author [i.e. Schenkel] had no right to repeat this description after I had publicly repudiated it with so many reasons and arguments. What I said was that this so-called Young Hegelian philosophy takes a direction quite different from mine, that it has a preference for naturalism while I return on principle to the viewpoint of the critical philosophy.
Fischer failed to understand that even this return to 'critical philosophy' could not prevent him from falling under the prohibition of the construction of secular philosophical theories - for Oberhofprediger Schenkel and the Baden ministry that shared his views believed that 'in practice a couple of collisions more or less is not the issue', and Fischer remained excluded from the University of Heidelberg. External and internal constraints, these direct encroachments on academic freedom, and the self-constraint as regards political, ecclesiastical and weltanschaulich questions that such practices seemed to indicate caused academic philosophy to decline into almost total cultural insignificance during the 185 os: only in the domain of history of philosophy and through its involvement with the individual sciences did its work manage to maintain a certain degree of continuity. 'Only what relates to history of philosophy seems still to meet with any acceptance in wider circles', Johannes Schulze, the ministry counsellor responsible for the affairs of Prussia's universities, wrote to Rosenkranz on 12 November 1852, 'and even the students, at our
Philosophy in the post-March period
universities at least, are, as I see from the lists of lectures announced and already delivered, with few exceptions now accustomed to attend only those devoted to logic and at the most history of philosophy.' It continued to progress, however, above all in the domain of the problems of logic and epistemology, partly through its involvement with psychology, partly through its involvement with the methods of the individual sciences. In a fashion different from what was envisaged by the pre-March programmata of a closer association with the 'other' sciences, however, pursuit of these questions now became to some extent an end in itself, elevated to the principal, if not to the only object of philosophical labour. In the same month of October in which Prantl was deprived of his venia the Kiel professor Friedrich Harms (1816-1880) produced the first prospectus for a purely scientific philosophy of this kind. In his Prolegomena zur Philosophie there is enunciated for the first time the express desire to return to the' method' of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and for the first time - three years before Helmholtz - this' return to Kant' is demanded, not merely historically or in vague intimations, but for the systematic reason that philosophy must again orientate itself by the methods of the individual sciences. In the conviction he was rediscovering Kant, he reproached the idealist understanding of Kant founded by Fichte with having neglected the critical method and thus divorced philosophy from the sciences completely. The absolutist autonomy of 'pure thought' was responsible for the difficult position contemporary philosophy was in, because philosophy had rendered itself absolutely independent in relation both to 'common sense' and to the sciences. In addition, however, philosophy was threatened from the direction of anthropologism - which concept Harms employs to mean approximately what would later rather be called materialism - with' the abrogation of all scientific knowledge'. It was these two tendencies, which imperilled the continuance of philosophy, that a return to Kant was intended to counter. Far more interesting, however, than any of the conclusions of this work, almost all of which - in a fashion nonetheless strangely similar to Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre - Harms arrives at deductively, are the constellations of problems from which he commences, for in them we find for the first time an expression of the twofold assault on materialism and German idealism that was to be typical of the later neo-Kantian programmata: If ... the scientific life is not to consist in a conflict between the practical sciences and
philosophy we can only give up one or the other, unless we resolve again to inquire into the first principles of philosophy ... Although historically we found our inquiries on Kant's immortal works and are endeavouring to acquire fundamental principles and a method of knowledge which also make possible the development of the practical sciences, the aim and aspiration of philosophy nonetheless lie not in this surface exterior but in the nature of the mind itself. It is in accordance with this that we have
The 'Sceptical Generation' sought to determine the essential character and the task of philosophy. It has to explain and offer grounds for the definition, the concept of science whose validity is presupposed in every particular science. This task is alloted to it by the nature of our mind, which strives to attain insight into its own essential character, and by the essential character of the particular sciences, which demand for their elucidation a primary and basic science.
It was not the task of philosophy to encroach upon the material domains of other practical sciences, as natural philosophy or philosophy of history for instance had done when, instead of devoting themselves exclusively to their scientific-theoretical task, they had worked empirical knowledge into their theories. In the previous year, in an essay' On the Task and Terms of a Philosophy of History' which appeared in the Allgemeine Monatsschrift fur Wissenschaft und Literatur, edited by Droysen among others, Harms had been the first representative of professorial philosophy to argue for the replacement of constructive philosophy of history by a scientific theory of science of history: Philosophy of history has to explain the conception of science whose validity historiography presupposes and applies. Constructive philosophy of history, too, is consequently of interest to us only in accordance with the conception of science whose validity it presupposes and applies when it construes history. For a constructive historiography is itself only the consequence of the presupposed validity of a certain conception of science. Philosophy of history, however, is not itself a species of historiography, but the application to history of the problem of philosophy.
It may be that this essay originated in association with Droysen - that he either inspired it or saw in it a further invitation to lecture on the 'Study, Encyclopedia and Methodology of History' (which he did from 1857) - but in any event Harms was the ·first professional philosopher before Dilthey to conceive the idea of a 'critique of historical reason' which Droysen had for his part already demanded to some extent when he wrote in 1843: We need a I(ant to scrutinize, not historical material, but theoretical and practical attitudes towards and within history, and, somewhat analogously to the moral law, establish a categorical imperative of history, the living fountain-head from which the historical life of mankind gushes forth. Or has 'philosophy of history' already done that? I think not ... And yet much seems to indicate that a more profoundly comprehended conception of history will be the centre of gravity in which the present confused vacillation of the humanities must achieve stability and the possibility of future progress.
Harms was certainly not the IZant desired by Droysen (whom Dilthey wanted to be), but philosophy of history was not 'replaced' by anthropology or typology of Weltanschauungen (Odo Marquard) but by stu4J; of history, by a critical theory of the science of history which made it its task to secure the foundations of this science
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Analogously in the natural sciences: here too the materiality of natural philosophy (in the sense of an empiricism of individual sciences) was to give way to the laying of scientific-theoretical foundations: 'Philosophy is in its conception a critical science which has to justify and account for its knowledge', Harms asserts in anticipation of the convictions of neoI
The ' Sceptical Generation' various SCiences also promote an interest in this domain. It is because the sciences now acquire the function of founding Weltanschauungen that there now appears the need for a supreme court of control to adjudicate border disputes 'which - long before neo-JZantianism philosophy feels itself called upon to be. Among the motivations of the rise of a substantive discipline called' theory of science' is the consideration that the individual sciences are not, as they were always supposed to be, value-free and non-practicable, but can on the contrary be evaluated and exploited weltanschaulich. In the organic conception of the world' the world ... is divided' on the basis of whether mechanistic or teleological forms of action predominate: One half constitutes nature, the other history or the spirit. When human thought is engaged with nature there arise the natural sciences [Naturwissenschaften]; when it is engaged with history or the spirit there arise the humanities [Geisteswissenschaften]. Strictly speaking we need only the two basic sciences, namely that which considers principally the material and necessary - Naturwissenschaft, and that which is engaged with the domain of the free and the spiritual- Geisteswissenschaft. Even the remotest branches of knowledge converge on these two principal stems. The champions of one of these principal stems we may call realists, those of the other idealists. Thus, just as in the last resort there are only two sciences, a realist and an idealist, so there are also only two Weltanschauungen - a realist or materialist and an idealist or spiritualist: a viewpoint to which matter or n1.ere force is everything, and a viewpoint to which spirit or thought is all that is real.
In principle as many Weltanschauungen may be possible as there are sciences: in practice, and from the point of view of philosophical interest, however, there are only two antithetical Weltanschauungen founded on Naturwissenschaft or Geisteswissenschaft. Although he does not employ the word, IZym is in fact engaged in one of the first critiques of positivism: a critique of the view that the individual sciences can furnish the knowledge that is to replace philosophical knowledge. IZym recognizes the danger of replacing philosophy with positive sciences which for their part then lead onesidedly to the Weltanschauungen of materialism and idealism. A full eight years before Mill's Logic first appeared complete in German, in Shiel's translation (1862), and led to the first great debate on the relationship between philosophy and the sciences, Natur- and Geisteswissenschaft, and to a rigorous questioning of the scientificality of the latter, a practical positivism in the attitude and procedure of professional scientists led the Trendelenburger J(ym to desire a reconciliation through philosophy (now understood as theory of science) with the Weltanschauungen founded on this. It needed no importation of books from Britain or France for it to be recognized that a detachment from speculative thinking had taken place and would continue to do so, and that philosophy, too, had consequently to enter into a new relationship with the facts of the individual sciences.
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This distinction between an earlier practical scientific attitude designated as positivist and this more recent appreciation of positivist theories seemed impossible, to be sure, as long as the hundred-times repeated falsehood, that Mill's translator J. Shiel had in 1849 incorrectly translated the term' moral sciences' as 'Geisteswissenschaften', and thus given currency in Germany to the positivist mode of scientific classification, had not been banished from the earth: there could be no dispute over that, the view could not even be refuted because it rested on the assertion that a book existed which had at this time not even appeared! If the appearance of Mill's Logik der Geisteswissenschaften in 1849 was a pure fiction, Mill's translator could hardly have been guilty of that error. The opposite was, in fact, the case: the translator could employ this mode of problem-formulation and these classificatory concepts in his 1862 translation because they were already current in Germany. This point is of great importance but first becomes evident from the fact that German philosophy was already dealing with the problems of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences that arose from the renunciation of speculative thought even before Mill became known in the 1860s: the unitary science of philosophy had been replaced by the two great scientific groups formed by the autonomous individual sciences. This is demonstrated by the advent of the need for classification and of the corresponding classificatory concepts. And these facts are of decisive significance in another respect too: the theory which in the case of Comte or Mill was, as 'theory of science', to replace the metaphysical unitary science of philosophy was at this time already being promoted in Germany and its outlines sketched there. For at bottom Trendelenburg, Harms and Kym had laid hold of the same problems that positivism sought to solve - such as, for example, that of how the individual sciences can be rendered independent, or how to establish criteria of inquiry in the individual sciences. The history of how positivism was received in Germany was in no way determined by the merely arbitrary interests of philosophers or individual scientists: it was the factual posture prevailing within the individual sciences, with which philosophy too had to an increasing extent to contend, which ensured that it was only from the beginning of the 1860s that there appeared any livelier interest in Mill or Comte, though both had by then been accessible to the .. Germans for some time in translation or summary. That German philosophy of the 185 os exhibited so little interest in positivism was due to the unprecedentedly distressed condition in which it then found itself, for at this time it believed it was engaged in a fight for survival: against Feuerbach and the anthropologism he originated which through a universal naturalization of all spiritual phenomena threatened to replace philosophy with inquiry confined to natural science (Prantl, Harms); against empirical natural-scientific psychology (Drobisch, Waitz) and the materialism which was an even crasser
The 'Sceptical Generation'
manifestation of it, and which moreover exhibited political and weltanschaulich consequences that even threatened human society as such; and, finally, against the importation of foreign positivist or inductive logics such as those of Herschel, Comte, Mill and Opzoomer, which were likewise incompatible with any traditional conception of philosophy's task or themes. While such natural scientists as Liebig - and his pupil Jacob Schiel, though the latter was obliged to seek exile in America in 1849 and returned only in 1859 - were already strongly engaged in promoting positivism, the majority of German professional philosophers regarded this tendency at any rate with uneasiness when they did not reject it altogether. Inductive logicians had' nothing new' for Germany except 'the old Anglo-French theory of sensualism', Hermann Ulrici, for instance, wrote in a review of the principal works of the abovementioned logicians that appeared in the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik in 1852. At this tinle we find evidence of the penetration into Germany of the philosophy of positivism not in the organs of the traditional science of philosophy but rather in the border areas between philosophy and the sciences. In the Allgemeine Monatsschrift fur Wissenschaft und Literatur produced between 185 I and 1854 by professors at I<.iel University (Droysen and Harms among them), for instance, we encounter not only continual references to the 'inductive method' and to Harms' abovementioned proposals for a union between philosophy and the sciences, but, as early as 1853, the very first essay on Comte in German: 'The Basis of the Science of Society (Sociology) of Aug. Comte', composed by Schleiermacher's pupil Franz Vorlander but unknown to this day. Even the most recent bibliography of Comte (1. Fetscher, 1979) knows nothing of it, and it is highly instructive as to the kind of reception positivism received in Germany that VorHinder himself predicted that the German public would be completely uninterested in it, even though 'much can be learned from Comte's work, especially by that vague idealism which seeks an explanation of facts and phenomena above or behind them in a region that can never become an object of science'. Ever since Erich Rothacker it has been repeatedly demanded that we try to discover the' channels through which positivism penetrated into Germany', but such an attempt can be fruitful only if we seek not only to explain the earlier existence of factual positivism in the individual sciences through supposing it to derive from the influence of the writings of Comte or Mill, but to understand how the individual sciences could be interested in these writings on account of the factual posture they had already adopted. Only when we pay heed to the sharp antithesis that obtained in this domain between the posture of the individual sciences and the philosophical pretensions and idealist premises of academic philosophy can we understand why positivism had such a hard time of it in Germany. Here materialist and naturalist
Philosophy in the post-March period tendencies were, like positivism, and not only in the 185 os, graded as , dangerous' on account of their propensity to undermine all morality and idealism in just the same way as was the secular conception of philosophy as 'pantheism'. Among the consequences of the political and ecclesiastical repression was that, unlike in France and England, in Germany the rise of the natural sciences, of technology and of industry could not at first be attended by a philosophical theorizing in this sense 'appropriate to the age'.
3
THE 'SCEPTICAL GENERATION' OF THE 185°8
Only now was the campaign of calumny against philosophy to attain its highpoint: it was inaugurated by Friedrich Julius Stahl in the preface to the third edition of the second volume of his Philosophie des Rechts, the Rechts- und Staatslehre auf der Grundlage christlicher Weltanschauung. In March 1854 the Berlin professor (rector 185 proclain1ed a demand for a 'reversion to science': ... respect for philosophy is now lower than at any time in the history of civilized nations. It has almost passed out of recollection. Hardly any reference to even the most celebrated philosophers is any longer to be found in the newspapers, in conversation, in works of positive science, in the great transactions of state and church ... A welldeserved judgment has been passed on philosophy. The ecclesiastical movement at the beginning and the political movement at the end of the 1840S have for the second time made plain to the whole world that the ~vVay of thinking to which all modern (rationalist-pantheist) philosophy belongs has at its centre a denial of the living God and that the disruption in church and state is only the ultimate practical fulfilment of the philosophical teaching admired for so long ... For a century-and-a-half philosophy has regarded ruling authority and marriage and property not as the ordinance and disposition of God but as deriving from the will and conventions of men, and the nations were only following its teaching when they elevated themselves above their ruling authorities and all historically established ordinances and finally also above legally constitued property.
Stahl avers that he does not wish to abolish philosophy altogether, but every 'rationalist-pantheist principle' must be banished from it once and for all. And this attack is by no means directed solely against the Young Hegelians and the materialists: such liberal or conservative professors as Erdmann and Braniss also had reason to feel themselves addressed. Two lectures directed against Stahl in this year - in part declarations of loyalty towards the king and kingdom of Prussia, in part truly inept attempts at redefining the meaning and goal of philosophy - n1ake clear the degree of oppression to which philosophy quite generally was exposed. Erdmann fantasizes about the' Germanness' and 'German character' of philosophy and lays claim to the classics and their relevance for Prussia; Braniss demonstrates that contemporary philosophy has two fronts to fight on: against calumnies on the part of theology and against the realist tendencies of the age which, inflating themselves everywhere in the
The 'Sceptical Generation'
sciences and in public life, have led to the fact 'that at the present time philosophy has stepped into the background of contemporary consciousness'. Yet the solutions and answers he, too, offers to the problems of the age testify at bottom only to a retreat into a 'pure' scientificality whose actual character, however, no one was at this time yet able clearly to describe. Whoever in these years wanted to take up the study of philosophy - and there were few who did - saw himself confronted by extremes drifting ever more widely apart: materialism outside the university and the sniffing out of demagogues and pantheism within it. The party landscape of the philosophical tendencies of pre-March sketched by Ulrici now threatened to lose its middle ground altogether, for the political polarization of the revolutionary period was unreservedly - and by no means only by Stahl- blamed on the secular basic tendencies of modern philosophy. Just as the whole Enlightenment was convinced that theories exercised a direct influence on human actions, so Stahl, too, could not imagine that social changes were caused by anything other than new ideas and theories. The search for the theory that could have ignited the revolution was consequently bound to discover the guilty among the , rationalists' and 'pantheists'. That a revolutionary uprising, an atheist movement, or even a mere 'religion of reason' could arise from other motivations, that science and philosophy in the pre-March sense could not possibly constitute the' revolutionary forces' Stahl sought to represent them as being, were considerations which even his critics failed to advance against him. The conviction existed - and it was at this time held not only by those who argued for or against a 'reversion to science' but also by the German governments and by not a few of the clergy of both confessions - that what had happened must have its origin in a distinct, theoretically grounded species of thinking, and the only question was how in this situation one could again acquire control over such lapses and 'errors'. The belief existed that one could proscribe theories and decree belief in the incarnate God. F. H. T. Allihn, for example, a Herbartian of whom Dilthey said 'Once the Hegelians are dead he will have nothing left to do', confined his philosophical activities to the task of recognizing Hegelianism also in the non-Hegelians and summarized the' cultural-political task of Prussia' to this effect: By all available expedients of genuine learning and scientificality, and by those yet to be created, in true pedagogical wisdom continuously to take care to see that the widespread corruption of thought brought about by the years-long effect of halfidealist, absolute idealist, Spinozist and mystical-pantheist, common materialist, plain empirical, sophistical and hedonistic theories not only in the so-called regions of learning and scientific education but also down to the lower strata of common consciousness shall be eradicated as completely as possible ...
What' elements' might prove useful 'for so thorough a reaction' Allihn does
Philosophy in the post-March period
not detail more precisely, but he does not conceal that many a German professor, including even Braniss, Erdmann and Rosenkranz, might well be affected. The Hegelian system did not collapse at this tin1e, nor were students bored by 'barren materialism', but their interest in the departments of the philosophical faculty did suffer a steep decline. Compared with pre-March, enrolment until the winter semester of 185 5-56 sank by no less than 13 per cent, although during the san1e period the natural sciences and the historical and philological faculties recorded an increased intake. The inner and external constraints to which academic philosophy was exposed were reflected in the attitude of the prospective student body: at this time it was no longer' done' to study philosophy; one placed another discipline at the centre of one's interests and at most attended only incidentally the lectures of that faculty which for more than half-a-century had occupied the rank of a leading and guiding discipline. If we consider the total number of students at all the German universities between 1830 and the winter semester of 1876-7, and then observe the shift in favour they showed as between the individual faculties, it becomes clear that the complaint of a lack of interest in philosophical reflection repeatedly voiced by German academic philosophers was wholly justified. The number of enrolments in the medical faculty grew comparatively steadily, those in the faculty of law oscillated around a median but exhibited the greatest degree of variation. Compared with the high point in the winter semester of 1850-1 the number of law students had by 1860-1 - just at the time, that is, when Stahl was proclaiming a 'reversion to science' - fallen by 43 per cent and thus declined to a level previously recorded only before 1830. This virtual halving followed a boom in law enrolments that extended to 1848, and it leads to the conclusion that the explanation of both the pre-March 'wave of jurists' that, for example, provided Gans in Berlin with audiences of as many as 900, and the post-March decline in participation in the law faculty had to do with the degree of interest students had in questions in the widest sense political and social. Considering the interest in philosophy that. existed in the pre-March period, one might even venture to say that what was unfavourable to the faculty of law must also have been bad for philosophy: insofar as during the pre-March period it was political involvement that led many students to choose the faculties of law or philosophy, the post-March period must have produced a counter-reaction. The overall development of the theological and philosophical faculties invites the same conclusion. Viewed as a whole these faculties received an almost literal reverse apportionment from the total percentage of the student body: what the philosophical faculty gained was proportionately lost to the theological. But the 185 as constituted a striking exception: while interest in
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the philosophical faculty ten1porarily declined, interest in the theological showed a marked increase. Perhaps for this period the hypothesis holds good that what benefited the theological faculty and provided it with a new impetus was bad for philosophy. In any event, the increase in enrolments in the theological faculty seems to indicate that the trend that furnished it with this strong influx of students was a result partly of a 'reversion to science' in the sense propounded by Stahl, but in part also of an absorption of philosophical talents: just as the study of medicine could be a compromise between a study of the natural sciences and a training for a profession (as in the case of Helmholtz), so the study of theology could likewise be a compromise between philosophical interests and economic constraints (as in the case of Dilthey). -That the pre-March 'wave of philosophers' was followed during the revolutionary period by a 'wave of jurists' reflects - to formulate it somewhat exaggeratedly the politicization of philosophy, while the post-March' wave of theologians', on the other hand, reflects its struggle against absorption into the 'Christian Weltanschauung' decreed by the state. Nonetheless, statistics really furnish hardly more than hypotheses - questions to be referred to concrete reality, so that, with this as a starting-point, we may be in a position to relate the intentions that prevailed during the nineteenth century one with another. What motives may really have inspired the students of the 185 os to come to different decisions from those of their contemporaries of the I840S can only be conjectured. Why did Dilthey really study theology? For familial or economic reasons, or because he was interested in it? Who can say what role was played by the tendency of the age, and what value, on the other hand, can be placed on biographical documents? That a subsequent philosopher should first have studied theology is no uncommon thing, to be sure. But why did Jurgen Bona Meyer start with natural science and medicine but Max Heinze with theology? Why did Julius Baumann, Ernst Laas, Friedrich Albert Lange and Christoph Sigwart study the entire palette of faculties required for a higher teaching position? Why during this period did no subsequent philosopher actually study philosophy? Any attempt at a purely biographical explanation can only fall short: the post-revolutionary , slump' in student interest in certain branches of the philosophical faculty can be adequately explained only in terms of social psychology. And this applies not only to the student group: those who had already begun their academic careers during these years also had to suffer the calumnies directed against philosophy. A sceptical attitude towards all questions of Weltanschauung is thus the distinguishing characteristic of these years. To observe that the programmatizers of a new I<.antianisrn, criticalism - or at least a partial recourse to Kant - who, following the contention over materialism, emerged in the 185 as, were all born between 182 I and 1829, is at first sight no more than surprising. But, just as the initiators of the new
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Erkenntnistheorie Ernst Reinhold, 1. H. Fichte and Friedrich Eduard Beneke were born in the five years 1793 to 1798, so that they finished their studies in about 1820 and brought forward these programmes during the decade of the 1820S while they were in their mid-thirties, so the most important pioneers and initiators of the new criticism - Hermann Helmholtz (1821), Rudolf Haym (1821), I
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doubled between 1855 and 1865 while at the same time the number of lecturers declined by 2 I per cent, and what effect this had on the evolution of philosophy during the mid-nineteenth century - it might also create the basis for a better understanding of the singular partiality philosophers felt for }Cant, for 'rigorous science', for 'abstinence from Weltanschauungen', and for the spirit of asceticism, discipline, duty and self-sacrifice. As Dilthey said in his obituary of Ueberweg: 'It would be interesting to determine for once how many have ventured a philosophical career in German universities over the past fifty years and what their fate has been. We would then see that the decision required courage'. In any event, to the n1ajority of the unsalaried lecturers in philosophy of the 185 os no life-style was possible but one of renunciation and self-sacrifice, and this may have contributed not a little to the idealized image of the 'German scholar'. The age at which these Privatdozenten married is also occasionally informative as to the state of affairs in philosophy, and in the 185 os this was essentially characterized by the interposition of disciplinary measures by the state. Significantly, the only one to achieve a straightforward career was the medical student and natural scientist Helmholtz, who received a full professorship at the early age of 3 I. The six philosophers, on the other hand, achieved this only at the average age of 42 fourteen years after attaining a lectureship! The legend of the conformist, anti-proletarian programme neoI<.antianism is supposed to have possessed from its inception is as misleading as is the hundred-times repeated assertion that neo-I<.antianism, or' criticalism " owed its existence wholly to the scientific plausibility and convincingness of the works of Immanuel I<'ant. The rise of neo- I<.antianism, and indeed the whole problem of the transition from German idealism to the philosophy of the so-called' true' nineteenth century, appears, on the contrary, in a wholly new light when we bear in mind the fact that the philosophers who formulated the really' effective' programme of a 'return to I<'ant' all belonged to the same quite distinct generation. Trendelenburg, Ernst Reinhold, Beneke and the speculative theists may have pointed in this direction and created the first preconditions for a new conception of the meaning and nature of philosophy: but it was only the philosophical situation that existed in the 185 os which permitted a generation of sceptics to grow up who would then be the immediate predecessors of the neo-I<.antianism of the 1870s. The first stage of this situation was created by the year 1848 thus a vital year also in the history of philosophy! - and especially because it produced in the post-March period a prohibition of all free weltanschaulich philosophical discussion. The second, however, was created by the contention over materialism of 1854 and succeeding years, because budding philosophers were from now on compelled either to find their way back to the so-called 'Christian Weltanschauung' as
Philosophy in the post-March period understood by the state ideologists or to opt for a mechanistic picture of the world with all its materialist consequences which emerged as a political opponent of the ruling powers. The early exponents of critical scepticism experienced this second wave of weltanschaulich polarization at ages ranging from 26 to 35 at a time, that is to say, when their formal education was completed and their own philosophical thinking beginning to evolve: their basic position was therefore one of seeking a philosophical justification for an attitude of 'neither-nor' or one of 'this as well as that'. Prantl desired a 'truly objective idealism' which as 'anthropologism' (naturalism) and at the same time as idealism should reconcile these antitheses: like that of Ueberweg, his idealism integrates the progress achieved in natural-scientific knowledge without rendering it absolute in a materialist sense. Similarly, Lange too combined a mechanistic picture of the world and the rigorously naturalscientific dress in which he clothed his philosophy with a 'standpoint of the ideal' incapable of scientific justification. Helmholtz and Meyer were the first to advocate a new' criticalism' on the basis of an attitude of' neither-nor', the consequence being that in theoretical philosophy their arguments were predominantly materialist but in practical philosophy predominantly idealist. Their dualism is most clearly recognizable in the form of scepticism, while with Haym and Fischer the' double-entry book-keeping under science and idealism' (Bloch) is comparatively the least conspicuous: partly because they stood at a greater remove from the natural sciences, and thus from the whole materialist movement, and on the other hand were much closer adherents of political liberalism than the others were, but partly also because they were in any case immunised against any kind of materialism by their Fichtian-liberal conception of freedom. Nonetheless, in their case, too, fundamental liberalsensualist convictions combined during the 185 os with a liberal picture of man and history to make them desist from any positive formulation of a system or Weltanschauung. They remained historians or critics, and their critique of metaphysics (materialism, too, meant dogmatism) was grounded in scepticism.
4
THE EARLIEST NEO-KANTIAN PROGRAMMAT A: HELMHOLTZ, MEYER, HAYM (1855-7)
In an exemplary statement of how the neo-I
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appeal to the natural scientist and physician Heln1holtz as the supposed cofounder of the new epoch in philosophy that was intended as it were to offer to neo-I<'antianism a guarantee that a truly pure-scientific new beginning had here been made that was remote and detached from all previous tradition: Helmholtz seemed to have learned in the school of nature rather than in that of philosophy. If nothing else spoke against such an idea, it is contradicted simply by the curious fact that the origin of the programme of reinstituting a connection between philosophy and the natural sciences can be described as a kind of family history: Erich von Berger was godfather to 1. H. Fichte, who was in turn godfather to the 'founder of the epoch' Helmholtz! Above all on account of the close friendship that existed between Helmholtz's father and the younger Fichte it is not irrelevant to recall that Helmholtz and his father maintained a continual correspondence with one another that dealt above all with questions of philosophy, for it is only this correspondence that enables us to set Helmholtz's celebrated address on I<'ant of 185 5 in its true historical context:' Last Tuesday', he wrote to his father, ' I delivered a lecture for the benefit of the I<'ant memorial on the subject of human sight in which I tried to make especially clear the agreement between the empirical facts of the physiology of the sense-organs and the philosophical conceptions of I<.ant and Fichte ... ' Interestingly, neither in this letter to his father nor in his address does Helmholtz make any distinction between I<'ant and Fichte in the matter of their epistemological foundations; so that we have to ask ourselves towards what end this 'I<'antianism' n1ay have been directed: was it in fact only a natural-scientific confirmation of the epistemological foundations of the I<'antian (and Fichtean) philosophy, as neo-I<'antianism subsequently asserted, or was it the highly topical objective which Friedrich Albert Lange, who heard Helmholtz lecture at Bonn, described in his History of Materialism? There is a domain of exact natural science which prevents our contemporary materialists from angrily turning their backs on all doubt as to the reality of the phenomenal world: it is the physiology of the sense-organs ... Once it has been demonstrated that the quality of our sense-perceptions is wholly determined by the nature of our organs we can no longer dismiss with the predicate 'irrefutable or absurd' the postulate that the entire connected cohesion to which we reduce these sense-perceptions, in short our whole experience, is determined by a spiritual organization which compels us to experience as we experience, to think as we think ...
Lange was not the first to draw his principal argument against materialism from the physiology of the senses, which, being a theory drawn from medicine and the natural sciences, was supposed to offer a 'purely scientific' resolution of the contention between Weltanschauungen, for the motif is already to be found in Helmholtz, and had indeed in the meantime become indispensable to the later neo-I<'antians' belief in their own scientific theories: the motif of the
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refutation of materialism. In response to his father's concern that he might have become 'an adherent of the trivial tirades of Vogt and Moleschott' Helmholtz was able to reply: A thoughtful natural scientist knows very well that the fact that he has gained a somewhat deeper insight into the complex activities of the natural processes does not give him a trace more justification than anyone else has for pronouncing on the nature of the soul. So I do not think you are right when you call the majority of thoughtful natural scientists enemies of philosophy. The greater part have in any case grown indifferent to it, but the blame for that seems to me to lie solely with the excesses of the philosophy of Hegel and Schelling, who are presented to them as being the representatives of all philosophy.
Because and so far as the issue was the critique of materialism, I<.ant and Fichte could together represent the principle of an idealist epistemology - which was why Helmholtz's address could produce so enduring an effect: it introduced an argument drawn from natural science into the political and weltanschaulich contention over materialism. Johannes Muller's 'theory of the specific energies of the senses', which as early as 1840 Rosenkranz had characterized as a 'consequence of I<'ant's philosophy', was amalgamated with I<'ant's theory of pure forms of perception into a single compact argument. According to Muller's theory, 'the quality of our sensations, whether those of light, heat, sound or taste, etc., does not depend on the perceived external object but on the sense-organs which transmit the sensation. If you like paradoxical expressions', Helmholtz goes on, varying a saying of Goethe's, 'you could say: Light becomes light only when it meets a seeing eye; apart from that it is only vibration of the aether'. Natural science seemed to point in the direction of idealism: That the character of our perceptions is conditioned as much by the nature of our senses as it is by external objects ... is of the highest importance for the theory of our faculty of knowledge. That which in more recent times the physiology of the senses has demonstrated by empirical means is precisely the same thing that I(ant, by setting forth the part played in the formation of our ideas by the particular innate laws of the mind, as it were the organization of the mind, earlier sought to demonstrate with regard to the ideas of the human mind in general.
The 'more thoughtful natural scientist' could, to be sure, not elucidate the , nature of the soul' by employing the means of science - an anticipation of du Bois-Reymond's 'ignorabimus'- but the Zeitgeist nonetheless called for an interpretation of I<'ant which turned the a priori forn1s into' innate laws of the mind'. At the same time, however, in Helmholtz's view the need to assume a law of thought independent of experience which is capable of effecting the connection between sensation and reality still spoke at this time against a deterministic generalization of such a recognition of an 'organization of the mind': ---------------------
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... we have to presuppose the presence of external objects as causes of the excitation of our nerves; for there can be no effect without cause. How do we know there can be no effect without cause? Is it an empirical law ? We have wanted to present it as such; but, as we see, we need this proposition before we have any kind of knowledge of the things of the external world; we need it if we are to be aware at all that there are objects in the space around us between which a relationship of cause and effect can subsist. Can we derive it from the inner experience of our self-awareness? No; for we regard the self-aware acts of our thought and will as free, i.e. we deny that they are the necessary effects of sufficient causes. Investigation of sense-perceptions thus again leads us to the insight already arrived at by I(ant: that the proposition' no effect without cause' is a given law of our thinking that precedes all experience.
Helmholtz argues first of all with the aid of a naturalized a priori concept purporting to derive from IZant but in fact exhibiting far more the characteristics of a materialist determinism, then, however, overcomes this suggestion of a deterministic effect of 'innate laws of the mind' by means of a demonstration that all that is universally and necessarily obliged to happen independently of all experience is merely an a posteriori conclusion from the sensation effected to a cause of it. This alone is supposed to indicate the impossibility of explaining thought and the will through 'sufficient causes'. Belief in freedom of will thus involves the assertion of the apriority of the causal concept, and this apriority renders impossible any attempt at a total dissection of thought by purely scientific means which would rob it of its autonomous formative power. If the materialism of Moleschott (theory of nutriment, 1850) sought to demonstrate that thought and the will are determined by diet, by climate, even by individual substances contained in food, we encounter with Helmholtz the opposite conclusion that the will is free at the point at which Helmholtz is in harmony with IZuno Fischer. It establishes the fact of the apriority of thought so as to retain its autonomy in relation to sense experience and perception of the world of objects. Thought and will belong in the domain of freedom; only the senses belong in that of necessity. In this matter, too, we owe the most pertinent reference for ordering this conviction of Helmholtz's within its historical context to his father, who wrote to him in the same year: By the way, I would like to draw your attention to I(uno Fischer's Francis Bacon of Verulam, in case it should have escaped your attention. The book makes the relationship between scientific observation of nature and transcendental inquiry ... very clear ... It also recently became clear to me why Schopenhauer sent you his book. His pupil Frauenstadt, who praises him in the papers and everywhere else, accuses you in his book, Materialism, its Truth and its Errors, of having in your memorial lecture on I(ant borrowed from Schopenhauer what you said about the relationship between sense-impression and idea without naming Schopenhauer, as you should have; but what he presents as Schopenhauer's is in fact partly from I(ant, partly from Fischer's
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lectures on the relationship between logic and philosophy, which I remember Schopenhauer and I attended together.
As the originator of the I<.ant-Fichte synthesis I<.uno Fischer comes as little into question as does Schopenhauer, for Helmholtz's 'philosophical teacher' was - besides, according to his own deposition, Beneke - above all his father, who in the following years too, after Heln1holtz had been called from I<.onigsberg to Bonn, continued to try to influence his son: he wrote in 1857: So far as what you write about philosophy is concerned, you seem to judge without thorough reflection; and out of prejudice, or because it disturbs your scientific activities, you have underestimated and misunderstood Fichte's anthropology [1. H. Fichte is meant]. Newton showed, but I(ant showed even more, that there is more than an empirical knowledge of nature, and if everything else is not to be left to faith an a priori objective knowledge is also required.
Within the Helmholtz family, too, a 'contention over materialism' took place in which the father was wholly on the side of the younger Fichte: All understanding of nature first presupposes a reciprocal action between the a priori ideal and the objective ... Thought and observation must run beside and alternately penetrate one another if knowledge of true reality is to eventuate ... The mistake Schelling and Hegel and their pupils make is that they dispense with observation ... and even the individual ego has become to them a pure formality without essential real individual content, whose immortality they lose hold of just as surely as do the materialists who halt at the most general chemical and physical forces and out of them in their fashion turn the living spirit and content into a merely formal species of chemical process. To have clearly demonstrated this is the merit of the younger Fichte, even though it already follows from a correct understanding of the Wissenschaftsiehre.
The contention over materialism ended in the world of academic philosophy in much the same way as it did in the Helmholtz family, for in his reply the son tried to settle the matter' modestly and respectfully' (I<.onigsberger) by setting all weltanschaulich questions aside: Vogt and Moleschott were not to be accounted among the more thoughtful natural scientists, natural science was able to say no more about the' nature of the soul' than other men were. With regard to all Weltanschauungen, and even with regard to the findings of the natural sciences, Helmholtz was a sceptic. Almost forgotten today, but from the point of view of the history of philosophy characteristic of the period of the contention over materialism, is the rediscovery of criticalism by Jurgen Bona Meyer. What was comparatively speaking harder to recognize in Helmholtz - that his criticalism was quite definitely directed against materialism, while he saw Fichte as the guarantor of freedom of the will - is in Meyer through his uncomplicated attitude towards materialism made crystal clear: in the contention over body and soul the philosopher must adopt the posture of critic and sceptic without, however, in any way promoting the critic and sceptic who is himself a 'party man'.
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, Criticalism ' as it is presented here is not yet the' method' of neo-Kantianism inaugurated by Lange: it is a far more general and far less specific designation of philosophy as a 'standing above'. Jiirgen Bona Meyer at first studied medicine and the natural sciences at Bonn, then in 185 3 moved to Berlin and in addition studied philosophy with Trendelenburg. He obtained his doctorate in 1854 with a dissertation on Aristotle which he subsequently expanded into a book, Aristotles Thierkunde (Berlin 185 5). He then spent nine rnonths in Paris, where he conducted research for a history of modern French philosophy, and afterwards lived as a private scholar in Hamburg until in 1862 he received his licence to lecture at Berlin. From this situation in Berlin he intervened in the' contention over body and soul '. On 24 January 1856 there appeared in Robert Prutz's Deutsches Museum the first of a series of articles which with reconciliatory intent introduced the' criticalist position' into the contention over materialism. The most important natural scientists had taken hardly any part in this controversy, Meyer said, and hitherto no critic of the contention as such had arisen from the ranks of the philosophers; he must therefore be permitted to claim to be in fact the first who, looking beyond the questions at issue, had sought to develop criteria for deciding how far these questions were resolvable at all. His first article, ostensibly a review of Julius Schaller's Leib und SeeIe (Weimar 1856), commends it as the most valuable contribution in 'all the literature of the V ogt-Wagner contention', but goes on to censure it on three grounds: 1 that Schaller has' attributed spurious consequences' to materialism, 2 that his standpoint is uncritical and dogmatic, and 3 that he has overstepped the bounds of knowledge. Firstly, Meyer rejects Schaller's view that, together with freedom of the will, materialism is also obliged to deny the will as such and therewith the fact of consciousness: 'It can declare that man is a machine, but still distinguish him as a thinking and willing machine'. Secondly, Meyer advises caution in the employment of such assertions as that 'the brain of a simple man possesses a different structure from that of a clever one', because' another could perhaps assert with greater plausibility: form and structure are not the point, it is much more likely to be a speedier subjection to alternation of the electrical currents of the nervous system ... ' In this so greatly 'prejudiced age' one had to 'guard against' presenting' as fixed and settled' what was in fact still doubtful. In any event, the' dogmatist' Schaller had in the main himself argued only sceptically, almost in the spirit of criticalism even, when he neither unambiguously rejected Wagner's view of the substantiality of the soul nor unambiguously accepted it. 'Here there can be only an aut-aut', for one had not only the right to inquire into the demonstrability of this thesis, one had also the duty to refute it if it could be refuted: 'It is only to criticalism that
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idealist, materialist or ideal-realist modes of explanation can appear as equally possible hypotheses as to whose truth it does not, knowing how narrow are the limits of our knowledge, dare to decide'. A dogmatic idealist such as Schaller, on the other hand, should have answered unambiguously. A few months later there appeared the first neo-I<'antian book: Zum Streit tiber Leib und Seele. Worte der Kritik. Sechs Vorlesungen, am HatJJburger akademischen Gymnasium gehalten von }iirgen Bona Mryer (Hamburg 1856). Unlike Helmholtz, who turned away from u/eltanschaulich problems and towards specifically directed scientific investigation of knowledge, Meyer here speaks of the' duty of science to desert its normal boundaries and offer a suitable response to a manifest universal need'. That Helmholtz and Meyer hardly deserve to be differentiated from one another so rigorously, however, but rightly belong together at the inception of the whole neo-I<'antian movement, is shown in particular in the confession Meyer includes in the preface to this book: On principle, criticalism determines with severity the boundaries of our knowledge; it knows the question a solution to which we seek in vain; it knows where there are no longer any ponderable arguments. So far as striving after scientific insight is concerned it here declares the only justifiable attitude to be one of critical abstinence; it leaves the door open, however, to consistent subjective opinion and belief. Every positive viewpoint is accustomed to regard itself as more clearly demonstrable and comprehensible than those opposed to it; criticalism combats all such trumpeting of demonstrability and comprehensibility as a deception. Aware that knowledge of the limits of our knowledge is also worth something, it hates pretension to knowledge and prefers frank confession of ignorance. He who knows these limits strives with undivided strength for what is possible within these limits. It brings to contention between parties an impartial judgment. Now, this criticalism is my standpoint.
Meyer's 'criticalism' is, however, by no means merely a particularly rigorous scientific-theoretical abstention from weltanschaulich questions, it also represents an attempt to segregate philosophical, epistemological and scientific-theoretical problems from every political and weltanschaulich contention. The 'pure scientificality' which the second and third generations of neo-I<'antians later promulgated represents the wholly positive version of a doctrine that arose in the 185 os as a negation and an attempt at a reconciliation directed at both materialism and the idealism that was in these years contemporary with it. Whereas the former, alienated from history, appealed to the evidentiality of I<'antian theorems, the latter had first to become I<'antians and neo-I<'antians. Science and Weltanschauung took different sides, for' many are not really concerned about body and soul; under the cloak of these words the opposing parties continue their suppressed religious and political struggles'. The constraint and self-constraint imposed on philosophy in regard to weltanschaulich questions prior to the contention over materialism was from 1854 intensified on account of this contention, and the two motivations behind
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the programmata of pure scientificality converged into one: 'Who has not long been aware', asked Meyer in a further article in the Deutsches Museum, that under the mantle of materialism many forms of opposition are active which would not hide under this mantle if the repressed needs of the spirit were not forcibly conducted to this outlet channel? Those who believed they had a right to repress free and independent impulses can take the responsibility for this. Above all, however, they should cease to confuse the various elernents in this forcibly compounded stream one with another; there are also spiritual elements among them. The spell exercised by materialist books proceeded not so much from their theories as from the social opposition with which they were associated.
Without the 'repression of free and independent impulses' in the period of reaction materialism could not have become an 'outlet channel' - now, since religious, social and political problems were being debated under the' cloak' of the contention over materialism, officious idealism should henceforth cease its vvitch-hunt against materialism. It was this 'reaction', and not its own individual theories, that had secured the success of materialism. Meyer's discussion of these materialist theories in lectures and articles, at first only in the Deutsches Museum, subsequently also in the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, is certainly among the most valuable things written during these years about the pertinent philosophical problems and those allied to them. His training in the natural sciences permitted him unreservedly to affirm every advance in natural-scientific knowledge - his philosophical' abstention' in regard to the weltanschaulich conclusions drawn from them allowed hypotheses based on idealist and materialist views to appear equally worthy of discussion. His' criticalism' also implied a desire to liberate the natural sciences from the tutelage of theology and philosophy and was therefore almost compelled to further a positivist conception of science. When in 1859 !(arl Twesten adopted a positive attitude towards Comte he was not the first to do so: as early as 1856 Meyer had shown himself notably appreciative of the ideas of positivism otherwise scornfully rejected by Germany's philosophers. In his sixth lecture he says of Comte: His system elevates to a principle questions of the suprasensible as opposed to resignation in ignorance and doubt, and makes observation and the gathering from it of the general laws governing all events, whether thought or physical motion, the purpose of all scientific inquiry. The facta, the positive facts, which we discover by this path ought to suffice us; and suprasensible things should not concern us. Mankind sought after first causes only in its youth, abstract concepts of matter and energy, cause and effect, only in the brooding epoch of early manhood; now, however, the time has come when, fully adult, we know what we cannot do and thus where we must cease to squander our energies in endeavours that are useless. This is A. Comte's theory of what constitutes progress ... Many, and the English especially, who adhere to his principle of philosophical abstention do not follow him in his socialist daydreams ...
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Jiirgen Bona Meyer, too, in a certain sense adheres to this 'resignation to ignorance' and to the 'standpoint of critical abstention', and thus we might almost think that his criticalism derives from the positivism of Comte, so that the history of neo-I(antianism would be enriched with a further facet. But this is not so: just as Beneke and, a decade later, Helmholtz found their way to Mill because they perceived in him endeavours related to theirs, so it was exclusively the problems that also led Meyer first to I(ant and then to a certain interest in Comte: 'I therefore side \vith Comte's principle of abstention', he says in the final lecture, but adds: 'only I think that I(ant staked out the boundaries of our knowledge before him and did so much better and more consistently' . In 1857 there appeared as Meyer's fourth article one 'On the Meaning and Value of Criticalism " and in this he summarized his philosophical position for the first time: 'I believe that at any rate the relationship between body and soul belongs to the problems that lie beyond the horizon of our knowledge; I believe that all metaphysical problems are of this kind, and am of the opinion that I(ant has demonstrated this rigorously enough for all time '. Meyer's 'resignation to ignorance' thus involves the proposition that historical progress in philosophy consists at most in an increasingly clearer elucidation of problems, while the possible number of antithetical philosophical axioms have in principle ren1ained the same. Yet' in regard to knowledge of the things in respect of which I(ant demonstrated that they lie beyond our sphere of knowledge I find it impossible to discover any progress or to hope for any'. Metaphysical problems must, rather, be transformed into psychological, and the only discipline that promised an increasingly fertile evolution was epistemology: Apelt, Lotze, Steinthal, Lazarus, Trendelenburg and 1. H. Fichte had demonstrated in different fields that great philosophical achievements could be accomplished even after the period of system-thinking. Because 'there are ultimate questions that elude our knowledge' no one need fear that philosophy would come to lack 'material'. Criticalism wants to liberate all our energies for this positive endeavour. Thus it is negative so as to do all the more to aid a positive enhancement of our knowledge. It believes that progress and satisfaction are possible only through this endeavour, and is convinced that with it philosophy will be in a position to show itself a science elevated above all ill-will and hostility.
This prognosis of Meyer's was to be in a certain sense correct. But the triad of early neo-Kantianism would not be complete if, after the natural scientist Helmholtz, the advocate of a connection between philosophy and the individual sciences, and]iirgen Bona Meyer, the advocate of a criticalist selfconstraint as regards weltanschaulich questions, we did not go on to speak of the practical philosophical impetus provided by Rudolf Haym through which a political and weltanschaulich motivation for the return to I(ant for the first time
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became clearly articulate in a truly effective form. The years 185 5, 1856 and 1857 saw the successive creation of the' purely' epistemological, the criticalist and finally, by Haym, the liberalist IZant. In his lectures 'Hegel and his Age' of 1856 and 1857 Haym takes the 'restorational character of Hegel's whole system' as the occasion for a biting polemic which culminates in the demand that his philosophy must be 'transcribed into the transcendental'. With these lectures Haym - who in 1848 had belonged to the centre-right of the Frankfurt National Assemb]y, later officiated as editor of the Preussisehe fahrbueher, and, like Treitschke and Dilthey among others, had at the end of the 1860s turned towards Bismarck in the way characteristic of liberals at that tinle - exerted an influence that went far beyond the realm of neo-Hegelianism and lent to the contempt for Hegel that marked the post-March period its most forceful and pregnant expression. But, just as it was said of Mommsen's History of Rome that it revealed far more about the age in which it was written than it did about Rome, so what emerges most strongly from Haym's Hegel lectures is the nature of his own political and philosophical interests: 'Only an aesthetically disposed generation can erect grand metaphysical structures, great discoveries in the domain of transcendental philosophy can be made only in epochs in which the pulse of national life beats higher, in which there has awoken a new courage to expand the depths of the heart to an expanding world. Our age do not deceive yourself - is not such an epoch', he says, still in the tone of the resignation with which post-March liberalism was afflicted. In the immediately following years, to be sure, the 'pulse of national life' was again to beat very much higher a fact made particularly evident by the Schiller and Fichte commemorations of 1859 and 1862 but for now the present had so to speak to defer discoveries and rediscoveries in the domain of transcendental philosophy to the future. A programma that wanted to return to transcendental philosophy could enjoy any prospect of success only when the national movement had at the same time experienced a fresh impetus. Haym's expectations were abundantly fulfilled as regards national history and the history of philosophy but, either because they were too vague or because they betrayed too clearly their anthropological, Left Hegelian origins, his other prognoses turned out to be false. By associating it with the names of I
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metaphysics of the concrete concept a critical investigation will have to go back to its source, to its foundation in the interior of man. Man in the totality of his being is the object of this critique. No other way of apprehending it will be possible except that prescribed by Kant and Fichte. It was from the function of perception, judgment, drawing conclusions that the critique of reason discovered the elements and laws of abstract knowledge. It is from the living deeds of man in the totality of his being by which he connects himself with himself and with the real world that the critique of the concrete laws of the human spirit will have to make discoveries. The exhaustive answer to the question 'how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' lies in the more comprehensive question' how is the synthesis of language, art, religion, just, moral and scientific practice possible? Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the parallelism of transcendental philosophy and national history had been joined by a third undertaking, history of philosophy. But this thesis of Haym's involves not only the hope of a kind of second Enlightenment and an all-embracing valid transcendental philosophy, it involves above all a strong emphasis on the performance of the subject in the process of knowing and acting: this thinking within the categories of 'freedom of the individual', thinking's conformity with law (instead of a conformity by being) as the foundation of all knowledge, a performative reason instead of the 'slavish' metaphysics of Hegel, lends expression to a conception of the subject which, while it has since the Enlightenment certainly belonged on principle to the philosophical repertoire, has nonetheless possessed a special meaning at certain times and enjoyed varying high and low points as regards its popularity. Erich Rothacker very clearly recognized in Haym an example of the connection between historical situation and ethical and philosophical inclination. Speaking of the rise of a regular' religion of the great man' that had been suggested by such figures as Napoleon III and subsequently Bismarck, he says of Haym's critique of Hegel: If you wanted to condense to a concise formula the influence on the humanities of the new political picture of the world [the period following Haym's lectures is meant], you might say: a metaphysic of the organically growing spirit of the people has with increasing resoluteness been replaced by a historical philosophy of the hero ... The turning towards the will now necessarily drew after it the new ideal of action and active participation in the life of the state: the valuation of the active individual. Just as in the domain of the humanities organological thinking retreated and one rose to the veneration of heroes, so analogously the meaning of the subject changed within the realm of philosophy, in that a contemplation of the objective spirit in Hegel's sense had to be replaced by a subject-theoretic transcendental analysis. And thus behind the scandal of Hegelian metaphysics there was also concealed that of materialism, and it was not hard to see that behind the names of Kant and Fichte there stood not only convictions in the realm of
The ' Sceptical Generation'
1°7
epistemology and theory of science but even more a reactivation especially of Fichte against the Hegelian' persuasion '. Then, when a few years later IZarl Rosenkranz celebrated Hegel as the' German national philosopher' and made a final attempt at vindicating him, it very quickly turned out that it was Haym who had in fact delivered the last effective' kick' to the' dead lion' (Bloch). Up to 1870, at any rate, in which year IZant was to be promoted to the German national philosopher, Hegel's system had, as Rosenkranz summarized it, been accused by Fichte, Weisse, Ulrici, \Y/irth, Carriere, Baader of pantheism; ... by Leo of atheism; ... by Hengstenberg and many other theologians of unchristianity; by the Austrian school inspector Exner, a Herbartian, of unscientificality in its psychology; by . Allihn, a Herbartian of Halle, ... of corrupting the young; ... by Schubarth and Hirschberg of high treason against the Prussian state through its theory of constitutional monarchy; ... by Stahl of political rationalism; by Ruge and Haym of harbouring reactionary desires; by Feuerbach of spiritualism; by the Catholics of unbelief and harbouring revolutionary tendencies; by all parties of inconsistency of method.
And in the new German Reich - in the German-speaking world in general up to 1890 fifteen times more courses were then held on IZant than were held on Hegel.
4
<J==============================================[> The philosophical criSiS at the time of the' New Era'
I
ERKENNTNISTHEORIE AS MEDIATION BETWEEN THE OLD IDEALISM AND THE NEW MATERIALISM
It seemed at first that the 'burial of the Hegelian philosophy by Haym' (Meyer) was to be followed towards the end of the 185 as by a kind of philosophical churchyard-peace, for except in Austria, where a 24-year-old published a notably unconformist treatise, 'The Present Task of Philosophy', in which he simultaneously argued for a 'return to the I<.ant of the Critique of Pure Reason' and warned against I<.ant the 'revolutionary', there was little to indicate the coming advent of neo-I<.antianism. No, Carl Sigmund Barach (1834-1885) has not been' unjustly forgotten' (Topitsch) : for his alliance with Stahl ' Stahl ... was quite right to include I<'ant among those who had produced the doctrine of which the revolution was the literal execution' - and his epistemological proposals - 'The I<'antian critique is at present to be regarded as the negative science whose goal is to reject the objectivity and apodicticity of the perceptions of reason and to determine their limits and boundaries; it has to be supplemented by a positive epistemology which, exploring every species of knowledge, lays a true foundation for degree of objectivity and evidentiality' - could not inspire anyone to a resuscitation of the obscure Konigsberger. It is true that later, in the 1860s, Barach did something for the promotion of I<'ant in Austria, though this time in close association with I<.uno Fischer: but this early work disclosed only too clearly what another I<'ant-discoverer said of his colleagues a few years later: 'The human fox is seldom content merely to sigh over the fact that the grapes of the church and the breadbasket of public service hang too high. One tries to accommodate oneself ... ' (L. Noack). In any event, the' return to I<'ant' which was palpably close as early as the mid- 185 as now came to a temporary halt, for between the demand for Hegel to be 'transcribed into the transcendental' and the beginning of the 1860s no further programme for neo-I<'antianism was published. All that appeared, in 1859, was a contribution to the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie by Friedrich Ueberweg in which he attempted to formulate a new foundation for philosophizing - not for I<'antian philosophizing, to be sure, but at any rate 108
The' New Era' for critical-epistemological philosophizing. In an essay' On Idealism, Realism and Ideal-Realism' he demanded a renewed analysis of the epistemological antithesis of realism and idealism, and an analysis in the I(antian sense quite similar to the one Frauenstadt had desired in 1854, though in his case it derived from Schopenhauer. Neither were I(antians, but both were nonetheless in harmony with the I(antian philosophy in that, on the basis of doubting the prevalence of either sensual or conceptual knowledge, they believed the problems of epistemology must be confronted anew. In doing so, philosophy must not arrive at a complete subjectivism in the I(antian sense, as Ueberweg thought it would; on the other hand, however, the idealist and post-idealist objectivism of the psychological and physiological researches of modern times had no real arguments to set against it. The idealist tendency, which to this extent must be regarded as overcome, and modern materialism each possessed its 'charisma' and each its element of 'danger' : Pure idealism preserves the higher, nobler tasks of the spirit, it is true; but it can easily become alloyed with unscientific and mythological elements. The merit of realism is that is preserves the purity of scientific interest; its danger is that by denying the inadequate shell it may also lose the kernel of truth concealed within it. The consummation of ideal-realism is that mediation of extremes whereby both sides come wholly and completely into their own ...
said the future materialist Ueberweg in 1859. A connection with earlier tendencies was in this sense no longer possible: 'only an energetic continuation, sharpening, deepening and perfecting of a critique become a historical force can from now on lead to the goal of a rigorous epistemological science refined through critical sifting and aware of reasons for trust and reliance as well as of those for distrust and rejection'. It was in precisely this sense that Schleiermacher had already' entered in his Dialektik on the path which, rightly pursued, must lead to an epistemology that does not do away with I(antian negations [of an adequate knowledge of the object] but overcomes them'. This ideal-realism would have to be a synthesis: it would not hypostasize the general and essential, nor would it. .. attribute to them a merely subjective significance: it would (with Aristotle) recognize the one in the many and in the phenomena the immanence of the essential being. Ideal-realism does not (with Hegel) reject physical observation or (with materialism) teleology; nor does it dualistically look for the teleological cause where knowledge of the effective cause comes to an end, or appeal to mechanistic causality where purpose appears to be lacking; it discovers in mechanism the complex of those laws which the ideal purpose itself determines as routes to its realization. Ethical ideal-realism does not (with I(ant and Herbart) recognize purpose as the determining cause of moral behaviour, nor does it (with utilitarianism and hedonism) regard the moral norm as resii~~~~~eY---':lgJ~~e~ ~tti~e11 __
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for themselves but in their value-relationships ... Ideal-realism does not replace an anthropological moral principle with the will of God or in service of an anthropological foundation exclude the theological form of ethics, it believes that what men find most valuable and what God wills coincide.
As this proceeded from Bonn, and immediately after the replacement of Friedrich Wilhelm IV by Wilhelm I, such' pantheism' could for the moment be uttered with impunity. But it is perfectly clear that even where the progran1n1e of a new philosophy is being formulated, as it is in this essay of Ueberweg's, a fundamentally sceptical attitude very much predominates: the new ideas are developed out of the negative posture, and only occasionally is there a flash of cautious critique. Ideal-realism denotes a negating and critical transitional formulation, and probably it would never have been developed systematically if Ueberweg had not, for purely economic reasons, been compelled to accede to the suggestion of the publisher Toeche that he should write an Outline of the History of Philosophy. Ueberweg's programme for an 'Erkenntnistheorie' draws upon the tradition founded by Schleiermacher - the typificatory way in which he treats contemporary philosophical problems, on the other hand, points back to his teacher Trendelenburg, who as long before as 1847 had published an academic dissertation 'On the Ultimate Distinction between Philosophical Systems'. Proceeding from the 'conflict between physics and ethics', between energy and thought, Trendelenburg had here firstly distinguished between materialist and idealist systems and invested these two' types' with the historical names of Democritism and Platonism. A third possibility - 'that thought and energy are in no way distinct and appear so at most through the way they are perceived' he saw as having been established by Spinoza and designated it 'Spinozism '. According to a study by Joachim Wach, which was confirmed in its essentials by Odo Marquard, Dilthey's types of different Weltansc:hauungen derive from this dissertation. Marquard's intention was to establish the thesis that typologies of Weltanschauungen were' mediations temporarily pensioned off or in retirement', and claimed to recognize in the phenomenon of the , typologies of Weltanschauungen' then being created an ' anthropological thought-form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'. That typologies of Weltanschauungen constitute such' mediations in retirement' may be true in the case of Dilthey and his successors, but in regard to his predecessors the thesis is, in my view, absolutely untenable: firstly because Trendelenburg's supposed type of a 'Spinozism' is in reality not a type at all, for, what Wach and Marquard failed to see, even Spinoza himself can hardly be accommodated to this concept; secondly because, in both this dissertation and his Logische Untersuchungen, Trendelenburg actually speaks of only two' world views' and when he does so he always has in mind that' conflict between physics and ethics' in which one is required to mediate. 'Realism without the idea becomes materialism, and idealism without access to the real becomes a dream of the
The' New Era'
Table
I.
III
Mediational concepts deriving from Trendelenburg
Trendelenburg 1847 Mediation in the sense of an 'ideal realism' Democritisn1 Platonism (Spinozism) materialism idealism Prantl 18;2 'The Present Task of Philosophy': realism subjective idealism
the 'true objective idealism'
Kym 18;4 Critique of positivism and materialisn1: realism idealism 'the university nlaterialism spiritualism Weltanschauung' Meyer 18;6 Meditation in the contention over materialism: materialism idealism criticalism Ueberweg 18;9 Sketch jor a system oj ideal-realism: realism idealism
ideal-realism
Trendelenburg 1862 Programme of mediation: (2 forms) 'synthesis of realism idealism organic 'synthesis of physical Weltanschauung Weltanschauung
' '
Meyer 1870 Critique of Trendelenburg's classification: idealism dualism materialistic monism as a fourth, unsystematic group Meyer proposes scepticism, criticalism, empiricism
Kym 187; Contra Darwinism and materialism: Spinozism realism
Platonism idealism
(as alternatives)
imagination, a world of eidolons ... That is why we have to strive after a true unification and not desist until we have achieved it', he writes in the Logische Untersuchungen, where, moreover, he also settles the question whether or not Spinoza is to be regarded as an independent founder of a type: If in Spinoza's substance thought and extension really permeated one another and did not merely stand beside one another as two expressions of one and the same thing, then here, too, an organic view would be possible. But this view is alien to Spinoza. By abolishing purpose he abolishes thought in the foundation of things. Even though his temperament is opposed to it, he nonetheless adheres therewith to the physical view of the world, and to this extent constitutes an antithesis to Plato.
In Dilthey's sense of the term, therefore, Trendelenburg
IS
in no way
lIZ
Philosophy in the post-March period
concerned with' typology of Weltanschauungen' but wholly and solely with th conflict between two antagonistic tendencies, systems or Weltanschauungen: a species of ' Spinozism " however, is to intervene in ll1ediation. To have attempted precisely this, or something similar, is what also distinguishes a whole succession of Trendelenburg's pupils. For a dissertation by Trendelenburg is by no means all that exists before Dilthey: Prand (1852), I<:'ym (1854, 1875), Jurgen Bona Meyer (1856, 1870), Ueberweg (1859), Laas (1879) and finally Friedrich Paulsen (1877, 1892) also, and mostly in heavy reliance on their teacher, worked at a typology in this sense, either in efforts parallel to those of Trendelenburg or with a view to establishing their own standpoint. An 'anthropological thought-form' called 'typology of Weltanschauungen' is alluded to - before Dilthey - in Prand's address on 'The Present Task of Philosophy' of 185 Z discussed above, in which he starts from the proposition' that all the different tendencies [of philosophy] are necessarily rooted in the innermost being of man'. In this lecture he even anticipates the sense of Dilthey's type-designations: 'realism ' (empiricism, psychologism) is confronted by a 'subjective idealism', but both are to be reconciled in 'true anthropologism " in 'true objective idealism'. This 'anthropological' line of typifying goes from Dilthey back to Prand (and then to Feuerbach). Trendelenburg, on the other hand, goes back via von Berger to Schelling's idea of an 'ideal-realism' (1801), which can in turn be traced via Fichte and the elder Reinhold back to I<:'ant and Platner. But typifying is one thing: the series of attempts at a reconciliation of the fundamental antithesis in the philosophy of the mid-nineteenth century that between idealism and n1aterialism (or 'realism' and the like) is another. 'Within the limits imposed today', Jurgen Bona Meyer asked in 1856, 'has it not become a duty to decide the issue in the conflict between materialism and idealism without unjustified reference to society and religion?' His 'criticalism' was altogether representative of the views of many of this generation. If we survey all the Trendelenburg-related works glanced at elsewhere and their attempts at classification we see that in almost every case the third concept or 'ism' designates the philosophical programme of the author concerned (see Table I). The Logische Untersuchungen first appeared in 1840; it was not until two decades later that a second edition appeared (I 86z), but a third was then called for in 1870: its sales success coincided with the period in which the contention over materialism was at its height. Trendelenburg's reputation experienced a new revival during this period of enhanced dispute, for the ideas on the necessity of a mediation between idealist and realist elements he had sketched out proved to be highly susceptible of development. While his treatise of 1847 still originated primarily in the requirements of history of philosophy - in so far, that is, as it derived from von Berger's lectures on the history of ~hilOSOPhY, which had likewise sought to survey the multiplicity of systems
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through constructing a typology - from the time of Prantl it began to become clearer that the champions of the younger generation of philosophers could no longer be satisfied with any living tradition; the philosophy of 'neither-nor', whose beginnings were already to be detected in their teachers, now gave rise to further programmes: the positivistic independence of the different branches of knowledge and the conflict between different Weltanschauungen were answered with a 'universal Weltanschauung', ' criticalism' answered the contention over materialism with a demand for the renunciation of weltanschaulich thinking, Ueberweg's 'ideal-realism', finally, returned to the fundamental questions of epistemology and in this synthesis for the first time lent to the concepts of 'idealism' and 'realism' a purely epistemological meaning also within the school of Trendelenburg. The premises of the philosophy of identity lost their power to convince, idealism and realism appeared to be not absolute but merely relative antitheses: in short, belief in the veracity of thought, whether it proceeded from energy or from the idea, was by critical and epistemological means rendered problematic and the antithesis residing in it thus at the same time overcome. From now on what was demanded as a matter of principle was a 'scientific inquiry' which should resolve the subject-object problem in such a way that neither the share of the subjective nor that of the objective would be made one-sidedly, and thus uncritically, absolute. This was the real meaning of the philosophical scepticism of the post-March period - it was in this that there lay the allurement of the philosophy of mediation deriving fronl Trendelenburg, and it was at the same time also the fundamental idea behind the renewal of epistemology during the' New Era'. After Ueberweg it was above all Eduard Zeller who, with his inaugural address at Heidelberg in 1862, 'On the Meaning and Task of Epistemology', formulated a programme and at the same time again made absolutely obligatory a connection between epistemology and a starting-point in I
The analogy subsequently so frequently pressed between the origin of the I
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Philosophy in the post-March period
tween, if you like, Berkeley and Wolff. The critique of the old ontology and of' pure reason' corresponded to the critique of the philosophy of identity and of materialisn1, and in both cases the philosophical endeavour was directed towards the conversion of an absolute opposition into a relative one, of a confrontation into a synthesis; Zeller said in his address: !(ant acknowledges ... the truth of that empiricism which asserts that all ideas derive from experience, and the truth of that rationalism which has them all derive from within us; but he does not acknovvledge the truth of either of them when they maintain their assertion to the exclusion of their opposite; through uniting and thus overcoming both points of view by distinguishing between the form and the substance of our ideas, he is able to understand not merely some of our ideas but all of them as at the same time an effect of the objects and a product of our self-awareness.
This was clearly intended to be a statement of Zeller's own view, and his address thus caused additional scandal through constituting a sign that a by now' former Hegelian' had succumbed to the new tendencies, broken with the idealist tradition and even den10nstrated a high appreciation of empiricism: 'I cannot concede that anything appears in the content of our ideas of reality that does not originate, directly or indirectly, in inner or external experience '. But Zeller also makes it clear why rejection of 'pure thought' could follow from a return precisely to a I
It had not yet been determined whether the I
The ' New Era'
I I
5
logic and epistemology the possibility of treating of the laws, methods and forms of actual thought, for these were now something other than mere creations of 'pure reason' or speculative thinking. In this situation epistemology now required only one object an object of investigation in precisely the sense in which Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchungen had discovered such an object in the methods of the sciences - to be able to establish criteria of its validity. From this position philosophy at first deprived of one of its own n1ethods - drew close to the sciences. In the second place, however, epistemology from now on also acquired a critical function with regard to the sciences, because, after philosophy had for more than a century exercised a powerful influence on the formation of public opinion, the sciences had in the meantime replaced it: in that they had in their turn universalized their way of viewing things and thus appeared to render philosphical treatment of weltanschaulich questions superfluous, politics, history and the natural sciences had relieved philosophy of this function (cf. I
2
THE RENASCENCE OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE FICHTE CELEBRATIONS OF 1862
Eduard Zeller's episten10logical programma, which in its endeavour at mediation appealed to I
I
16
Phiiosophy in the post-March period
and as a methodology of the individual sciences - Erkenntnistheorie at any rate promised the domain of theoretical philosophy an overcoming of the traditional weltanschaulich antithesis. Carl Ludwig Michelet might protest, to be sure, 'that of I-Iegel's Swabian school Zeller is the first to play truant and abandon the colours', and even fear there would on that account arise a 'cry of triumph from the neo-Kantians [my italics] or from Trendelenburg', but the motivations defined by Zeller were responsible only in part for the revitalization of interest in philosophy that had started at the beginning of the 1860s, to merge finally with what Michelet had named neo-I<'antianism. When in 1860-1 Jurgen Bona Meyer published in the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie his two essays' On Criticalism, with Particular Reference to I<.ant', the fact that it was no longer solitary individuals who were arguing for a return to I<..ant became inescapable. The name I<"ant was now to be discovered more and more frequently even in non-specialist publications, and it became clear that, at least so far as academic philosophy was concerned, the realistmaterialist and idealist positions for whose reconciliation Trendelenburg had called were to be increasingly treated as part of a debate between a more realist or a more idealist interpretation of I<..ant. The question was no longer primarily - as it had still been in connection with the contention over materialism - one of the antithesis of energy and thought, but merely one of the relative preponderance of the one side or the other. The' compromise' sought was thus itself conceived and described in terms that approached the I<..antian, so that the 'contention over world-views' was succeeded by a contention over the interpretation of I<..ant: a transcendental investigation of the 'given' whose realist side was taken from I<"ant was confronted by an idealist interpretation which here tended more towards a subjective 'production' of cognition and a belief in pure forms of reason. It was in this that the antithesis in the varying forms of connection with I<"ant was held to lie, and, according to Meyer, this antithesis received fresh nourishment from I<"uno Fischer's presentation of I<"ant: If I understand him correctly, Fischer maintains ... that in the second edition of the Critique the I(antians had impelled }(ant himself to the standpoint of that empirical idealism which he had sharply rejected in the first: that is to say, to the standpoint which, according to Fischer's presentation, ... does not deny that there are things external to us and only calls into question our idea of their nature because we do not perceive these things directly but know them through inferences. The inference here is said to be: there are things external and additional to our ideas, independent of them, thus things in themselves which are external to us. What is external to us is for just that reason in space. If there are things in themselves which are external to us there are things in themselves in space, thus space is a stipulation pertaining to things in themselves. Empirical idealism thus attributes to the stipulation of space not only a subjective but also an objective validity. And thus it is to this idealism that I(ant is said to have later made concessions.
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This question of the subjective or objective validity of the IZantian concept of 'space, the debate over a realist or an idealist interpretation of IZant, also stood directly in the line of those problem-issues which Meyer had traced from the contention over materialism back to IZant: the old idealism had been no less , dogmatic' than the old and the new materialism, and only the critique was capable of determining the part to be attributed to the subject and the part to be attributed to the object in the process of cognition (cf. Cassirer). To this extent the fundamental motif of criticalism too leads in the end to the demand for an Erkenntnistheorie, but it does not only therewith inherit the conflict between systems and We/tanschauungen and the need to mediate between them, it is at the same time also the court which is to decide the specific question of the claims of materialism and those of idealism: scepticism attacked a we/tanschau/ich resolution of this antithesis and led on to criticalism. It was not until then, however, that the principal philosophical disagreement of the midnineteenth century - that between materialism and idealism - led Meyer, and others with him, to a second step towards an Erkenntnistheorie whose principal task was seen first and foremost to lie in a denegation of the subjective element in cognition in favour of the objective. Thus the contention over materialism, too, played a not insignificant role in the revitalization of philosophy. Throughout the 185 as the only forum available for the discussion of philosophy had been the Zeitschrift fur Phi/osophie: by now, however, the renascence of philosophy had already become apparent in a purely external way through the foundation of three new philosophical journals. On 21 January 1862 the Gedanke, edited by Michelet, reported from Wiirzburg: 'In the meanwhile, Frohschammer has also founded a philosophical journal. He wrote the first number entirely by himself', the correspondent, Hoffmann, added, 'and I do not know whether he has any collaborators in mind, or if he has who they are. Thus there now exist four philosophical journals in Germany ... ' The Gedanke observed: 'As the second such journal we rejoice at having assisted the birth of two other colleagues so swiftly in the course of the year; we believe that, here as in all things, competition will substantially enhance the interest of the public'. Whether Michelet's Hegelian Gedanke was actually the second, or whether the Herbartian Zeitschrift fur exacte Phi/osophie had not perhaps been announced before it, is a question that concerns only the vanity of the respective schools that published in them. In any event, the Gedanke was determined not to fall short of the journal of the Herbartians in any respect, not even when, to demonstrate the strength of its school, the latter prefaced its first number with an alphabetical list of the school's adherents and their writings. IZarl Rosenkranz at once seized this opportunity to compile a list of about eighty Hegelians from which it could be seen that the Hegelians were easily in front. In the field of debate and criticism, however, several serious and important
118
Philosophy in the post-March period
consequences ensued, for it was now possible, in essays, critiques, replies and reviews, to react more quickly and comprehensively to innovations and current and topical problems. The topical relevance of philosophy as a whole depends to no small extent on the degree to which it is adapted to the needs of the Zeitgeist (even though it may stand in opposition to them), and the founding of these journals offered a basis for this, and for the first time again allowed something resembling German philosophy to become visible. In addition to this, moreover, it had in the most various contexts also learned to take up again themes that were of interest to the public. And these themes were: I The dispute over the 'body-soul problem' which had since 1854 been treated in a multitude of brochures and smaller monographs mostly of a popular kind and usually having the aim of once again and' quite decisively' refuting 'materialism'. Towards the end of the 185 as the older contention over the substantiality of the soul then gave way to the contention over the teachings of Darwin. 2 The enthusiasm for Schiller which, running parallel with the hopes that informed the 'New Era' but also with those of an entry of Prussia or the German Confederation into the Franco-Austrian war, made of Schiller a national hero and his hundredth birthday in this sense into 'a commitment of the German people to idealism' (Ziegler).
Although Prussia had mobilized it did not enter the war, and Rudolf Haym caught the mood very well when he wrote in his essay on Schiller in the Pretlssische ] ahrbiicher: A mighty consolation has, however, even now been given us. This poet lives undyingly in the heart of his people as does no other. The world has seen the incomparable spectacle of the divided branches of our people, indeed its limbs dismembered and scattered over the globe, joining together in veneration of this poet with a unanimity similar to that with which the Greeks once joined in praise and appreciation of Homer. This November celebration ... , a true' victory celebration of the spirit', was a proof of the durability, indeed of the imperishable vitality, of the workings of the spirit. It was above all a national celebration ...
But it was at the same time also the celebration of a pupil of I<'ant - as was to be demonstrated in a series of publications dealing expressly with the relationship between I<'ant and Schiller or obliged to treat of it in a discussion of 'Schiller as thinker' (Fischer, Tomaschek, Zimmermann, Drobisch, Ueberweg). Except within the non-conformist religious communities, I<'ant the moral philosopher, the philosopher of history and the champion of the Enlightenment had effectively played no role at all in the neo-I<'antianism of the
The' New Era' 185 os: after the Schiller celebrations, however, there appeared the possibility that I
And by 1860 it was already not difficult to substantiate this view, from external evidence at least, for Fortlage's collective review under the title 'I
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Philosophy in the post-March period
such empiricist interpretations of the I<'antian philosophy as that of the Herbartian Drobisch, or over all other possible sceptical dealings with I<'ant seemed to have been achieved by Fischer, who was held to have proved with finality that' Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre is identical with I<'ant's critique' ! Here it is demonstrated in the clearest way how I(ant already saw that the pure self, independent of all change in the empirical circumstances in which it exists, remains unchangingly the same ... That the ego is at every moment the same ego, and consequently in the course of its thought not subject to the changes of time, is the reason everything is radically combined in it, ideas distinguished and compared, the multiplicity synthetically united. Thus in this part of his Critique I(ant already recognised and established the ego or subject, in the sense of a pure and timeless thought-function, as the ground of all objectivity and consequently also as the first and supreme principle of knowledge.
After I<'ant had thus been substantially Fichteanized it was also possible to speak of the service 'I<'ant' had rendered to pure idealism in practical philosophy: ... he rose above perceptual reason grounded in the mechanism of nature to the realm of the free resolutionary act, namely to the realm of the moral law as a law of volitional reason which involves the demand that it accomplish itself and that it do so through the motive power of pure reason itself, whereby the material of perception in nature and history acquires the capacity to be employed as means to an end, as the material for the construction of what alone is real and actual. In this way alone, through the iron scales of the highest law, can an over-arching regulator be imposed upon the affairs of man. In this way alone can man become his own master, empowered to refer back to himself and his own conscience without being compelled to submit either to the monotonous sameness of nature or to the false allurements of world-history, or to an inactive standing still between both.
The free resolutionary act of a volitional reason determines all morality which pursues the goal of dominating nature and history: it was only this iron , regulator' - the will that was deduced from a reading of I<.ant, though it could in fact be found only in Fichte, and was of course above all also supposed to be increasingly perceived in Bismarck - that permitted I<.ant, too, to become a popular philosopher at this tiille: when on 19 May 1862 Germany celebrated its Fichte - principally, it goes without saying, the Fichte of the Addresses to the German Nation - I<.ant, too, was received into the circle of Germany's national heroes. Who celebrated Fichte, however, and where he was celebrated, within the bounds of the university or at public ceremonies, was in these years inevitably a political issue of the first order, for since the accession of Wilhelm I and the Franco-Italian-Austrian war the question whether Germany was to be dominated by Austria or by Prussia had again been a subject of vehement
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debate. Every vote for a strong central power meant at the same time the advocacy of a 'Little German' solution, whereas the hegemony of Austria implied a federalist Greater Gerniany. Fichte, who had said that' the spirit of Prussian history compels us to go forward to freedom, otherwise we shall perish', thereby embodied the hopes of the majority of German liberals for a free, constitutional and united Germany under the leadership of Prussia. What this meant was that the Fichte celebrations came to represent the celebration not so much of a philosophy as of Little Germanism. They concerned 'in the minds of those who promoted them not in general the philosopher but the spokesman of the idea of the German nation; not him who ~ad proclaimed in Jena a new speculative wisdom but him who had in Berlin pronounced the celebrated Addresses to the German Nation'. 'Fichte was employed to give public expression once again to the idea of German unity', Hermann Marggraff, the editor of the Blatter fur literarische Unterhaltung, who was inclined to favour a Greater Germany, wrote in the same year. The promoters of the celebrations, the two journals the Grenzbote (Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag) and above all the Preussische Jahrbucher (Rudolf Haym), stood on the side of the Deutsche Nationalverein, which had been founded in 1859, the year of the Schiller celebrations, with the aim of achieving a united Germany under the leadership of Prussia. On 3 March 1862, at a time when the N ationalverein already had 25,000 members, a meeting of its Berlin members resolved, on the motion of Lowe-Calbe, to hold a celebration on 19 May. 'It may be left to members in other towns whether or not to do likewise', the Wochenschrift des Nationalvereins said a few days later. 'The Nationalverein was [according to Lowe-Calbe's motion] precisely the body to organize this celebration; for Fichte had pronl0ted the national cause in difficult times and had been the first to demonstrate that the German people could not have unity without freedom or freedon1 without unity. The members of the Nationalverein were truly Fichte's disciples.' 'The motion was passed by an overwhelming majority', concluded a report which proved to be a signal to all Germany. Fichte was, to be sure, not only the philosopher of the Borussian Nationalverein, he was also the philosopher of the Freemasons and the nonconformist communities, the author of the Wissenschaftslehre and the predecessor of Hegel: but the speeches made on this day in almost all the cities and university towns of the German-speaking world were above all about the 'first herald of the ideas which inspire Germany's national party today' (Treitschke). A survey of the university celebrations shows that a large number took place outside the boundaries of Prussia, but also that the Fichte celebrations in the sense indicated represented a political event: in HessenDarmstadt, the kingdom of Hannover, and Mecklenburg the N ationalverein was either banned altogether or, as in the case of Hannover, it was decreed that its members' are not to be considered for any appointment, promotion, salary-
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increase or other act of favour'. Whereas the rulers of Sachsen-Weimar and Baden, and in Berlin the Prussian Crown-Prince, participated personally in these celebrations, no academic or public celebration of any kind took place in the four territories aforementioned, so that the universities at Rostock, Gottingen, Marburg and Giessen were the only ones in the German-speaking world to be wholly excluded from the universal trend. That 'the philosopher only ran along beside the patriot, indeed that the former would as it were delay the latter' (Strauss to Fischer, 10 July 1862), was - except for e.g. Treitschke (Leipzig) and in the case of the public lectures delivered in Prussia - a matter of course above all for the speakers at the Berlin Fichte celebrations of the Nationalverein (Berthold Auerbach, Lowe-Calbe, I<.alisch) and the two Jubilaumsschriften by Adolf Stahr and Adolf Helferich that also proceeded from this circle. It was a political demonstration: threeand-a-half thousand guests followed these celebrati01!s in Berlin, in which such prominent liberals as Virchow, Duncker, Schulze-Delitzsch, Carl Twesten and Delbruck participated. 'The Nationalverein gained 502 new members on this occasion', a report of the proceedings stated, and it may be assumed that similar gains were made elsewhere by this precursor of the future NationalLiberal Party, for between the Schiller festival and 1864, the year of the DanoGerman war, it achieved a membership of over 30,000. At the same time, however, the example of the academic celebrations at the Swiss, Austrian and Bavarian universites, where above all Fichte's 'antimaterialism' (Lott, Vienna), the purity of his character (Wildauer, Innsbruck; Lowe, Prague), his significance for philosophy and the sciences (1<.ym, Zurich; Hebler, Bern), or his German patriotism in the wider sense were emphasized, testified that a more or less philosophical interest in Fichte was possible without the speaker's being rendered politically suspect: 'The undeniably great progress that has been made in Austria', wrote the Blatter fur literarische Unterhaltung, 'is demonstrated, if by nothing else, by the mere possibility that in the year 1862 an official academic celebration in honour of Fichte could take place at all in Vienna, Prague and Innsbruck', for there too the worst period of reaction was in the past. There was now no longer any talk of a 'return to science' and academic philosophy was gradually acquiring a new respect. For the first time it had again become' topical' in the sense that many newspapers and journals now found what professors of philosophy had to say about the 'greatest of their guild' worth reporting. Even the prognosis advanced by Haym five years previously was to prove accurate: 'the national pulse' was now 'beating higher', and 'discoveries in the domain of transcendental philosophy' too would not be long in con1ing, for with increasing interest in Schiller and Fichte interest also grew in their teacher I<.ant, as was manifested in the addresses delivered by Brandis (Bonn), Braniss (Breslau), Fischer (Jena), George (Greifswald), Harms (I<.iel), Kym (Zurich), Lott (Vienna), Reichlin-
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Table 1.2
22·3
19·5
26.6 28.6 4·7
August
24·9
3°·9 8.10
autumn 20.10
22.10
2.
Chronicle of the year
12 3
1362
Fischer (Jena): vice-chancellor's address on 'The Two Kantian Schools at Jena' The Nationalverein calls for Fichre's birthday to be solemnly celebrated von Miihler becomes Prussian minister of education George (Greifswald): king's birthday address on 'The Structure of Science' Lange (Duisburg): king's birthday address on 'The School in Relation to Public Life' The so-called Jagow Decree forbids Prussian public officials to engage in any form of oppositional politics Lange becomes leader-writer for the Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung (Duisburg) Trendelenburg (Berlin) completes the 2nd edn of his Logische Untersuchungen and introduces the term' theory of science' Lange signs an electoral manifesto The Literarische Centralblatt begins publication of a list of lectures announced at all German-speaking universities Fichte celebrations throughout the German-speaking world Lange is warned about his political activities The Philosophische Gesellschaft (Berlin): Michelet discusses the 2nd edn of Trendelenburg's Logische Untersuchungen Lange petitions to be relieved of his teaching duties The Vieweg-Verlag (Braunschweig) announces the forthcoming publication of John Stuart Mill's System der deductiven und inductiven Logic, which appears complete during the course of the year Bismarck becomes a government minister and presides over the cabinet Lange ceases teaching Bismarck becomes Prussian prime minister and minister for foreign a/fairs (conflict over the constitution) Ueberweg (Berlin) is called to Konigsberg as extraordinary professor Haeckel (Jena) delivers the first German lecture on Darwin Zeller (Heidelberg): semester inaugural lecture on 'The Meaning and Task of Erkenntnistheorie'
25. 10
Nov. 3. 11 17.1 I 22. I I
29. I
I
End Nov.
Meyer qualifies as a lecturer at Berlin Meyer becomes a lecturer at the Royal War Academy The Biideker Verlag (Iserlohn) accepts Lange's History of Materia/ism: publication is announced for the following year but does not take place until 1866 Lange becomes editor of the Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung Helmholtz (Heidelberg): birthday address' On the Relationship between the Natural Sciences and the Sciences as a Whole' - connection with Mill The Philosophische Gesellschaft (Berlin): discussion of Zeller's lecture. Michelet adjudges him a 'neo-Kantian' Dilthey (Berlin) makes his first reference to work on 'a kind of theory of science'
Meldegg (Heidelberg) and Trendelenburg (Berlin). Kant had reformed philosophy, Fichte wanted to reform through philosophy, was Kuno Fischer's handy formula. One now spoke of the' Kantian-Fichtean philosophy', and this identification of Kant with Fichte, which had, to be sure, already been adumbrated or even directly asserted by Helmholtz (father and son) and by Haym, Fortlage and Fischer, was in the coming years to represent the most
12 4
Philosophy in the post-March period
successful variant of all the interpretations of the I(antian philosophy. That Fichte's U7 issenschaftslehre 'first set forth correctly the high significance of I(ant's work for the development of philosophy' (Braniss) was also valid, tnutatis mutandis, for the rise of neo-I(antianism: for from the beginning of the 1860s interest in I(ant was always additionally nourished by the motivations that had been dominant during the Schiller and Fichte celebrations. The Fichteanized I(ant for whose creation and propagation I(uno Fischer above all must take the credit was subsequently to become the distinguishing mark of the South-West Gern1an school of neo-I(antianism which derived from him. Its history began on 19 May 1862.
3
THE NED-IDEALISM AND ERKENNTNISTHEORIE OF KUNO FISCHER
In his laudatory review of I(uno Fischer's book on I(ant, Fortlage asserts that through I(ant's 'theory of the freedom of will of the intelligible character' all , indifferentism' - one is supposed to think of Meyer - and 'all materialism ... are from the outset excluded and rendered impossible'. That Fischer had viewed I(antian philosophy one-sidedly through 'the lenses of Fichtean and post-Fichtean idealism' was maintained as early as 1862 by Ludwig Noack, in an essay published in the Deutsche Jahrbucher fur Politik und Literatur under the very significant title 'I(ant with or without Romantic Pigtail?' Noack, who had the previous year himself published a book on I(ant - Immanuel Kant's Resurrection from the Grave (Leipzig 186 I) - accused Fischer of a 'Romantic distortion' of I(ant's teaching which he attributed above all to Fishcher's having wholly neglected those interpreters of I(ant Fries, Herbart, Beneke, Lotze, Trendelenburg who belonged to the' line of development of post-I(antian philosophy that did not proceed from the school of Fichte' : The assertion by the present-day I<'antians of Athens-on-the-Saale [i.e. Jena: Noack means Fischer and his I 8-years-older colleague Fortlage, who, because as a psychologist he derived from Beneke, had still not been called to a full professorship] that the I<'antian critique teaches that in all so-called physical phenonlena nothing is to be recognized but the one intuitive reason, the one intuitive faculty, the one spirit in: which we all live and have our being, is merely a translation of I<'ant's teaching into the Weltanschauung of Fichte and his successors ... Every attempt to translate I<'ant's teaching into the idealist gibberish of the Fichtean theory of science must come powerlessly to grief on the rocks of the proposition enunciated by I<.ant in the Prolegomena which the Romantic fox on the Saale [i.e. Fischer] silently slinks past: 'The proposition of all idealists is contained in this formula: all knowledge acquired through experience and the senses is nothing but illusion, and truth is to be found only in the ideas of pure understanding and pure reason. The principle that universally governs and determines my (formal or, better, critical) idealism is, on the contrary: all knowledge of things acquired only from pure understanding or from pure reason is
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nothing but illusion, and truth is to be found only in experience! ' It is this proposition of I(ant's, and not his theory of space and time as merely the forms of our sense perception, that is the real key to the I(antian critique of pure reason, i.e. reason divorced from experience ... To give clear expression to this important outcome of I(ant's critical achievement is the task of my I(ant redivivus; to remove it is the accomplished objective of the Romantic expounder of I(antian philosophy.
On this point Noack, following Beneke, interprets I<'ant quite correctly, but Fischer's I<.ant interpretation was nonetheless to enjoy incomparably greater success precisely during these years of the 185 os and 1860s. His one-sidedly idealist explication of I<.ant came at precisely the right time as much at the right time as his interpretation of Hegel was later to do in relation to neoHegelianism. Between the pre-March and the pre-war periods Fischer always knew how to seize the spirit of the age, and he even originated, as did Haym, Harms and Prantl, in Left Hegelianism. He refused to accomn10date himself to the usual pattern of ' isms', and perhaps his development might be worth studying on its own account for the detailed instruction such a study would supply as to the techniques by which he was always able to present 'his' classics in the light he desired. Even his first' transformation' from a pupil of Weisse and nonetheless also a Left Hegelian into a 'neo-I<'antian programmatiser' reveals that every new formulation of the 'actual aim and interest of idealism' was achieved at the expense of historical truth. How Left Hegelianism and 'I<'antianism in the Fichteanized sense' could in general be reduced to a synthesis became provisionally clear as early as 1848, when, in an essay on 'Ludwig Feuerbach and the Philosophy of our Time' published in Arnold Ruge's philosophical journal Die Akademie, Fischer laid the foundations of his subsequent so-called' critical philosophy of identity': 'The character that animates Feuerbach's entire development', he says in this youthful work, 'is an intensive effort to grasp actuality fully and entirely in its true nature', whereas 'speculative pantheism' was unable 'to endure the fullness of life-informed actuality' and had submerged it 'in the night of the absolute, where it fades into logical thought-phantoms'. This had been the situation at the time of the advent of Feuerbach's naturalism and its radical rejection of all idealisn1: 'sensually pulsating actuality' had, in its incompatibility with 'pure, solitary thought', instigated Feuerbach to break with all idealism: 'he rouses the forces of nature which the idea had charmed into a magic sleep and leads them into the field against the terrorism of thought '. It was in this that his philosophical achievement resided, but it was also the point at which he went astray, for he had wrongly identified Hegelian idealism with idealism as such: 'It is blamed for having laid nature waste, suppressed freedom, alienated man from his true being, transmuted life-informed sensuality into the wraiths of Proserpina. I concede the possibility of these crimes, but such anti-cosmic tendencies are only the errors, not the truth of
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idealism', Fischer opens his attempt at a rehabilitation and a programme for a new idealism: 'I claim idealism on behalf of freedom. I maintain with Feuerbach that we must conceive of real actuality, the visible world, as the subject of itself, if, in sacrificing its autonomy, we are not at the same time to forfeit its positive truth; I am likewise convinced with Feuerbach that an unworldly, abstract logic is incapable of penetrating to the kernel. But where does this kernel lie?' Feuerbach had discovered it in sensation Fischer purports to have discovered it in freedom, a 'whole full human freedom' embracing both thinking and the sensations: 'In demonstrating freedom of thinking, idealism at the same time demonstrates the ideality of the visible world, in demonstrating the freedom of the thinking man it demonstrates the ideality of the sensual man ... One does not cease to see when one sees the world with the eyes of Plato; on the contrary, one begins to see properly only when one senses the object in its ideality'. Because only' the ideal sense' was capable of 'affirming another being in its self-evidentiality " only thinking could 'permeate' sensuality and thus 'transform the world into visible thoughts'. The nature of reality manifested itself only on the basis of freedom of thought, and 'the task of the most recent philosophy' was thus to recognize reality in the laws of freedom. The' kernel' lay in the individual's spiritual freedom, in an ideal freedom that would on the one hand assimilate all of Feuerbach's sensualism but on the other would not fall into 'servitude' to sensuality. Fischer's' genuine' and' true' idealism, which appeals to Plato but can be traced back to the Fichtean problem of the dialectic of ego and non-ego, is then, in his Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, described as 'critical philosophy of identity', though in fact it at first remains completely uncritical, for here too the presuppositions of the philosophy of identity are retained in their entirety: 'From the transcendental viewpoint, which I(ant discovered and Fichte completed, logic becomes theory of science, and through philosophy of identity, which Schelling founded and Hegel completed in the transcendental spirit, the problem of logic is solved. As science of reason, which is the unity of nature and spirit, of subject-object, it is at once metaphysics and theory of science, i.e. philosophy of fundamentals'. Fischer's 'Romantic Platonism' - which according to Max Wundt is to be discovered only during his early period, whereas his revitalization of 'theory of science' 'represented s0111ething quite novel' - propounds above all the riddle of deciding whether' critical' elements can still exist at all in all this. For that which professes to be 'critical' does not in fact have to be 'critical' in the I(antian sense, any more than that which lays claim to the name , transcendental' has to be thought of as transcendental in the I(antian sense: 'The problem of logic in which I perceive the science of concepts', Fischer says, in what Wundt regards as a programmatic work, 'I identify or at least
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connect quite closely with the problem of cogn1tion. The problem of cognition can in truth be perceived only from the transcendental viewpoint which philosophy was for the first time seriously involved with through Kant and which it must never again abandon'. And a little later any remaining doubts as to an identification of I
Just as in 1857 Haym wanted to see Hegel 'transcribed' into the transcendental, so in 1852 Fischer had already confessed to having placed the Hegelian system' under the critical viewpoint or under the control of I
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Philosophy in the post-March period
, anthropologism '. But in the case of Fischer this critique takes a different direction to the extent that it does not seek a remedy through history of categories and philosophy of language, as Prantl does, nor a scientifictheoretical remedy, as in the case of Harms, but proposes to reconstruct philosophy through a direct historical counter-movement. Fischer's programme is the' revitalization' of an unjustly abandoned tradition - a project very sin1ilar to that already advocated by his teacher Weisse in his address of 1847: only a new' historical orientation' could give rise to new possibilities of solving systematic problems. The set phrase' Back to ... ' with which Fischer's pupil Liebmann would subsequently weary the reader signifies in his case a return not to I
And it was above all in this sense that Fischer was then' critical': he attacked the materialism, sensualism or 'dogmaticism' of Feuerbach, and thus it could also happen that I
The' New Era'
all fell within the 185 os, and its highpoint received its most pregnant expression in his account of the' founder of modern realism', Bacon: Franz Bacon von Verulam. Die Realphilosophie und ihr Zeitalter (Leipzig 1856). Here - indebted as ever to the prevailing Zeitgeist he even polemicizes against' German idealism', which is 'so affectedly superior' as to treat the realist animators of I
I
Philosop!?J in the post-March period predilection for I<.ant, though always under his own self-chosen motto' Truth is the daughter of time' (Bacon). Max Wundt records that it was this work on Bacon' from which Alexander von Humboldt read to I(ing Friedrich Wilhelm IV and thus procured his permission for I<.uno Fischer to be appointed to a lectureship at Berlin'. The appointment was then effected but its ministerial confirmation was delayed, so that Jena University was able to anticipate Berlin in inviting Fischer to lecture: in November 1856 he received a call to the' GesamtuniversitCit Jena' maintained by the three Thuringian duchies of Sachsen-Weimar, Sachsen-Gotha and Sachsen-Meiningen; it is not improbable that the initiative may even have come from Grand Duke Carl Alexander (Weimar), for during the coming years Fischer was to maintain a very close contact with the court at Wein1ar. The lectures on 'The Life of I(ant and the Foundations of his Teaching', which immediately preceded the large-scale work on I(antof 1860, also owed their origin to this Weimar connection. They were entitled' I(ant's Life and Character', 'The Problem of Human I(nowledge as the First Question of Philosophy' and 'Space and Time as the First Conditions of Human I<.nowledge " and the last two treated themes that were to occupy the entire neo-I(antian era: firstly the problem of the boundaries dividing philosophy from the sciences, secondly the question of the status of the senses in the process of cognition. Both involved establishing the grounds of the autonomy of philosophy and the question whether the process of cognition included an aprioric element or whether cognition as such might rightly be understood as lying beyond all philosophical reflection. What was being determined at the Weimar ducal Residenz in the person of honorary professor I<.uno Fischer was thus nothing less than 'the vital question ... What is philosophy?' 'A science has a valid existence if it possesses a clearly defined, well demarcated domain, a domain that everyone recognizes and no one disputes. If it [philosophy] does not possess such a domain its existence is dubious'. But this was of course meant only rhetorically, for Fischer had already written in 1852 that the 'problem of cognition', and therewith that of philosophy, 'can in truth be perceived only from the transcendental viewpoint', and now, too, the solution to the problem was to be discovered in this direction. Using the physicist as an illustration he made clear where and in what philosophy had to seek its 'object' : Among the scientific voices which refuse to suffer any science other than the empirical sciences and deny to philosophy any legitimate and properly warranted existence, a particular class of natural scientists is today making the most noise. If they had their way physics would be the only science deserving the name. What does the physicist explain to us? .. He can explain nothing but what he observes and perceives. What he perceives is single sense impressions and only these: what he does not and never can perceive is their cohesion, their necessary connection with one another ... Without the
The' New Era' concept of such a necessary bond, without that is to say the concept of thing and quality, cause and effect, potential and actualized energy, etc., no physical explanation is possible. And these concepts themselves, what are they? ... we discover ... that there is something the physicist does not explain to us and from his viewpoint neither can nor will explain: the concepts without which neither the experience nor the knowledge and perception of things is possible. Suppose he has explained the possibility of natural phenomena: what he has not explained and cannot explain is the possibility of physics. Nature is being illuminated, but physics remains obscure!
The sciences to this extent explained things but did not explain' knowledge and perception of things', and there had to be a science which would explain the 'fact of the exact sciences': 'Thus there has to be a new science, differing from all the others but no less exact than they, whose object is the fact of knowledge and perception itself. What name it bears is to me a matter of indifference, though it should be different from that of the others from which it is distinguished by its object. This new, necessary, equally exact science is philosophy' . It is not only from the time of Fischer that part of the basic methodological technique of Zeitgeist-philosophy in pursuit of topicality has everywhere been, through a simple adaptation to current public debate even as regards the realm of terminology, to produce the impression that a fulfilment and solution of demands and questions then engaging everyone is here being offered. Fischer never had the remotest intention of explaining the' possibility of physics', but he promised a new science, and an exact one moreover, which would do so. Whether the physicist really perceives only 'single impressions', whether a possible connection between these must at the same time carry the predicate of necessity if it is to be called an act of cognition, whether, further, it is really 'concepts' - and if so what kind of concepts - that make possible experience and knowledge of 'things': none of this needs to be explained, specified, problematicized or proved, precisely because each of these views and assertions can attach to the Zeitgeist. I
It was that simple! A new science was required which would' explain' the fundamental principles of ·all the others, and this science was philosophy in the
Philosophy in the post-March period
form of transcendental philosophy, whose transcendentality consisted wholly and solely in the banal circumstance that from now on one intended to 'address oneself to cognition itself'. This was supposed to be the meaning of the' critical philosophy' first founded by I
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As the tendency here exhibited almost completely forsakes the critical horizon of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, it is hard to say what I
Whereas I
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Philosophy in the post-March period
mathematics bring with them this supreme degree of evidentiality and certainty. We grasp that 2 times 2 = 4 with such perfect clarity and once and for all only because we create this truth ourselves, because we ourselves produce these magnitudes and their equation, because here conviction and action coincide in a single act. If in the previous lecture I established as a fact the universality and necessity of mathematical knowledge, here is the completest explanation of this fact. It is explained by the nature of space and time.
The plausibility of Fischer's Fichtean mode of thought, remote though it is from I<.ant, gained more adherents for neo-I
Nonetheless it was not only this 'simplicity' of the Jena professor, or the possession of a gift for exposition, that ensured his success, for I
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conviction of it appeals to the fact of our self-consciousness from which that of our freedom is immediately and clearly evident.
In appealing to this unscientific and 'pure' reason Fischer was on very safe ground, for, as many of his contemporaries demonstrate, there existed in a large part of the public, and especially of the academic public, a great readiness to make this self-consciousness of the individual the starting-point of all (pseudo-)philosophical reflection. That, in addition to this, the Fichte celebrations of 1862 \vere concerned precisely with Fichte the 'man', the , character', the 'man of will and action', was an unmistakable sign that an approach to I<'ant emphasizing his criticalist, realist and sceptical side could nov; expect far less success than that offered by Fischer: the neo-idealism particular to the I 860s which, because in the domain of theoretical philosophy it knew how to rehabilitate the pure forms of reason and in the domain of practical philosophy could lean on the liberalist Zeitgeist, did not let its ego and self-consciousness be 'corroded by reflection', and was able to repulse every naturalist thesis, appealed to the purified I<.ant-Fichtean I<.ant of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This tendency pushed the realist elements of I<.antian philosophy completely into the background and with the greatest one-sidedness emphasized the subjective and formal elements in the process of cognition. In order to demonstrate that only the capacities and accomplishments of the subject could be made the object of a theory of the faculty of cognition the criticalist conception of I<'ant such as that chan1pioned by Meyer and Noack was set aside in favour of an appeal to the purely subjective formality of space and time. The subject produced its own perceptions: if one wanted to avoid relapsing into that pre-I<.antian 'dogmatism' which had regarded the 'thing in itself' as knowable one could never regard something objective as the actual cause and fashioner of cognition. It was in this sense that Fischer understood' his I<.ant', and it is only in this sense that he had a right to describe himself as 'critical'. He understood 'criticalisn1' as Fichte did, as the opposite of a 'dogmatism' that claimed to know the objective as such. Later, towards the end of the I870S and no doubt first and foremost under the pressure of his dispute with Trendelenburg, he withdrew further and further from the realist and positivist interpretations of I<'ant that held that in I<'ant's view' the things outside us are by no means mere representations', so that within the framework of his book on Fichte (1884) he had found his way to a 'critique of I<'antian philosophy' which denied all possibility of knowledge of a given object unless our reason itself produced it.
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136
4
OTTO LIEBMANN AND THE CONCL USION OF THE NEO-KANTIAN PROGRAMMA T A
Three philosophical elements above all had to come together for neoI<'antianism to become the dominant movement in German academic philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century: theory of knowledge as the systematic concern, a new idealism as the weltanschaulich concern, and thirdly a new relationship with tradition. The 'suspension' of the Weltanschauung conflict of the 185 os pointed on one hand in the direction of a theory of knowledge criticalist in intention, but on the other also in that of a neoidealism which differed from the old idealist philosophizing of the postHegelian era first and foremost in that the latter maintained it was speculative while the new idealism maintained it was critical. In the neo-I<'antian era, at any event, and in many handbooks and much secondary literature since then, it has been customary to distinguish the old from the new idealism in this way. That all intermediate positions, the whole prehistory of Erkenntnistheorie from Schleiermacher to Ueberweg, but above all every historical or political change that had occurred in the meantime, thus remained outside one's purview was - since neo-I<'antian philosophizing was founded on a concept of knowledge formed on the model of the exact sciences - only too understandable: for what owed its origin to the fact that, as a consequence of the discrediting of German idealism, philosophy believed it had to defend itself against being reduced to anthropologisrn, materialism and positivism, or being taken over by the contention between systems and Weltanschauungen, could hardly be expected to regard itself as a continuation of the philosophicalhistorical tradition, let alone relativize itself in a political-ideological sense. To reproach neo-Kantianism with having completely neglected or even systematically excluded a whole dimension from its image of itself would be as idle as the reproach made by the neo-I<'antians against German idealism that it had paid too little heed to the natural sciences and their methods and failed sufficiently to model itself on them. As the Romantic era thought primarily organically and in historic-individualizing terms, so, precisely because only an exact scientificality seemed capable of preventing philosophy from being reduced or taken over, neo-idealist neo-I<'antianism thought in the normative categories of universality, principles, duties and maxims, in relation to which the particular, single, individual, particular interests and motivations of actions always appear only as individual case, object, and of theoretically inferior value: its hierarchical thinking recognizes no analogies, parallels, contingencies or co-existent forms of equal value and equal merit. Everything is either traced along paths of induction to principles and ideations or it is derived from them as the individual special 'case' and adjudged as such. As neo-idealism it insists on a priori truths and laws of thought and on the
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evidentiality of the dogma of freedom of will - it was prepared to denounce every kind of cautious, undecided scepticism, such as that of Jurgen Bona Meyer, as 'indifferentism', and tolerated no intermediate positions. It regarded contemporary philosophical projects even those of realist neoI<:'antianism - with the same intolerance as it displayed towards the philosophers of the era of German idealisn1 that preceded it. It possessed the truth, knew how - and what - questions were to be answered, and was wholly and totally positive. It was 'critical' only when it stood on the side of the powerwielding majority, or could at least reckon on broad agreement within the academic domain. That it was even in a certain sense' popular' was what made it so 'successful', for the 'success' of a philosophical movement is measured in the short term by quantity of heads and only in the long term by their quality. The success of this philosophical movement, however, was due first and foremost to the fact that its basic conceptions were and would be shared by so n1any: but that so many could share its basic conceptions was in turn due not least to the fact that this neo-idealism depended on evidentiality. Proofs by evidentiality can succeed only if the majority, 'common sense', ratifies them so that the mere fact of the success of neo-idealism in a way contains some indication of its position within society and the university and in relation to differing philosophical tendencies. Another consideration is that, inasmuch as it depended on the voice of the many, it could hardly spring into being 'at a stroke': wholly differing tendencies had to flow together to create this 'current' named wholesalefashion as 'neo-I<:'antianism '. In a way similar to that in which political parties and movements come into existence and begin to spread, it too was not founded by a 'classic deed', by a great philosophical idea, or even by an individual work from which the existence of the movement could be dated. It arose slowly and hardly perceptibly; heterogeneous currents flowed together; but not one of the active participants in this process understood itself as part of a more comprehensive movement. The movement became visible only when the fact was noticed - and it was no accident that it was precisely its critics who noticed it - that there existed a whole series of philosophical tendencies which, though they might be quarrelling among themselves, nonetheless possessed the comn10n feature that they all appealed to I<:'ant. Not only was an originator, a birth-date and a programme lacking, the neoI<:'antians received even their name from others as a mere label: from the very beginning the concept' neo-I<:'antianism' denoted - and in an extremely crude and misleading way, moreover - a phenomenon of the history of philosophy whose comrnon denominator was at n10st an alleged recourse to I<:'ant but which never represented an individual, definable philosophical tendency. There was no work, no originator, no occurrence and certainly no design or plan that could have called it into existence. But the autonomous evolution
Philosophy in the post-March period which everywhere underlies our way of conceiving the history of philosophy seems to demand precisely such a clear and unambiguous starting-point associated with a single work: neo-I<'antianism must surely have' started' somewhere! Whoever had demanded it - perhaps whoever had propagated it most persistently or loudly must be its originator. This, at any rate, is what is to be gathered from the many assertions which declare Otto Liebmann (or alternatively Helmholtz and Liebmann) to have originated it. Liebmann's stereotyped expression' Thus we have to go back to I<'ant!' was memorable enough to satisfy the need to see the ' beginning' of neo-1<'antianism concentrated in one work, one person and one occurrence. The force of this need was then sufficient to elevate probably the least significant of the neoI<'antian theoreticians of his time to the position of originator of the entire movement. The fact, however, is that the appearance in 1865 of Liebmann's youthful work Kant und die Epigonen marked, not the beginning of the neoI<'antian programmata, but their conclusion. Just as Eduard Zeller's address of 1862 was, because it was so typical an expression of the theme, accorded the credit of having first coined the conception of (modern) theory of knowledge and first formulated its aims, so here, too, the need of the historian to grasp an enormously more complex developmental process by means of a typical and representative occurrence led to a 25-year-old doctorate candidate and his not very remarkable first publication Kant und die Epigonen (1865) being styled the beginning of an era. Liebmann himself, however, writing in 188o, was much more modest: 'My first work, Kant und die Epigonen (1865)', he wrote, 'lent more pointed form to the conviction that" we have to go back to I<'ant" ; I thought that, after so many false paths, it was only through such a return that we could arrive at a starting-point from which further progress was possible. In this I gave more __ precise expression to a thought which was at that time so to speak hovering in the air [I] and for which I therefore do not claim any sort of personal credit. ' He concedes he was not the originator of the neo-I<'antian movement, to be sure; but even in 188o, when it already had the first phase of its general diffusion behind it, Liebmann still persisted in tracing its origin directly to the misdevelopments of German idealism. His picture of the philosophical tradition and prehistory of this movement represented an absolute nadir of his own standpoint's contemplation of its own history. Of the 'epigones' he wrote in I 86 5 : \V'e have only to recall with what enthusiasm the oracular pronouncements of Schelling were once listened to, which Herbart afterwards declared to be 'metaphysical nonsense'; with what astonishment Hegel's dialectic, embracing the whole world in its never-extinguished germinal power, was gazed at, though Arthur Schopenhauer ... knows not how to treat it with sufficient hatred and contempt. When in addition we take into account Fries's polemic against Fichte, Schelling and Hegel,
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Herbart's against the last two, and Schopenhauer's against all of them, not to speak of the squabbling and wrangling indulged in among themselves and with others by their adherents and semi-adherents, there extends before our eyes so inextricable a chaos of opinions, a terrain so overgrown with briers, the more distant observer might think it a quite impossible task to make his way through it, let alone orientate himself within it.
Liebmann in fact stood far further from all this than he himself believed, which is why he was able to decide to 'make his way through' these' briers'. He was born in 1840 and was thus ten to twenty years younger than the sceptical generation and practically a child of the age of Bismarck: a spirited Burschenschaftler with moustache and hair precisely parted, he looked - if the comparison may be permitted - more like a Prussian lieutenant or a German engineer at the construction of the Turkish railway than any philosopher before or after him. Liebmann studied mathernatics and the natural sciences, and was an admirer of Treitschke and a robust Franco- and Anglophobe -- though in this he perhaps differed little from the average German nationalist. His style had in it nothing of the 'angry young man' but rather something of the ruthlessness and brutality of the central figure of Der Untertan, and his attitude towards tradition corresponded to it: 'It's all gabble', so we have to go back to IZant! The 'chaos of opinions', the wrangling and squabbling, the whole 'confused chatter and confusion of ideas' had to cease, and Liebmann, who, having studied at Jena with Fischer and Fortlage, was already a pupil of the new IZantianism, was the man who intended to use it to tidy everything up: analysis, interrogation of the epigones, decision. And thus this hammering of German idealism turned out to be even more severe than that imposed by Schopenhauer. Unlike the latter, however, who united such a condemnation with the whole tragic course of his scholarly life, Liebmann had only his twenty-five years and his one question touching on the 'thing-in-itself': all the 'epigones' of IZant could be subsun1ed under four chief tendencies, the 'idealist represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the realist by Herbart, the empiricist by Fries, the transcendental by Schopenhauer'. IZant, 'the most significant thinker of Christian humanity', must have made a mistake, for these philosophers dependent on him had gone wrong, and that could have happened only if they had a. failed to recognize the mistake and therefore let it stand, or b. recognized it but had been unable to correct it. Liebmann also proposes a further possibility, c. that the mistake had been recognized and corrected but that this possibility was realized not by the epigones of IZant but only by Liebmann himself: 'Where, however, one of the first two cases obtains we shall be justified in deserting the system concerned and going back to IZant'. As IZuno Fischer had' luminously and beautifully set forth', this' lamentable error of IZant's which the aforementioned tendencies had failed to recognize
Philosophy in the post-March period
consisted of an 'inconsistency' which had already lain concealed in the first form of the IZantian philosophy: Whereas it necessarily follows from the transcendental aesthetic and the fact, emphasised and often reiterated by J
To IZant's distinction between' thing-in-itself' and phenomenon it had to be objected that a 'sub-stratum for phenomenon' such as is here assumed would have to lie outside space and time, which would be a practical impossibility, for these are to be exclusively conceived as 'necessary forms of the intellect'. Criticalism stood or fell by the exclusive subjectivity of the categories and forms of perception: in this sense' something lying outside space and time is, of course, nonsensical'. That neo-IZantianism could mean, not only a reversion to IZant, but also a correction or even a complete revision of his teaching, is shown above all in neo-idealist neo-IZantianism. Liebmann himself says that, in the Critique ofPure Reason, IZant speaks 'light-heartedly of the" thing-in-itself" as of that which "lies behind appearance" and ... "must lie behind it'" and goes on: Thus we see how this alien [to J
It would be on the whole unprofitable to pursue in detail the instruction IZant was then obliged to receive from this 'raw, somewhat more than necessarily free-and-easy author'. Nor is it necessary for us to undertake any laborious demonstration that, for example, Schelling, Hegel, Fries and Herbart were not the first to detect what Liebmann calls a 'mistake in Kantian philosophy' and then gone on to 'correct' it. In their view IZant himself had with the distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance' worked to death' the actual critical philosophy: so how could that which IZant did not teach be expected to have decisi vely influenced his 'epigones '? After having uttered his refrain in chapter after chapter - a refrain which was very soon to become virtually the only thing ever quoted from his book - Liebmann summarizes the outcome of his 'dissection' in the words:
The 'New Era' The 'thing-in-itself' haunted the minds of all the epigones. To the idealists it was 'absolute ego, universal ego, the absolute, absolute spirit' and was known through intellectual intuition or evolved in dialectical trichotomies; with Herbart it appeared as a multiplicity of spaceless realities ... ; with Fries it was the object of a 'speculative faith'; with Schopenhauer it was the transcendental will, ... in fact it is in the end a dogmatic chimera which is not entitled to lead even a pseudo-existence in words. I(ant originally employed it as a transcendental scarecrow ... So away with it!
is how this singular work concludes: a work hardly distinguished for' love of truth, modesty and moderation', and one which owes its significance solely to the fact that the history of philosophy has so thoughtlessly regarded it as significant. When considering Liebn1ann's quite singular form of 'I
And thus it was by no means only the' epigones ' but the' historical I
Philosophy in the post-March period out. In this army everything, down to the smallest detail and up to the greatest extreme, has to be done according to regulations, 'correct', 'propre' and precise. To the outside observer it may all seem ludicrous military pedantry. So it seemed to e.g., Heinrich Heine, who mocked at it. This ramrod-straight, buttoned-up bearing made him split his sides. And who could deny that, if the essence of the thing resided in this, it would indeed be ludicrous? But it is in fact not the essence of the thing but its appearance, not the end but the means. It is a manifestation of the spirit of discipline and subordination, of the postulate of rigorouslY unselfish and conscientious performance of duty, of an awareness of a duty to sacrifice oneself in the service of the law and the state. Prickly egoism has to hold its tongue, the individual to feel himself at all times a subordinate member of the whole. It is the spirit of the categorical imperative. This spirit, which in Prussia rules from the meanest serviceman up to the king - which rules over the king himself, who desires to be, and should be, not the possessor of the state but its servant (primus inter pares) - is the spirit ofpolitical order and discipline. It is what makes us great. It permeates our army from top to toe. May we always protect and cherish it!
Liebmann belongs to those who - very similar in this to their mentors Fischer and Treitschke - everywhere seek to break through the esotericism of science, and specifically philosophy, and, therefore, as in this case, to translate I(ant into the spirit of their own times. In face of the clarity of these expositions, hermeneutic problems or problems of the interpretation of I(ant for the time being retired into the background, and if we bear this in mind the popularity and explosively rapid dissemination of neo-I(antianism around the year 1870 becomes comprehensible. That Liebmann, just returned from the front, was appointed to his first academic chair at the newly founded university in occupied Strassburg is also explicable as a consequence less of any special philosophical achievement than of the topicality of his philosophizing and the happy agreement between his (I(antian?) philosophical views and those of the state and army leadership. His opinion of the French - 'the Rothosen' - was as low as theirs was, especially as regards the' inflated, exalted heroism' of the French, and the form of their state, an 'unintelligible many-headed abstraction', a 'theatre-republic', was also the subject of his fluent mockery. Socialists he described simply as 'rabble '. 'Germany, I(aiser Wilhelm' were his 'highest ideals'. Yet Liebmann's' Diary of a Siege' is as valuable as it is, not because it gives an especially clear and vivid account of the political and weltanschaulich positions of a 'neo-I(antian' -later world war publications offer better examples - but rather because his philosophizing is, in fact, a formulation of the contemporary Zeitgeist. For if we disregard the purely factual side of the statements it contains and direct our attention to the philosophical abstractions that appear even in the brief extracts we have quoted we recognize that the (mostly) I(antian concepts employed do not serve, for instance, to communicate philosophical knowledge, or to demonstrate how topical philosophy is again capable of being, but rather that Liebmann's own thinking
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and the way he expresses it takes its start in precisely this terminology and in precisely these categories. For him the semantics of the idioms and expressions of his own language cannot be differentiated from those of I
Without wishing to exaggerate the philosophical content of these statements, we have to say that it is only on the basis of these concretizations that Liebmann's concept of the idea, which, moreover, cannot be separated from his concept of the ideal, becomes comprehensible: ideas and ideals do not signify, as they do in I
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significance, and we may say also a political and propagandistic one, for they serve the demand for the' complete self-sacrifice' and 'subordination' of the individual in the interest of the German state. Behind the 'ludicrous appearance' of military drill, too, there is concealed the' essence' and objective of guaranteeing complete subordination to law and state, and it is thus not to be wondered at if the concept of duty and the 'categorical imperative' stand at the centre of Liebmann's interest in IZant's practical philosophy. It is in the Prussian army above all that they find their realization, and the internal organization of this army is to him as to many of his contemporaries - the ideal organization for society as such. His ethical judgments thus always proceed fron1 the ends and demands of the state, and that means in concreto from current law and statute. It goes without saying that under these circumstances no differentiation between legality and morality can exist for him, but neither does there exist even a separation of the domain of justice from that of morality, for the concept of duty is differentiated merely according to the various spheres to which duties apply: duty towards the state, duty to society, and thirdly an individualist concept of duty which Liebmann insists on regarding as a 'maxim' in the IZantian sense. The' maxims' n1erely encompass more than the norms required by society but must at least embrace the totality of these norms. The same applies on the next highest step, i.e. duties towards the state: here the domain of the norms merely embraces more than the laws demand but must at least embrace these. In its foundations at least, Liebmann's ethics seem at first sight to be highly contradictory, not only because the' individualist proof of the freedom of human will' he induces appears on the face of it to contradict what he brands as the' too luxuriant growth of individualisn1 hostile to the state', but above all because at almost the same time, in his Gedanken und Thatsachen of 1904, 'reason and love' are celebrated as the foundation of ethics because they contain the' power to heal the wrongs, hardships and cruelties of life', while a few years earlier he had produced another new edition of his 'Diary of a Siege' in which he preaches hatred of the 'hereditary foe' France. And by France he means, not merely a sovereign state or its official representatives, but quite expressly the French people: 'On France a fearful judgment is now being pronounced, on a nation covered with guilt! And the German people are visibly an instrument of everlasting justice! Not against the rejected comedian Napoleon, no, it is against his audience, who once applauded him and now hiss him from the stage, it is against the French nation this war is being waged' . .Although on the face of it this is merely chauvinist invective, it does in fact possess an eminently philosophical content, for Liebmann founds it on an enumeration of the absolute contraries of what he understands by , Prussianhood' and true 'Germanhood' and at as early a date as this outlines the subsequent imperialist claims of the Bismarckian Reich:
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... 'The arrogance of this people, its intrinsic mendaciousness, its rude lack of cultivation while claiming to stand at the summit of civilization, its dissolute thirst for innovation, its injustice towards, indeed complete indifference to the life and needs of other nations, have become such a plague to mankind it must now at long last, in any fashion and by any means, feel the iron might of other nations, that it may attain to humility and to a limitation of the claims it makes to those that are alone justified. ' Yes, that's how it is! We are fighting to regain for European, for civilized mankind the light and air denied it by this nation of foppish braggarts and bullies made mad by overpresumption. It is the most justified war that has ever been fought.
'Our ethics are not the ethics of gods or the ethics of angels but the ethics of man', Liebmann writes appositely enough in his other, more theoretical wo.rk: On the other hand, however, in the final, highest instance there are powers, capacities, functions of a supra-sensible kind which are not necessarily tied to the specifically human organization and from which as it were from above certain moral values and ethical demands seem to follow. They are called reason and love. Both of them, reason and love, are of an altogether supra-sensible nature. Both of them, reason and love, are supra-personal, lift us above our own personality, build an invisible bridge from individual to individual, constitute a spiritual bond that ties man to man and unites the many into an ideal spiritual community.
What from the perspective of political philosophy may here seem to be the crassest contradiction imaginable is nonetheless in fact only the consistent application of one and the same basic idea, and, moreover, first and foremost a Romantic one: the 'many', the whole nation, ought to be united in reason and love. But the pronounced hatred for the 'thirst for innovation' of the French, for' passionate partisanship', for the republican form of the state as such, are then the expression of an incapacity to retreat by so much as a hair'sbreadth from what has once been held or recognized as true from a conservative and Romanticizing ideal of state and community: diverse conceptions of the world and value-systems, the co-existence of equally legitimate claims - even if they are only those of differing theories - exist in this philosophy of life as little as does the possibility of Liebmann's grasping and accepting conflict of interests, for instance, as being a driving force, and to that extent a legitimate one, for social and historical evolution. What is true, what is just, what is good is determined absolutely: in Liebmann's philosophy just as in the Prussian army, for not only does it inspire an 'unconditional, well-justified confidence in Moltke and the whole leadership of our army', there even exists an identity between Liebmann's ideals and Bismarck's authoritarianism - an unusually happy relationship between a philosopher and the country he lives in. 'Here', Nietzsche wrote at this time of such' professors of philosophy who are so well contented with their state', 'we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than
Philosophy in the post-March period to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism but into stupidity'. Whoever thought that through the foundation of the Reich, attended by so much rejoicing, men could be turned' once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth' had only' to come forward, for he truly deserves to become a professor of philosophy at a German university, like Harms in Berlin, J iirgen [Bona] Meyer in Bonn and Carriere in Munich'. 'It is strange', Moriz Lazarus, who as a Jew and a Hegelian was otherwise disinclined to chauvinism, also reflected at this time, ' ... when great ideas, when principles of a philosophical spirit, gain such power over the hearts of a people that, spread far and wide, they fashion the inner life of this people or at least help to fashion it.... In intimate union ... with the organisation of the army and the evolution of the military forces ... the power of the basic I(antian moral principle' had asserted itself' with equal thoroughness throughout the hearts of the people. How often in the course of the past year have so many not exclaimed almost involuntarily: it is the spirit of the categorical imperative that has proved victorious'. For these reasons Liebmann's philosophy, too, required no actual theoretical foundation but could substitute for such a foundation an appeal to the ratification it received from commonly accepted norms, value judgments and conceptions of justice - or, alternatively, to the proposition that two times two had always equalled four. Just as Fischer had responded to the basic questions of theoretical and practical philosophy by referring to a sense of evidentiality, so his pupil Liebmann also on the whole appealed to the reader to feel the sensation of freedom within himself, but he did not concede so much to his mentor, and thus to I(ant and Schopenhauer, as to regard an , intelligible character' as the actual decisive determinant of all decisions of the will. Unlike Fischer, who was prepared to assume an 'inherent character' (here meaning intelligible character) in a racialist sense insofar as this served to explain the moral inferiority of the Jews, Liebmann seems not to have been an anti-Semite. For to him the assumption of such a character meant granting the existence in the realm of moral philosophy of a complement to the parasitic 'thing-in-itself', and in his early work of 1866, Ueber den individuellen Beweis Jfur die Freiheit des Willens, he did not merely again' rectify' the critical philosophy in this regard but subjected Schopenhauer above all to the stiffest criticism: 'The character is not unalterable, not constant. If it is not, however, virtues and vices are not inherent ... and if the individual is placed in precisely the same situation a second time he is not compelled to act in precisely the same way as he did the first time (for the character and disposition have possibly, indeed probably altered) ... ' 'Duty', 'the objective norm of our actions appearing as a con1mand of conscience', obliges us to obey not only our moral conscience, as it does with I(ant, but also the laws in force and the current social conventions: to observe
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these is the duty and highest freedom of man, for ' [genuine] morality is manifested at its finest where, overcoming every selfish inclination ... without thought of pleasure or utility, perhaps at the risk of our life and at the sacrifice of our happiness, we do what we recognize to be our duty'. Liebmann's ethics desire to impose a duty towards a true and good that is to be conceived of as an already valid norm and in no way as a goaldetermining ideal, and because he therewith quite disregards the philosophicalhistorical ideas, critical intentions and material contents of I<:'antian philosophy his conception of the 'spirit of criticalism' can in this respect hardly be understood as anything but a Zeitgeist-conditioned reduction of I<:'ant to banality. In his principal work he says, with unsurpassable clarity: I(ant is quite right to say - and this is in its simplicity a truly grandiose saying - that ethics is concerned with that' which ought to happen even if it never does' ... Here in a single line there is expresed, with the conclusive precision of an eminently clearthinking and eminently moral man, the entire essence of every ideal, and especially of the ethical ideal. 'That which ought to happen even if it never does.' Splendid! Just as, in a disparate sphere, logic treats of the laws according to which we ought to think even though we often think otherwise, i.e. erroneously, and according to which we should have thought even though we have always thought erroneously, so ethics treats of the laws according to which we should have willed, acted and lived, even if we never have. As the prescriptions of logic are an unconditional obligation, a categorical imperative for the human understanding, so those of ethics are a categorical imperative for the human will. As a sound understanding is to logic, so is a moral character to ethics. In the former we have obligations of thought, in the latter obligations of will.
Logic and ethics received parallel treatment because both were supposed to adjudicate norms; and it is precisely this that reveals how firmly fixed was a way of thinking which saw a multitude of contrasts between laws, ideals, ideas, norms, duties,etc., on the one hand, and on the other a 'reality' that failed to satisfy them. It was in no way a 'product' of an 'appreciation of I(ant' of whatever character - it did not even proceed from the purely theoretical sphere, but referred every domain of opinion, belief and knowledge indifferently to what was in the end no n10re than two categories: those of value and disvalue; and to distinguish between them there existed only the criterion of the feeling of evidentiality furnished by 'common sense'. With Liebmann philosophy again became 'positive': its 'criticalism', founded exclusively on evident rules of thought and will, realizes the full meaning of the 'neo' in 'neo-I<:'antianism " for the period of the sceptical programmata, of attempts at synthesis and of mediation as a solution to the problems of the transitional period sought through a 'Back to I<:'ant! ' was now past: 'On 18 October [1864] the statue of I<:'ant, of bronze on a granite pedestal and one of the final n1asterpieces of Rauch, was unveiled at I<:.onigsberg', and in the following year with Liebmann a completely new type of philosopher began to teach - one for whom German idealism, the philosophy of the pre-
Philosophy in the post-March period March period and the post-March reaction were now only history. That is why an account of the phases of the neo- IZantian programmata must end with him and that of the diffusion of neo-IZantianism must now begin. According to the desire of the individual philosopher and in ever differing combinations, this diffusion could be founded on four already evolved' types of argumentation for a return to or a reconnection with IZant': On a critique of 'pure thought' and of 'system philosophy' in the line of Schleiermacher, Beneke and T rendelenburg. 2 On the thesis that from Fichte to Hegel German philosophy had misdeveloped and that this misdevelopment could be overcome only through a direct reconnection with the tradition deserted since the time of IZant (Beneke, Weisse, Fischer, Liebmann). On maintaining the necessity of: either a. an enhanced involvement with the individual SCIences (von Berger, Trendelenburg, 1. H. Fichte, Harms, Helmholtz) or, more particularly, a sensual-physiological foundation for IZantian Erkenntnistheorie (Helmholtz, Lange) ; or b. a warding off of involvement with knowledge drawn from the individual sciences, and in particular from the natural sciences, and therewith also of anthropologism, empiricism, positivism, materialism and psychologism, in order to reconstruct the autonomy of philosophy, as with Harms, Haym, Fischer and Liebmann. This defensive posture was, together with the endeavour to separate science and Weltanschauung, the chief motivation behind the new ideal, even though all the idealist premises were at the same time regarded as scientifically demonstrated (proof by evidentiality). 4 On maintaining the necessity of a critique of knowledge that should, with scholarly and scientific means, seek to determine the limits beyond which matters of weltanschaulich dispute cannot be decided - a course which, in contrast to the idealist critique of Weltanschauungen, here tended towards an , ignorabimus' (Helmholtz, Noack, J. B. Meyer, Zeller, Lange). I
PART
III
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The dissemination of neo-I<.antianism (1865-1881)
5
<]================================================r> From Lange's critique of materialism to Cohen's critique of experience
I
THE NEO-KANTIANISM OF FRIEDRICH ALBERT LANGE
A species of neo-I
Lange says in a letter to a friend written on the day before his thirtieth birthday. This book was never produced at least not in this form - but Lange realized his programme most fully in the History of Materialism that appeared almost exactly seven years later. After the appearance of its first edition in 1866 it was in a few years to become one of the most important and above all the most read of all the writings of neo-I
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
more personal relationship and to whom he may owe his great estimation of Aristotle. He was awarded his doctorate as early as 185 I ('Quaestiones metricae ') and soon afterwards passed his teacher's examination; then he did a year's military service in Cologne and reached the rank of corporal. After a probationary year as a teacher, a period of employment as a domestic tutor with the banker Herstatt, and further teaching, a reform proposal, 'On Combining Gymnastics with Military Training', brought him ministerial recognition; but, still only an assistant master and now married, he asked to be released from teaching duties so as to seek in Bonn a lectureship in philosophy and pedagogics, which he was awarded soon afterwards in the autumn of 185 5. He delivered his inaugural lecture, 'On the Connection between the Educational Systems of Different Ages and their Dominant Weltanschauungen " but of the courses he announced only a very few took place, and these attracted only between five and nineteen students (history of materialism). During this period he became friends with Friedrich Ueberweg and conceived the plan to write a history of materialism, though his current literary production was still confined wholly to pedagogic and psychological themes. After only two-and-a-half years of lecturing he returned in 1858 to Duisburg and resumed teaching; but now he very soon became a senior master and occupied a large number of subsidiary posts as deacon and with, among others, the National- und Turnverein and the Sunday and higher girls' school. It was now, too, that he entered politics. The first outcome was an address on Schiller's hundredth birthday, in which Lange investigated' what lay behind' the newly awakened enthusiasm for Schiller: uncontestably it was' Schiller's significance for the nation', but Lange cautioned against overlooking the fact that Schiller was also a citizen of the world: 'No patriotism should ever lead us to forget that, above the goals of the nations, there stands the goal of mankind '. There had been an immense awakening of public spirit, he says in this address, and only three years later he was to come into conflict with the school authorities for precisely this reason and subsequently to leave the Prussian education service for good. The immediate occasion of this conflict was a I
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Unfortunately this plea for social engagement on the part of the teacher coincided to the day with a ministerial decree prohibiting any form of political activity by public officials. In spite of this decree - or precisely because of it - Lange a few days later became a leader-writer for the Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung (Duisburg), and he devoted his first leading article, dated 26 March, to precisely this theme: 'The decree ... contains a passage of so curious a nature', he writes, 'that its effect must on the whole certainly be considered to work against its purpose. We mean the words: "In any event it would be incompatible with the position of a royal official if he went so far as unmindful of his oath of loyalty to His Majesty the I<'ing to participate in electoral.agitations in a sense hostile to the government'. " Appealing to the constitution, Lange rejected this new rule, whose practical effect was 'to impose the obligation to comply with the wishes of the ministry', and responded by reiterating the outlook of the ' N ationalverein ': the constitution, he says, gives ... to the public official full civil rights ... and does so on mature reflection, because in a healthy state there is no room for the view that one faction, perhaps engaging a significant proportion of the country's moral energies, is in fact hostile to the crown and to the state itself for whose sake the government exists. It is in the nature of political parties to strive in their own fashion for the good of the whole.
Lange's liberal conception of state and society would probably have in the last resort been tolerable even to the Prussian state, but now, with the conflict over the constitution already under way, he was warned about his behaviour, and after he had affixed his signature to an electoral manifesto and had again been warned, he anticipated being suspended from duty by applying to be released from the education service (4 July 1862). From the standpoint of the longer-term interests of the state it was an error altogether typical of the 185 os and 1860s that intellectuals such as Lange should have been driven into the opposition, for, as Lange's article serves to demonstrate, it was not their hostility towards the state but precisely their idealistic devotion to state and constitution that occasioned these conflicts. In his polemic The Conflict over the Constitution (in collaboration with Schroers, Duisburg, 1863) Lange even expressly says of the views and tendencies of the Nationalverein, of which he was a member: Who else but the press of the Liberal Party so much reviled by Lassalle has always defended the cause of order in the conflict between owners and workers? It has abominated revolution and disorder. It is precisely through opposing all revolutionary activity that the press has sustained the task of all governments, namely the promotion of calm and order. But the sword it has wielded in the cause of order founded on political freedom and constitutional institutions has been wrested from it. The press has every reason to wash its hands of the matter if the undercurrents of society now evading the eyes of the authorities swell up more strongly than is beneficial to the state.
Thus it was only the renewed censorship and constraints imposed on the press
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during the conflict over the constitution that turned Lange into an enemy of Bismarck and a member of the opposition. In his application for release from teaching of the previous year he had said he would never allow himself to be deprived of the right to work zealously within the law to promote his views and principles; now, on I December 1862, he wrote to Ueberweg: What I occupy myself with now is mostly in the mornings writing advice and opinions or compiling letters to newspapers on behalf of the local chamber of commerce, while in the afternoons and evenings I devote myself to studies of my own. I have resolved to publish the history of materialism next year; the statistics of morality will again be put back. All I am concerned about now is myself and truth.
The political conflicts, pamphlets and founding of newspapers that occupied Lange in the following years were then dictated more and more by the events of the day and are significant of his basic attitude only insofar as they reveal an increasing political engagement that finally led him to move from the Liberal Party over to the working-class movement. His friend Weinkauff reports: He participated in the' Conference of German Workers' Clubs' at Leipzig in October 1864; together with Bebel, Sonnemann, Max Hirsch and others he was elected to the standing committee; he warned in vain against party fanaticism and, himself an enthusiastic friend of the co-operative movement, exhorted the Schulzeaner, the radical party, to tolerance of the justified motives in the endeavours of the Lassalleaner. His projected 'Voice of the Fourth Estate', in which both parties were to have their say, failed to materialize. As a consequence he wrote, for his own justification and to clarify his views to both workers and employers, the booklet The Significance of the Labour Question for the Present and the Future (1865)'
He wrote in the January of this year in the foreword to the book: I know, of course, that many are bound to find my work uncomfortable, that many will find in it a touchstone as to whether their efforts on behalf of the working class are seriously intentioned or not. It is possible to reproach the party of Lassalle with drawing close to elements of reaction and in this way succeed in ignoring what they say; no such reproach can be levelled at me: I shall have to be listened to and answered. Many of the friends of self-help can be reproached with standing in the service of the bourgeoisie; but I would like to see anyone who could make that charge against me ... In this cause [that of the' complete renewal of the principles of living, especially the principle of communality and the relations obtaining between man and man '] the calculating mind of the peasant and artisan cannot be a model to us: we must await the effect of the enhancement of pure joy in living, of the dissemination of spiritual and spiritualized sensual pleasures, lastly however also of a deepening of the inner life and an ennoblement of the character such as we shall be able to realize when the oppressed classes are, as Owen desired, offered not only material betterment but also leisure and fellowship in free and novel modes of life.
The booklet enjoyed little success, probably not least because, in the spectrum of tendencies then current within the working-class movement, it did in fact justify the judgment pronounced by Marx in a memo to Engels - 'Confused,
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15 5
Malthusians mixed with Darwin, ogling in all directions, but a few nice things said against Lassalle and the rogues of bourgeois consumers' - and Lange had fallen between all the stools. From this time on, however, he counted as a socialist and' alienated himself' from both the Duisburg chamber of commerce and the various newspapers for which he had been writing. In place of this there appeared a comprehensive anti-clerical pamphlet, The Papal Enryclical, a brochure on building societies, Everyone a House-Owner, and, as the fourth independent work of this same year, his first work of philosophy, The Foundations of lvIathelJJatical P.rychology. From now on Lange seemed to lead a kind of double life - at least if we insist on seeing in the author of the History of Materialism only the philosopher and in his polemical writings only the politician. In January 1866, shortly before his departure fron1 Germany, he published his chief work and a further political publication, J. S. Mill's Views on the Social Question and Carey's Supposed Revolutionization of Social Science (Duisburg 1866). It was produced by his own publishing house as one of its last publications together with a work by an Englishman bearing the title The Theory of Legal Opposition. That Lange left Gertnany at just this time is interpreted by Weinkauff as an act of political resignation: Since the autumn of 1865 he had undertaken as a publicist a last vain struggle against the government and against the radical party ... he had sought to assist the creation of a 'genuine people's party' through his social-political journal, Der Bote vom Niederrhein, intended particularly for working-class circles ... Lange exerted himself to enlighten the workers as to their situation and their interests and to the course of the social movement in Germany and Europe ...
Abolition of household franchise and the introduction of universal franchise and laws relating to co-operatives and the disabled were among the things it demanded. Weinkauff goes on: Naturally, there was no lack of house-searches by the police; the daring publicist was deluged ... with legal actions, in which he defended himself with imperturbable humour and dialectics as incisive as they were brilliant, but which compelled him to fritter away his valuable time. The money men, too, let him feel their hatred. He persisted in his mistrust of Bismarck ... After the defeat of Austria ... and the dissolution of the German Confederation the 'rage for annexation' and 'worship of success' left him cold and indifferent, and in the way the majority had changed their opinions he saw only hypocrisy and cowardice. In his increasing isolation it became uncorr~.fortable and painful. .. for him to stay in Duisburg.
Towards the end of 1866 he emigrated with his family to the canton of Zurich, again became co-editor of and partner in a newspaper and printer and publisher, taught for a short time at the Gymnasium at Winterthur, and in addition to his many-sided journalistic activities again occupied a large number of public offices. After the exceedingly favourable political circumstances obtaining had enabled him to rise in an incredibly short time to,
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among other things, membership of the cantonal constitutional, banking and educational councils, and forestry commissioner, he was appointed in the autumn of 1869 to a lectureship at Zurich university, where a professorship in 'inductive philosophy' was created for him the following year. It was only from the date of this appointment (13 August 1870) that philosophy came to constitute the main field of activity to which he was to devote himself for the five years he still had to live. And this too had, as Weinkauff reports, a political reason behind it: On 15 July [1870] in Paris war was declared on Prussia, on the 16th in Rome it was decided that the Pope was infallible. Lange ... reported the war for the Landbote, and although his reports were strictly objective the public found them too favourable to Prussia. The passionate sympathy for France exhibited by the Swiss troubled him greatly, and he saw disappointed the great confidence he had placed in a politically highly educated people who were not capable even of being just to the Germans. fIe therefore resolved to relinquish all the posts he occupied and, in the bitter knowledge that he was too much of an idealist to be a politician, to devote himself in Ziirich wholly to scholarly study.
One of his last attempts to involve himself in the politics of the day is represented by the draft of an 'Appeal to Philanthropists of all Nations', which Lange wrote during the war winter of 1870-1 and sent to various of his friends. It is an appeal truly reflecting the spirit of I
The situation that existed showed the lack of an international court of arbitration for the settlement of international disputes, and Lange therefore proposed the formation, as a preparatory organisation, of an international league which would recognize no authority other than' justice itself'. For only two paths of development were open to Europe: One leads to everlasting appeals to the sword and to the endless prolongation of that war abomination that we now see with horror enacted before us; the other leads to the victory of humanity and to the foundation of higher guarantees of the freedorriand welfare of the peoples than an egoistic statecraft sustained by armed force could ever offer. All the nations of Europe should rise up and demand it. .. The bond of interests and commerce, and of common spiritual labours and struggles, which unite all civilized nations, grows ever tighter, and the more the circumstances that actually obtain irresistibly create this unity, the more perilous will be the neglect of a great and planned promotion of international relations.
Weinkauff may be right to say that Lange had at this time distanced himself too far from international chauvinism and from the national enthusiasm that characterized the Grunderzeit of the newly created German Reich, but it is not
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correct to say that in the last years of his life he in fact withdrew from politics altogether. On the contrary, the third, revised edition of his Labour Question, which, after the first two editions had addressed themselves primarily to the working class, was now presented as a theoretical work, was to appear as late as 1874, and the second, revised part of the History of Materialism only in 1875, a few months before his death. Though the subject matter of each of them might seem to be very different, both works are in fact essentially political in content and have always been gravely misunderstood - a state of things which the study of Lange undertaken since his death has been unable to correct: 'Lange was of a conservative disposition because he was afraid of a revolution. His intent in writing the history of materialism was to help avoid the outbreak of revolution', Hans Martin Sass, for example, il1aintained in a debate in 1978; three years previously he had expressed himself even more pungently: 'Lange's struggle against a radical socialism whose intention was revolutionary economic and political change was grounded in fear of revolution. ' It is in this that Sass sees the central motivation of Lange's' standpoint of the ideal' and the origin of his labours on the History of Materialism, just as he is supposed to have conducted a 'struggle against radical revolutionary socialism' for the same motive. Sass also asserts that against' the Marxists' and' many other purely economically-orientated socialists' Lange set up the' standpoint of the ideal' and contested 'the utility of their goals and actions', although he produces not a single piece of evidence to support his claim. And the fact is, indeed, not surprising, for the sources witness to a precisely opposite tendency: concerning his critique of 'econon1ism' Lange says quite expressly that it is 'not to be understood as saying for instance that every undertaking directed purely at material improvements in the situation of the worker is simply reprehensible. Such an undertaking is unconditionally reprehensible only when it is calculated to employ material advantages to reconcile the worker again to his former condition of ignorance and subjection' - which tendency and intention he imputed, as Marx too did, to consumer cooperatives on the Schulze-Delitzsch model and other benevolent institutions which operated only on symptoms. The first misunderstanding is that his critique of economism differs in every way from Marxism! Sass quotes Lange to this effect and misunderstands the concept' materialism': 'A current of materialism runs through our modern culture and anyone who has not found firm anchorage somewhere is drawn along by it. Philosophers and political economists, statesmen and manufacturers concur in praise of the present and its achievements. Praise of the present is united with the cult of hard reality ... ' It was indolence and this' ethical materialism' - which had moreover nothing but its name in common with the theoretical materialism of Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott that was the creed of precisely those believers in progress, the philosophers and political economists, statesmen and n1anufactu~~~2_\£"b-l(~h
_
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was conjuring up the danger of socialistic attempts at revolution 1 That which Lange employed to explain why the working class was impelled towards revolutionary solutions is employed by Sass to show that Lange had turned against the' economism ' and' materialism' of the socialistic theoreticians! The contrary, however, is the case: Lange radically rejected the 'praise of the present' uttered by liberalism everywhere, its faith in free trade, and such 'blind fanatics for legitimism' as Trendelenburg who short-sightedly kept in view only the interests of the ruling class but for whom the' social question' as such simply did not exist: for, he maintains, it was their attitude of ignoring the needs of the masses that was driving the workers into the arms of the revolution 1 Consistently enough, Sass makes this, too, into its exact opposite: , On account of the pervading tendency of the age to regard social and political problems purely from an economic point of view, and on account of the extreme character-structure [?] of the radical labour leaders [1], "if socialisn1 should ever achieve this immediate, purely negative goal" the result would be not progress but a "gloomy stagnation"'. Sass alleges that a socialist revolution would, according to Lange, lead to a 'gloomy stagnation', whereas what Lange actually says is: 'There is only one means of countering the alternative [1] of this revolution or [I] a gloomy stagnation ... ' Revolution does not lead to a 'gloomy stagnation', nor does socialism represent such a thing in Lange's eyes: it is the state of affairs prevailing in the German Reich of 1874-5, and precisely in regard to the 'social question', that constitutes a state of 'gloomy stagnation'! This is why the present alternative appears to be either revolution or a continuation of this state of stagnation, which, as Lange repeatedly warns, will ceaselessly strengthen the forces of revolution. There does, however, exist a means and a hope of countering this alternative: 'This means does ... not consist, as Strauss believes, in the cannon to be brought up against the socialists and den10crats: it consists wholly and solely in the prompt overcoming of materialism' the' ethical materialism' of the proprietors of capital and of Schulze-Delitzsch, Ricardo and Adam Smith, but not that of the Marxists, as Sass, furnishing no proof and unable to furnish any, thinks. Only' constructive ideas and sacrifice', Lange therefore says, 'are still capable of saving our culture and transforming the path of devastating revolution into a path of beneficial reforms'. Constructive ideas were required above all by the social movement, by all who really wanted to improve the situation of the working classes; 'sacrifices', on the other hand, were, as is also quite explicitly and unmistakably stated several times in the third edition of the Labour Question, to be demanded of the owning classes. Lange's' standpoint of the ideal' signifies neither a withdrawal from politics nor a conservative concept for the avoidance of revolutions: on the contrary, as late as 1874 he could still say' on what side' one had to stand in the conflicts within society:
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Let us leave aside the question whether our present culture, in which tasteless luxury, strutting pseudo-cultivation and egoistic self-inflation play at any rate a prominent role, really deserves the sympathy of noble men to so great a degree ... Whoever in the full sense of the word truly recognizes men as men can have no doubt ... on what side he will stand when awareness of a higher destiny is awakened in the masses. All that concerns him is to facilitate the transition to the new state of things, to alleviate the struggle, and to rescue and take with him what he can of the eternal beneficent possessions of mankind. As soon as such a movement appeared unmistakably widespread and deep-rooted any conscious opposition to it would in our view receive all the execration the shortsighted doctrinaire heaps upon revolution as such.
Lange did not in fact believe that a revolution was on the point of occurring, and it is only in this that his viewpoint differs from that of the Marxists whom he is supposed to have opposed so warmly. Far from opposing Marx, indeed, there is no author Lange cites in his Labour Question so frequently or with such approval: Das Kapital this' excellent work' is quoted by the page, and Lange makes use of Marx's 'unrivalled expert knowledge' while distinguishing between Marx the radical critic of liberalism (' Marx's enduring merit' 1) and Marx the politician: Lange hypothetically objects: The social revolution could always be an easier and quicker one than that brought about by the rule of capital ... The idea that such revolutions are required, and violent ones at that, is very naturally linked to the idea of the appearance of a state of affairs quite novel to us; but history not infrequently takes other paths. The social revolution is thus not necessarily a general political revolution, even though in this instance the idea of it may very easily arise; for those circles and classes whose interests are most closely associated with the political conditions now obtaining, and whose influence is tied to the continuation of the old forms, also have to a greater or lesser degree an interest in the continuation of the rule of capital and will often harbour the idea that the authority of the factory owners and entrepreneurs of all kinds serves to sustain the state and that a certain solidarity is demanded between all forms of authority in state and society. But this linkage of ideas, too, is not absolutely necessary, and quite different combinations could arise without prejudicing the progress of the purely economic revolution.
This was why one had to separate Marx's political views, and above all his prognoses, from his theory, for' the great social revolution prophesied by Marx' might also' prove to be a consequence of very many smaller steps and the outcome of a sometimes peaceable, sometimes stormy struggle extending over a lengthy period. ' Because the third edition of the Labour Question of 1874 has, for some undiscoverable reason, customarily been ignored in the Lange literature, 'interpretations' of Lange's political philosophy and ethical viewpoint - and thus also of the objectives of his criticalism - have succeeded in explaining his critique of materialism and his appeal to IZant as opposition to socialism,
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Marxism or even to the whole working-class movement. But his 'standpoint of the ideal' whose meaning can be inferred from his final writings, even though, as he himself demonstrated, it cannot be established theoretically - is an incomprehensible obscurity from which the whole study of Lange has had to suffer: not only because of the inadequacy of its historical sources, but much more because he who was supposed to break through the hermeticism of weltanschaulich thinking now has to be subsumed under two alternative Weltanschauungen which are, moreover, recognizable only later: these alternatives are neo-I
It is its richness of content and its political and philosophical topicality which is first and foremost responsible for the fact that the work has been reprinted more than ten times and is still available in bookshops today. While the most recent edition of 1974 - plainly counting on its voguish association with Marx and materialism - canvassed for Lange with a quotation from a letter from Rosa Luxemburg, others emphasize the early neo-I
One such truth was' that I
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empirical mechanistic concept of science 'likewise, however, that his rescue of the Ideas via the practical path is not mere illusion, as Noack represents, nor purely capricious, as in the Kantianism with which J. B. Meyer combated the materialists'. Certainly Noack deserved great credit for having' searchingly exposed the negative side of the I(antian critique', but in doing so he had' let fall overboard an essential element of I(ant's philosophy which consists in the candid ... evaluation of the Ideas whose theoretical untenability I<.ant den10nstrates. ' That 'I(ant allowed the validity of only one single species of knowledge, empirical and strictly rational knowledge' which led to 'an aitogether naturalistic conception of the world' could not be denied, but he also considered that metaphysics possessed 'its value as architecture of concepts', indeed that it was one of 'the most essential needs of mankind'. Even though 'as science metaphysics is self-deception', the possibility nonetheless existed of replacing metaphysics and preserving the Ideas 'through the free invention of concepts compatible with the critique' in the sense advocated by Schiller: 'The transition from the critique to the drawing up of practical principles of life can never be so secure as the principles of the critique itself', but neither could it be denied' that the continuance and content of clear and definite Ideas' could 'never fail to influence the course of events'. The familiar assertion at the beginning of the second volume of the second edition of 1875 that I(ant's practical philosophy is the perishable and transient part of his system is also to be discovered in essence in the first edition of 1866, and the idea in fact goes back to the beginnings of the neo-I(antian scepticism of the 185 as. Lange's motive for rejecting this practical philosophy is made very clear in the letter to I(ambli of 27 September 1858 already quoted: Much as I abhor the Hegelian philosophy from a purely theoretical point of view, I have in many respects a higher regard for the philosophy of religion of this school than I have for rationalism, even for I<:'ant's; for I discover I<:'ant's greatness only in his stringent proof that the Ideas of God, freedom and immortality are theoretically undemonstrable, and far less in his positive constructions ... Hegel, as I think, divines most of the kernel of Christianity, Christology, and offers a mediation, I would say a kind of art of translating myth into idea and idea into myth. What I am asking in this is no more than the confession that here science ceases ...
This scepticism - if not indeed hostility - brought to bear on all religious, weftanschaufich and metaphysical dogmatism is customarily interpreted philosophically in· the light of a definite view of I(ant and of science, but it is nonetheless no doubt based primarily on wholly 'practical considerations' such as those obtaining in a world much riven by political, ideological and confessional contentions which in principle leave open to the scientist and scholar only two possible paths: that of association with one of the contending parties, or precisely that of acquiring a critical distancing which would have
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to direct itself specifically against the claim to 'scientificality' advanced by the opposing sides. This was the position adopted by Lange, and it is in general comprehensible only if we bear in mind the contemporary situation of the 185 os, when Stahl, metaphysicians of varying origin, and both Christian confessions on the one side, and the adherents of Feuerbach and the materialists on the other, were asserting with the same dogmaticism that their views, demands and claims were scientifically grounded. Progress in science and technology during an age that saw the breakthrough of the industrial revolution in Germany also enhanced the value of the predicate of scientificality - the reverse side of which was that during this phase, which was at the same time one of the sharpest ideological and political differentiation within society, this index of value always adhered to one's own position and was denied to that of others. To evolve criteria of scientificality - and to do so with a view to preventing science from being absorbed by Weltanschauungen - so as to determine the limits of the claims of a 'subject or a community' to be universally 'valid, objective, true, theoretically correct' seemed especially sensible and significant from the point of view of resolving both the scientific and the ideological and weltanschaulich crisis. For, although scholarly-scientific and weltanschaulich positions were during the 185 os identified with one another more completely than in any other period before or after, every scientific theory - from theology and philosophy to physics and chemistry - concurred in adopting a quite specific political partisanship. Theobald Ziegler later described this situation from the perspective of the neoI<'antianism that had in the meantime established itself: Ulrici, Hermann Fichte, Fabri and all the rest of these anti-materialists were bad champions of their cause ... They all wanted to prove too much not only to refute materialism but at the same time to provide a secure philosophical basis for the theistic Weltanschauung and for the Christian dogmas. Thus they, too, had forgotten I<'antian criticalism, were just as dogmatic as their opponents, and therefore did not offer a refutation even of their opponents' mode of procedure ... but were in fact feebler also in natural-scientific questions, because here their knowledge came to them second-hand and this new knowledge was truly incompatible with ... the antiquated ideas of Christian dogmatism.
Lange's History of Materialism and Critique of its Significance for the Present Dqy thus directed as comprehensive an attack against metaphysics, system philosophy and the Christian Weltanschauung as it did against materialism - indeed, his 'overcoming of materialism consisted precisely in his demonstrating that materialism was metaphysics and then from the standpoint of the critical philosophy showing that metaphysics was impossible' (Windelband). His appeal to I<'ant served this twofold objective, and thus what he inherited from I<.ant for his own philosophical purposes was first and foremost no more than the' Copernican revolution': it was' only I<'ant's basic idea, or more precisely the starting-point of his critical thinking' to which
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there could be 'ascribed an epoch-making significance valid for all time', while 'the whole working out of the system differs from the vaporous conceptual architecture of most German philosophers only in possessing a somewhat more solid structure'. Specifically' for questions of materialism' I<.ant was , much more important on account of the timely transformations his basic idea' permitted 'than on account of the inflexible form of his system'. Like the neo-idealists of the school of Fischer, Lange too at first admitted only a single basic idea of I<'antian philosophy. Like them, he saw this basic idea to be that I<'ant had' quite calmly and surely' inverted' all experience, together with all the exact and historical sciences, through the simple postulate that our concepts do not conform to the objects, the objects conform to our concepts '. But he did not go on to employ this' revolution' as the neo-idealists did, to re-establish the autonomy of philosophy by means of the autonomy of reason rescued and preserved by this apriorism, he merely sought to demonstrate 'that the objects of experience in general are only our objects, that the entirety of objectivity ... is not absolute objectivity but only an objectivity for men and similarly organized beings if there are any ... ' While the neo-idealists misunderstood the a priori as that 'which I cannot imagine absent from the subject of cognition without at the same time annihilating this subject itself' (Liebmann), Lange misunderstood the 'possibility' of an a priori knowledge of the object desired in the Critique of Pure Reason (B XVI) in the sense that the a priori now signified the natural disposition of our senses and our understanding. That is why Lange can say that I<.ant knows no kind of knowledge other than an 'empirical knowledge strictly conformable to the understanding' which led 'to an altogether naturalistic conception of the world'. He is not concerned, as I<.ant is, with determining the presuppositions of a priori knowledge, which in his view, too, cannot exist at all in I<'antian philosophy and which he is accustomed to designate as ' fiction', but rather n1erely with demonstrating that the 'knowledge apparatus' of man places a decisive stamp on our experience of the external world. The participation of the subject in the act of perception demonstrated by the theory of specific sense-energies had raised 'doubt as to the reality of the phenon1enal world' to a precept of science which materialists and old-style n1etaphysicians equally transgressed. Appreciation of I<'ant's critique of 'theoretical' reason, whose transcendental aesthetic had been scientifically underpinned only by the physiology of the senses, served to repulse every kind of claim to ontologically conceived - scientific objectivity, while Lange found even I<'ant's table of categories unconvincing and revelatory of the metaphysician in I<.ant. Here, too, it is already made clear how narrowly circumscribed was the interest in I<'ant felt by so many' neoI<'antians '. And the neo-I<.antianism of Friedrich Albert Lange stood, moreover, very much closer to a form of naturalism than it did to the neoidealism of other neo-I<'antians :
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism So far as the necessity of the Ideas is concerned, the comprehensiveness I<.ant accords it must decidedly be contested. Only the Idea of the soul as the Idea of a unified subject for the multiplicity of sensations and impressions can perhaps be called necessary. The Idea of God, insofar as it sets over against the world a rational originator of it, by no means demands such a natural quality.
It was not only forms of intuitive perception and categories which in Lange's hands became' natural qualities': the Ideas of the ego, of God and of immortality, too, were to be founded on them - or it was denied that they could be traced back to natural qualities, and they were therefore to be rejected. The Idea of God at any rate was not rooted in the nature of man - though 'that of the soul as a unified subject for the multiplicity of sensations and impressions' may be - very much in the way Liebmann and very many subsequent I<'antians were also to decree, though the latter offered proof by evidentiality and the former by naturalization. In this naturalism, too, the unity of the subject, the germ of the subject-theoretical constitution of the foundations of philosophy, remains obligatory. Standpoints differ, on the other hand, in regard to freedom of will, for here, in contrast to all subsequent neo-I<.antianism, Lange expresses himself as a determinist: If it is first shown that the quality of our sense perceptions is wholly determined by the constitution of our organs, then we can no longer dismiss with the predicate 'irrefutable but absurd' the postulate that the entire coherent unity itself to which we reduce our sense perceptions, in a word our entire experience, is determined by a spiritual organization which compels us to experience as we experience, to think as we think, whereas the same objects may appear quite different to a different organization and the' thing-in-itself' cannot be conceived or imagined by any finite being.
The problems of laying the foundations of philosophy are thus to be decided in Helmholtz's laboratory, for the 'psycho-physical organization' decides absolutely as to what is to be known, thought and willed. In this respect Lange's viewpoint is altogether identical with that of contemporary materialism, and his critique of it is therefore not content with uttering the idealist credo 'that the world of appearance is a product of our ideas', as Fischer and Liebmann, deriving from Schopenhauer, had recently held against it, but was inspired by the objective of strictly segregating the world of exact inquiry from that of ethical convictions, that of science from that of Weltanschauungen. In this he was for once truly - and quite rightly - in direct connection with I<.ant: Reason, the mother of the Ideas, is according to I<'ant's conception directed at the entirety of all possible experience, while the understanding is concerned with what is single and individual. Reason finds satisfaction in no series of perceptions so long as it has not comprehended the totality. Reason is thus systematic, as understanding is empirical. The Ideas of the soul, the world and God are only the expression of these strivings after unity that lie within our rational organization. If we ascribe to them an
The critiques of Lange and Cohen objective existence outside us we plunge into a boundless sea of metaphysical errors. If, however, we honour them as our Ideas we only fulfil an imperative demand of our reason. The Ideas do not serve to extend the bounds of our knowledge, but they do destroy the force of the assertions of materialism and thereby create room for moral philosophy, which I<:'ant considered the most important part of philosophy. What justifies the Ideas as against materialism is thus not so much their claim to a higher truth, whether demonstrated or revealed and undemonstrable, as precisely the reverse of this: a complete and unreserved renunciation of any theoretical validity in the domain of knowledge of the external world. The Ideas differ from mental delusions first and foremost in that they do not for instance make a transitory appearance in the mind of an individual man but are grounded in the natural disposition of mankind and possess a practical purpose that cannot be ascribed to ordinary mental delusions. Thus while the critique cannot harm the Ideas, it abolishes all dogmatic metaphysics and thus dogmatic materialism as well.
In this passage all the basic notions of Lange's philosophy are collected together and related to one another. I
2
4
6 7 8
9
10
There is his altogether legitimate appeal to 1<'ant' s distinction between reason and understanding and its translation into the concepts of Weltanschauung (= metaphysics = reason) and science, which, serves on the one hand to 'clear the path' for the materialism of an empirical and' exact inquiry in all domains', but on the other, to show that the 'strivings after unity that lie ~\Vithin our rational organization' do not, at least in principle, stand in opposition to this exact inquiry. For this conviction is, grounded in a naturalistic conception of the thesis of a 'natural disposition of mankind' to desire unity, which is, however, designed not for instance to rehabilitate the dogmatic concept of the Idea but rather only, to create room for moral philosophy. This last must then 'unreservedly renounce any theoretical validity', which has already correctly been said of materialism, but must nonetheless, as 'standpoint of the ideal' be conceded at least as a possibility, for, the materialist view 'that the world is as it appears to us by virtue of our senses' is to be disputed. This view has, been maintained through sense-physiological interpretation firstly of Kant's forms of perception, then also that of the categories, and finally by a possible tracing back of Ideas to natural disposition, so that, materialism has established, not that ethical norms, maxims and social ideals are undemonstrable, but merely that they have been insufficiently demonstrated. In a pragmatic sense and as non-scientific guiding emblems these are, both of evident value and demonstrable as historical and anthropological constants of a relative range and validity.
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The object of Lange's critique of materialism is thus solely to rescue the ethical picture of the world from the mechanistic-determinist and to repulse weltanschaulich claims to universality regardless of who formulates them. On all these points Lange was wholly a problem-thinker; indeed, properly speaking he did not even have a philosophical n1entor, and the essence of his philosophy - the critique of the weltanschaulich claim to universality advanced by both materialist and metaphysical thinking and of the 'standpoint of the ideal' evolved by the latter cannot be elucidated through a reference back to any existing lines of tradition but only froll1 his biography and thus from his relationship with his age. Lange's' undogmatic access to reality - to scientific reality and also to that of antithetical Weltanschauungen ' is 'of the finest Kantian heritage' only in the sense that from his student days at Bonn around 1848 onwards he concerned himself with a theoretical formulation of his antidogmatic standpoint and thus came upon I(ant's 'stringent proof of the theoretical undemonstrability of the Ideas' in which alone he perceived , I(ant's greatness' to lie. What is directly responsible for this sceptical attitude is not an attachment to any particular philosophical theory but the political polarization that existed from 1848 onwards and especially the intensified constraint to political partisanship that proceeded from it: thus, for example, even as a student he retorted to a criticism of the National Assembly that it 'applied a completely unfair standard' by failing to take adequate account of' either the times or the circumstances'; he told a fellow student that 'in theologicis' he had 'not yet arrived at any sort of positive unified view': 'I write of it only with reluctance ... I no longer see any absolute distinction between Christianity and other religions. The moral and religious demeanour of honest servants of the various religions ... differs only relatively ... Even in ideational content there is no absolute difference'. In a letter to his parents of 29 May 1849 he says with similar caution that the 'lack of civic self-sufficiency and independence' of which he has become aware is sufficient reason for him to refrain from active involvement in politics. He did not yet feel disposed 'to close the file' and 'join a party'. And this was not merely the hesitancy or timidity of a student: much later, too, in his Labour Question, he still retained this attitude: In our time anyone who promotes a cause on account of its preponderant good sides is counted as being one of the army of the cause, and whoever supports a movement as its ally is assun1ed to be ready to follow the leaders of this movement in every further step they take, even if the causes involved have changed completely. This tendency of the age has its justification; only it will not be denied that at the same time thinking for oneself has a certain justification too.
It goes without saying that this scepticism with regard to weltanschaulich obligations also originated in an uncommonly rich experience of society, for the pastor's and professor's son all his life mixed with very various social
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
circles: those of the university, of the schoolteacher, of a banker's family, of the workers' clubs, of the mercantile class, of the public official, and in both Germany and Switzerland - so that his 'undogmatic access to reality' can perhaps be in part explained by this circumstance. The 'standpoint of the ideal' in any event, understood as an 'antithesis to action determined by Weltanschauung' and directed against those Weltanschauungen each of which desires 'to elucidate and transform the entire totality of life from a once-andfor-all determined pre-comprehension of it', forms, as Hans Martin Sass has pointed out, the basis of a differentiation in principle from neo- I(antianism and a distinct alternative to it. The' position usually assigned to Friedrich Albert Lange in the history of philosophy', Sass therefore concludes, is 'to this extent a completely wrong one': 'he is not a precursor, let alone a founder, of neoI(antianism: he is the alternative to neo-J(antianism and provides an anticipatory critique of its basic position'. But the philosophy of Immanuel I(ant also stands in opposition to Weltanschauung-thinking, and the insight thus begins to grow that neo-I(antianism has far less right to appeal to the author of the Critique of Pure Reason than is custon1arily supposed. Even though in his obituary of Lange Cohen already censured this 'fundamental error in the treatment of the ethical question' and therewith the sceptical hostility to Weltanschauung inherent in Lange's 'standpoint of the ideal', after the neoidealist boom of the 18 60S was over the History of Materialism nonetheless did more to popularize I(ant in the 1870S than any other work: 'If you want to understand the basic frame of mind in which I(ant was received at that time, and what essentially impelled it, you must take up Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism', wrote Wilhelm Windelband. But even he failed to appreciate that the impulses behind early neo-I(antianism at first pointed as much in the direction of a neo-idealism as they did in that of a naturalism and positivism.
2
THE FISCHER-TRENDELENBURG DEBATE
'I can have the world-totality at any time only in a concept but not at all (as a totality) in perception', I(ant writes in the section of the Critique on the 'Analysis of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Combination of the Appearances of a World-Totality'. Although it is possible to grasp the concept and representation of a world-totality, it can never be realized empirically, and thus in regard to its knowledge-value the concept is to be comprehended either as 'empty' or as a merely regulative Idea. To Lange, too, the fact was established that philosophy and epistemology could not produce a principle calculated to bridge the hiatus between the empirical and a complete and absolute conception of totality. His basic understanding of philosophy, also, consisted in the view that for this reason its task was to determine critically the
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boundaries between the scientific and the weltanschaulich. To this extent he was certainly - and in the best sense - a Kantian, he was certainly entitled to appeal to the authority of Kant, and only a narrow conception of what constitutes a 'neo-Kantian' will want to separate the criticalist Lange and his guarantor I<'ant from each other. It goes without saying that Lange is entitled to a special place within the spectrum of neo-I<.antianism, and is so not so much on account of his sense-physiological interpretation of Kant but rather because, unlike many later neo-I
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
that there existed a 'gap' in I<'ant's theory, that I<.uno Fischer directed his attack in the second edition of his System of Logic and Metaphysics of 1865 ; whereupon Trendelenburg in 1867 replied, this time in a treatise expressly devoted to it, with a comprehensive statement of his views and the assertion that many passages of Fischer's presentation of I<'ant were' not in accord with I<.ant'. Fischer retorted to this, in a sharply polemical form, in the second edition of his book on I<'ant (1869) Trendelenburg then composed an equally polemical reply, Kuno Fischer and his Kant (1869), to which Fischer in turn replied with a brochure entitled Anti-Trendelenburg (1870). Then in 1871 Hermann Cohen reduced what this contention was really about to the simple question whether Trendelenburg had demonstrated' that I(ant had left a gap in his proof of the exclusively subjective nature of space and time' and whether 'I(uno Fischer had taken non-I(antian elements into his presentation of I(ant's philosophy' . Whoever today wants to undertake the task of reading the some fifty brochures, treatises and reviews centring on this debate would do well either to leave aside all the personal, tendentious and other adornments with which they are embellished and to follow Cohen in extracting their purely factual content, or to pursue the question - which is the course followed here - of why it may really have mattered whether these questions were resolved in one way or the other. The presence of' non-I<'antian elements' in Fischer's presentation of I(ant might have been discussed in one of the more detailed reviews, but, as Cohen's questions and the answers he received first lead us to suppose, the motives lay deeper than that, and Trendelenburg, on a single occasion at any rate, expressly indicated the importance of the issues at stake: Since our present-day German philosophy takes its start from I
What superficially and in retrospect might give the impression of being a petty skirmish over philological interpretation was in fact - at least in the eyes of Trendelenburg - a decisive conflict between two fundamentally different philosophical tendencies both of which, since all philosophy first sought to come to an understanding with I<.ant, seen1ed to arise directly out of interpretation of Kant. Trendelenburg's objective, 'the establishment of the ideal in the real', in this respect coincided with that of his pupil Cohen whose intentions in this regard have, so far as I know, hitherto gone un-
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recognized who in his critique of Lange believed he could produce a 'critically rigorous demonstrable connection' between the' standpoint of the ideal' and 'the world of reality and the principles of experience'. And even Trendelenburg's critique of I<'ant and Fischer and Cohen's critique of Lange share the same tendency to seek scientific proof of the coincidence of the ideal and the real so as to employ it against both pure transcendental idealism in Fischer's sense and an agnostically understood renunciation of a scientific grounding of Weltanschauung in Lange's sense. That both parties, Trendelertburg and Cohen on one side and Fischer and Lange on the other, shared the view that no possible forms of being should supply the proof and basis for those of thought united them all as critics of materialism. But on the other hand it is also clear that the' subjectivist' and in this sense' sceptical' position of Fischer, as also that of Lange on account of his imperfect legitimation of the ideal, were regarded as inadequate. And thus the FischerTrendelenburg debate already highlighted, through the difference it disclosed on this point, a division of the movement into-two fundamentally distinct tendencies: the older standing in the tradition of Fichte, Schopenhauer and Fischer, the younger represented by the school of Trendelenburg and continued partly in Cohen's scientism but also partly in the realist neoKantianism of Riehl and Paulsen. Just as in Charlottenburg, in Berlin, two parallel streets, a I<.uno Fischerstrasse and a Trendelenburgstrasse, lead to the Neue I<'antstrasse, so the roads to neo-I<'antianism led either through the school of Fischer or through that of Trendelenburg. This battle of the giants also did something more: it obliged every new interpretation of Kant first of all to commit itself to one side or the other. Yet the contention had certairtly not been from the beginning one over the meaning of the' transcendental aesthetic'; and until 1867 until, that is, the appearance of Trendelenburg's treatise On a Gap in Kant's Proof of the Exclusively Subjective Nature of Space and Time - it had been conducted only in footnotes, allusions and scattered observations. The disputants, who subsequently became personally hostile to one another, had even conducted a correspondence, and when in 1856 Fischer sought a lectureship in Berlin Trendelenburg had strongly supported him. It is to this period we have to return if we are to discover the true causes of a contention supposedly only over the interpretation of I<.ant. In a still unpublished letter from Trendelenburg to Fischer of 3 February 1866, the second-to-last they ever exchanged, we read: Now that, Hochgeehrter Herr Geheimer Hofrat, I have perused [?] your new edition of the System of Logic and Metaphysics I should like in a few words to clear up any false impressions I may perhaps have given you. We have been friends with one another in life and I would not like to have been the cause of our having become anything else in science. In the passage in the second edition of the Logical Investigations where I had to deal with the post-Hegelian form of Hegelian logic I necessarily had to criticize your
The critiques of Lange and Cohen Logic and Metaphysics, and an opinion advanced there gave me a special right to do so. I wanted to get at the line of argument but at the same time stick firmly to the matter in hand and yet express myself clearly. Because I hoped that this intention was transparent I believed I could send you a few literary trifles as a sign of my unaltered personal respect. Perhaps I was wrong. As I now see, you take personally what I had said of the thought presented in your Logic. Of that style in which in the first edition thought addresses itself: 'I am being, I am non-being', etc., I employed the expression 'an affect of certainty without truth '. If you believed yourself obliged to see a different meaning in this expression I am sorry, and that is what I wanted to say in these lines. I placed the entire passage from the Logic before my criticism of it at length and in its own words, and the reader will thus know in what context I used the expression and what I rneant by it ...
From this letter it appears more clearly than from the writ1ngs of the disputants that it was only towards the end of the I 860s that the weight of the dispute shifted to the question of how I<'ant was to be interpreted, and that the original, much more fundamental philosophical controversy became more and more concealed behind it, so that on account of it Trendelenburg's true interest, the continuation of his critique of Hegelianism, could become forgotten. The key phrase in the letter is the expression 'an affect of certainty without truth' with which Trendelenburg attacked Fischer's appeal to the participation of supposed evidentiality in the foundation of his logic, just as he had, indeed, long before already criticized Hegelian logic on account of its reliance on pure thought. In the second edition of the Logical Investigations Trendelenburg said of this conception of Fischer's of how logic begins: It is audacious at the very beginning to designate pure thought engendered by the abstraction of all content, that is to say thought made empty, as being filled with the essential nature of things. This piece of audaciousness is in any event an inherent contradiction, but not of the concept but of the comprehending mind.... The pathos of the thinking that surprises itself as it says to itself' I am, I am being, I am being that is not, I am becoming' is the affect of a certainty without truth.
These were certainly harsh words for Trendelenburg to pronounce against Fischer's basic postulate, the participation of the evident, but it was the fact that he could produce such good reasons for destroying what his opponent regarded as perfectly self-evident and undeniable that first introduced animosity into the dispute: It is further audacious to derive pure being from the proposition evident from all thought 'Thought is' and to pass off its solitary monologue 'I am' as a proud declaration to the world' I am being'. The proposition' Thought is' contains no pure being but the being of active thought and nothing else; and fron1 the self-knowledge 'l am' to the universal assertion' I am being' is a jump in one bound from subject into object. 'Thought declares in its origin: I am being; and what thought says of itself is at the same time a universal concept, i.e. the declaration of the constitution of the world.' Do these words solve the most difficult problem that has ever engaged the
The dissemination of neo- Kantianism K':.antian epoch or do they mangle it? It is audacious to seek to conquer the whole of idealism, all lf7e/tanschauung, with so light a touch.
Whether this origin of logic was grounded in the thinking of Hegel, or Fichte or, as Fischer seemed to believe, in that of I
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debate began increasingly to decline into invective, rhetoric and mere repetition. This treatise constitutes a highpoint above all because in it Trendelenburg not only pursues a critique of I<.ant and of his interpreter Fischer but is also already engaged in criticizing the new I<.antianizing idealism: 'If language still displaces red, which is a sense-impression, and calls the object red, modern physiology endeavours, with its discovery of purely subjective visual phenomena, to displace colour into the eye as a form of energy peculiar to it; it subjectivizes and leaves only a causality from within outwards ... " so that even the fundamental concepts of the natural sciences now seemed to be one and all rooted only in the capacity of the subject. It was precisely because such consequences followed that it was only too comprehensible that the question of the proof of the exclusively subjective nature of the forms of perception should engage contemporary thinkers more than any other, for what was at issue was whether the sciences were capable of determining anything about the world of things or only about the world of phenomena. But that this' idealist scepticism' and this new subjectivism of the young idealists could simply appeal to proofs furnished by I<.ant, as Kuno Fischer above all had maintained, was to be contested unconditionally. Whether a fact was so or not and whether Kant had definitely proved something - or even perhaps had only wanted to prove it - was tumbled together in constant confusion in this debate: interest in the reconstruction of I<'antian theorems with a view to giving them a topical currency and possibly founding a new science (sense-physiology) was confronted with the sceptical consequences to be apprehended. Because his objectives and the inner coherence of his theorems were trimmed according to individual requirement I<.ant now became an absolute contemporary. The question whether the sensephysiological interpretation of the transcendental aesthetic was tenable was not made an issue: the consequences of such an interpretation were, however, foisted on I<.ant. Even Fischer did not contest the equalization of I<.ant, Fichte, Schopenhauer and neo-idealism (= subjectivism = scepticism) imputed by Trendelenburg, but instead became indignant at the fact that Trendelenburg could demand' a quotation' to show that I<'ant had demonstrated the empirical reality of the forms of perception but had rejected the transcendental. 'You might as well ask for a quotation to demonstrate that I<'ant lived! I would not know how to go about looking for a single relevant sentence in the entire I<'antian philosophy insofar as it is critical which I<.ant could possibly have written if he had not demonstrated the transcendental ideality and empirical reality (subjectivity and objectivity) of space and time and refuted their transcendental reality. ' Fischer had replied using I<'antian formulations, but that did not by any means automatically guarantee that he or his opponent was employing them correctly and that these formulations were thus an adequate reply to Trendelenburg's demand. For Fischer understood Trendelenburg's demand to
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just the extent as would enable him to explain Kant so that Trendelenburg would understand him and thus understand Kant. But this he could not do, if only because he himself did not correctly understand Kant, and Trendelenburg could have replied to him on these lines: insofar as the Critique inquires after the conditions of the possibility of phenomena it discovers space and tin1e, which can of course then make a claim to validity only as presuppositions of that by which they are presupposed, i.e. only as presuppositions of phenomena. Space, for exanlple, as such a presupposition, is described as 'subjective' so as to express the fact that what is involved is a presupposition contributed by the subject in the act of perception. Thus when we speak of 'space' in this sense it must always be borne in mind that it is subjects which perceive and that space denotes a 'condition of the possibility of phenomena', but also that as soon as we speak not of phenomena but of 'things-in-themselves' which are not perceived a wholly different conception of space would be required; not one which denotes a presupposition of the perceiving subject but one which is wholly indifferent to the possibility of an act of perception: 'Thus we maintain the empirical reality of space (in regard to all possible external experience), even though we also maintain its transcendental ideality, i.e. that it is nothing as soon as we omit the condition of the possibility of all experience and assume it to be something that underlies the "things-inthemselves".' Already in I
_
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'things-in-themselves' in fact partake of space or temporality, Fischer makes it into a conditio sine qua non that these forms of intuition as such and in principle are not able to be related to the objective. The tendency of this neo-idealism thus not only strikes down every critical import of Kantian philosophy, it also notably contributes to the general confusion of opinion about the matter and how I<'ant is to be correctly understood, as the following quotation from Fischer amply makes clear: What the Logical Investigations calls object is with I<'ant 'thing-in-itself' or 'transcendental reality'. And now I<.ant is reproached with having only denied the objectivity of space and time in this sense, not refuted it; he is said to have' completely failed to den1.onstrate' its impossibility, and to have 'hardly given thought to the possibility that space and time are both together', subjective in his sense and objective in the sense established by the Logical Investigations. This is supposed to be the' gap' which the latter fills. Such an assertion completely ignores the context of I<'ant's philosophy. The required demonstrations are provided, both directly and indirectly: directly from the fact of pure mathematics, indirectly from the cosmological antinomies, from the faculty of freedom, which would be impossible if time were something real in itself. ..
Because Fischer regards the forms as forms of pure reason he neither recognizes their position in relation to I<'antian 'phenomena' nor understands that Trendelenburg's concept of the object differs in principle from the I<'antian 'thing-in-itself'. Trendelenburg's subject-object relationship mediated by constructive motion resolves the problem of the validity of the concept of forms through a parallelism, and at bottom he poses only the simple question how I<.ant - and Fischer with him - intended to effect the leap from a pure subjectivity of the forms of perception to a perception of reality - a question Fischer failed to enter into. For what interested him was not the question of the possibility of perception of reality but merely a demonstration of the autonomy of reason: the same pure mathematics that I<'ant adduced again and again as so splendid and seductive an example of perception by pure reason was employed by Fischer to establish the thesis that philosophical knowledge was based on the latter - indeed, even the I<'antian 'Idea' of freedom now became an indirect proof of Fischer's tendentious idealism. I<'ant replied to the latter with the antinomies, to the former to the' dogmatic use' Fischer makes of it - with the words' that it is in no way suited to the nature of philosophy, and especially not in the field of pure reason, to strut about with a dogmatic gait or to deck oneself out with the titles and decorations of mathematics, in whose order it does not belong ... ' The 'decorations and titles of mathematics' were, however, precisely what were later on to bedeck a tendency of neo-I<'antianism whose very first publication was directly connected to this debate: Hermann Cohen's essay' On the Controversy between Trendelenburg and I<'uno Fischer'. Certainly this essay did not as it were' end' the debate or 'bring it to a conclusion', as has
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been asserted in an obvious attempt to emphasize its importance, for it did not need to: on account of the coarsest personal attacks Fischer had launched against him Trendelenburg himself had by 1870 already announced that henceforth he would stay silent. Nonetheless it does acquire a special significance for having first introduced a novel interpretation of I
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intuitions' he had therewith' demonstrated their pure subjectivity and thus excluded the pure objectivity by which they would be acquired from things through experience'. It was in this that the merit of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' consisted: space and time being purely subjective intuitions 'their possible reality as an objectivity grounded in things, thus their pure objectivity, is refuted '. However, inasmuch as Trendelenburg understood subjectivity not as 'exclusive' but only as 'pure', 'a different concept of the objective' became accessible to him. His pupil goes on: We have hitherto thought only of the purely objective that is grounded only in things and knowlege of which we can thus acquire only empirically. This pure objectivity turned out to be impossible after I(ant had exhibited pure, aprioric intuition, i.e. intuition preceding all experience, in space and time. If, however, this pure subjectivity of space and time need not mean that they are real only and exclusively within us and cannot apply to anything external to us, then this distinction at the same time posits the possibility that there is something objective which is not dependent on our subjectivity. This objectivity is not a pure one, for an a priori intuition of it is possible.
The novelty of this concept of the objective was that, unlike the empirically understood purely objective, it did not exclude all a priori knowledge, but as a 'bare objectivity', as Cohen puts it, united apriority and objectivity. 'Bare, Trendelenburgian objectivity preserves a ground and basis to which a priori intuition could relate; it offers an objectivity which prevents things from falling into the abyss of phenomenality ; it wants to protect the world-prospect from "evaporating" into transcendental idealism'. Because Trendelenburg had confronted IZantian theory with this' new kind of objectivity', which meant that the forms of intuition were' necessary for mental representation and real in things', and not with the' pure objectivity' Fischer supposed he had, it was clear that Fischer did not understand Trendelenburg at all. He was, in fact, incapable of understanding him, because his own idealism of 'forms of reason' reduced all forms to 'only' subjective forms. It was for this reason that in Kant's Theory of Experience, which appeared at the same time as the essay, Cohen gives his approval to what Trendelenburg says of the view that' space and time are only something subjective': '" this exclusive' only' is not established. " Quite correct! Not only does the thought of objecting to an unhindered objectivity existing at the same time appear nowhere [in I(ant], even the basis for it is not laid in this proposition'. That they were for Trendelenburg 'something subjective and a priori' did not imply any decision as to their 'exclusive subjectivity', for only a correct understanding of the concept of apriority could decide this question. Cohen then subjected this question to a searching inquiry and offered an answer to the question of the nature of the new kind of objectivity which Trendelenburg had set up in opposition to Fischer's subjective idealism: The transcendental-subjective signifies on one hand the wholly objective and at the same time no less a perhaps demanded exclusive subjectivity; for there is no higher or
The dissemination of neo- Kantianism more certain objectivity than the apriority of intuition recognized in the formal character of subjective sensibility. It is with this alone that the geometer constructs the triangle with which the physicist takes the dimensions of nature; it is from this that we learn 'that we know only the a priori of things which we ourselves implant in them'. Only that is objective which a priori subjectivity 'produces', constructs.
The basic principle of all Marburg neo-Kantianism that objects are not , given' but' produced' or 'constructed' by a priori subjectivity rested on an interpretation of J<'ant that desired to close the' gap' which Trendelenburg asserted existed in the J<.antian proof without at the same time falling into the other extreme of a subjective idealism. Fischer allowed the' forms of reason' . to produce their mental representations, Trendelenburg contributed to the warding off of the sceptical denial of objectivity - it was from both that Cohen evolved his theorem of the 'production of the object'. That is the theorem is not to be legitimated by the Critique of Pure Reason alone, as is usually maintained, but is, rather, to be understood as an outcome of the Fischer-Trendelenburg debate. In forgetfulness of its origin, the new conception of objectivity Cohen had discovered in Trendelenburg was then expanded and developed by the Marburg school. That in this and on a whole series of other points Cohen is to be seen as Trendelenburg's pupil is likely to go unrecognized, to be sure, if the assertion by the Marburg school that they had reconstructed the genuine historical J<.ant is uncritically accepted, and if as a consequence every theorem is traced back to J<'ant and not to Cohen's true mentors. If it is remembered that as early as 1840 Trendelenburg had said that logic had to direct itself to the sciences otherwise it would have no definite goal and object, and that therewith an object of interest for a 'theory of science' was for the first time demanded, it will be easier to see that Cohen, the father of neo-J<.antian scientism, in fact learned far more from Trendelenburg than has as yet been realized. In any event, Cohen .was at the very least not only a 'pupil' of J<.ant but, as the following section will show, answered questions of the greatest topical interest.
3
COHEN'S CRITIQUE OF EXPERIENCE AND ITS WEL T ANSCRA ULlCR PREMISE
The chief difficulty in Cohen's interpretation of J<.ant consists in the fact that in his terminology and through extremely copious quotation he seeks to come as close to J(ant as he can but is in fact as far from him as he could be, because he 1 claims to have deduced from the Critique of Pure Reason its opposite, a 'critique of experience', on whose account he 2 pursues, and was obliged to pursue, a course of argumentation wholly independent of the Critique. In doing this he 3 selects his quotations simply according to their usefulness for his own theory without paying the slightest regard to the relative value of the role they play in the Critique. Ignoring their original argumentative function
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he 4 employs these quotations, and even mere parts of sentences, as dogmas and as wholly objective autonomous statements claiming a teminological and semantic identity in his own work and Kant's. This identification (here = bringing I
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that Cohen could feel it was legitimate to employ the Critique of Pure Reason as a vehicle for the explication of his own Weltanschauung. 'In the present book', the preface to Kant's Theory of Experience begins, 'I have undertaken to prove the Kantian theory of apriority anew'. The theory was in its results those of I
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This formulation which, though intended as interpretation, at bottom already anticipated Cohen's weltanschaulich premises - marks the beginning of the history of the Marburg school theorem of the' production of the object'. For this early work already speaks continually of such a 'construction', though without, indeed, even once discussing or documenting to what extent this notion may in any way be called I<.antian. The experience of the natural sciences is 'constructed' by experiments, a triangle is 'constructed' a priori, just as space and time 'construct' experience in general. Paul Natorp has provided an excellent summary of what is decisively novel in this understanding of I<.ant, and we should notice the unintentional leap from the wholly I<'antian construction of a priori perception in mathematics to the construction of experience in general: I<:'ant 'discovered a new concept of experience', Cohen tells us ... It is that which is illumined, one might even say as brightly as the sun, by the very familiar expositions in the second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason: that the first discoverer of the basic truths of geometry did not investigate what he saw in the figure or in the mere notion of it and from that learn what its qualities were; what he produced was what he himself had a priori thought and mentally represented in it; and in like manner in the exact knowledge of nature reason perceives only what it itself produces. 'It is not outside ... it is within you'; but even then not as something that lies there finished and has only to be exhibited: on the contrary, 'you are everlastingly producing it '. Such production of the object constitutes experience as it occurs in unbroken progress in genuine science, genuine human traffic, in all genuine culture.
This experience which produces its own object lays claim to the Critique of Pure Reason as the source of its validity. But whereas in the Critique, beside the general concept that experience signifies merely the perception of a given object, through the epistemological division into the a priori and a posteriori components of cognition an additional concept is acquired which simply says that, as an act both of the understanding and of the senses, experience is already founded on concepts and forms of intuition, Cohen makes the a priori component in every experience absolute, with the result that the realm of the a posteriori, the giveness of the object, is completely lost. Whereas I<.ant indicates again and again that every act of the subject in the process of cognition can be effectual only through an actual application to real or in any event thinkable experience, and also that it is only to this extent that we can speak of experience or cognition, Cohen effaces the distinction between form and material of cognition which is thus presupposed and made absolutely obligatory: Where, then, is the material originally? Where did the a posteriori itself, with which all our cognition commences, originate? Is it perhaps like the marble before it receives a form? Is it not, rather, present in the whole phenomenon, inherently united in and with the form, and only analysed afterwards out of the effect on our senses? Thus both are from the beginning only present in us ourselves as the entirety of a phenomenon.
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That form and material constitute an inseparable unity is supposed at the same time to demonstrate that they are both conceivable only as 'present in us ourselves'. The concept of the object evaporates through this interpretation: it is to be thought of only as an actively' produced' phenomenon and one that exists only to the extent that we have conceived it. Since what is called 'object' is what appears to us, it is as such at the exclusive disposal of the subject, and thus we can speak only of the a priori element in experience and no longer of a real a posteriori. Cohen's conception of experience acquired its meaning exclusively froi1.1 the predisposing a priori forms operating within the subject, and it was thus inverted into the diametrical opposite of what Locke, Hume and common sense understood by 'experience'. That a relation with a given object could occur through intuition and evidentiality, and that cognition could thus dispense with experience, had been conceded by I<.ant exclusively in the case of mathematics. It offered' the most splendid exan1ple of a pure reason successfully enlarging itself without the aid of experience': 'philosophical knowledge is rational knowledge from concepts, mathematical is knowledge from the construction of concepts'. Rational knowledge from construction is what characterizes mathematics; the same from concepts is philosophical knowledge. This is what is stated in the Critique ofPure Reason. The possibility of a 'construction' even functions in the Critique as the criterion for distinguishing mathematical knowledge from philosophical knowledge, for the sole instance of a priori knowledge through construction is that of n1athematics. A different view is taken by Cohen, for whom all so-called 'experience' is a product of certain 'constructions': To the geometer a triangle is not an object extended in space: it is constructed from the formal qualities of a subjective intuitive perception of space. Only thus and for that reason is it a priori. If the transcendental solution is to explain the possibility of such an a priori which produces the object, then the subjectivity in which it places the ground of the apriority of external perception must serve to demonstrate the exclusive nature of subjectivity. For if I am able to say' With this pure intuitive perception I construct all experience', and if, further, the possibility of such an experienceconstructing intuitive perception is grounded in the formal qualities of the subject, I cannot go on to exclaim 'But in the end the objects exist in external experience!' For now the question would be returned: 'But what did you want, then, from such an a priori knowledge?'
The much-cited 'triangle' now serves as a model for experience in general and is employed to demonstrate and confirm the exclusively subjective origin of the apriority of the forms of perception. But this subjective origin must be distinguished from an objective validity, for it does not by any means exclude the possibility that' experience-constructing intuitive perception' is capable of declaring something' about the nature of the objects'. And not, indeed, about objects in the ontological sense they possessed before Trendelenburg, but in precisely the sense that in principle only subject and obLe_c~ ~eX~~r_e9_!() one
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
another made possible an a priori knowledge at all: about objects as constructions by the subject - like the' triangle' produced and engendered by pure thought: whereupon it then turns out that the effacement of the concept of the object in the sense it possesses in I(antian philosophy represents the basic presupposition of Cohen's universal constructionism and therewith of the model character that geometric construction possesses for experience in general. Through the replacement of the reference to object and experience which the a priori enjoys everywhere in Kantian philosophy by a conception of mere 'mental representation' to which the a priori relates Cohen succeeds in passing over from a 'pure intuitive perception' such as is known to geometry to the construction of experience in general. Again Natorp remarks very appositely: There is no object except by virtue of reference to it through cognition; but there is no subject either except by virtue of the same thing ... Thus the much-discussed I<'antian forms of intuition and thought are ... processes, acts of forming and shaping, acts of intuitive perception, of thought, that is of beholding, of creating the objects in thought. The objects originate as the contents of intuitive perceptions, as thoughtcontents, proceeding as they do from the inner sources of pure, that is to say strict unity-bestowing intuition and thought.
Where - except at most in the case of the 'triangle' did I(ant ever 'behold', 'engender' or 'produce' an object, as Natorp says he did? The philosophical-historical source of this is to be found, not in the Critique of Pure Reason, but in the philosophy of Plato, and in his early work of 1867, Plato's Theory of Ideas Developed PsychologicallY, Cohen himself offered a hint that his interpretation of I(ant was from the first infused with Platonic rather than I(antian principles. For at this time, when he was still of the opinion that I(ant had 'been surmounted', he had already developed the basic idea of his interpretation of I
This' beholding '. was an active abstract, intellectual beholding which was, 'as the actual activity of the thinker as of the artist', to be regarded 'as the basis of all creating'. In this Plato was the' early ancestor of the intellectual intuition of transcendental idealism'. It is in precisely this direction that there also lie the intellectual presuppositions of Cohen's interpretation of I(ant, whose fundamental idea - the' production of the object' - was connected on one hand to the synthetic a priori judgments which mathematics demonstrates
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
through construction, and on the other to the term 'conditions of the possibility of experience'. The fundamental idea of the transcendental philosophy - to inquire what are those constituents of an indubitably valid store of true propositions (synthetic a priori judgments) such as are contained in mathematics and the natural sciences which' make possible' their apriority, and thus to determine the preconditions, possibilities and limits of 'pure reason' - was misunderstood by Cohen in the sense that he believed that these constituents represented an autonomous power, an active agent, which first had to create for itelf the 'objects of possible experience' in thought or intuition - and do so by means of 'mental representation' as the basis of a 'pure thought' independent of the objective world. Cohen's point of view has herewith become exactly the opposite of that of the Critique of Pure Reason: the end I(ant intended the discovery of the forms constituting the basis of cognition to serve an analysis of the sciences for the purpose of drawing the boundary between faith and knowledge - Cohen has elevated to an independent 'theory of experience' in which the concept of experience is allowed validity only in the exalted sense of an experience engendered by the a priori forms, an experience to be encountered exclusively in the sciences: because only scientific experience can satisfy the criterion of the universal and necessary validity of judgments, and inasmuch as it is only here that pure a priori thought can find its sphere of application, the concept of experience coincides with that of scientific knowledge. 'That we know of things only the a priori we ourselves introduce into them' - this scrap of quotation is woven by Cohen again and again into his interpretation of I(ant: indeed, he can be said to hammer home this proposition with a vehemence similar to that with which Liebmann reiterated 'his' proposition. Already in this early work it is employed no fewer than twelve times to legitimate his , constructed experience', but in thus employing it Cohen completely overlooks the fact that I(ant sought merely to establish the participation of the a priori in scientific knowledge without in any way identifying it with knowledge in general. With I(ant the categories serve' only to establish the possibility of empirical knowledge. This, however, is what is meant by experience. Consequently the categories can be employed towards a knowledge of things only insofar as these are taken for objects of possible experience'. Categories' playa role' in knowledge of the world we can experience, but the a priori element we 'introduce into things' does not for that reason by any means construct and produce the 'objects of possible experience', as Cohen thinks it does: it serves merely the 'application to empirical perception'. Cohen finally sought to answer Trendelenburg's question as to the objective validity of subjective forms with his 'theory of apriority', and in doing so completely failed to take account of the fact that the question of the objective value of the categories is not the same as the question as to the degree to which
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
the a priori participates in the act of cognition. His conception of experience thus became a scientific fantasy that a 'given object' can only produce itself: ... in transcendental logic the a priori deepens into the formal condition of experience. With this notion experience itself becomes a concept which we have to construct in pure intuition and pure thought: the formal conditions of its possibility space, time and synthetic unity - now count as a priori because we construct experience with them, because they are the constituents of experience. Now there is no further need for the formal ground of this possibility also to be innate in the intuition of space: space is a priori because it is a formal condition of experience. We are not at all concerned with whether it is innate or not: we construct a concept of experience according to transcendental principles as the synthetic unity of experiences; and what we need to employ for the production of this synthetic unity, the necessary units of construction, we call a priori. In this deepened significance of the a priori, the a priori is itself at the same time enlarged.
With this' enlargement' and' deepening' of the a priori Cohen - who in the oral examination for his doctorate had still advocated the thesis 'omnem philosophiae progressum in psychologia constitutum esse' and whose early writings had all been devoted to ethnic psychology had not only finally rejected the psychological interpretation of I(ant but was already on the way to a system of philosophy of his own. This complete reconstruction of his thinking took place within the space of a single year: in a review of Jurgen Bona Meyer's treatise on Kant's Psychology, which appeared in the same year as his book on I(ant but was plainly written earlier, Cohen had still described' the Herbartian theory of the derivation of psychic phenomenon from mental representation' as ' the greatest deed in psychology since I(ant's discovery of the transcendental aesthetic', and asserted that 'we have to be grateful" to Meyer for having recognized 'that in I(ant the psychological interest is the driving motivation' ; only a little later, however, the contention between Trendelenburg and Fischer over the subjectivity and/or objectivity of the a priori made him think that, if every kind of truth was not to become either only a relative truth explorable psychologically and empirically demonstrable or a materialist dogma that left the problems of knowledge completely out of account, the a priori could be established neither on a pure objectivity nor on an equally pure subjectivity. Trendelenburg's 'new concept of objectivity' revealed to Cohen a concept of the a priori to be conceived in principle only as a 'circle', in that the object 'is given only through being intuitively contemplated', just as conversely' a given object can exist only on condition of an intuitive contemplation': 'I(antian philosophy consists in the resolution of this circle'. Objectivity and subjectivity impose limitations on each other, but thus also demand each other: Ernst Cassirer later explained: For the transcendental 'subjective' is that which is demonstrated as the necessary and universally valid factqr in every kind of knowledge; it is precisely this, however, which
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constitutes for us the highest achievable' objective' insight. Consequently before any further step we have to see that, once the' Copernican revolution of the problem' has been completed, 'subjective' and' objective' are no longer regarded as members of a correct disjunction.
Because it is only in this sense that there can be any question of an objectivity at all, Cohen' constructs ... a concept of experience as the synthetic unity of experiences', and it is he, and not I<.ant, who designates the' necessary units of construction' which he 'needs to employ for the production of this synthetic unity' as a priori. Now these' synthetic unities' of Cohen's are, however, for their part nothing other than the categories, and since only categories are and have to be endowed with the' insignia' of apriority and thus with the character of necessity and universality, only scientific knowledge can constitute the foundation of this concept of experience. 'The fact of science' is the presupposition of this conception of objectivity, as it is of that of the a priori: in which connection, though, it should be noted that it was only from the beginning of the 18 80S that Cohen drew this last conclusion from the Fischer-Trendelenburg dilemma of the objective, whereas now, in the 1870s, he acts in the belief he is above all accomplishing a new interpretation of I<'ant. It is true that with his 'enlargement and deepening' of the concept' a priori' he had professedly exceeded the bounds of pure interpretation, but he nonetheless also persisted in the assertion that all he desired to do was to furnish a new demonstration of 'I<'ant's theory of apriority'. The core idea of this interpretation is the theorem of the 'construction or production of the object', which appeals to the proposition six times quoted, three times paraphrased and three times alluded to that we know a priori of things only what we ourselves have put in them, and which in later editions of Kant's Theory of Experience, in Cohen's commentary on I<.ant, and elsewhere, functioned as the credo of the Marburg school. This core idea is founded on a misunderstanding and a false interpretation of I<'ant. For when we 'look closely' at this quotation and subject it to a 'vigorous critique' to employ the phases with which Cohen is accustomed to introduce his polemical passages we observe, firstly, that it is never quoted as a complete proposition or sentence but only as part of a sentence! Seeing that the phrase is quoted or alluded to twelve times, and always in the role of a confirmation or verification of Cohen's interpretation through I<'ant's own words, this fact alone is, as Ernst Laas has also noted, at the least very remarkable. In addition, however, we have to ask whether this partial quotation elevated to the status of a dogma can really lay claim to a universal validity in Cohen's sense of the concept: 'So far as objects are concerned', we read in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, 'to the extent that they can be thought simply through reason and then necessarily thought, but (at least in the way in which reason thinks them) can in no way be given in experience, attempts to think them (for they must be capable of being thought) will hereafter provide a
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
splendid touchstone for that which we take to be the new method of thinking, namely that we know of things only the a priori we ourselves introduce into them '. Thus we see that Cohen's dogma is formulated by IZant in the first instance only as a hypothesis, and above all that he also assigns the domain within which this hypothesis is to be tested: within the domain of objects which' can in no way be given in experience', that is to say the domain of metaphysics! That which Cohen employs to 'possibilize' the objects of experience, IZant refers, quite explicitly and contrary to Cohen, precisely to such objects as cannot be given in experience. Cohen pays regard neither to the hypothetical framework of this much-quoted phrase nor to the domain of application envisaged for this hypothesis. Indeed, he does not even notice that here, where, because the concept of the object was to include such objects of pure reason as God, freedom and immortality - where, that is to say, the concept of objects (possible experience) is amplified to include merely thinkable objects - IZant had to choose the broadest and vaguest formula for his 'revolution of thought', he is polemicizing against pure reason, in respect of which it is then, in the theory of antinomies, to be proved that what it cannot and may not lay claim to is precisely the truth-value of scientific knowledge. I(ant himself was plainly aware of how easily his forn1ulation could be misunderstood, and he therefore affixed an explanatory note to this passage - likewise completely ignored in Cohen's interpretation - in which he adds that what is meant is a 'method imitated from the natural scientist' which, applied to objects of pure reason, will possibly lead to nothing more than antinomies. The purely hypothetical character of I(ant's formulation - for what is involved is an adumbration of the transcendental dialectic, which, like the 'theory of method', is scarcely referred to by Cohen was thus at the very least to this extent overlooked by Cohen. But here, too, there was more at issue than a mere overlooking: that the transcendental dialectic, the whole argumentation for the antinomial character of the understanding, whose purpose was of course precisely to restrict the claim to validity of the elements of pure reason to the domain of possible experience, was excluded from consideration in Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience revenged itself on him in the form of a fundamental misunderstanding of the I(antian concept of experience. For there can be no question whatever of any' reason striving to go beyond the limit of experience' unless the concept of experience is seen to involve a limiting of every capacity of reason by sense-perception, by the 'given object', by the objects presented to the senses, or by whatever other paraphrases of 'objects of possible experience' I(ant may have invented. The paucity of Cohen's detailed discussion of' his' core proposition of the Critique of Pure Reason was equalled by the dogmatic use he made of this formulation of the' new way of thinking'. In the above-mentioned note IZant
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himself alludes to the practice of the natural scientist and to experimentation, but Cohen pays no heed to the differences I
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
described and analysed experience as a construct - lacks all foundation not only on Cohen's argumentation but above all in Kant's own writings. Interestingly enough, in making this attempt it was precisely the formula taken from the context of metaphysics Cohen applied to experience in general, whereas the two taken from the context of mathematics and the natural sciences clearly seemed to him less' usable'. These last he quotes only at the beginning of Kant's Theory of Experience and thus obscures their true significance: demonstration of the a priori propositions of geometry, of experimentation in natural science and 'critique of pure reason' by . 'experimentation' in the antinomies. Why Cohen never undertakes to elucidate the two phrases' that reason perceives only that which it itself brings forth in accordance with its design' and 'we know of things only what we ourselves introduce into them a priori,' in the light of the complete propositions and within the context in which they occur, we can only surmise. Whether it was an ethical motive or Cohen's need for a refutation of empiricism and materialism that led to this interpretation of I<.ant, it was at any rate not the sceptic Fischer but the 'sober Romantic' Trendelenburg who offered him the possibility of a starting-point: both had lacked an understanding of the transcendental, to be sure, but Trendelenburg had nonetheless always maintained that the a priori forms must possess more than a merely subjective validity. Cohen thus argues against Fischer's subjective idealism in virtually the same terms as Trendelenburg had done, and even goes so far as to assert that Fischer's subjective idealism was closer to empiricism than n1ight have been assumed: both agreed, though for completely different reasons, in rejecting 'objective' validity. The theory of the absolute unknowability of the' thing-in-itself' really signified in regard to the concept of law the same thing as did the theory of a merely comparative concept of the universal: 'If the object the appearance of which is the empirical object is to be a transcendental object = x, then, in consequence of this degradation of the effective cause, appearance becomes - illusion'. For, just as in the case of empiricism, there existed here no universal and necessary judgments as to an objectivity. And thus, in that it did not surrender the' thing-in-itself' to the absolute unknowability posited by Fischer and Liebmann but later on even subjected it to a positive interpretation as the' task' of scientific inquiry, this interpretation of the 'thing-in-itself' too can be traced directly back to Trendelenburg's novel concept of objectivity. In both cases it served as the basis of the critique of the scepticism of subjective idealism, and the only difference was that, while Trendelenburg maintained there existed a parallelism between forms of being and forms of cognition which were brought into connection with one another through the theorem of 'constructive motion', Cohen took a reciprocal reference between the subjective and the objective as a means of 'establishing the ideal in the real' and of ascribing an objective
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism validity to the a priori forms. His appeal to the fact of science corresponded to that which Trendelenburg had made as early as 1840 when he advanced the demand that' logic must direct itself towards the sciences, because otherwise it will have no definite object by which to orientate its theories'. Cohen was thus also the first who, after the sceptical period of the neoKantian programmata, revived the claim to found a Weltanschauung and system on the basis of the new apriorism. In 1871 a polemic against Lange in Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience led to a scholarly fruitful contact between the two, but the difference in the objectives each had in view with respect to the compass and concept of philosophy remained unaffected. Cohen was able to correct Lange's naturalistic conception of the a priori(' qualities of the organism '), but even here Cohen's weltanschaulich critique of Lange's renunciation of and verdict against any scientifically grounded Weltanschauung already exerted an influence, for with his attack on the naturalistic image of Kant Cohen had contended from the first against Lange's all too' problematic Weltanschauung', as he would put it in 1876 in a brief obituary in the Philosophische Monatsheft. And in the same year he would in the Preussische Jahrbiicher prosecute this critique in more detail and present three points as being the principal respects in which his Weltanschauung differed from the views of Lange. Firstly, he contested Lange's view that I
Against this proposition Cohen emphasises that, except for Democritus, the inventors and discoverers of antiquity had been idealists, and his critique of Lange culminates - insofar as it is made good - in the assertion that the latter had misunderstood the' ideational element': ' ... the Idea is an epistemological
The critiques of Lange and Cohen
emblem and not an inner emotional concept. This misunderstanding of the epistemological character of the Platonic theory of Ideas stands in a causal relationship with ... an uncertainty in the definition of materialism that marks the work. Materialism and idealism here still appear as antitheses equivalent only in both being" world-historic errors" '. Cohen cannot share this basic position of post-March scepticism, in which Lange too participated, for idealism had been understood quite wrongly: idealism is to inquire into the meaning of the real, whereas materialism, proceeding from senseperception, fixes that reality in a something for which the senses cannot offer a sufficient guarantee. Idealism asks after the reality-value of that something, of that stuff. On the other hand, however, there exist, to be sure, ostensible forms of idealism which, no less than materialism, dogmatically suppose such a something, namely the so-called mind, as the site and organ of ideas. Let us remove the deceptive name from these endeavours and call them after what they teach: spiritualism. This is the born antithesis of materialism; idealism, however, in its classic forms, in Plato, in Descartes, in I
With Cohen there enters, beside the' subjective idealism' of Kuno Fischer and his pupil Liebmann and the' naturalistic I<'antianism' of Lange, a tendency in neo-I<.antianism which may be called a 'methodic idealism', which at the same time also lays claim to a different philosophical line of tradition. But because, in accordance with the thinking of his Weltanschauung, Cohen can distinguish only between' true' and' false', he cannot enter into a discussion of the History of Materialism but only pass sentence on it: Lange's entire historical standpoint is, according to this obituary, 'unsupported', his 'analyses of concepts' are' defective', and a lack of 'assurance in historical knowledge of the subject' is felt in all he says. This is evident especially in connection with the vital question whether' the I<'antian philosophy is presented correctly' in the work. For here it must be 'acknowledged' that 'firstly the theoretical question of materialism, the question of the meaning of the antithesis of matter and consciousness, is not decided with unambiguous directness ... And this gives rise to the suspicion that the author is a dualist. He is not one; but he would never seem to be if he had discussed the transcendental question more accurately' . Lange had not been' on the point' of explaining the objective world as a product of the constructions of the aprioric capacity of the subject, as Cohen here wants us to believe, but even in the matter of I<'ant interpretation Cohen's Weltanschauung cannot allow ambiguities of any kind: 'In the same place there lies ... the fundamental error in the treatment of the ethical question. The point here was to make it clear that "the standpoint of the ideal" possesses a connection with the world of reality, with the fundamental principles of experience, that can be demonstrated with greater critical rigour than a
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mixture of synthesis and poetic invention is capable of... Here lay his limitations'. Lange's relative evaluation of materialism (as the method of natural science), his view of historical progress in philosophy as a line of tradition from Democritus and Aristotle via Bacon and Locke to the materialism of the eighteenth century and finally to Kant, and thirdly his naturalistic picture of Kant, represented Cohen's points of criticism, which finally coalesced into the single objection that Lange had been unable to found practical philosophy in theoretical. Because to Lange all practical ideas were at the least subject to historical variation, and were perhaps even only a kind of emanation and product of human natural dispositions, he was debarred fron1 the formulation of a positive unitary Weltanschauung. Here there lay a real 'limitation' of Lange's whose significance Cohen was, however, unable to appreciate, for the Platonic-I<'antian transcendental concept of objectivity, as it would later be called, presented a 'bulwark' against Lange's ethical 'agnosticism' in its attempt' to expunge ethics from the system of philosophy' and thereby discredit the 'concept of the Weltanschauung, the n10st intrinsic product of and testimony to systematic philosophy'. For whoever, like Lange, rejected ethics renounced the most precious thing in all philosophy, and thus it was vital that, through its determination of the concept of science, logic should create the precondition for' the demonstration and establishment of the concept of law in the case of ethics'. The merit of having been the first to recognize this fundamental problem of philosophy and to resolve it in an exemplary way belonged to Plato, in that he established logic as logic of mathematics so as, with this as a starting-point, to define the concept of the Idea as a scientific category. With that he had been the first to raise ethics to the status of a science. It is not always easy to decide whether Cohen and his school I<.antianized Plato more than they Platonized I<.ant or vice versa. In any event Cohen lends the Platonic concept of the Idea a transcendental meaning which leaves every problem of the object wholly out of account and instead substitutes the new transcendental concept of objectivity: the formulation of axioms guarantees the laying of the fundamental basis as a whole, 'the Idea itself is therefore at bottom nothing other than the laying of the fundamental basis'. Cohen goes on: The axiom is not in the nature, not in the organization of the mathematical head, is not innate in it: and such a natural disposition could not establish its basis or its right. The axiom is rather the fundamental basis only. in that it is formulated in the laying of a fundamental basis and by virtue of it. Pure thought, which is consequently scientific thought, itself brings forth the axiom in the laying of the fundamental basis. Thus pure thought becomes the legitimate means of the production of the Idea.
This later precis - taken from the' Introduction with Critical Supplement' to Lange's History of Materialism (Leipzig 1902) - of what the treatise on Kant's Theory of Experience purported to establish from the interpretation of I<.ant, at any rate clearly shows that it is still possible to speak of a quite independent
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'continuation of !(ant'. The significance the concept of the Idea receives in Cohen, the value ascribed to this concept in the analysis of cognition, derives from sources quite other than the Critique of Pure Reason and is diametrically opposed to those bestowed upon them there: ' ... it is the Ideas, as the laying of the fundamental bases, that constitute the content of cognition, the store which can be everlastingly augmented by new foundation-Iayings; even though all new foundation-Iayings might turn out to be deepenings of the old. ' Cohen's apriorism represents a universal weltanschaulich conviction which as such - as Weltanschauung - advances the claim to a rational comprehension of totality, yet with the concept of the 'Idea' - insofar as it is intended to signify a 'foundation-laying', and thus something primary, in both logicalepistemological and in practical philosophical employment it nonetheless in fact constitutes a first insurmountable obstacle to scientific-discursive thought. For this analogy between theoretical and practical philosophy can be made plausible only by an appeal to an 'ideal validity' of the Idea to be encountered in both. That is why, unlike in his earlier book on !(ant, in which his Platonizing interpretation is carried through as it were only as an underpinning, in his second, Kant's Foundation of Ethics of 1877, in an altogether freer treatment of the problem Cohen begins with Plato himself: precisely because 'metaphysics has at all times been seen to possess a ... relationship with moral philosophy, if a contentious one', it was necessary first of all to return again to Plato, whose 'supreme merit it was' to have established 'this connection': ' ... and the Idea of the good is as it were the profoundly serious coinage of the epistemological kernel of the theory of Ideas, just as it presents the keenest consequences for the foundation of ethics'. Even the supposed 'profundity' of this asserted analogy of course serves the same end as that which the' production' of the object had already served: that of critique. 'It is, to be sure, not by chance', Cohen begins his critique of all non-idealist ethics, 'that, today and in the age of Plato, empiricists and spiritualists contend with one another over the origin of knowledge. Whoever takes the senses for the sole root of knowledge threatens the validity of those ideas which require daring mediations if they are to be interpreted as off-shoots of experience'. For it was only on the presupposition of something suprasensible that made possible the concept of an 'ought' at all that logic and ethics could be combined: 'Without logic no ethics', Cohen says elsewhere, and' however enlightenedly' one might' strive to resist the fact', the question of ethics was always the question of the 'possibility of another species of reality, the species of the validity of something suprasensible. In this conception of the problem the founder of the transcendental Ideas stands beside the author of the theory of Ideas: I(ant is the first since Plato to determine the task of ethics. According to I(ant ethics has to teach what ought to be'. Cohen's 'epistemological foundation of ethics' insisted on guaranteeing
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
what 'ought to be' through a scientific concept of ethics which, unlike in I(ant, where the Ideas are conceived of as being endowed with a merely regulative validity, claimed to furnish the Ideas formally and materially with a scientific foundation and thus procure for them an objective validity. But this remained merely a pretension, and it was no doubt the increasing feeling that he was incapable of giving scientific proof of this union of Erkenntnistheorie and ethics that led him to take refuge in mere polemics in which he cut short any possibility of a critique of the postulation of obligations by starting from asking 'in what ... that God-abandoned delusion that there exists no "ought" , was rooted, and thus withdrawing from scholarly discourse altogether. But even where he does not regard those who think differently from him as madmen, where he offers a positive explanation of his conception by saying that, parallel to the fact of the sciences that provides the foundation for theoretical philosophy, there runs a fact of 'ethical reality' - subsequently 'fact of right' - which is intended to provide the foundation for practical philosophy, even where Cohen remains within the scholarly and scientific forms, an immanent meaning at most is possible, because his premises can only be believed in: If men did not exist the totality of things would nonetheless still have to have a final aim. We are utterly unable to divest ourselves of this thought [1], for unity of purpose remains our inheritance even if we lose the title to possession of causality. And even if this teleological mechanism of our thinking did not exist, we could still maintain that the moral is to be thought of as a reality of such a kind as would have to exist, that its being would have to be, even if there were no existence to which it applied. If all reality of experience, if all sensible existence were destroyed, its boundaries in the noumenon would have to remain. If all nature were to perish, the Idea of freedom would remain. If all experience should cease, ethical reality will remain.
Thus Cohen. He could have expressed himself just as emphatically but more simply if he had said that his concept of' ought' represented an absolute which he, Cohen, would allow no one to take from him: whatever could be said against the Idea of freedom, he would always adhere to it. But when he erected his ethical theory on the assertion of an 'ultimate final aim of the totality' Cohen was certainly not intending to express a mere private predilection but to establish a scientific Weltanschauung which, proceeding from I(ant and attested by the authority of that great name, rested on the Idea of freedom. It goes without saying that, to the extent that he made direct employment of I(antian formulas to this end too, even this could not be accomplished without suspect reinterpretations. Thus the antinomy of freedom and necessity was first degraded to a merely 'apparent' one, and Cohen then even maintained that in I(ant its only meaning was to demonstrate that 'the noumenon' was 'as such free', for 'without the noumenon of freedom' ethics as such could ' be only an empty sound': he says in contradiction to all non-idealists:
The critiques of Lange and Cohen If human existence can be accounted for without remainder; if the causal conditionality of the human, though it may here and there experience a temporal constraint, has no essential limitation; if this freedom is only a wisp of straw; ... if the preservation of these moral ruins is to be ascribed only to scholarly piety; if the notion of man in truth signifies only and nothing but a phenomenon; if contemplation of the human lot presents on no side and in no connection the prospect of the regulative significance of the noumenon, of a transcendental Idea; then, then indeed, will ethics have been - abolished, brought to an end. Let history, let justice look to how they balance the [moral] statistics!
'My ethics are moral statistics', the thirty-year-old Lange had said, and when he later came to formulate his 'standpoint of the ideal' he maintained that an ethic cannot be established scientifically. But even his critic Cohen cannot in the last resort make plausible why an ethic is in any event possible and meaningful but quite definitely necessary in any other way than by an appeal to the conviction of his contemporaries that mankind ought not to be able to be accounted for as a phenomenon - as, say, a product of nature, society and history. In his Ethics of Pure Will (Berlin), which appeared three decades later, he presented his arguments for the foundation of ethics in greater detail, and it is interesting to see that here too it is only the new, transcendental concept of the objective that opens the way to the possibility of ethics: All theory, all law can have no basis other than that laid down in the fundamental basis. And there can be no security or certainty other than that which exists in the fundamental basis ... And yet it is referred to correspondence with phenomena, to the success it is able to achieve in connected and coherent explanation of phenomena. If it fails to achieve this success, then it has not held good as hypothesis; but the validity of the hypothesis cannot be shaken by the individual example of it. So long as it realizes the concept contained in it, the hypothesis possesses security and certainty. It is the only kind of certainty there is.
As pure noumenon the Idea of freedom is at first forn1ally defined as such; but through connection with the 'success' and 'failure' it endured as a regulative idea or 'hypothesis' it very quickly acquired a highly substantive significance. And this happened not only because the idea of freedom was a political issue of the first order in the nineteenth century, but rather precisely because the success of this idea seemed also to be demonstrable historically: If we expunge the autonomy, the homo noumenon of the ideal personality we destroy not merely the scholastic system of I(ant but at the same time the ideal world of our national poetry; and we bring to naught the ardour for freedom and the enthusiasm for right and justice which inspired our political liberalism [!] in the days of its strength. This autonomy led the way against the materialism of natural causality as well as against the despotism of injustice and servitude to dogma.
The general weltanschaulich concept of the Idea, and also this more specific concept of an Idea of freedom, now possess, besides a sense belonging to the history of philosophy, an altogether party-political sense, and, insofar as it is
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guaranteed and determined by this criterion of success, the 'epistemological foundation of ethics' simply serves the ends of political liberalism : 'For what sense would there be in ethics if the subject as given, as born and raised in his milieu, were totally graspable? Ethics would then be absorbed into anthropology and sociology ... ' which, conversely, seemed to be preventable only by showing that the liberalistic Idea of a homo noumenon was a historical force. This is why, like Hayn1 and other liberal admirers of Fichte, Cohen too contended against' the Hegelian reactionary saying: the real is the rational. And the rational is the real', which then reveals unambiguously that the supposedly formal concept of freedom is in fact meant substantially, that the horiJo noumenon of pure thought is in truth a hOJJJO phaenomen of a liberalistic conception of the state: Thus [in Hegel] for the sake of the Absolute, in whose eternal decree this identity is safely stored and guaranteed, the distinction between what is and what ought to be, between nature and morality, between actuality and potentiality, between reality and Idea, was finally blown away. Though that may have sustained the notion of the state for a time, it could not provide it with a lasting foundation. In the long run one cannot believe in a state that is not founded on justice and morality. In Hegel, therefore, the Absolute led to the materialization, and thus to the debilitation and relativization of ethics.
Though Trendelenburg may, with Stahl, Schelling and others, have believed in the divinity of the existing state, and Cohen, with Lange and the champions of liberalism, have believed in the' ideal' state in the belief it was only the state that made possible the highest values of human existence there was a wide measure of agreement. That is why with regard to the individual this ethic was, like that of Liebmann and other neo-idealists, concerned above all that he should 'in unconditional free obedience recognize the moral law of the state; recognize that, whether he stand high or low, there is no salvation for man, spiritual or moral, without the state or outside the state'. Because the state alone bestowed' mature humanity on the individual' the supreme virtue was loyalty and obedience to it, for paying taxes and satisfying our military obligations is not a sufficient demonstration of our patriotism; we have to realize that we are indebted to the state to which we belong for the basic condition for the existence of human morality and culture, and that it is only to a state that we can owe this indebtedness. Thus the absolute precondition for allegiance to a state is the sacred conviction that the only state we have a right to conceive of, let alone aspire to, is the fatherland.
Although these stipulations constitute in a quite literal sense a 'deification of the state', unlike the conservative and neo-idealist political philosophers Cohen did not in fact mean that the existing state as such, with the property and legal relationships existing within it, was already sacred: he meant that a state could acquire this 'sanctity' only by becoming a constitutional state founded on law:
The critiques of Lange and Cohen Our ethics is open to the objection that it orientates itself by the state, while the empirical state corresponds so little to this ideal and, indeed, frequently and emphatically bids defiance to it. The logic of the tendency that guides the state nonetheless compels ethics, however reluctantly, to swear allegiance to it, even at the risk of seeming hypocritical. The empirical state is, to be sure, the state of estates and ruling classes: it is not the constitutional state. The state founded on force can become the constitutional state founded on law only by fashioning the law, not in the interests of the estates and classes, but in accordance with the Idea of the state.
Whether the German state regulated itself in accordance with 'the logic of the tendency that guides' it which this ethic must 'swear allegiance to' - whether any state has ever realized this 'scientific hypothesis' of Cohen's - belongs to the realm of political and historical debate: but that this ethic succeeded in regarding the sanctity of the state as being as scientifically demonstrable as the axioms of Euclid is what first makes the foundations of Cohen's theoretical philosophy, and therewith his interpretation of I<.ant, fully comprehensible. On the basis of the' uniformity of method in both logic and ethics' the category of the Idea and its development in 'pure thought' twice accomplishes the same thing: in that it places the material under the absolute primacy of the forces that shape the normative-logical, and invests with the predicates of originality and value only the universal thus conceived, it divests science and life of any place of refuge for what is only accidental, for the particular and truly individual. What is distinct and particular in interest, in will and desire, appears in Cohen's' critique of experience' - the theoretical and the practical - only as a pernicious and reprehensible negativity, as a negative to be eliminated in the realm of theory as an unscientific element and in that of practice legitimately to be abolished by the state. In logic as in ethics the concept of law - though it pretends only to be claiming the establishment of certitude through the establishment of a validity obligates, in science as in society in general, above all an acknowledgement of the absolute validity of ideal norms: on one hand of the norm of science. constructed on a naturalscientific and mathematical concept of knowledge, on the other of that of civil law, insofar as it is grounded in morality. That an incessant advance of social evolution, and especially of the evolution of law, would lead to an ever closer approach to morality was for Cohen, who counted as one of the fathers of the social reform and social-ethical programme of the so-called revisionist movement, beyond question: The ideal is the being of eternity. Thus justice will become the virtue of eternity. Its being is eternal; every virtue is eternal. Without justice all virtue is worthless. As the virtue of the ideal it also elevates above all the scepticism and flaccidity of conservative opportunism, to whose worldly wisdom belief in a new world is an ideological illusion. Justice is the virtue of man as the man not of the other but of the new world.
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The preconditions of the rapid dissemination of neoIZantianism in the 1870S
I
THE PROFESSION AL PROSPECTS OF THE' NEOKANTIAN GENERATION' AND THE DISSEMINATION OF THE STUDY OF KANT
The phase of the neo-I
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Starting from the generally shared conviction that these non-idealist tendencies must have been 'overcome' by Erkenntnistheorie, IZantianism and a renewed connection with the classical period, this historiography in the last resort describes nothing more than the bare fact that this 'resurrection' had been directed against these tendencies. Because, however, it starts from the simple assumption that its evaluation of the transitional period will be shared by its reader, it makes not the slightest attempt to describe or clarify how this sudden change could have happened or why this' overcoming' had been so important and justified an event. And this is not all: inasmuch as such a historiography is wholly unaware of what is individual and significant in the forerunner philosophies and tendencies of the post-idealist period, it is also unable to determine or understand correctly what is in fact novel in the evolution which followed. All it seems able to imagine, and what even finds literal expression in the concept of neoIZantianism, is that' philosophy' could have been awoken to new life only by a leap back, a 'return', an attempt at the rescue, preservation and restoration of a lost possession. As a consequence, to Oesterreich neo-IZantianism was a product of such a retreat - in the end, indeed, of a 'flight to IZant' (Michelet, 1870) - that came into being through a turning away from everything that marked the transitional period and an attendant and seemingly quite unmotivated attempt at a justification of the existence of philosophy as systematism: the continuity of the influence [1] of philosophy was interrupted to such a degree it was necessary first of all to redetermine what its tasks and problems were. Philosophy began its work all over again. There then emerged a twofold possibility of securing the existence of philosophy without coming into conflict with the realist instincts [?] of the age. On one hand its task could be conceived as a concentration of the results of the individual sciences into a universal Weltanschauung ... The second way of rescuing the existence of philosophy consisted in imposing upon it the task of investigating knowledge itself. As theory of science, as Erkenntnistheorie, there still remained room for it after reality itself had been partitioned among the positive sciences. This tendency of thought gained by far the greatest amount of influence and at first exerted the decisive influence on the regeneration of philosophical thought. This turning towards Erkenntnistheorie at the same time brought with it the reconnection with I(ant.
The transitional period was not understood, and the redefinition of the aims and goals of philosophy that had quite undeniably taken place called forth from Oesterreich only the observation, characteristic of the historical viewpoint he shared, that philosophy had to begin its work all over again! Liebmann, Cohen and other early neo-IZantians had already thought likewise, and this continued to be the neo-IZantians' view of history up until the time of Cassirer. Instead of exploring this transition from the point of view of the history of philosophy they were satisfied with a more or less severe denigration
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of the philosophies that preceded them; instead of inquiring after the historical causes of the development of neo-I(antianism, after its motivations and the problems to which it desired to be a philosophical answer, they contented themselves with an unbelievably naIve glorification of I(ant. The' intellectual act' he performed was supposed by itself alone to have in a quite literal sense 'brought about' neo-IZantianism : Of all earlier thinkers he has exercised by far the greatest influence and an extraordinarily profound one. Not only did neo-I(antianism, at the end of the century the mightiest current in philosophy, come into being, but every other standpoint has also had to come to terms with I(ant. Just as I(ant's philosophical system is not a selfenclosed unity, so neo-I(antianism (neo-criticalism) is not such a unity either: the differing tendencies already present in I(ant's philosophy have, rather, led to the formation of widely divergent tendencies in neo-I(antianism too. At its beginning there stand more primitive interpretations which display a tendency to interpret Kant's Erkenntnistheorie psycho-physiologically. They were soon overcome.
That there could at any time have existed - except perhaps in the case of examination candidates a' compulsion' to come to terms with IZant, or that the contradictions in 'I(ant's system' could have led to the formation of differing neo- I(antian schools and tendencies, can with absolute certainty be denied. Contrary to what this teleological mode of historiography would have us believe, neither the' grounds' or 'causes' nor the' motivations' of the rise and dissemination of neo-I(antianism can be discovered inherent in the works of IZant. But, inadequate though these attempts at elucidation may be, they sufficed to gain for Oesterreich the reputation of having attempted a 'first exhaustive survey of the entire neo-criticalist movement', a survey which as a general typology of neo-IZantian philosophizing has not been replaced to this day: Seven tendencies are to be distinguished in neo-criticalism: I the physiological tendency (Helmholtz, Lange); 2 the metaphysical tendency (Liebmann, Volkelt) ; 3 the realist tendency (Riehl); 4 the logicalist tendency (Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer the Marburg school); 5 value-theoretical criticalism (Windelband, Rickert, Munsterberg the South-West German or Baden school with which Bauch, too, is closely connected); 6 the relativist remodelling of criticalism (Simmel); 7 the psychological remodelling deriving from Fries (neo-Friesian school, Nelson).
Whether the 'relativist' and 'psychological remodelling of criticalism' by Simmel and Nelson are to be accounted a part of neo-IZantianism at all; whether what is specific in Lange's interpretation of IZant really lay in the field of physiology, but was not rather a general naturalistic conception of all modes of knowledge and types of action; whether it is a good idea to have this tendency followed by a 'metaphysical' and a 'logicalist' - as, indeed, whether ------------------------------
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in this succession, which is obviously intended to be chronological, it is right to place Liebn1ann (as a metaphysician, which he was to become only much later), Vol kelt and Riehl before Cohen - are things about which opinion can certainly be divided. That Benno Erdmann, Hans Vaihinger and Friedrich Paulsen are wholly absent from this array is to be ascribed to the fact that Oesterreich proceeded from the sum total of neo- I<'antianism as it appeared in 1928, whereas from the point of view of the histC?ry of the evolution of philosophy the I<.ant scholars from Fischer to Paulsen and Benno Erdmann must be taken into consideration at least as much as the I<.ant systematizers Cohen and Windelband. As the example of Cohen in particular demonstrated, in the 18 70S such a division did not yet exist at all, and the differentiation of the original neo-I<'antian moven1ent which would certainly exclude Vaihinger, Paulsen and Erdmann likewise occurred only later on. If we confine ourselves only to the neo-I<'antianism of the 1870S the first thing we notice is that, of the five tendences named by Oesterreich, four that is to say all the truly classic tendencies - were founded by young philosophers none of whom had in 187 I passed his thirtieth year: Liebmann, Cohen, V olkelt, Riehl and Windelband - but Erdmann, Paulsen and Vaihinger also belonged to this same generation. They were all born in the 1840S (1840-52) and all studied in the 1860s or at the beginning of the 1870s. They were thus, strictly speaking, not among those who effected what Oesterreich was in principle right to call the 'resurrection of philosophy' but in fact its first beneficiaries: while they were still studying the History of Materialism had already appeared, I<'uno Fischer, of whom Liebmann, Volkelt and Windelband were pupils, had already produced his presentation of I<.ant, the turning towards Erkenntnistheorie was something already accomplished, and the distressed situation philosophy had found itself in during the post-March period had likewise long since been overcome. The generation earlier described as 'sceptical' - the twenty-years-older programmatizers of neoI<'antianism who experienced the revolution and the period of reaction and almost all of whom had had to suffer interference by the state smoothed the way for these younger neo-I<'antians. The latter were able to start out from the neo-I<'antian programmata, but above all they encountered quite different preconditions outside philosophy, for social and political circumstances, too, had undergone a decisive change. Not only were they no longer obstructed by resistance on the part of church and state, some of them were even able to achieve outstandingly glittering careers: 'How in the end shall we find philosophers?' Haym, still under the impress of the professional prospects facing lecturers during the 185 as and 18 60S, had asked as late as 187 I: 'we philosophers or semi-philosophers will soon be worth our weight in gold'. And so it was to turn out: whereas the members of the older sceptical generation had had to wait on average almost 14 years after their (first)
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lectureship until they could achieve a professorship, those of the' neo-I
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being called to a professorship was insofar as direct political reasons were not responsible - the result of the generally unfavourable educational policies in force at the time they received their venia legendi. They share with Dilthey, Heinze, Baumann and Laas - the younger generation of philosophy professors born on average ten years later between 1830 and 1839 who, after being variously occupied in other fields, though mostly as Gymnasium teachers, were first called to the university only during these years - the fate of a belated university career. If we consider the statistics of the teaching staffs in the philosophical faculties and distinguish the variations in the numbers of professors, assistant professors and lecturers, we firstly confirm what has already been said as to the situation of philosophy during the 185 os, and in the second place it becomes clear how greatly the so-called 'resurrection' of philosophy during the I 860s and I 870s was assisted by the simple circumstance that between 1860 and 1880 the number of teachers in the philosophical faculties of Germany almost doubled. At the same time it was a distinct generation - which around the year 1870 was still studying or had just completed its studies that profited most from this extension of the universities, and this casts quite a new light on the rise and dissemination of neo-I
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The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
1860-5 and 187°-5. Thus it also becomes apparent that throughout this whole era only the 185 os show a rise in the number of lecturers (1850-5) immediately followed by a decline (185 5-60) without there being for these lecturers the prospect of a university position within the foreseeable future: it was for this reason that Lange ceased to be a lecturer and reacquired a licence to lecture only a decade later; his friend Ueberweg was obliged to wait for more than a decade before his income permitted him to found his own household. It was only from the second half of the 18605 that the social situation of the Privatdozent changed for the better. When, after securing his doctorate in 187 I , Friedrich Paulsen rejected his teacher Trendelenburg's suggestion that he should consider taking the senior teachers' examination he was not only acting quite differently from the way in which the preceding generation of those who had studied in the 185 os and early 1860s had acted: though an impecunious son of a peasant he could immediately afterwards venture to enter on an academic career. As the decline in the number of Privatdozenten after 1870 shows, in the entire history of the German university there has probably never been a time when conditions were so favourable for achieving at least an assistant professorship so soon after receiving a doctorate and licence to lecture as they were in the first years of the new Reich. Indeed, in 1875 the Prussian education minister, Falk, even created a 'Privatdozenten scholarship' to make it possible for' aspiring young people without means', as they expressed themselves in those days, to acquire a licence to lecture - a measure, previously quite unthinkable, which contributes to showing how great was the need for new academic blood at this time. Immediately after the F ranco- Prussian war things moved forward rapidly and neo-I(antianism as a whole quickly rose in the world: legend has it that Otto Liebmann, only just back from the front, was surprised immediately after a students' duel with the news that he was to teach at the newly created university in occupied Strassburg - in the Strassburg intended as a 'fortress of the German spirit against France', as is stated in the stenographic report of the Reichstag debate on the founding of Strassburg university, which also goes on to record, among other things: ... we are all agreed that Alsace and Lorraine shall be retained by Germany; not merely through the might of German arms with which they were regained but through the might of the German spirit, and we are certainly all agreed that one of the mightiest resources of the spirit, of the German spirit, is the construction of a German university in Strassburg ... The German universities, resting on the foundation of freedom [I], are so peculiarly German an institution that no other nation, not even one racially akin, has risen to this institution, and it is for just this reason that a German university is one of the mightiest of all means of again reconciling with the motherland German racial comrades who have long been separated fron1 her ... You may believe, meine Herren, that Bonn university has done as much to defend the German Rheinland as have the German fortresses on the Rhein. (Hear hear~~~0~leitl
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20 5
That the author of the 'Diary of a Siege' should have been called to precisely this university is hardly a cause for surprise; but in the rest of Germany, too, the academic merry-go-round now began to revolve: 'Professor Zeller of Heidelberg has been called to Berlin, Prof. 1<". Fischer of Jena to Heidelberg, Prof. Lange of Zurich to Marburg', the Philosophische Monatshefte announced in 1872 (the year of Trendelenburg's death). In the following year Cohen (Marburg) and Windelband (Leipzig) received licences to lecture, and Riehl became assistant professor in Graz. In 1874, the year following the' crash' of the Grunderzeit, this evolution halted for a moment, only to resume in the second half of the 1870S and then to effect a definitive breakthrough on the part of neo-I<"antianism: in 1875, the year in which Lask and Honigswald were born and Lange died, Cohen was named assistant professor and in the following year full professor. Windelband, not quite 28, was called to the chair of 'inductive philosophy' at Zurich which Lange had vacated three years previously and Wundt had occupied in the interim. Volkelt and Benno Erdmann received licences to lecture, in 1877 Vaihinger also did so, and by 1880 the leading minds of early neo- I<"antianism down to Vaihinger, who was still in his mid-twenties, had all been named at least assistant professors. Neo-I<"antianism was thus represented by at least one prominent advocate at nine German-speaking universities, and the movement as a whole had within six years more than doubled the number of the positions it held. , Everyone has felt compelled first to come to terms with I<..ant', Oesterreich had written; and this is true to the extent that the number of works published on I<"ant or dealing with him as a central issue since about 1870 is more than anyone person can read. A statistical evaluation of a I<:'ant bibliography would reveal a geometrical increase in the number of pages written about him every year since 1862. The same applies to lectures on I<"ant delivered at universities: whereas in the I 860s there were never more than three or four courses on I<"ant offered in any semester at all the German (including Austrian) and Swiss universities put together - courses on Plato and Aristotle averaged twelve at the beginning of the I 880S at least twelve - and up to twenty! - were held each semester. A comparison of the number of courses on I<"ant held in the I 860s with those for the 1870S shows a three-and-a-half-fold increase: 54 courses during the decade from the Fichte celebrations (1862) to the foundation of the Reich compared with 189 courses between the foundation of the Reich and the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. It was only in Leipzig, where Drobisch, who had crossed over from Herbartianism to a I<"antian empiricism, taught towards the end of the 185 os, and in Vienna, where Fischer's admirer Barach-Rappaport taught, that more than five I<"ant courses were held during the I 860s, while a course on I<"ant was offered in less than every fifth semester at every other university. No course on I<..ant was held at Erlangen or Wurzburg in either decade, and in Munich,
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too, there v/ere still very few. In addition to the three Bavarian universities, it was precisely those which had ignored the Fichte celebrations of 1862 (1) - such as Rostock in Mecklenburg and Giessen in Hessen - that continued almost to ignore I
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after 1870" are sought only in the evidentiality and convincingness of I
2
CONTRA NATURALISM, PESSIMISM AND CLERICALISM
Readiness to see a particular period, or even a whole era, characterized by one particular philosophy tends to grow in part as the period itself grows more remote in time, but also in part as the inner content of the period grows more remote. That the history of philosophy is accustomed to concern itself not only with the effect produced by historical systems and ideas but above all with
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their value serves to deepen even more the gulf between the present day and the so-called Grunderzeit. Here this concentration on value even produces the paradoxical situation that it is precisely the philosopher who published his writings under the rubric' untimely' who occupies the chief place of interest in the philosophical historiography of this Grunderepoche - which not infrequently gives rise to the impression that during this period in the evolution of philosophy the principal figure is, even if only in an oppositional sense, Nietzsche. Nietzsche's critique of the spirit of the Grunderzeit was so rejectionist but at the same time so pervasive as, again from the point of view of values, to threaten once more to obstruct an understanding of the real tendencies of this period: the reverse side of the high estimation in which Nietzsche is held is a contempt for the Grunderzeit, with its faith in science and progress, and this gives rise to the question of what happened to the joyful optimism of the first years of the new Reich, for the associations aroused by the idea of the Griinderzeit lead to the difficulty of understanding the tendencies - in part contemporaneous with it, in part succeeding it - to Weltschmerz, pessimism and all that is denoted by the term Jin-de-si'ecle. In any event, if we fail to distinguish between different spheres of activity within philosophy - between the institutionalized philosophy of the universities, whose principal task was the training of teachers and general preparation for official positions, and the Weltanschauung interests outside them, which already in the nineteenth century either declined into shortlived fashions or were attached to specific social groups we lose our ability to assess the significance which every individual phenomenon may lay claim to at the moment of its appearance: so that the optimism of the Grunderzeit and the pessimism that attended it, naturalism and neo-IZantian idealism, scientific philosophy and Catholic philosophy - Marx, Nietzsche, Buchner, Hartmann and Duhring must then continue to pursue in philosophical historiography a mutual hostility which, at the time it was influential, was in fact for the most part silent. Every tendency is given a chapter of its own, thinkers can be numbered or listed alphabetically, and, as though from a sale catalogue, everyone can select from history whatever suits his taste: some prefer Marx, some the neoIZantians, others have recourse to con1binations, for the public's attention is always heightened by contrasting colours. The problem of philosophical historiography, however, here - and not only here - consists in recognizing what is common and what is distinctive in contemporary philosophy and as aspects of philosophical evolution, in distinguishing the history of the production of philosophy from that of its reception, in co-ordinating it with the findings of sociology, in differentiating between academic spheres of activity and extra-academic, in comprehending, in the sense of the sociology of science, how a development such as the rise of neo-IZantianism could attain pre-eminence. And in regard to the question
The rapid dissemination of neo-Kantianism of the dissemination of the movement it is precisely the perspective of its contemporaries that can be of most help to us: for such a phenomenon as the dissemination of ideas can be understood only by relating the ideas to a distinct juncture in time, to opposing or deviating but in any event comparable phenomena. Thus a contemporary of the mid-I 870S would probably have seen the element common to all neo- I(antians in relation to competing philosophies and Weltanschauungen to lie first and foremost in their opposition to naturalism or materialism, to so-called' clericalism', and to the pessimist movement. It is true that the neo-I
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as a free, moral and autonomous individual could therefore also continually spread itself abroad. In any event, even during the I870S it was still believed that freedom, real freedom, would be imperilled in the new Reich as much through a purely natural scientific view of the soul of man and of the world he lived and acted in as it would be through a weltanschaulich elevation of religious dogmas to absolutes or the pessimist thesis of the valuelessness of life. It was precisely because philosophical, political and weltanschaulich ideas were regarded as the' causes' of social conflicts rather than as one possible expression of them that critique of ideas was considered an adequate response: a critique of such ideas as egoism and self-interest, of a struggle for existence in which, as in the animal world, only the stronger would survive - a critique aimed at bottom at every conception of human communality, society and history that presumed to demonstrate scientifically something other than that which fitted into the liberalist image of man and the world. Here it was above all Friedrich Albert Lange who, more influential than the all too self-confident and overweening neo-idealist Fischer, attracted the student generation of the end of the I 860s and beginning of the I 870s, and did so precisely because, unlike Fischer, who contented himself with appealing to the alleged evidentiality of the positions he maintained, he applied himself to a critique of contemporary ideologies. Even though he himself possessed a strongly naturalistic side, Lange made it possible for many students to find their way to an ethical idealism while retaining a natural-scientific outlook on science and the world, and he did so because as critic he applied himself to that point at which the students' thinking, in principle natural-scientific and materialist, was unable to bridge the hiatus to the idealistic, criticalist and in part also politically oppositionist view they adhered to at the same time. As can be demonstrated from various biographical sources, most of those who subsequently became leading neo-IZantians had to find their way from materialism to idealism only gradually. In his Jugenderinnerungen Friedrich Paulsen, for example, after a detailed account of how unprofitably 'he had spent five semesters of study three semesters of theology at Erlangen and unsuccessful attempts at philosophy at Berlin lay behind him, together with a comprehensive and intensive participation in student revelry - records that during the summer semester of 1868 a 'happy chance' put him in possession of Lange's History of Materialism: It was the first book I had ever read with real interest; indeed, I read it with passionate interest. It arrived like the answer to a cry of distress: on one hand it helped me to think through the lines of thought I had begun to construct for myself ... on the other it pointed beyond them: the way in which the relative rights of a naturalistic view of the world, its rights in face of the dogmatism of contemporary theology with its hostility to science, were everywhere ruthlessly acknowledged, was what won my confidence; on the other side, it was made clearly manifest that it was impossible to remain fixed to
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this standpoint as though it was the ultimate one: I
With his reading of this book the semesters' full of painful disappointments and bitter feelings of uncertainty and lack of direction' were at an end for Paulsen. He entered Trendelenburg's seminar, studied Ueberweg's logic, and in attending the lectures of Harms, Steinthal, Bonitz, du Bois and Diihring passed his 'first truly fruitful semester of study'. The rescue of idealism especially in the domain of ethics, while nonetheless preserving a strongly naturalistic mode of thinking in regard to most scientific and philosophical questions, was, as Paulsen likewise records, something which Benno Erdmann, too, was able to accomplish only gradually: At the time we first became acquainted [around 1872] his general way of thinking was still of the naturalistic and radical kind such as I myself had entertained during, for instance, my years at Erlangen but had by then for some time left behind me. Under the influence of the considerably older man [i.e. Paulsen] the younger man's mode of thinking also gradually changed, and the study of I
Erdmann, whom Paulsen had got to know at the Philosophischer Verein in Berlin, arrived at Kant and idealism, as Paulsen did, only in his later semesters, and it is indeed a distinctive mark of the majority of the members of the' neoI(antian generation' that the provenance of their earlier philosophical training was inclined to be materialist: 'It is not an experience peculiar to me', Paul Natorp, too, reports (192 I), 'but one shared by everybody who was young fifty years ago and had not been completely deserted by the philosophical spirit, that at that time [around 1875] idealism had as good as died out in Germany; that one had to accord to a materialism that gave itself great scientific airs but was philosophically hollow the credit of having at least kept alive an interest in philosophical things'. Unlike Paulsen and Erdmann, even as a sixth-form schoolboy Natorp was unsympathetic towards materialism, yet he, too, owed his awakening to I(ant chiefly to a fortuitous encounter with Lange: I was approaching the end of my schooldays; now I was in Strassburg. I had done all kinds of things and gained no satisfaction from them, had fastened myself nowhere, (and was ... inwardly and outwardly in a state of confusion that bordered on despair. \Then a friend who was as much opposed to academic philosophy as I was wrote to me from 1-1arburg about Lange, Cohen and their I
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than merely confirmed: mature, executed scientifically in a signification of science such as was hitherto unknown to me.
The connection between the occasional 'bluntness' of Lange's style, a defensive posture towards' normal academic philosophy', 'uncertainty', 'lack of direction', or even 'confusion' and 'despair', is not a chance coincidence of biographical detail but bears witness to the fact that early neo-I(antianism constituted a 'movement' in which strong affective preconditions were also involved. This also emerges in the account given by Hans Vaihinger, who was likewise captivated in the mid-1870S by his reading of Lange and who thereafter spontaneously saw in him his' leader', 'master' and' instructor in the ideal': Here [in Lange's book] the spirit which impelled me forwards more or less obscurely prevailed in full lucidity and at the same time in a beautiful form: on one hand supreme respect for facts, an exact knowledge of the natural sciences and at the same time a command of the whole history of culture, on the other I
Paulsen, Erdmann, Natorp, Vaihinger, and the youthful Volkelt too, who had for a time even' got involved with radical socialism', started from a more or less pronounced naturalism and materialism, advanced froin that to idealism - and only then went on to encounter I(ant: and as these five subsequent neo-I(antians overcame the naturalism and materialism that characterized their own philosophical beginnings it is easy to understand how the rise of neo-I(antianism as such is so frequently regarded as an overcoming of precisely these tendencies, since in the purely biographical domain this view is correct at least as far as these five are concerned. But because descriptions of the rise of neo-I(antianism have hitherto relied so heavily on the selfdescriptions of the neo-I(antians themselves, the fact was obscured that this so-called 'overcoming' of materialisn1 applied in the first instance not to the so-called 'petty bourgeois materialism' of the 185 os and of course not to the materialism of Marx and Engels either - but was directed against the ethical materialism of the status quo, the materialism of Realpolitik and doctrine of free trade the materialism of Carey, Strauss and Bismarck and against the 'tendency of the owning classes to materialism ' (Lange): 'It was the ethical, which is to youth the "aprioric", that at this time aroused enthusiasm for Lange's History of Materialism' (I(arl Griin), and the reason this fact could be so thoroughly misunderstood and unappreciated was no doubt above all that in the twentieth century 'materialism' is equated with oppositionism and a
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'critical posture', whereas, quite to the contrary, where the academic youth of the Grunderepoche were critical they thought idealisticallY - in the case of Cohen and the Marburg school they criticized precisely materialism, and did so not least because they believed socialism to be grounded in I(antian ethics. Not all , idealists' were for this reason criticalist, to be sure, and certainly not in a sense in which this critique could have been associated with the parties of the political left. But the students of the 18 70S who were inspired by Lange were - in contrast to those of the 18605 inspired by the neo-idealism of I
Any sociological apportionment of this pessimism seemed to be ruled out, for it was not only aristocratic to be a pessimist: pessimism is preached in the streets no less than in the salons, it goes hand in hand with that political agitation which excites new needs
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in working circles so as to be able to demonstrate to them the inadequacy of their situation, and in this way diffuses itself into every stratum of the populace as a mood of despondency and dissatisfaction.
The pessimism of the salons and that of the working people originated, of course, in quite different causes, but discontent, depression and doubt as to the meaning of life were equally present in all classes of society. Whether Windelband was justified in explaining the discontent that existed 'in the streets' by reference to the excitation of new needs, whether this specific form of pessimism in fact originated in 'political agitation', may be left undecided. The historian of the period, Hans Rosenberg, has difficulty in differentiating in what way the various social circles, strata and classes were affected by the explosion of the' Grunderschwindel' in 1873, but in his book Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit maintains that public mentality sustained a quite general and universal alteration: After the great change in the economy that set in in 1873, however, enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment. Hereafter it was the fast-increasing discontent, anxiety over acquiring a livelihood and social animosity, and the explosive rise of social and economic group interests, complexes of attachment and ideologies, which imparted to the intensifying of political activity and political competition a new and enduring impetus.
The pessimist movement, too, flourished in this climate, to be sure, but its growth is likely to have been affected only to a small degree by the decline in the economy and the intensification in political contention, for this movement was directed in a relatively unspecific and wholesale way against the industrial society of the new Reich as such, and pessimism was less a critique of society than a critique of civilization in a comprehensive sense. In an address on 'I(ant's Categorical Imperative and the Present' delivered in Vienna in 1875 by Johannes V olkelt both the non-specific nature of this critique and the relationship between the pessimist and the idealist movements are made unmistakably clear: It seems to me ... that no word characterizes the moral attitude of our time so well as the word' easygoing '. Cool laxity, noble complaisance, pertains to good form. I am well aware that this deplorable phenomenon is closely associated with the progress and advantages enjoyed by our age ... Our increasing command over nature has multiplied the means we have of satisfying our needs and made it easier for us to acquire them. The most exquisite pleasures can be procured with very little difficulty. The whole of civilized humanity is organized like a machine: a gentle pressure on one of its springs is all that is required for the satisfaction of any need we may feel ... What this means is that our pleasures soon cease to please and our needs become more complex and refined. Command over nature thus leads to a constantly proliferating dependence on its artificial products. Is it then any wonder if a paralysis of initiative, a perilous undermining of manly individuality, a certain spinelessness and lack of fibre is gaining ground? It is certainly part of the progress of our culture ... that all paths are growing
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ever smoother and leveller, that sharp collisions are everywhere avoided. How right I am you will discover for yourself if you look around your comfortably furnished room, if you take a walk through the streets, if you undertake a journey. Even the remotest mountain valleys are no longer safe from the railways and the modern hotel industry.
Even love and war had acquired an 'impersonal, brisk machine-like character', and' complaisance' had penetrated into every domain of social and private life. At this time, when, through the Hegelianism and socialism communicated by Lassalle and an intensive study of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, he was beginning to cross over philosophically to I(antianism and politically to National Liberalism, Volkelt, too, occupied the same theoretical ground and built on the same knowledge and experience as had entered into the pessimist moven1ent throught the work of Eduard von Hartmann. But he drew from it the opposite conclusion: what would effect a rescue from the 'insipid spiritlessness of our time' was, as Liebmann had already maintained, not world-denial through asceticislTI and withdrawal, but a struggle on behalf of the ethics of the categorical imperative: Am I wrong if I call on the spirit of !(ant in the face of such phenomena? ... And that lukewarmness constructed from nothing but consideration of opportunism, that indolent idleness, that indifferent shrug of the shoulders ... would an immersion in the I(antian spirit not spur them to a decisive partisanship, to a courageous confession of their colours? .. And if we regard our Stock Exchange heroes with their refined egoism, ... with their outlook that life exists only to have as much sensual pleasure as possible extracted from it: would it not purify this putrid atmosphere if that pleasuredenying rigorism, of which I(ant has too much, became the moral property of this circle? In the eyes of these cash-and-banknote people who have lost their souls in the fluctuating money market, ideality has long since been dismissed from the agenda, morality counts as something purely conventional created for social considerations: is there not here a need for something of the spirit of !(ant, who has freed the moral law from all empirical dependence and laid the foundation-stone of morality in the intelligible world?
It is in precisely this that the origination of a philosophical-weltanschaulich movement differs from that of a 'school' or a 'tendency': that the motivation which impels its adherents extends far beyond the internal domain of scholarship and science, and it is not so much sustained by theoretical foundations as it is related directly to the questions of the hour. Volkelt represented the problems' of the present' exactly as the pessimist movement did, and how strongly he identified himself with the arguments of this movement can be seen from a work almost forgotten today - Pessimism and its Opponents (Berlin 1873) - by Agnes Taubert, the wife of Eduard von Hartmann, in which Volkelt's early utterances on pessimism are for this reason criticized only very mildly. In an essay on 'The Development of Modern Pessimism' the latter had among other things stated that the 'contradiction between the needs of the people created by progress in education and the
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enhancement of self-awareness and the ... circumstances that oppose their satisfaction' were almost bound to result in pessin1ism, and that it 'ought not to complain at the depravity of the world', for it was itself' a product of the tremendous progress of our own age'. 'The causes of modern discontent are recognized and exposed so accurately here', Agnes Taubert comments on this after quoting Volkelt at length, it can only be regretted that Volkelt has not also enjoyed a similar success in consistently drawing the final conclusion, i.e. having admitted that the consequence of an ever more impetuous progress is pessimism he has not gone on to allow that this consequence must also irresistibly grow greater, but has instead prophesied that at some future time it will veer round into optimism. Once we admit that the continual enhancement of culture engenders and nourishes pessimist reflection ... we must also admit ... that the enhancement of mankind's self-awareness will grow and increase for as long as progress and cultural evolution do.
The more mankind's needs increased in this way the greater its discontent would grow, and this process would irresistibly continue, so that ever greater progress would engender ever new ' needs, pleasures, refinements and comforts', which, however, would be enjoyed only by a minority, while the great majority can and will ... attain for themselves only a small part of them. For only single individuals can walk upon the mountain heights of mankind, and the great optimistic error of the socialists is to believe they can alter this condition of things and usher in a state of bliss for every class of men ... It is in close connection with the whole materialist tendency of our time that the social question has assumed such dimensions dimensions which n1ust concern every thinking person the more in that the actual material condition of the working classes has never been such a good one as it is today.
A conservative' have-and-hold' social philosophy, too, could through the force of this propaganda extend to an ascetic world-denial, for it did after all make quite clear who was supposed not to have his needs satisfied. A passage in the same work even proposes an alliance of the cultivated and well-situated classes against the working-class movement which originates in the same spirit as the anti-socialist law passed five years later:
Never before has the danger contained in the optImIst doctrine appeared so undisguised: it is precisely now in our own days, when materialism and optimism are consciously preached in every street, that the social question threatens to become a universal conflagration unequalled in all history. If we continue along this path a general uprising of the elements now in ferment is unavoidable, unless the idea unconsciously at work in socialism, the pessimist recognition of the universal suffering of this world, does not even now awaken in time and make clear to the masses the foolishness of their strivings. That this guiding idea will sooner or later be apparent to all is beyond doubt, but whether it will penetrate the strata which threaten us in time to prevent the worst from happening will depend essentially on how so~~Q1~~e~s~~__
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movement succeeds in overcoming the resistance of its opponents, now so numerous and distributed in every camp, and becoming the common property of, in the first instance, the cultivated and well-situated classes.
The pessimist moven1ent worked with the prescriptions of a negative utopia and was essentially historical and social ideology in a posture of defence against the n1aterialism of every class - but in the first instance of the lower. The dialectic of progress it upheld was as a whole conservative in intention and united a critique of civilization and progress with an almost panic fear of the social contentions that had become more clearly visible with the advent of industrialization. It was, in all that resulted fron1 it, also a political rf7 eltanschauung, and it was presumably only because it presented itself as philosophy and asserted it was grounded in scientific reasoning that it was able to summon its academic critics to the field. Only thus is it comprehensible that in 1876 Windelband should have published the already quoted essay on 'Pessimism and Science' and failed to adopt any clear position with regard to the claims the pessimist movement advanced. He did not contest the pessimist outlook but only the claim that one could or should' transpose an individual disposition into a Weltanschauung' in which the judgment' the world is good' or 'the world is bad' lays claim to being objective truth and to universal recognition - for then we stand before a question of principle of the first rank. To demonstrate objectively means to demonstrate scientifically. But the difference between scientific and ordinary thinking consists above all in the exclusion of feeling from the ideational content. Scientific reflection is disinterested reflection, and the first, if negative, condition of scientific thinking consists in the careful exclusion of all influence of feeling and disposition from the point of departure and from the progress of thought.
In this sense science already implied a renunciation of Weltanschauung, and was no longer only a court of criticism of weltanschaulich and purportedly scientific theories, but per deftnitionem, their opposite: when pessimism advances' loudly and clearly the claim to have demonstrated philosophically that its judgment "The world is bad and it would be better if it did not exist" is a scientific one, Le. that it treats of the fundamental principles of things', it desires' to see the content of the pessimist disposition recognized as a truth independent of subjectivity and philosophically demonstrated'. That was precisely what the pessimist movement did desire, and it is for this reason highly interesting to see that Windelband - now, however, entering into its content - goes on: 'It is not hard to perceive the perilousness of this combination if one considers how easily the masses allow then1selves to be impressed by a subjective certainty that presents itself with sufficient self-assurance and then allow this subjective certainty to be transformed into an authority'. We can thus see Windelband demonstrate the perilousness of weltanschaulich thinking, but he demonstrates its unscientificality only through a definition of science which
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excludes on principle that' in the final conclusions it arrives at, in its definitive judgment as to the nature of things, scientific thought should return to one of those dispositions carefully excluded beforehand'. The Windelbandian circle contained in his definition of science corresponds to the pessimist weltanschaulich vicious circle proceeding from a 'disposition' via a scientific proof to a disposition now 'demonstrated' weltanschaulich-scientifically: pessimism was unable to claim for itself any scientific legitimacy because it appealed to the feelings, the disposition and the universal Weltanschauung - for these were to be carefully excluded from all scientific thinking. A few years later, in an essay on the' Foundations and Causes of Pessimism " Friedrich Paulsen, too, disputed its claim to be 'a demonstrated theory', but, in contrast to Windelband, Paulsen was not content with simple corrective instruction as to the nature of real scientificality but sought to understand in terms of social psychology the nature of the changes in the world of human society that had made the phenomenon of pessimism possible at all: he named the big city, modern commerce, the political parties and 'social' and 'moral differentiation' as sources of the insecurity of 'modern man': ... with the enhancement of culture the multiplicity and intensity of suffering increases, but so do those of pleasure. That they do so to a greater degree was the confident assertion of historical optin1ism: the progress of history ensured an increase in happiness. Pessimism opposed it with the equally confident assertion: it ensures an increase in suffering. I consider both assertions equally undemonstrable; both can be made to seem very plausible by rhetorical exhortations; in truth there can exist no procedure through which an inquiry could be instituted which would ascertain the facts of the matter.
The objections of Windelband and Paulsen, and to a less degree those of Volkelt, to the philosophy of history of pessin1ism were essentially an objection in principle to any attempt at a philosophy of history at all, for any disposition to comprehend history through notions of pleasure and displeasure, progress and decline, flew in the face of the I
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J(antian boundary-drawing signified first and foremost a repulsing of the claims of the 'return to science' demanded by Stahl and others to a Christian Weltanschauung, but at the same time also that materialism might lay claim to validity only in the don1ain of natural science and not in that of ethics. In this sense the' resurrection of philosophy' from the I 860s onwards could be seen as a regaining of one of its own domains of interest and one of its own methods, and thus it was only natural that truth-claims demonstrated other than scientifically - and that had to mean laying clain1 to weltanschaulich value - ran on principle counter to neo- J(antian thinking. Materialism, naturalism, pessimism, and only a little later so-called 'scientific socialism', offended against the conviction and historical experience fundamental to neo-Kantianism and its whole evolution that science and philosophy had to prohibit any kind of interference in their domain whether it came from state or church, from the individual sciences or 'modern' ideologies. The ideal of the immunity and purity of science was as such a product of the interference in and suppression of science that took place between the J(arlsbad resolutions and the' New Era', and in itself it was at first no more than the expression of a will to emancipation on the part of scientific thought and labour. To neoJ(antianism there then fell the historic role of standing guard as philosophy over this - by no means merely abstract immunity: its conception of science, which was erected upon the maintenance of a rigorous antithesis between knowledge and interest, cognition and affectivity, was, indeed, the opposition appropriate to the situation in which science in fact found itself in the middle of the nineteenth century. This fact was revealed with especial clarity in the relations between neoJ(antianism and the Catholic church, which, unlike the Protestant, was in the second half of the nineteenth century still waging an offensive war against a purely secular conception of philosophy and science. And here, too, it was Friedrich Albert Lange who, as vanguard of subsequent polemics against the dogma of papal infallibility, neo-scholasticism and the church's resistance to natural science, as early as 1865 published with his friend Weinkauff a huge pamphlet, consisting mainly of quotations, which appeared anonymously and bore the title The Papal Encyclical and the 80 Condemned Propositions Illustrated with Quotations from Men of Modern Times and Historical and Statistical Records (Duisburg). In a work totalling 240 pages the authors first reprint in full the encyclical Quanta cura issued the previous year by Pius IX (plus the' syllabus' of the eighty heretical doctrines, practices and institutions), and go on to expound, in a strongly polemical tone, the heresies, such as pantheism, naturalism and rationalism, denounced in it. The collection of quotations which follows from Tertullian to Stahl, from Luther to Schleiermacher, Feuerbach and Garibaldi - sets against the eighty so-called' errors of the age' an anthology of 'sayings' that to son1e extent offers a 'summa' against the
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Pope, the Catholic church and 'clericalisn1', while on the other hand the account of the errors of the age reads like a philosophical textbook or an explanation of the fundamentals of liberalism. Among the doctrines proscribed and condemned were: I pantheism, 2 deism, 3 the autonomy of reason, 4 the anthropomorphic interpretation of the Bible, 5 the assertion that the Christian revelation is incomplete, 6 faith in progress on the basis of a perfecting of human reason, 7 the historical critique of the Bible ... etc., etc. It is not surprising that a large part of the' sayings' brought forward in opposition were taken from the works of I
More precisely, from 22 January 1872, the day on which Falk succeeded the preceding education minister, von Muller - a man regarded by the liberals as 'the epitome of everything the friends of intellectual and cultural progress detest '. In the liberal view, Falk, one of the' most liberal education ministers' Germany had ever had, was replacing' the last champion of reaction' still in the cabinet. Germany's Catholics saw the matter quite differently, to be sure: they regarded' Kulturkampf Minister' Falk as the true originator of all the legal vexations imposed on Catholics which were to come to their first climax with the so-called' May Laws' of 1873 'concerning the training and appointrnent of clergy, the disciplinary powers of the church and the institution of a royal court of adjudication for church affairs, the limitation of the right of the church to impose punishment and correction, and resignation from the church (before a court)'. Even severer measures followed in the years that succeeded. The law concerning obligatory civil marriage ... was in the following year extended to the whole Reich. The condemnation of the May Laws by Pius IX in the encyclical Quod numquam (1875) aggravated an already precarious situation in that it provoked further hostile and penal regulations: cessation of all the state's financial contributions to the church, expulsion of members of religious orders and assemblages, restriction of the administrative
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powers of church parishes, protection of Old Catholics (all 1875). It must not be forgotten that most of the regulations also applied to the Evangelical church, which, however, offered less resistance. The organization of the Catholic church suffered extensive collapse: in 1878 eight bishoprics and well over a thousand parishes were without incumbents
we learn from an Encyclopaedia of Church History published by two compilers, one Catholic, one Protestant, which records the public course and consequences of these legal measures though, as historical research has subsequently come to recognize, they were due far more to Bismarck than they were to his minister. For Falk was not only the minister for the Kulturkampf, which is how he is chiefly remembered today, he was also the minister in charge of the reorganization of the educational system and the training of teachers as a wholly public undertaking, and he was not least the man to whom most of the early neo-I
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churches, which also curtailed the rights of the Protestant churches, and their increased collaboration with the liberal parties. There are historians who support the thesis that the entire Kulturkampf was a political sham manoeuvre on the part of Bismarck, just as the campaign against the social democrats had been, since on both occasions he had been well aware that no real danger to the state existed but had maintained that it did for the purpose of securing a monopoly of power. Whether political tactical deception or a genuine concern was at work, however, the outcome was that in the elections of 10 January 1874 the conservatives sustained heavy losses, while the Catholic centre, and above all the National Liberals, won very considerable gains. Bismarck was henceforth dependent on the latter in regard to all questions of finance, and the power of German Liberalism was during these few years preceding the conservative revival of 1878-9 greater than ever before. This fact was especially evident in the realm of education and religious policy, which traditionally stood at the centre of liberal interests and for which the Kulturkampf already begun now offered a favourable opportunity of realizing every demand at a single stroke and without any kind of compromise: separation of church and state, supervision of school and university by the state, state monopoly of legal jurisdiction, subordination of the clergy to the jurisdiction of the state, and the immunity of science and research from outside interference. These traditional planks of the liberal platform became political reality during the era of the Kulturkampf, and they did so throughout Germany: for the non-Prussian Lander had in essence adopted only Prussian military law, and the federalism that existed de jure had possessed no significance de facto when it came to the implementation of the educational and religious policies of Bismarck and Falk. 'Only now', in 1874, as J urgen Bona Meyer declared, was' comprehensive representation of all the sciences and full freedom of scientific inquiry attained equally at all the universities'. 'On the whole the sciences have never been so well or so comprehensively represented in the German universities as they were at this time', Meyer said in celebration of' his' education minister, to whom he was to remain loyal for many years after Falk had ceased to hold office. So far as the world of the university and higher education was concerned, in any event, we can well believe that the much-cited' turning of the liberals towards Bismarck' began, not with the successes that attended the unification of Germany, but much more probably with precisely the Bismarck-Falk Kultuspolitik. With the book Morality and Dogma by Alois Riehl the younger neoI<:'antians, too, began as early as 1872 to engage in public discussion of the questions surrounding the Kulturkampf - in this case, though, the work proceeded from Austria, where the conflict did not attain to the same degree of intensity as it did in Germany. Riehl- who, as a consequence of repeated attacks on him by the archbishop of Freiburg culminating in Catholics being
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prohibited fron1 attending his lectures, in 1882 became a Protestant - in this early work discussed the problem of so-called indifferentism: the question whether a sound morality could be guaranteed by a 'disposition' inherent in man himself regardless of his confession, or whether such a guarantee was possible only through adherence to the Catholic church. Riehl claimed for himself 'the viewpoint of science' - as opposed to the presun1ption of dogn1atism and ecclesiastical authority, which was repugnant to reason - and to him this meant first and foremost taking cognisance of the fact that the 'overwhelming majority of mankind' did not believe' in a personal God or the immortality of the soul': 'Christians and Buddhists, who are closest to one another in regard to morality, are furthest removed in regard to dogn1a: a factual and striking proof of how completely morality is independent of dogma'. Statistical and historical evidence, moreover, demonstrated beyond doubt that the demands of papal dogma were in no way to be accounted as belonging to the foundations of religion as such, and if the dogmatic conception of religion was scientifically untenable, even less tenable was the idea that the morality of man could be promoted or guaranteed by the dogn1a of a personal God or the immortality of the soul, let alone that these were its sole origin. Riehl described the notion of a personal God as anthropomorphic, and regarded the immortality of the soul as philosophically disposed of by the refutation of the notion of a soul-substance: 'The ego is not substance but a form of consciousness'. Thus far Riehl would have been only a heretic and have offended only against the papal encyclical of 1864: in what follows he, a Catholic, became an active Kulturkampfer: A morality founded on fear and hope is no morality. Do you really know nothing of the beauty and self-sufficient worth of the good deed which neither requires nor desires reward? Do you not know that indwelling court of justice of the consciousness of guilt ? Yet we are already accustomed to hearing ethical materialism [I] preached in the name of morality. Whoever fears the punishment and forbears to do the evil he would gladly have done - he has already done it! Whoever, with an eye on the reward of virtue, practises good, although he desired to accomplish evil - he, too, has already accomplished it! Thus the idea of reward and punishment falsifies the moral disposition, and recruits not friends of virtue but mercenaries. This form of recompense, however, is directly attached to the' ego', to the morality of egoism.... In matters of morality every good is authoritative.
Riehl proposes in opposition to the idea of the Last Judgment and salvation solely through the church, and his charge against ecclesiastical dogmatism is thus the same as that against materialism, egoism and utilitarianism: 'Man should be free, he should free himself from the bonds of his sensual inclinations ... For where it is a question of the good, of the objectively valuable, all consideration of the pleasurable must be set aside'. Consequently
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the idea of the punishment of sins belongs in the same domain of thought as 'ethical materialism', and only a pure morality can overcome this point of view: Dogma cannot be the author of morality ... However greatly your ecclesiastical opinions may differ from one another they do not prevent people of civilized nations from agreeing completely on the principles of morality. Far above all dissensions of faith there rises the universal, the truly catholic edifice of the realm of humanity. Clearly though these facts speak for morality's complete independence of dogma, it still remains the great merit of I(ant to have determined the correct relationship between them once and for all.
The connection with J
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anonymously every Privatdozent of the I 870S could set down on the list of his publications to be submitted to the ministry and be certain it would do him no harm. Indeed, even a tutor of the later I
3
EARLY NEO-KANTIAN THEORIZING BETWEEN APRIORISM AND EVOL UTIONISM
'Given the negative posture ... Christianity adopts towards civic duties ... we are permitted to ask whether the stage of moral evolution we have now arrived at has not ... already gone beyond positive Christian ethics, provided we do not introduce or interpret into them anything they do not contain', says Alois Riehl, a philosophy professor no less' contented with the state he lives in' than Liebmann, Cohen, Meyer, Paulsen and Volkelt were: The welfare of the whole can be attained, the moral organism arise or be maintained, only within the state. The more the modern state realizes and is permeated by the moral idea in its true, i.e. rational form, the more the significance and influence of the church as a rnoral institution must necessarily decline. We are reproached with ... deifying the state; but the divine, the rational, must be realized somewhere ... If they are to acquite influence over life ideas have to be secularized!
The 'divine and the rational' seemed in the first days of the new Reich to
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have come so palpably close it was believed the meaning and value of thousand-year-old traditions and institutions could be denied overnight. The pathos of progress at first associated primarily with the development of science and technology was now nourished by an extremely favourable prognosis with regard to political and social development as well, and the universal mania for modernization that arose as a consequence during the early 18 70S united virtually all the liberal and liberally inclined forces, among which neoI<:'antianism, too, must be counted. It undertook the role of the moderniser of philosophy; indeed, throughout the entire 'Kulturkampf era' liberalistll and neo-I<:'antianism pursued what were in principle the same goals: the defensive posture of the National Liberals and the Radical Party in the political sphere towards conservatism and the Catholic centre faction, towards 'clericalisn1' and 'pessimism', corresponded to the neo- I<:'antian assertion of the autonomy of philosophy in face of the new' ideologies' and of any attempt to restore the authority of the church. It was thus only with the advent of the liberal era, the extension of the universities and the ministry of Falk that the very variously motivated and in part even contradictory grounds for a 'return to 1<:'ant , expressed in the neoI<:'antian programmata became a recognized and productive programme of philosophical renewal, and only now could neo-I<:'antianism establish itself in the universities as a distinct philosophical movement. Until the end of the 1870S it grew with the growth of German liberalisn1 but it is a gross distortion of this fact to assert that it means that, as it were on the instructions of their class, the neo-I<:'antians took up arms against 'the embattled German and international proletariat'. Bismarck may for a time have stood in need of the votes of the liberals in the matter of finance bills, but neither he nor anyone else in the governn1ent at any time required for the maintenance of their power the support of neo-I<:'antian Privatdozenten or young professors. Neo-I<:'antian philosophizing and liberal political thought constituted an indissoluble unity, but to ascribe to these philosophy professors of the Second Reich an influence and social significance that would render them in part responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich is completely to ignore the historical circumstances under which the early neo-I<:'antian n10vement disseminated and established itself. And it is in fact easy to extract from selected neo-I<'antian texts quotations calculated to show that this movement formulated in philosophical terms what' the bourgeoisie' thought anyway: 'Let yourself go day by day and you will soon be a slave of your desires; overcome them today and tomorrow and you will become master of yourself', Liebmann, for example, says in his AnalYsis of Reality: his first' chief work', which is, moreover, so greatly indebted to the 'reality' of the Zeitgeist, and resolves so many contemporary questions of a more or less philosophical kind so completely 'uncritically' and unmethodically, that doubt may arise as to Liebmann's claim
The rapid dissemination of neo- Kantianism to be a 'criticalist' at all. But the specific contribution of neo-I
Thus. did philosophy not only determine what was to count as scientific in individual instances: in Liebmann's eyes there existed an identity between science and philosophy on the one hand and apriorism on the other. Only philosophy pursued in his or in the neo-I
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history and against demands for a change in society supposedly following from the findings of science. And it is precisely in this that the congruity of the competing currents and tendencies is made manifest, for it is ~ot only this conception of science that is essentially one of limitation and exclusion: the neo-I<'antian programma was itself in this sense of a negative tendency: it was opposed to pure thought, system-philosophy, metaphysics, anthropologism, empiricism, positivism, materialism and psychologism. Repulsion of all these tendencies, or repulsion of the claims advanced by these tendencies and their products, is due first and foremost to the 'formality' of the neo- I<'antian conception of science. That Cohen, for example, should have attempted to refound a 'positive' theory of apriority in no way contradicts all this, for here, too, the impelling motivation had been a 'critique of experience' - experience in the sense established in empiricism, materialism and positivism. Indeed, even the neoI<'antian moral demands, the neo-1<'antian deification of the existing or hopedfor constitutional state, its propaganda on behalf of fulfilment of duty, selfsacrifice and subordination, in no instance contradicts a strict separation of science and ideal, and therewith the principle of neo-I<.antian science formulated above: the principle that conclusions practically relevant to 'life', to society or to the future cannot be drawn from the knowledge engendered by science, for moral demands, whether formal or substantive, were never erected on n1aterial knowledge but always on intelligible character, on a sensation of freedom, on conscience and - in the case of Cohen on faith in reason. With regard to its historical function and provenance this appeal to apriority certainly possessed a primarily negative, defensive meaning, but as its establishn1ent got under way this provenance became less and less evident, for in the rneantime neo-I<'antianism had, of course, already prevailed against the other tendencies. If in the matter of apriority the neo-I<'antians at first appealed almost exclusively to the Critique of Pure Reason, or at least believed they had verified its conclusions scientifically through inquiries in the realn1 of sensepsychology, in the course of the 18 70S neo- I<'antianism succeeded in establishing itself on a more or less independent basis and therewith bestowed on apriorism a new meaning vvhich either falsely proclaimed itself I<'antian or 'went beyond I<'ant' and' corrected' him. When in 1871 Cohen published his new demonstration of I<'ant's theory of apriority there was as yet no knowing in how many different ways the existence of such an apriority would be demonstrated in the following years. That such forms existed admitted of no doubt within the neo- I<'antian camp. But, as in the epoch of system-thinking, in the matter of apriorism, too, there arose an anarchy of opinions - a circumstance which n1ay lead us to suppose that here, too, the will and intention theoretically to possess an a priori by far exceeded the ability to
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demonstrate it with at any rate sufficient plausibility for all those engaged in pursuing this objective to go along with anyone of these demonstrations. This faet'oZan be discerned above all in the reviews the neo-Kantians devoted to one another's works. Thus Cohen, for example, in 1873 faced from Vol kelt the inquiry' whence then ... the diversity of perceptions in space and time, the a posteriori constituent of experience, is supposed to originate?' Cohen's 'interpreting away of the" thing-in-itself'" had severed any kind of relation between knowledge and anything objective. Cohen, just as little as Fichte, succeeded in deriving the material from the subject: 'How, then, does it happen that the a priori forms of the subject are filled with this rich, variegated empirical content? Cohen has broken the bridge that leads from this diversity to the subject, and likewise that which leads to the object; it is thus a pure miracle that any experience occurs, that the senses do not gaze out into emptiness, and that the understanding has not long since fallen asleep for lack of occupation'. Volkelt pays no heed at all either to the reformulation of the subject-object problem Cohen laid claim to which refused to concede the existence of an objectivity beyond what was still also subjective, or to the meaning of the formula the' construction of experience '. 'Strange' and' artificial' (Vaihinger) was certainly how the principal features of Cohen's theory already appeared to Volkelt, who later on, in his interpretation of Kant's Epistemology (1879), also mistook the true meaning of the thesis of the subjectivity of the forms of perception, which Cohen had conceived of as exclusive. Where in the aftermath of the Fischer-Trendelenburg contention Cohen had separated the question of objectivity from the problem of the 'thing-in-itself', a few years later Volkelt quite uncomprehendingly again demanded forms that would nonetheless possibly adhere to this 'thing-in-itself'. What he desired was to distinguish the metaphysical question whether and to what extent forms of being could possess a correspondence to forms of knowledge from the epistemological question whether a knowledge of these forms of being was possible or thinkable, and he thus maintained that Cohen had misunderstood Kant - just as Kant himself had 'thoroughly confounded' these two quite separate issues. For Volkelt believed he had 'penetrated much deeper' into Kant's thinking 'than he [Kant!] himself consciously succeeded in doing'. And, beyond this, so far as the' apriority problem' as such was concerned the starting-point must be 'that the connecting together of mental ideas necessary to thought is brought about only through certain unifying concepts immanent in the mind precedent to all experience' and that we could' become aware of these a priori concepts only through inner experience'. Volkelt, too, was, after all, a pupil of Fischer, and thus he, too, in the end takes refuge in a mere feeling of evidentiality that is supposed to guarantee epistemological and moral certainty.
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A different kind of misinterpretation of Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience was manifested by Riehl in a surprisingly favourable review of the book in 1872. This review, which consists almost exclusively of paraphrases and quotations, is of slight value in itself, but it does contain an interesting hint that Riehl himself shortly intends to treat in greater detail the questions addressed by Cohen - a hint which, either because the review is quite unknown or because Riehl and Cohen have been regarded simply as antipodes, has hitherto been completely ignored in the literature of neo-Kantianism and in that devoted to Riehl. This hint derives its great interest from the fact, so far unnoticed, that, although in his first more detailed interpretation of Kant in Uber Begriffund Form der Philosophie (1872) Riehl does not mention the name Cohen, he is in fact engaged in a critical debate with him throughout, and, indeed, even drafted his interpretation as a counter-scheme to Cohen and thereby in his own fashion rendered the a priori concept' topical'. What happened was in brief as follows: in his review Riehl firstly cited Cohen to the effect that Kant had everywhere comprehended 'the forms as psychic processes' and that Herbart had been quite wrong to attribute to Kant a theory of faculties, so that the possibility of a synthesis of Herbartianism and new Kantianism was open to Riehl, too: for Riehl understood Cohen's statement that 'this unity of apperception, this "faculty", ... is only a pure transcendental form' which could 'in an act of empirical cognition become effective only upon what is given' as saying that Kant had 'everywhere ... resolved forms and powers into actions " which was valid' for the understanding in general, just as it was for the concepts of the understanding': 'These are to him [Kant] functions of judgment, the category is to him in general the synthesis of multifarious impressions, thus an act of unification, the understanding, is in this view defined as the unity of apperception with reference to the synthesis of the imagination. ' The categories were no longer to be forms; pure, conceptually fixable forms in this sense could no longer exist at all, because the concept of apriority had now experienced a tremendous expansion: all continuous acts of apperception which were performed in the sciences and which, because they were constituents of science, to this extent indicated no more than an 'original psychic process', were now also to be accounted a priori: 'The a priori in the sense established by the critical philosophy is a discovery of great consequence. Between the alternatives of innate or deriving from experience Kant discovered a third alternative: acquired through the functions of the psyche'. Forms and concepts as such were always to be regarded as 'acquired', learned, and as the end-products of knowledge and science; on the other hand, however, what was 'acquired through mental activity' could nonetheless - insofar as it was regarded as product - on one hand possess an 'epistemological apriority' and on the other thereby rest on a - now in fact innate - power, on an innate mechanism of the
The rapid dissemination of neo-Kantianism mind: 'The mind's a priori knowledge is not innate: its innate processes are a priori.' For, after all, IZant had not asked' how we attained to the forms and concepts which in regard to their position in developed empirical knowledge are a priori by virtue of constituting its formal preconditions': he 'starts, rather, from the fact of a ... universal and necessary empirical knowledge in order to explain through logical reflection on the fact of this knowledge how it is possible'. And thus to Riehl it was the empirical sciences that were to yield what was a priori, and, consistently enough, the science that had to receive this store - philosophy - therewith became theory of science. That the a priori forms were to be conceived of not as forms but as mental processes Riehl took over from Cohen in the firm conviction that this interpretation of the aprioric derived from the Critique of Pure Reason. But his conception of the aprioric then diverged violently from Cohen's in that, whereas the latter established the apriorica first and foremost strictly on those of mathematics and mathematical natural science and conceived of them as preconditions for the' possibilization' of science, Riehl could in no way assign to such apriorica any enclosed domain but - a heritage of Herbartianism regarded them as products of reflection to be gained from all and every empirical science. The difference between these two conceptions of theory of science consists firstlY in the compass of those sciences that can be accounted an organum for the exploration of the aprioric, and secondlY above all in the fact that the concept of experience is understood in two completely different ways: the concept of experience in the exclusive sense in which Cohen understands it, that only universal and necessary connections can also count as experience, namely as scientific experience, is confronted by Riehl's quite unprejudiced acquaintanceship with a concept of empirical science which in the last resort knows no limitation through any normative principle that could be formulated beforehand. This is why Riehl asks in this connection - and, although he does not mention Cohen by name, it is quite clear of whom he asks it: ' ... is experience supposed not to furnish universal and necessary knowledge such as a priori knowledge seeks to be? These scruples are not IZantian. On the contrary: IZant even starts from the facts of a universal and necessary knowledge in order through logical reflection on the fact of this knowledge to explain how it is possible. He expressly denies the predicate of universality and necessity only to mere perception ... ' Which means not only that' critique of pure reason' is anything but' critique of experience', but also that, following Trendelenburg, theory of science had to clarify the logical presuppositions of all actually existing sciences without making of one particular science the standard for all the others. 'Transcendental inquiry' means to Riehl nothing other than posing the philosophical question as to the preconditions and presuppositions of cognition preconditions and presuppositions which are for their part
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grounded in 'unity of consciousness': 'The forms of thought and perception are originally combined through unity of consciousness', and this' formally unifying function of consciousness' is 'the foundation of all conceptual and sensual synthesis'. As ' the overarching form of all inner and outer experience, ... the bearer of all objects as phenomena', it effects a 'universal unity and systematism of experience', and only this is truly an a priori presupposition of knowledge and science, insofar as this is intended to mean that as pure concept it must form the basis of them. 'The individual laws of nature', on the other hand, 'the concrete circumstances and shapes in which they appear, cannot be understood from the logical and sensual form of consciousness. They comprise the purely empirical material of cognition presented to the consciousness, the content of knowledge. ' If in Cohen it was only the aprioric which produces the object at all, Riehl correctly understood by it a participation of consciousness in the act of cognition. But he, too, established the aprioric in a fashion quite different from I
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233
consciousness', Riehl maintains; and Cohen, too, sees in self-consciousness, or in the ego, the authority that guarantees unity of reason: ' As space is the form for external perception, and time the form for internal perception, so transcendental apperception is the form for the categories'. F ron1 this 'unity of reason', as 'un-IZantian' as it is uncriticalist, which reduced sensuality, understanding and reason to a unitary synthesis, Riehl had then even gone on to conceive a unitary scientific Weltanschauung, and from these theorems Cohen intended to found a new system of philosophy. Here the criticalist separation of understanding from reason, science from Weltanschauung, had been annulled, as it had already been through Fichte's hypostatization of the IZantian theory of the synthesizing function of the knowing subject: in the case of Cohen, in that the IZantian forms of perception and categories were reinterpreted into ideas and both treated, as practical ideas also were, as ideas in general which always figured as the' foundations' of science - in the case of Riehl, on the contrary, only episodically, and then only as long as he remained a Herbartian and considered it possible to found ethics on a realist basis. On the other hand, the theorem of apperception also pointed in an epistemological-psychological direction, in that, in continuation of Herbartian psychology, the concept of apperception was now understood in the sense of theory of learning: in ethno-psychology, which stressed its phylogenetic significance in the sense of a pedagogy that stressed its ontogenetic significance. The meaning of this concept is elucidated, for instance, by the still 'precriticalist' Cohen in his Poetic Imagination and the Mechanism of Consciousness of 1869 through the example of the process of the cognition of a table as a , recognition' of it: The old, already present idea had accumulated from the same elements which we now [on seeing another table] receive anew. In that the new stimuli are now consolidated into an idea in the unity of consciousness, they blend with the idea already present. This old idea is the a priori element, i.e. the psychologically older which, working together with the earlier, produces the new idea. This act of idea-construction we call apperception.
Cohen, too, expressly derives this conception from Lazarus, and thus from the Herbartian tradition, which, as the still un-I(antian employment of the concepts a priori and a posteriori indicates, he was to exchange for an attachment to IZant's philosophy only in the following year, without, thereby breaking faith with the Herbartian view of apperception as a process. The early neo-IZantian employment of the concept of apperception could in Cohen's case be combined with a Platonic conception of the recollection of ideas, it could depict the unity of the ego or of self-consciousness as a Fichtean concept embracing sensuality, understanding and reason, but it could also, as a dynamic further development of Herbart's theory of learning through the
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ethno-psychology of Steinthal and Lazarus, bear the sense of a theory of historical evolution. Because Darwin, Taine and Spencer were starting to exert influence also in Germany, and at the same time the beginnings of a German theory of evolution were now attracting greater attention, at first only the Herbartian theory of apperception but in the end even that of modern ethnopsychological evolutionism were credited to the I<'antian: 'Just as the Darwinian theory of the origin of species is as much confirmed by the evolution of the embryo as it serves to clarify it, so the ethno-psychological history of the evolution of thought is as much illuminated by individual psychology as it serves to verify and enrich it', Riehl was already writing in 1872, and it is thus easy to understand why a pure transcendental apriority of certain ideas and fixed forms came to seem 'demanded'. They could lay claim only to a character of an outcome of the history of thought and the sciences: , All theoretical activity is apperception', even Paulsen says in this sense, and, as though it were a matter of course, he, too, continues with a Herbartian explanation of this concept: 'i.e. is a determining and forming of the newly arrived ideational elements by the ideational groupings already possessed and formed', for only through a dynamic comprehension of the concept of apperception could evolutionary thought and I<'antian apriorism be reconciled with each other. In this sense the progressive discovery of ever' new forms' and the philosophy of apriority - I<.ant and Darwin - no longer constituted a true antithesis but now complemented each other in the idea that all forms - species just as much as logical or ethical norms - are always also to be regarded as an outcome of the entire evolution, so that evolution and present being appeared only as two different states of the same thing. That the boundaries between apriority-thinking and evolutionist-thinking were not always cleanly drawn, that interpretations of I<'antian theorems exhibiting this tendency could at the same time, and in some instances quite independently of one another, also achieve a synthesis between them, is to be attributed to the wholly experimental character of early neo-I<.antianism, for the objective was everywhere to establish a connection between I<.ant and the 'present day'. The reinterpretation of I<.antian theorems on the part of the various evolutionary tendencies is in itself evidence of this absolute predominance of topical contemporary interests; and how far this could go is demonstrated in the particularly instructive example offered by the development of the young Windelband, for he succeeded in achieving this same synthesis on a quite different basis. Cohen came to Herbartian psychology through his Berlin tutor, Lazarus, Riehl through his Vienna tutor, Zimmermann: that a philosophical training acquired through Lotze and Fischer could without any difficulty be combined with Herbartian psychology was already demonstrated by Windelband's Habilitationsschrift of 1873, 'On the Certainty of I<.nowledge " of which Ulrici,
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who reviewed it, felt entitled to say that it proposed not only to 'develop further' Herbartian psychology but even to introduce the concept of certainty into Herbartian philosophy. And this was an altogether understandable error, for Windelband, who in this treatise employed the concept in the everyday sense of the word, declared, wholly in accordance with Herbartian theory of learning, that, because the faculty of apperception was already present in the psyche as the faculty of combining mental ideas, certainty was' originally not a product of judgments but a state of the knowing psyche': ' ... the psyche ceases to doubt its cognitions' when it has' removed the contradictions from them, and discovered the possibility of a unifying connecting together of them'. Freedom from contradiction and 'unifying connecting together' proffer that certainty which is at the same time a primary precondition of any objective truth in thinking: 'For if the nature of the thinking process demands that, inasmuch as the psyche seeks unity of n1ental ideas, it has to strive after objective knowledge, then it follows that for the psychological state of certainty to exist the psyche has to regard the fulfilment of its striving for unity as having been accomplished by objective knowledge.' The 'psychological state of certainty' it is clear that at this time no distinction was made between , psychic' and 'psychological' - guaranteed the 'sensation' of truth, but not truth itself. How this at first merely subjective certainty could become an objective one can be explained only by means of a second precondition: through the necessity of thought. To effect this explanation Windelband distinguishes between the Herbartian necessity of the' psychic mechanism' that produces subjective certainty and the logical and ethical necessity within the discussion and elucidation of which objective certainty has to be explained. The' laws of nature' are, however, to be understood not as a kind of natural necessity and natural law of thought - not, that is to say, psychologically - but rather as maxims (in the same sense as ethical laws are maxims), for the laws of logic are' not laws which thinking is obliged to obey but laws which thinking has to obey if ... thought wants to become cognition'. Necessity and freedom are on different sides and the philosophical sciences of logic and ethics assert their autonomy by deriving their principles, laws and premises quite independently of (natural) necessity. Laws are thus replaced by norms, and only in respect of these can there be any question of a necessity, and then only in the sense of a necessary validity. This work, too, was discussed by Riehl in the Philosophische MonatsheJte as favourably as he had previously discussed Cohen's Kant's Theory of Experience. Within the space of two years the' realist criticalist' Riehl reviewed firstly the basic text of the so-called 'logicist tendency', then this book by the 'valuetheoretic criticalist' Windelband, in a surprisingly favourable way which is made comprehensible only by the fact that the various tendencies were as yet
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imperfectly differentiated. If he had received from Cohen a decisive stimulus towards interpreting the a priori forms as 'psychic processes' grounded ultimately in the unity of self-consciousness, Windelband's theorem of a 'psychological drive to the unity of the operation of mental ideas' now also signified to him exactly the same thing as 'I
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of this evidentiality, it ceases to be the naIve assertion it is with Fischer and Liebmann but, as the problem of inter-subjectivity, becomes a philosophical theme in its own right. And it does so in two respects, for in the first instance it opens the way to a 'value-theoretical criticalism' which - as in fact happened later on - rejects all inquiry after the origination of such norms as 'unphilosophical '. But at the same time it nonetheless also presents the possibility of investigating the origination and evolution of such supposedly inter-subjective norms, and it was precisely this possibility that was perceived by ethno-:psychology. If we forget for a moment everything ever said or written about Windelband, if we ignore the vehemence with which he later again and again attacked psychologism, relativism, positivism and every attempt to explain the validity of norms in terms of social or evolutionary psychology, and approach the sources without preconceptions, we discover in the Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft an essay by the youthful Windelband on 'Erkenntnislehre from the Viewpoint of EthnoPsychology' whose content is quite unknown and which does not even figure in Windelband's bibliography. It is an essay in which he presents himself as a relativist and pragmatist of the first order who had been the first to make comprehensible the connection between ethno-psychology and 'valuetheoretical criticalism'. For here it appears that even the subsequent formality of philosophy as an evaluative science was originally due to the materiality of ethno-psychology or to certain 'fundamental insights into the nature of negation' which had been provided by Sigwart's logic. And what is involved, it seems, are insights' which from the viewpoint of conventional logic may well appear especially heretical' but are nonetheless of extraordinary in1portance for the whole understanding of the nature of logic. Windelband summarizes Sigwart: From the very first he opposes the dogma that positive and negative judgment has the same origination, and convincingly demonstrates that, since the object of negation is always an accomplished or attempted positive judgment, and every negation thus presupposes at least an attempt at affirmation and therewith the possibility of a false affirmation, negation is by its very nature a judgment of a judgment or of an attempt at a judgment, of a hypothesis. Thus one can never express exhaustively everything of a subject that has necessarily to be denied: but every negative judgment has its psychological instigation in a positive judgment or in a hypothetical attempt at one, in question and inquiry.
If a negation is by its nature a judgment of an attempt at a judgment, then every affirmation is the outcome of hypothetical thinking and assaying. Here, too, the categories are again conceived of as involving a process, for, just as much as in the case of form, the 'true' is now the present outcome of a becoming regarded with a view to its historical reconstruction. Windelband owed this insight to Sigwart, whose logic had set itself the task of
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism exhibiting only those forms ... by means of which from the given state of our imaginative life we can attain to correct thinking ... The more evidently right such a treatment of the problem of logic was, however, the more the idea obtruded itself that the laws of logic ... must also stand in the closest connection with the historical evolution of psychological form, and that at every stage of this evolution logical lawgiving must prove to be an outcome of the assets of imaginative life present at this stage and of the purpose for which knowledge was at each stage intended.
What the relativist Windelband formulated in the Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie is nothing less than a complete historicism of the derivation of the categories, a historicislTI that does not even respect the law of contradiction or the law of causation but undertakes to explain these, too, in terms of' ethnopsychology' : at least he demands that' even those to whom the ethical and the logical law count as eternal, unchanging, not subject to evolution, must concede that mankind moves towards their apprehension, towards a conscious comprehension of them, in a gradually ascending and advancing evolution. Natural man has no immediate awareness of his moral duty or of how to order his thinking correctly: it is the discipline of history that has trained the peoples in both of them ... ' In his 'involvement with the history of the methods of science' Windelband had himself' long directed his attention to how greatly, in the case of indivdiual men and peoples, the application of forms also changes through objects of thought suggested by any kind of interest, and how the history of methods thus represents, in ascending and every expanding evolution, an adaptation of human thinking to the object of knowledge presented to it ... ' At an earlier stage, when truth was not yet sought for its own sake, adaptation of the consciousness to historical being occurred 'first and foremost only to the individual, preferably practical tasks of life': 'and thus by adaptation to the individual tasks of thought individual norms of correct thinking were bound gradually to evolve in the natural course of evolution ... ' If we, ... who stand on the shoulders of this entire evolution, ... do not need to construct laws of logic but only to discover them in ourselves, it means we have as a heredity the achievements of this evolution as something finished and complete, and, in that our language and our education place us effortlessly at the standpoint attained by the labour of generations, in this respect, too, we enter into the inheritance of the entire past. And through this conception such a hypothesis would explain something before which logic would otherwise stand as before something unfathomable - namely the' givenness' of logical law-giving ... How are we now to form any kind of idea of this 'givenness', this 'discovery in ourselves'? If we decline to take it for an incomprehensible revelation the easiest thing n1ay be to explain these logical forms in just the same way as we do the entire assets of imagination which we have within us but have not produced ourselves but received as heredity through language, through that which has been called in these pages 'condensation of thought in history': its 'givenness' would accordingly be a hereditary function which on a given occasion is activated and therewith becomes an object of our reflection. On these presuppositions
The rapid dissemination of neo- Kantianism the dignity of the laws of logic as absolutely valid norms would also be wholly preserved.
'Everything man is and has he has achieved gradually through labour supported by luck', Steinthal ratifyingly summarized Windelband's fundamental idea in a 'Postscript' to his article, and spoke of the' delusion' that 'logical forms of thought are an organic production in the proper sense of the word, the science of logic is the physics of thought, and language is logic become corporeal through organic evolution'. The' a priori categories' were 'products of heredity' - only not in the sense of physical heredity, as the Darwinist literature maintained: what was to be thought of was a 'spiritual heredity through which language, aesthetic forms, science and moral ideas are created, transmitted and evolved in us': 'Forms (and these are the logical just as much as the moral and aesthetic ideas) are propagated with the content and spread with the races of mankind of the different ages. Content is more changeable than form; much of the content vanishes and new content replaces it. ' Apriorism and the evolutionary thinking first inaugurated by the Herbartians did not by any n1eans yet represent an antithesis to most of the adherents of the still youthful neo-I(antian movement during the I 870s: what appeared before them was an extremely broad palette of possibilities for the contemporary realization of I(ant's theories of apperception and apriority extending from Liebmann, who maintained that apriority was a product of pure sensation of evidentiality, through Cohen, who also translated the forms into 'psychic acts' but nonetheless also upheld the idea of original pure concepts, to a partially psychological, empiricist or even pragmatic-historical (ethno-psychological) derivation and foundation of the categories which a majority of the members of the movement certainly regarded as possible. Of SteinthaFs 'theory of apperception', at any rate, which Benno Erdmann was to call the' most substantial achievement in the domain of pure psychology', it can be said not only 'that [its] influence extended to by far the greater majority of younger authors who discussed questions of psychology' but it was this theory that for a time made possible a symbiosis between modern evolutionary thinking and I(antianist apriorism.
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The phase of differentiation between neo-I<'antianism and positivism (1875-1881)
I
KANTIAN PHILOLOGY AND KANTIAN HISTORY
With the founding of the Vierteljahrsschrift jur wissenschajtliche Philosophie in 1877 the animated domain of neo-I(antian publications entered the realm of system and order: before that, however, there appeared during 1875 and 1876 a series of writings discoursing on I(antian philosophy partly in connection with its immediate pre-history, partly in the context of biography. The evolutionary thinking current at the time was not the least of the factors which encouraged a great interest in how I(ant's philosophy had originated, and this interest was enhanced by the expectation that investigation of its origins would disclose in what relationship I(ant had stood to the metaphysical tradition and to English empiricism. The oscillation of early neo-I(antianism between empiricism or positivism and apriorism was to be overcome by historical means, even though the aim of bringing I(ant into the contemporary world still greatly exceeded any effort at historical accuracy: 'After a series of writings had independently worked over the I(antian system with the aim of making propaganda for it', Vaihinger remarked in 188 I, 'a few years ago exact philological method gradually began to come into its rights. But it would be a serious error to believe that the latter method did not also serve the systematic development of philosophy. ' Cohen was by no means the only one to proceed on the. principle that historiography had to be subordinated to systematism: almost all the discussions of I(ant's evolution that now appeared display this tendency. But Cohen was a pioneer in this regard, and he was above all the one who also championed this principle aggressivelY. Between his two large-scale expositions of I(ant of 1871 and 1877 there appeared in 1873 a short book on Systematic Concepts in Kant's Pre-Critical Writings in their Relation to Critical Idealism, which in four sections pursued the question to what extent the basic conceptions analytic and synthetic, the relation of the principle of sufficient reason to causality,I(ant's disposal of psychology and ethics and the concepts of space and time, were already discernible in the pre-critical writings. In this inquiry he presupposed not only an agreement on principle with his specific systematic interest in the history of philosophy whose whole and sole objective was the
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'profit that might be gained for pure philosophizing', he believed he also had to presuppose 'the closest acquaintanceship with the full terminological significance of the principal I
The dissemination oj neo-Kantianism distinguished from the first by a greater distancing of the historian from his subject, thus bringing it a lot closer to true historiography. Paulsen's book - originally intended as an entry for the Berlin Academy of Sciences prize competition for an essay on 'The Influence of English Philosophy on German' - included the empiricist tradition in its interpretation of Kant's early writing to a far greater extent than had previously been done, which inclusion 'suddenly' disclosed to Paulsen the' meaning' of Kant's philosophy: I first read all of Hume, ... then all of Kant ... And then the meaning of the Kantian philosophy dawned on me. I saw the German thinker, starting from Wolffian metaphysics, come step by step closer to the standpoint of Hume: ... I then saw, as though with a sudden revelation, the change come about in the dissertation of 1770: it is as though a glance into an abyss that had suddenly opened up before him, the abyss of scepticism, had brought him round to a single recognition: that the a priori elements of perception and of thought ... make a priori knowledge possible, the former knowledge of the mundus sensibilis, the latter that of the mundus intelligibilis. And this is now the enduring front of Kantian philosophy: the rescue of rational knowledge, of philosophy as knowledge a priori, from the all-devouring scepticism of Hume. Now I read the Critique and the scales fell from my eyes. Compared with the expositions offered by Fischer and Cohen this had at any rate the virtue of evolving the genesis of the Kantian a priori and the problem of the 'thing-in-itself' with historical accuracy out of the antithesis of empiricism and rationalism which existed in the eighteenth century, and not out of that of idealism and materialism, which was in this form known only to the nineteenth. And a further characteristic of this second phase of involvement with Kant can also be perceived: that it no longer interpreted the history of philosophy so directly from the point of view of a we/tanschaufich front against materialism, but was already increasingly interpreting it in the interests of its own system. In a purely epistemological sense Kant's evolution then seemed to be one that led him away from Wolffian rationalism because in the 1760s he had clearly grasped the 'ambiguity' of rationalist proofs: 'Proof is not the same thing as causation, and therefore real causation cannot be known from logical proof'. The metaphysical validity of the categories thus became at least questionable, and the transference of the categories of metaphysics to categories of mere cognition had been purely a question of time. Nonetheless Kant did not straightway go on to embrace a positiveempirical epistemology consistent with this, for' the essential outcome of the writings of the I 760s is a negative one: no judgments as to facts can come from pure reason. This is the dogma of empiricism insofar as it constitutes a polemical opposition to rationalist epistemology. ' This conclusion had already been arrived at by Kuno Fischer, but neither could Kant's change of direction be traced back to a by now whole-hearted acceptance of Hume, nor might it be asserted that before the dissertation of 1770 Kant had evidenced a positive attitude towards empricisim, let alone an affinity with Humean scepticism:
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'His [IZant's] theory of knowledge consisted essentially in a critIque and negation of the presuppositions of rationalism.' What role Fischer's earlier tendency towards scepticism or Paulsen's tendency towards rationalism played in this controversy must remain as problematic as is the narrowing of the whole IZantian project to a consideration of purely epistemological questions in which theory of knowledge for its part no longer even designated the possible objectives or limitations of knowledge. It was not least on account of this diminished perspective that Paulsen described IZant's development from the I760s onwards by saying that what now took place was a retreat from the standpoint of empiricism he had just gained, which led on to scepticism, back to knowledge a priori: The outcome of this, which, after the treatise of 1770 had determined the new point of view in the most general sense, received its definitive formulation in the critique of pure reason, can be expressed in the formula: knowledge of objects is possible from pure reason, but only of objects as they are presented to us, i.e. of phenomena. We call this view idealist or formal rationalism. He [I(ant] therewith placed himself in opposition to both phases of his earlier development, to realist rationalism as much as to empiricism ... First and foremost, however, the new standpoint is set over against the empiricism as a critique of which it had been acquired. The positive part of the critique of pure reason, that is to say the new epistemological system, is directed against Hume.
If Cohen understood the critique of pure reason as a 'critique of experience' and saw in it a successful attempt to rescue apriorism from the scepticism of Hume, Paulsen modified this view in the sense of ascribing to IZant a criticalidealist rationalism refined and purified by scepticism. His interpretation of IZant reduced the objectives of the 'critique of reason' to 'critique of knowledge' in a fashion typical of early neo-IZantianism as a whole, but it nonetheless possessed the advantage over Cohen's 'constructive' interpretation of seeking to reconstruct IZant's position historically and systematically, whereas Cohen took it for granted that his own exposition of the theory of apriority offered only a new and improved representation of IZant's: Cohen's book was a productive appropriation, Paulsen's a secondary exposition consciously intended to serve as a means of historical critique. Written at the same time as this but not published until a year later was the first volume - 'The History and Method of Philosophical Criticalism' - of Alois Riehl's chief work, Philosophical Criticalism and its Meaning for Positive Science (Leipzig). 'Riehl's book signifies an essential advance in the study of IZant' was Benno Erdmann's correct assessment, and we can also agree with the grounds for making it he gave in his review of the work: Although it too gives prominence to the systematic requirement to orientate oneself as regards the philosophical problems of the present day by means of the theories of critical idealism, more adequate attention than heretofore is nonetheless paid to the demand for a critical agreement as to the actual content of these theories - a demand that has become ever more pressing - through a detailed and very conscientiously
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executed history of their evolution. For the valuable contributions to this question recently proffered by Cohen and Paulsen touch more closely only on one side of it: IZant's subjective evolution. Riehl is the first also to undertake a more detailed evaluation of the objective impulses that lie dispersed in the dogmas of German rationalism and English empiricism, as well as in the theorems of the German eclectic Enlightenment philosophy of that time.
Riehl's atternpt to place I
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these concepts arose, their applicability and range, so that the concepts in themselves are subjected to critical appraisal without regard to the manner of their origin. The first, primarily psychological method predominates with the English philosophers, the second, more metaphysical tendency determines the procedure of I
Diihring's 'exposition of criticalism' would eventuate in a re-evaluation of Hume which would also be of great consequence for neo-I<.antianism: Duhring conceives of I-Iume not as a sceptic but as a critical philosopher, because it is not a fortuitous designation but the goal of his philosophizing, \vhich in contrast to true scepticism was the liberation of the understanding and not its impoverishment, that determines its significance. Hume's theory of causality, whose basis the author explains in the most convincing way and whose consequences he demonstrates, has in its purely critical aspect remained uncontradicted.
Riehl's own exposition was structured and carried out in precisely the way in which he had summarized Diihring's: he discovers the 'historical' preconditions of the Critique of Pure Reason in Locke and Hume, and then goes on to explain I<'ant's further development as an effect of the influence of Lambert and Tetens, and not, as Paulsen did, of that of a turning towards rationalism. The second part of Riehl's book, on 'The Methods of I<'ant's Criticalisn1', comes to the conclusion that I<'ant's criticalisn1 had been a 'phenomenalism of perceptions', but at the same time also a 'realism of things', and this view, too, he shares with Diihring. Hume's so-called scepticism had been a preliminary stage of this criticalism and must consequently be regarded not as the 'goal' of I<'ant's epistemology but, as Erdmann correctly renders Riehl's (and Diihring' s) outlook, as 'the means of achieving positivity of thinking': 'His standpoint is, rather, a relativism of which experience and association constitute the twin poles.' This positive evaluation of Hume was in itself as uncommon and novel in Germany as it was a direct contradiction of that of Cohen and Paulsen. It, too, derived from the Critical History of Diihring - as did the distinguishing fron1 non-scientific philosophy, the employment of the term 'theory of science', which Riehl was the first to use in the announcement of a lecture course. Through his reading of Diihring Riehl became a mediator between positivism and I(antianism, and whoever has read no more than the introduction to this I 5-page review of Diihring's book will hardly be able to resist the impression that among the things that han1pered the dissemination of positivism in Germany most severely was the tragic fate of one of its most important propagators. This review is decidely relevant to the reception of positivism through the mediation of Riehl and, beyond that, to the influence exerted on neoI<'antianism: it is also informative in regard to the frequently asserted (though never demonstrated) origin of a thoroughgoing Riehlian 'realism' in Riehl's Herbartian teacher Zimmermann, for, except in respect of his early writings
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and In especial - as with Cohen a continued adherence to Herbartian psychology, Riehl was above all a continuator of Diihring: in any event, the abrogation and 'abolition of the transcendency of thought' and 'flight from the world' which Diihring had proclaimed, and which was to be guaranteed by a close association between philosophy and history and theory of science, could have been taken over by Riehl and made the basis of his own book on criticalism from no source other than his positivist teacher. 'The relationship between this book and positive science', Riehl prefaces the book by stating, 'is, I believe, not made entirely clear on the title-page. I have at least always followed the maxim that philosophy has not to teach natural science but to learn from it. It is my conviction that natural science and philosophy complement one another and advance through constant mutual reaction. IZant's critical philosophy owes no little part of the respect it has again achieved today to the profound insight of its author into the nature of the methods of natural science ... ' This historiography accordingly sought to discover a parallelism between the history of science and that of philosophy, and Fischer's biographical-evolutionary historiography, Cohen's PlatonicIZantian or constructivist historiography, and Paulsen's biographical-philological historiography were consequently joined by Riehl's positivist historiography, which also produced a fourth type of exposition of IZant: four classic expositions of IZant - four different views of history which nonetheless possessed a common element in that pre-IZantian philosophy now experienced a re-evaluation amounting to a rediscovery. In the same year the spectrum of expositions of IZant that herewith arose was enriched by a further variant: Benno Erdmann's philological and at the same time absolutely historical-reconstructionist procedure which, far more rigorous even than Paulsen's work, disdained to bestow on its results any kind of topicality: Martin Knutzen and his Age. A Contribution to the History of the Wo£07an School and especiallY to that of the Development of Kant (1876) is the title he gave his book. To many a reader [and it is safe to say that the book's reviewer, Paulsen, was one of them] who is quite content with his knowledge of the literary history of the eighteenth century, perhaps to many a reader convinced he is familiar with the specifically philosophical literature of that century, the name that appears in the title of the above book will be quite unknown. Nonetheless, as the reader of the book will discover, its bearer played a not insignificant role in his age. The fact is revelatory of the tremendous gulf that divides us from the intellectual world of the previous century. The period between Leibniz and I<:'ant is, for the historiography of philosophy in Germany, still almost undiscovered country.
Instead of seeking to elucidate IZant's theory of knowledge only with the aid of quotations from the classics, as was the usual custom, Erdmann's book on IZant's teacher and on the conditions prevailing at IZonigsberg University and in East Prussia sought to understand IZant's 'intellectual development' as an
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outcome of his environment. In this alone it offers a contrast to all other expositions of Kant, and that it does so is no accident, but, on the contrary, the outcome of a definite polemical intent, as is shown in the book's introduction, in which Erdmann quotes Cohen without naming him by name: The latest I(ant literature ... still [1876] bears essentially the same stamp as that which its peculiar origin had already imposed on its earliest works. Even today the systematic interest in critical idealism which led to the imposition of this stamp still outweighs everything that would be required for an unprejudiced historical reconstruction. The new adherents of the old doctrine view it no less in the light of a 'systematic partisanship' than do their new opponents. For unhappily it is in the nature of the case that adoption of a party position is only rarely the outcome of deep and thorough study but, on the contrary, such study is the result of a party position already essentially fixed. One is even to some extent proud of this partisanship, since' to understand I(ant's own texts it is indispensable to test each of the differing conceptions which made theory of knowledge possible as to their value for this theory'
And in another passage Erdmann attacks Cohen even more sharply, while at the same time also attacking Fischer, Paulsen and even Riehl: 'The work is not finished with an analysis of his [I(ant's] pre-critical writings so long as the essential basis for an elucidation of them - the philosophical current of the age from which they arose, and especially the specific intellectual atmosphere through which they evolved is not known and familiar in detail and its relationship to them understood. But this insight is precisely what we lack'. If the neo-I(antian movement, which in itself had its justification, was not as a consequence 'to be nipped in the bud, if it is not to lead to the tasteless absurdity of a new I(antian school - the most recent publications give good grounds for this fear - we must try to learn to evaluate I(ant historically'. The young Erdmann cannot properly be called a 'neo-I(antian ' in the sense the term subsequently acquired, for he preserved from the beginning the greatest possible distance between himself and the other pillars or adherents of this movement, indebted as they were to the Zeitgeist. On the other hand, however, precisely because he nonetheless stood in the midst of this n10vement and, at any rate at first (before he subsequently in part devoted himself to psychology and logic on his own account in quite independent works, while as a philologist he was exclusively occupied with editing scholarly editions of Leibniz and I(ant), he conceded to I(antian philosophy a surpassing significance also for the solution of the problems of the present, he must be regarded as one of the principal pillars of the 'I(ant movement'. The verdicts he pronounced on contemporary I(ant literature are so extremely valuable because, when he criticized what I(ant's new disciples believed they were discovering in their' master', he was not an outsider discussing a theme for which he had no sympathy but spoke from the centre of I(antian scholarship. In the numerous editions of and monographs on I(ant which he produced he thus usually appeared as an advocate of I(ant against the neo-
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I<.antians and as a critic of every attempt at rendering Kant topical and up-todate. When in 1878 there then appeared his second major work on IZant, which compared the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, as the leading contemporary authority on I<.ant he expressly and definitively distanced himself from the neo-I<'antian movement, for in the meantime he had become convinced that I<'ant's 'criticalism [is] more remote from the episten10logical problems and solutions presented today than the concurring and dissenting return to it that has become clearly evident since the middle of the previous decade has hitherto made it seem'. He now expressed the hope that this fact might become increasingly recognized, so that on the one hand systen1atic work could progress independently of the burden of historical and philQlogical problems, while on the other historical inquiry would no longer be burdened by the former. In a brief survey of the interpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason then current he evolved a valuable typology of 'conceivable interpretations' which he catalogued under the rubrics 'absolute idealism', 'forn1al rationalism' and 'criticalism'. Criticalism regarded I<'ant as above all a continuator of the work of Hume (Erdmann's own position), 'formal rationalism' attached itself to the Copernican revolution and the problem of concept and 'thing-in-itself', absolute idealism, finally, had a one-sided preference for the first edition and was to be seen historically as the position which, from German idealism to Schopenhauer, had enjoyed the widest dissemination. Of modern interpretations the criticalist of Riehl, the rationalist of Paulsen and even the idealist of Fischer were thus designated legitimate. Beside these ' conceptions made possible directly from IZant's own utterances' Erdmann continues his polemic against certain of the neoI<'antians - there were 'three others' which could 'appeal indirectly to the content of his expositions': ' ... the assertion that I<'ant's doctrine is a theory of experience' here, too, Cohen's name is not mentioned - secondly a 'criticism of philosophical methods', by which Lange and Vaihinger are meant, and finally a last type hard to define: a 'criticism of intellectual intuition'. With this Erdmann alludes to Gunther Thiele, the professor at I<.onigsberg, who in a book on Kant's Intellectual Intuition as the Basic Principle of his Criticalism (Halle 1876) had sought to demonstrate 'that the most in1portant theories of I<'ant's criticalism are a consequence of the proposition that ... ascribes to our faculty of perception no intellectual intuition'. Through historical insight, Erdmann hoped, it might be possible amid all these varying interpretations to arrive at a definitive 'agreement as to the actual value of I<'ant's criticalism', so that resolution of contemporary philosophical tasks could likewise profit from it. He adds that what I<'antianism would thus gain in profundity it would naturally have to lose in the extent of its dissemination, for he is not only right when he traces the supposed
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'topicality of I<'ant' to certain needs of the Zeitgeist, he is also already keenly aware that the diversity and contradictoriness of the tendencies within neoI<'antianism were themselves one of the principal reasons the movement had been able to grow so strong in so few years: even before this phase of historiographic work on I<'ant's development, which reached its highpoint in 1875-6, the multiplicity of ways in which I<.ant could be laid claim to for the resolution of contemporary questions had gained neo- I<'antianism new adherents. Now, however, in 1878, it could be perceived that the more historically furbished pictures of I<.ant now produced would establish themselves and could in the end lead to a multiplicity of different types of neoI<.antianisms. Erdmann was also one of the first to see the danger of such an independent development on the part of the various neo-I<.antian tendencies, even though the means he proposed for surmounting this state of affairs by" turning to history proved unavailing because - quite to the contrary - interest in I<.ant, and even the historical and philological investigation of his works, was due almost entirely to wholly contemporary objectives, so that I<'antian philosophy became a medium of discussion of philosophy in general: 'For that which calls itself our philosophical literature today', Paulsen, too, said at this time, 'I<'ant has, I would say, become an interpreter. It is by discussing his ideas with reference to I<.ant, and as it were addressing them first of all to him, that every author hopes to become comprehensible to all the others. Whether this hope is a sound one maybe left undecided ... ' In any event, I<'ant became at this time the most read philosophical classic; and if we compare the changes that took place in the share of courses the relevant classics were accorded at German-speaking universities during the 1860s, 1870S and 1880s, the effect ofneo-I<.antianism and interest in I<.ant on the 'modernization' of philosophy will become plain. During the period 1862 to 1890 the share of courses devoted to Plato, Aristotle and Hegel continuously declined, while those devoted to Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume, as well as to I<.ant, showed a continuous increase. The trend amounted to a contention with modern philosophy, and here I<'antian philosophy stood at the centre. It is true that lectures were also delivered on Herder (14), Fichte (13), Schelling (22), Herbart (34), Fries (I) and I<.rause (8), and courses offered on Comte (6), Mill (19) and Spencer (4), but considering the period in question contained 56 semesters and that 730 courses were conducted on Aristotle, 742 on Plato and nearly 500 on I<.ant, interest in the former group appears by comparison to have been very slight indeed. The 484 courses on I<'antian philosophy announced at Germanspeaking universities between the summer semester of 1862 and the summer semester of 1890 reveal not only the stages of its development the 'I<'ant movement' had attained to but, on the basis of a construction of the circles to which those who offered such courses belonged, also confirm scientifically
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Paulsen's assertion that IZant had become the' interpreter' of the contemporary philosophical questions of the second half of the nineteenth century: for no fewer than 1°7 Dozenten or professors lectured on Kant during this period, and by no means all of them were neo-IZantians - only about a quarter of these courses were offered by one or other of the eleven leading neo-IZantians, while almost a third were delivered by Dozenten who throughout this entire period lectured on him fewer than five times. It may be assumed that the majority of these 74 Dozenten offered instruction in }(ant on account of the fact that he had become the most read philosophical classic and his philosophy the medium of discussion for contemporary philosophical questions. If we take a closer look at this group we must, to be sure, deduct the very youthful philosophers - such as Richard Falckenberg, Otto IZulpe, Theodor Lipps and Paul Natorp, who were born only after 185 ° - many of whom were to lecture on IZant much more frequently after 1890. We further encounter those who died in the 1870S or early 1880s, such as Braniss, van Calker, Harms, Lange, Ueberweg and Volkmann, but also a number of older Dozenten who, mostly Herbartians, saw in the neo-IZantian movement on the whole a positive phenomenon: J ohan Heinrich Lowe, Franz IZarl Lott, Ludwig Strumpell and Tuiskon Ziller, as well as the Hegelian Conrad Hermann. Some of them had offered courses on IZant in the 1860s and -like Emil Arnoldt, Heinrich Romundt and Fritz Schulze - were more or less closely associated with IZant or with neo- IZantianism; this likewise applies to Rudolf Eucken, IZarl Guttler, Johannes Rehmke, Christoph Sigwart and IZarl Stumpf. That in the long run virtually every philosophy professor at the end of the nineteenth century lectured on IZant at least once may be gathered from the fact that the most assiduous included such prominent non-IZantians or pronounced critics of the neo-IZantian n10vement as Ernst Laas, who up to his death in 1885 nonetheless lectured on IZant eight times, Paul Deussen (surprisingly), the disciple of Schopenhauer and friend of Nietzsche, Julius Baumann, the pupil of Lotze, who lectured on IZant fourteen times, and finally Wilhelm Dilthey, who lectured on him eleven times, during this period. Positivists (in addition to Laas they included Theobald Ziegler, Carl Goring, Hermann Wolff and Friedrich JodI) likewise offered similar courses, as did Franz Brentano, Jacob Frohschammer, Carl Schaarschn1idt, Rudolf Seydel and Hern1ann Ulrici, who were all noted critics of neo-IZantianism: so that it is certainly not going too far to designate the decades from 186o, or at least those from 1870, to the turn of the century as the neo-IZantian period of German academic philosophy, for this designation would be founded not only on the fact of the predominance of the neo-IZantian movement but, beyond this, also on the fact that a compounding with IZant - far beyond the bounds of neoIZantianism - constituted one of the principal objects of philosophical teaching. Quite generally, Kantian philosophy prin1arily fulfilled the function of a
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cata1yst, stimulator and medium of discussion for the philosophical problems of the day; and how little concerned with the' historical IZant' even many a neo-IZantian was can be seen - in addition to the example of Cohen - from a review and vindication by Otto Liebmann of Kant's Analogies of Experience (Berlin 1876), a work by so considerable an opponent as the positivist Ernst Laas, in which Liebmann simply falls back on the unassailable position that, even if IZant's demonstration should prove fallible, 'the adherents of IZant on principle', among whom he by no means counted himself, at any rate 'had the duty' of 'resurrecting the basic idea of his apriorism in a new and improved form; this basic idea lies in the celebrated cardinal proposition: "The understanding does not derive laws from nature, it prescribes them to it"'. Only twelve years after writing Kant and the Epigones Liebmann falls back on this simple formula, and he says quite expressly that this formula is in fact the only thing worth rescuing: 'For all the orthodox forms of original IZantianism could break to pieces, the whole table of categories, together with all subordinancies, all schematicism and "principles of pure understanding", all "analogies of experience", etc., etc., could crumble into ruins, without that general cardinal proposition, that Copernican basic idea, being affected in the slightest ... ' IZant might be refuted, but that would not do the slightest harm to neo-IZantian apriorism. Laas was in this fashion deprived of even the slightest reward, for he might have expected that his refutation of apriorism would at least be followed by an attempt to establish it anew. Although with his exposition of IZant he had aimed a blow at almost the whole of neoIZantianism but specifically against the idealists, the 'commentators and paraphrasers' - 'IZ. Fischer, E. Arnoldt, H. Cohen, J. Witte and others' - his hope that the' sunlike clarity' with which it was believed IZant had been read, interpreted and understood would soon give way to a more scrupulous comprehension of IZant was not to be fulfilled: The view is growing more and more that even in non-philosophical circles not only will the necessity and utility of engagement with I(ant's writings soon be rated at their true value, but sufficient understanding and so to speak instinctive feeling for what is genuinely I(antian will also be acquired to permit us to be somewhat more particular than we have been as to the teachings and teachers we enrol under the great head of this school; for by no means all those writers are' I(antians ' who proclaim themselves such or are described as such by others.
Truly said! Many were in no way 'genuine' Kantians - Liebmann himself maintained he was not, but neither are Riehl, Paulsen, Cohen, Vaihinger, Windelband or Lange in the proper sense of the word: they are all NEOKantians.
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism 2 THE 'SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY' OF THE VIER TELJAHRSSCHRIFT BETWEEN POSITIVISM AND NEO-KANTIANISM
Seldon1 in the history of philosophy can it have been possible to pursue the division of its development into periods in such fine detail as it is for the years following the death of Friedrich Albert Lange: 1875 and 1876 are the years during which there arose a widely ramified I(antian philology and an exploration of the pre-history of I(antian philosophy which brought with them a general re-evaluation of pre-I(antian philosophy influential far beyond the bounds of neo-I(antianism. In 1877 and 1878 there then followed the period during which the majority of the prominent neo-I(antians made their closest approach to positivism - an approach which found expression in the work they published in the recently founded Vierteijahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie. Critique of metaphysics and rejection of the entire philosophical tradition reached their culmination during these years, but as early as 1878 there followed a turning towards practical philosophy and idealism which would be consolidated to offer to neo-I(antianism alternatives to positivism. It was only during the 18 80S that a rigorous division between these tendencies occurred, and the image of the neo-I(antian movement that subsequently evolved usually forgot or suppressed the positivist phase through which many of its adherents had passed during the 1870s. The differences between the neo-I(antianism of the 1870S and the neo-I(antian programmata that preceded it are, however, not less than those between the neo-I(antianism of the 1870S and that which would take shape from the beginning of the 18 80S. No one gave clearer expression to the' spirit' of this new scientific-positivist beginning of philosophy a new beginning that had to renounce all those merely traditional stocks of problems philosophy still dragged along with it, so that, abandoning the old pseudo-problems, it could address questions pertaining to reality instead than did Friedrich Paulsen: On one of the bridges that cross the river on which there lies the capital of the German Reich a man once stood and, leaning over the parapet, gazed steadfastly at the water. Soon a second and a third joined him and did the same. Finally everyone crossing the bridge stopped and a large crowd assembled, all gazing intently and inquiringly down on to the river. Finally one of them asked his neighbour: 'What are we looking for? What can you see? I can't see anything.' 'Neither can I', his neighbour replied; but everyone nonetheless stayed where he was. And then a general murmuring arose, they all looked at one another, and the group began to disperse without having any idea of what there had been to see. He who had first stopped there, however, stood aside and observed the event with a smile of cunning on his face.
In his review of a book by C. Goring on freedom of will Paulsen pronounces with sovereign composure that the era of scientific philosophy now dawning
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desired to see a definitive end to the age of theological and metaphysical thought. 'Those problems', Vaihinger also said in this same year, 'which involve inquiring after things and effects which do not exist at all, and that means all those problems which simple, rude and unschooled common sense desires philosophy to resolve', ought, as 'lay problems' and 'pseudoenigmas', to be excluded from scientific philosophy, for 'true philosophy' could come into being only' when attempts at the resolution of such irrational problems are at last visited with the same curse of ludicrousness as might today visit an attempt to desire of mathematics the quadrature of the circle or to extort from mechanics the secret of the perpetuum mobile'. The contempt which many neo-I<'antians had shown for Gern1an idealism was only a kind of prelude to the breach with philosophical tradition in general, at least insofar as it had treated of metaphysical or theological questions, that was now provoked by the positivist side of the movement. It was above all theology that had burdened philosophy with its 'pseudoproblems' and it was theologians who had brought together that 'n10b assembly' Paulsen had described: If there is no free will in the world - i.e. no events brought about by man in an absolute sense, i.e. not through his nature nor through the circumstances in which he lives - then God is the author of every event, thus also of bad events, thus also of evil. And what happens to sin? and to redemption? and to the Incarnation? and to the faith? Therefore man ... must be able to perform acts that are not effected by his nature but which he performs, i.e. causes, as absolutely free, i.e. uncaused acts.
It was in this that the whole problem of human freedom consisted, but' actual philosophers who have approached it have in fact seen no problem here at all'. Freedom as the antithesis of 'being compelled' of course existed, but it went without saying that human willing was not without causes. The cooling down of the earth and the suitability of its elements is the cause of the way it is organized, and its primary organization is, with all other causes that contributed to it, the cause of the evolution of mankind; the experiences of our ancestors in central Asia, or wherever they came from, their immigration into Europe, their division into nations, their physical and spiritual vicissitudes up to the present day, are the essential causes of the condition and evolution of their latest descendants. And is God then the cause of all their acts? Undoubtedly; if God or nature created all individual creatures then they remain in God or nature with all they do and suffer, and God or nature must bear the responsibility for all the consequences, and naturally for every aspect of them. There is and never has been any theology other than pantheism among philosophers, that is to say.
The external circumstances - the soil upon which the views of philosophers fell - had changed so much in the course of a mere tw~ decades that, whereas the mere suspicion of a partisanship for pantheism had formerly been enough to deprive Prantl and Fischer of their venia, it had now become a species of
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scientific common property. The separation of church and state achieved through the Kulturkampf, and the freeing of academic teaching from theological and 'clerical' influence that resulted, did not favour neoI<:'antianism alone: it represented an objective basis for every kind of 'pantheist', atheist, positivist and anti-metaphysical as well as finally for a neoI<:'antian concept of philosophy. Only now might university teachers openly declare in their lectures what, during the period of the neo-I<:'antian programmata, would have meant the loss of a licence to lecture and during the era of German idealism and the pre-March period would even have fallen prey to the censor. 'Opinion' had not progressed: all that had happened was that now it could be dissen1inated without restriction. It was to precisely this task of disseminating an absolutely secular philosophy - free of all traditional 'freightage' - that the Vierteijahrsschrift devoted itself; and in his introductory article Richard A venarius dismissed virtually the entire philosophical tradition with the san1e composure Paulsen had shown in dismissing the theologians: Incidentally [!], we ought also to say a few words about the wretched [!?] pseudoproblems which, causing only confusion and dissipation of energy, have, especially in the philosophy handed down to us, passed from generation to generation without its being asked whether these problems are legitimate in origin. Every problem has a certain context, but the context of every problem is not determined by experience and is thus a legitimate object of scientific treatment. Such problems, which arise especially out of the childish pseudo-experiences of lower cultures, have as little right to 'philosophical' treatment as the sea-serpent has to zoological. The only treatment they deserve is psychological or ethno-psychological elucidation.
The 'scientific philosophy' of the end of the 18 70S promised a final clarification of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences - a clarification which had de facto long since been accomplished by the individual sciences themselves. And this not only through an assertion of autonomy first of all by the natural sciences, which had first found organizational expression with the' hiving off' of a natural science faculty by the University of Tubingen as early as 1863, nor only through the fact that the various humanities had become independent of the philosophical form of inquiry by maintaining the primacy of positive knowledge over sense-construction, but rather above all because philosophy for its part localized the domain of its interests to logic, in the sense of theory of knowledge and of science, and history of philosophy. When, after Beneke and O. F. Gruppe had in 1834 and 1835 pointed in this direction, Helmholtz in 1862 publicly commended the natural sciences for having taught many things to all the sciences - 'unconditional respect for facts and fidelity in assembling them, a certain distrust of what appears to the senses, the endeavour everywhere to seek a causal nexus and to presuppose one' - he was not only one of the first German philosphers to draw positive conclusions from a reading of the translation of Mill's Logic then just fresh from the press,
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he was also willing to concede to philosophy at most the treatment of the logical and epistemological problems of just these autonomous individual sciences. With Helmholtz the full extent of this development towards a consistent delimitation of the traditional domain of philosophical inquiry first became clearly visible; but by 1868 even an ex-Hegelian such as Zeller could, in an address 'On the Task of Philosophy and its Relation to the other Sciences', deploy in favour of the continuation of philosophy hardly more than that it might perforrn a useful service to the sciences as critique of knowledge, and could beyond that perhaps fulfil at most the function of a general 'means of education', though one of a nature not easy to define. It was precisely this development that found its consummation in the even more radical programmata of scientific philosophy, for its object was delimitation and it regarded as constituting a problem amenable to scientific investigation only that which was accessible through experience, so that even its attitude towards the history of philosophy suffered a fundamental change. History divided into problems discussable only within the context of ethno-psychology and those which, because they continued to constitute problems of contemporary philosophy, were an1enable to treatn1ent by the appropriate branch of science. The rest of history, the individual features of past eras, thinkers and undertakings, in this way fell into oblivion, as they had in the era of the Enlightenment. Philosophical work was to concern itself solely with practical problems, and this is no doubt why the transformation of philosophy into a positive science that was at the same tin1e beginning to be carried out in England and France aroused in general so little interest in Germany. The Germans were certainly familiar with Comte and Mill by this time, but even the Vierte(jahrsschrift contains very few references to the positivism flourishing in other countries. Except for two essays by Vaihinger 'The Concept of the Absolute (with reference to Spencer)' and' The Law of Evolution of Ideas of the Real' - and one by Riehl - 'Contemporary English Logic' only Friedrich Paulsen engaged in this journal, and in a number of reviews previously published in the Zeitschrift fur Viilkerpsychologie, in any detailed discussion of contemporary foreign philosophy and, in especial, of that of J. S. Mill: It was Steinthal who introduced me to it. He gave me R. Flint's History of the Philosophy of History to discuss in his journal at any length I desired. I produced a very detailed review ... in the summer holidays of I 875. This was at once followed by the essay on Mill's philosophy of religion prompted by his posthumous Three Essays; ... it, too, appeared in Steinthal's journal. Finally there followed Bagehot's On the Origin of Nations. The essay on Mill gave rise to a little event. I had called a German reviewer to account for having condescendingly treated Mill as a dull-witted English empiricist, and vigorously asserted that nationalism of this kind could only reduce us to an embarrassed silence when confronted with the reproach of Teutonism. I received a letter in which the author told me he recognized the justice of the reproof and regretted his hasty judgment.
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
Whether what may have stood in the way of the appreciation of contemporary foreign philosophy was Teutonism of this sort or a specifically neo-Kantian complacency can be decided only case by case. Cohen and Liebmann, for example, simply could not understand why, since Kant's apriorism had succeeded in refuting Hume, so much fuss was made over Taine or Spencer: 'For the legitimation' of the' external world of things', Cohen says of Spencer's psychology, 'he retains, though he speaks of Kant, ... as a last recourse the dualism of matter and spirit ... This lingering behind a stage attained a century ago, which he shares with Alexander Bain, is documented in the naivety of supposing "nervous shock" to be the "final unity of consciousness" ... ' Cohen's view that 'the psychologist Spencer' had been 'systematically overestimated' finds a parallel in Liebmann's censuring of Taine, in a discussion of his Reason, for having paid too little attention to German psychology and for lacking all understanding of the Copernican revolution of the a priori. In any event, ressentiment of 'shallow, prosaic and idealess' empiricism and positivism fell into the same groove as the critique of materialism and naturalism had earlier fallen into: it resorted to casting suspicion on their political consequences, so that Paulsen could complain: 'That sensualism or empiricism leads to materialism, to the relinquishment of all idealism, and thus is highly pernicious and must not be allowed to spread quite regardless of whether it is true or false, still stands as an axiom in many heads at the commencement of their epistemological thinking'. This period in the development of neo-Kantianism is distinguished above all by the fact that the successors of the programmatizers Harms and Helmholtz strove after a close shoulder-to-shoulder march between philosophy and the individual sciences, while any interest in history of theory or in the way philosophy had been received and appreciated was largely confined to Kant and to his' precursors' Locke, Hobbes and Hume. The new scientific philosophy seemed not to require a legitimation of its own, even a historical one; and if the latter was ever reflected on - as it was, for instance, in Paulsen's essay 'On the Relationship of Philosophy to Science. A Historical View' published in the first year of the Vierteijahrsschrift - what happened was that the entire history of philosophy was surveyed with the object of extracting from it in cursory form a tradition whose goal had been knowledge of reality, against which was set another tradition, assembled from the most heterogeneous elements, which was said to have lacked precisely this goal. A few years later Laas was to describe this confrontation in 'Platonism and its Opposite': here, as with Lange, Riehl and Paulsen, Aristotle stands at the commencement of scientific philosophy, while Plato is the author of the concept-inventing philosophy which had diminished the scientific value of philosophical inquiry far beyond the age of German idealism. Paulsen, who was among the most industrious contributors to the
The phase of differentiation Vierteljahrsschrift, published in this first year two more essays, one of which, 'On the Basic Differences between Epistemological Outlooks', attempted to subjugate through pure logical deduction the theme bequeathed by I<arl Leonhard Reinhold via Trendelenburg. In this essay and even more clearly in another 'On the Concept of Substantiality' - it becomes apparent that at least for a time Paulsen stood very much closer to Mill than he did to I(ant: Positivism in theory of knowledge has, however, been naturalized in Germany for some time: I<.ant the epistemologist stands so closely related to it that Comte could have been his pupil if he had not been a pupil of the English: if we ignore the' thingin-itself', of which we cannot say whether it is body or soul, one or many, substance or force or event, whether indeed it exists or does not exist for all these are categories valid only for phenomena - if, I say, we ignore this absolutely indeterminate That which adheres to every This like its shadow, and fasten our eyes only on the given world of things which alone comes into consideration for science, then there are in it no substances or accidentia but only phenomena linked together into groups through our thinking in the category of substantiality. The only empirical world known to I<'ant is precisely the world of Mill; 'possibilities of sensation' and phenomena are differen~ names for the same thing. There is a difference only in the methodology, not in the metaphysics.
Whether Comte could have been a pupil of I(ant or I(ant a tutor of Mill ' scientific philosophy' reinterpreted its I(ant in the interest of rendering him topical just as unsparingly as Cohen had reinterpreted his I(ant for his own ends a few years previously. Whereas in his obituary of Lange Cohen had reproved hin1 for his d~ficient understanding of Plato and his significance for I(ant and for sciedce, the Vierteljahrsschrift accorded its approval to precisely the positivist traits he exhibited: 'It is very meritorious of Lange', Max Heinze says in an essay on Lange's idealism, 'to have drawn attention to the validity of the method of natural science and thus as an idealist directed philosophers first of all to the ground of simple experience. Only I would like to call this method the scientific method as such, and not claim it for materialism alone. It is in general the method of experience which the exact inquirer in any domain has to apply if he is to achieve anything for science '. That experience was to be regarded only as a product' of our organization' distinguished this viewpoint from the materialist, and' philosophy of experience may hope to advance further in this department than mere ll1aterialism can': In his [Lange's] 'organization' he expressly emphasized the subjective element in perception and sensation, which is only to be acknowledged. But in this he failed to address anything essentially different fron1 ':vhat is generally accepted. His positive idealism will fail to last because it is theoretically useless, and when it is moved over into the ethical domain it is making for a goal other than knowledge and thus forfeits its claim to the name of philosophy, however highly one may rate the effect its ideas exercise on ethical action.
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
Lange had delimited the tasks of philosophy too one-sidedly to the theoretical sphere alone and, as materialism had already done, unjustly excluded ett1ics from philosophy. , Scientific philosophy' or 'philosophy of experience' also wanted to reserve to itself a revision of ethics, but at first this remained only an aspiration, for the essays that appeared in the Vierte(jahrsschrift were in fact confined almost exclusively to the domain of theoretical philosophy. Thus even Otto Liebmann, whose ideas for a practical philosophy would not have been compatible with those of positivism, could publish in this journal, and he, Paulsen, Riehl and Windelband together furnished almost half the dissertations and reviews that appeared during its first year. If we consider that in addition one of IZurd Lasswitz's first publications (concept of infinity), two more by Wundt (cosmology and a reply to Lasswitz), and another essay by Zeller completed this first volume, it becomes clear that, at its inception at any rate, the Vierte(jahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie was the organ of the neoIZantian movement. Up to the foundation of the Kantstudien in 1897 there would be no year in which many neo-IZantians did not contribute to every philosophical journal in this fashion. During the first year of the Vierte(jahrsschrift, positivists, neo-IZantians and criticalists participated in equal numbers: thus before a differentiation occurred within the grouping of 'scientific philosophers' another became apparent which consolidated itself in the opposition between the Philosophische Monatshefte, now in its thirteenth year, and the Vierte(jahrsschrift. Carl Schaarschmidt, who taught as an assistant professor at Bonn and was a university librarian there, had replaced Bratuscheck as editor of the Monatshefte and given the journal, which had always appeared as a general forum for the discussion of philosophy, a new and more distinctive programme. It was to continue to provide' as complete and faithful a picture as possible of presentday philosophy', but now also had in view a 'continuati.on of philosophy as "a science of reason which, it goes without saying, does not turn away from experience, but is at the same time independently autonomous"'. 'It was not enough', V olkelt sumn1arized this standpoint to conceive of philosophy as the general science mediating from a position of centrality between individual disciplines diverging towards different goals. It was 'rather the systematic knowledge of the highest and most universal ideas, and therewith the highest and most universal goals or tasks, of mankind '. The highest goal of theoretical knowledge was from out of the idea of the good to prepare for a new impetus and a new revolution... Thus even' metaphysical' thought was by no means to be banished to the realm of poetry or arbitrary subjective belief.
The programme of the Monatshefte represented a counter-programn1e to that of the Vierte(jahrsschrift, and as a reviewer V olkelt took the opportunity to
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formulate the way in which the Monatshefte and he himself differed from 'scientific philosophy': The two articles that inaugurate the first volume of the Vierteijahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie differ in characteristic fashion from this introductory article to the new volume of the Monatshefte. In the first essay Avenarius exhibits a view of philosophy of precisely the kind Schaarschmidt rejects as inadequate. According to this view philosophy consists essentially in bringing a universal, definitive concept to bear on the concepts of the specific sciences. The method of thinking employed may well be different from that of the specific sciences, but there is no question of philosophy's engaging in an independent creative activity. On the contrary, Avenarius scrupulously insists that the objects that constitute the content of philosophy really are provided by experience, but in particular that they derive from that supreme and most general concept of experience. In the second essay Paulsen goes even further and wants to see the borderline between philosophy and the sciences abolished altogether. Hereafter philosophy would retreat back wholly into the specific sciences and remain perceptible in them merely as a certain' mode of inquiry'. The Monatshefte is earnestly desired to carry through its programme rigorously to a triumphant conclusion in face of these empiricist endeavours.
It is consistent with this that - except for Jurgen Bona Meyer, who had in the meantime confined his activities principally to the realms of education policy and journalism - Volkelt and Cohen should be the only prominent members of the neo-I<.antian circle who failed to publish in the Vierte1jahrsschrift. Even the question what philosophy is or ought to be did not remain undisputed within the neo-I<'antian movement, and this explains why more lectures dealing with this question were announced during precisely this year 1877-8 than at any other period before or after. Mostly styled an 'introduction to philosophy', three such lectures were delivered by neoI<'antians in the summer semester of 1877: Riehl lectured first' On Preparation for and Meaning of the Study of Philosophy', and Volkman and Erdmann, who, like Vaihinger, commenced teaching during this semester, announced 'Introduction to Philosophy' and' Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy' (repeated in the sun1mer sen1ester of 1878). In the winter semester of 1877-8 Paulsen, too, delivered a lecture on 'The Principal Problems of Philosophy', as did Liebmann in the summer semester of 1878 and Windelband in the following semester. All these courses, whose titles seen1 to indicate they were merely introductions to the subject, were in fact concerned with the relationship between 'idealism and realism', which was the title under which Liebmann went on to offer a course in the winter semester of 1878-9' In all these instances the question under consideration is essentially 'what is philosophy?' and it divides itself into the two subsidiary questions what , scientific' philosophy is and what' non-scientific' philosophy would then be. This controversy found only sporadic and usually indirect expression in the
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publications of the neo-I<.antians, but for that reason it was fought out with all the greater animosity by the editors of the three leading philosophical journals of the time. Avenarius was particularly vehement, and in a series of articles of 1877-9 he called to account all other conceptions of philosophy, and especially that of Hermann Ulrici, the editor of the Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, in terms even sharper than those he had employed in his introductory essay: ' ... the assertion by Herr Ulrici that abstract comprehension and structuring of the material takes place without being " occasioned" by experience and "does not depend on experience" but represents a "transcendence of experience'" was a crass contradiction of scientific psychology, and Steinthal's theory of apperception of sensations had, moreover, adequately demonstrated' that sensations [occurred] in the form of abstract structuring, however rude and imperfect this structuring might originally be', so that U"lrici's assertion that scientific philosophy was incapable of distinguishing perceptions from experiences must be regarded as mere polemics. Only the theory of apperception had succeeded in explaining the emergence and evolution of logical forms and epistemological principles: So far as logic is concerned, what constitutes its material is theoretical apperception in its manifold evolution under the influence of representation by signs - its material is thus empirical ... That the object of logic appears reduced to an abstract expression should not deceive us as to its foundation in experience! It is easy to understand how we should be thus deceived: what is less easy to understand is how we come to be deceived over the experiential foundation of theory of knowledge ... For what is it, then, that has vindicated genuine theory of knowledge as physiological, psychological (or ethno-psychological), philological (or linguistic) and ethnological observations on the occurrence and hence on the boundaries of ' knowledge' ?
this was the question he posed to the' metaphysician' Ulrici, who stood at a far greater remove from him than Beneke had stood from contemporary theoreticians of pure thought and speculative theism during the pre-March period. The division of roles in regard to academic positions had changed in the meantime, however, and Avenarius was able to develop his ideas freely: the genesis of forms and concepts represented the chief problem of logic, the principles of knowledge were to be traced back to what had been achieved through apperception at historically earlier stages, had subsequently continued to solidify and had finally become independent as forms. An 'evolutionary theory of the problems of philosophy' had to replace the 'unscientific' concepts of philosophy that had reigned hitherto, and it could commence from such work on 'evolutionary history' as 'for example I myself attempted in 1869 in regard to Spinoza's pantheism, Paulsen did in 1875 in regard to I<'ant's theory of knowledge, and Windelband did in regard to I<'ant's doctrine of the "thing-in-itself"'. These represented vital prepatory work for the theory of evolution, but were not yet this theory itself: 'the former presents each
The phase of differentiation
separate evolution in its individuality, the latter what is general and universal in the evolutionary processes. ' Avenarius's demand was that theory of knowledge and logic should be expanded and enriched through the addition of a partly historical, partly psychological dimension, and should also involve critique of science; but this programme, too, was to die the death every methodological programma deserves to die when it is not attended by performance. What the article lacks in historical precision is clearly intended to be masked with polen1ics: Metaphysics represents in its product a block of ideas tl1 which determines through apperception the content of another block of ideas r whose content is relatively undetermined. This scientific determination will be scientifically admissible if - apart from the qualities which the block of ideas r must come to possess - the content of the block of ideas m is scientifically admissible: but whether this is so or not will not be decided by whether in the accomplishment of his apperception the metaphysician feels scientifically disposed, it will be decided by theory of evolution or problematization. The results thus gained, however, cannot possibly banish metaphysics from the 'domain of philosophy' in general, but only from that of scientific philosophy - which happens if it emerges that a substantial part of the content of the metaphysical block of ideas m has originated in normal or abnormal illusions, delusory experiences and the like.
What should have been demonstrated that metaphysics rests on illusion and pseudo-experiences remains with Avenarius dogmatic assertion: and thus Ulrici also remained of the opinion that this so-called 'scientific philosophy' was' in truth the old dogmatic empiricism ... only trimmed up to look modern, based on the dogma of the sole validity and unimpeachable authority of natural science and its products'. That this new theory of evolution desired to erect itself' primarily on ... the new theory of apperception and philosophy of language' and to see itself as a continuation of the 'new psychological advances achieved by Steinthal, Geiger, Wundt and others' had, however, no effect on the fact that the majority of the contributors to the Vierteijahrsschrift were going in quite a different direction, and thus the whole controversy broken off in 1879 at the stage of mere confrontation and polemics seemed in retrospect to have been hardly more than a battle of words. For when we ask the question suggested by Avenarius's draft pro'gramme - whether the leading neo-I
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
purely systematic questions. And that almost two-thirds of the historical courses dealt with the era from Bacon to I<:'ant reveals that Avenarius's, Windelband's, Paulsen's, Riehl's and Vaihinger's approaches to a historical theory of the evolution of the problen1s of philosophy remained hardly more than episodes: as Trendelenburg had done before them, they lectured on the philosophical classics in order to realize and exhibit the thought of the past, but first and foremost to do the same for their own. With all this it must be allowed that at no other time during the period 1870 to 1884 was neo-I<:'antianism historically accoutred to this extent, nor can it be overlooked that the predominating emphasis on history of philosophy and positive-systematic and ethical issues produced by the precise periodization of the evolution of early neo- Kantianism into phases undertaken initially also had an effect on its academic activity. Thus compared with the period 1870 to 1874 there appeared during the period from 1875 a perceptible shift towards history of philosophy (excluding I<:.ant!) and towards introductory courses which could be described as phases of a re-evaluation of early modern philosophy and· of scientific philosophy. As the development of the percentage of courses devoted to individual themes from the summer semester of 1879 (compared with the four semesters of 1877 and 1878) shows, this was associated with a turning towards practical philosophy which led to a doubling of the number of lectures in this domain. Although this fact has hitherto received no scholarly notice at all, why and how this 'turning towards practical philosophy' came about represents one of the most difficult problems of the entire evolution of neo-I<:'antianism: for only now did positivism and neoI<:'antianism take leave of one another for good.
3
THE' TURNING TO IDEALISM' DURING THE CRISIS OF 1878-9
'On the average, the neo-I<'antianism of the 18 70S and 18 80S was strongly empiricist and agnostic', no less an authority than Wilhelm Windelband confirmed in retrospect. For a long time, and offered a hand thereto by such prominent natural scientists as Helmholtz, Rokitanski and others, it entered into an alliance with sense-physiology in accordance with the precedent set by Schopenhauer, the outcome of which was an entry on to the slippery slope of psychologism. In Germany, too, theory of knowledge became ideology. Psychological history of the evolution of ideas, and many traits of this aberration have persisted into the literature of the present day. On the other hand, this I
- by the Vierteljahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie, for example, and in
The phase of differentiation a certain sense even by Windelband himself, for during the liberal inaugural years of the new Reich he, too, certainly belonged to this circle of 'average' and 'aberrant' neo-I<:'antians. He wants to make the reader believe that in those days philosophy had surrendered to psychologism, positivism and theory of evolution, for he, too, was adept at that practice, so much beloved of the neo-I<:'antians, of rendering one's philosophical opponents or predecessors contemptible. Instead of historical explanations we encounter apologias for one's own point of view, instead of an elucidation of why neo-I<:'antianism formerly bore the character it did and then why it had in the meantime acquired a different character we everywhere discover only negative evaluations which not only contribute nothing to historical knowledge but above all conceal the true state of things: behind metaphors of moods and humours, proffered hands, alliances, slippery slopes, traces of aberrations and abdications there lies entrenched a picture of a philosophical development which, whatever it may be indebted to, is not indebted to historical truth. For the truth is something quite different. When in 1876 the Philosophische Monatshejte published the announcement of the Vierte(jahrsschrift, Cohen and Volkelt were to be alone in failing to appreciate the positivist programme of the new journal. 'The blossoming of the empirical sciences', the announcement stated unequivocally has been associated historically with a reaction against speculative philosophy: this reaction was, however, on the whole directed solely against its methods, and only in part against the problems it dealt with. A selection from the latter took place, rather, which conserved those philosophical problems that related to objects of experience, or perhaps to their conceptual content, and submitted them to treatment by the methods of the empirical sciences.As a consequence of this development the empirical sciences in fact began to participate more and more in the solution of philosophical problems, and, through the influence the empirical sciences and the security of their methods have exerted on it, philosophy is today in the act of receiving a renewed impetus.
The Vierteijahrsschrift wanted quite expressly' to serve only such philosophy as is, in the sense of that presupposition, science', and almost all the neoI<:'antians believed they could support this programme - indeed, this declaration of war on the method and the problems of the philosophical tradition and their replacement by a 'philosophy as science founded on empirical experience' was at bottom nothing other than a commitment to a synthesis of I<:'antianism and positivism, a synthesis that was to inaugurate a new era of philosophy. Thus in 1876 the age of metaphysics seen1ed to have come to an end in Germany too, and if external circun1stances had not prevented it positivism would no doubt have achieved a definitive breakthrough during this same year, for a majority of the younger professors at any rate tended in this direction.
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
But things were to work out quite differently, and not only so far as the neoKantians alone were concerned: after no more than two years of participation in the Vierteljahrsschrift Liebmann and Windelband (both pupils of Fischer 1) entirely withdrew their collaboration from the journal, and as early as 1882 this same Wilhelm Windelband - who in his History of Modern Philosophy had in 1878 still celebrated English empiricism as the beginning of the' truly scientific evolution of modern philosophy' and four years previously published largescale essays in the Vierte(jahrsschrift - was to revile all 'scientific philosophers' as 'sophists': The distinction between scientific and non-scientific philosophy is a contention known from of old. Plato and Aristotle called their philosophy science [episteme] and set it in opposition to sophistry, which they called unscientific prejudiced opinion [doxa], and with an inversion that might be called a witticism of history the positivist and relativist renewers of sophistry are nowadays accustomed to calling their doctrine' scientific philosophy' and setting it over against that philosophy which still upholds the great achievements of Greek science.
Now, in 1882, the former positivist and relativist Windelband no longer counted among these' positivist and relativist' sophists, and during these few years certain general changes had taken place which were becoming perceptible among the neo-I<'antians too: since 1878 there had been an increasing turning towards practical philosophy and a parallel turning away from the Vierte(jahrsschrift. The bibliography of the group of the ten most prominent neo-I<.antians, too, shows an absolute decline in their publishing activity in 1879, and finally there is the fact at first surprising that even the statistics of lectures demonstrate that during the summer semester of 1879 the number of lectures on I<.ant, Plato and even more strikingly on Aristotle attained an alltime low at all German-speaking universities: Aristotle had not been lectured on so little for over ten years, and during every coming decade without exception there were never again to be so few lectures on I<.ant, as during this semester! If we arrange these statistics so that the average values for the four semesters from the winter semester of 1876-7 to the SUll1111er semester of 1878, followed by the absolute values for the three following semesters, and in turn by the average values from the SUll1mer semester of 1880 to the winter semester of 1881-2 the question arises whether this parallel movement in the number of lectures delivered on the three most read of the classics can possibly have a 'philosophical' ground. After this steep fall of 1879 the general trend remained a continually increasing number of lectures on I<.ant and likewise a rise in those delivered on Plato, whereas those on Aristotle showed a very marked decline, which in turn accorded with the trend evidenced by the total developn1ent between 1862 and 1890: up to this summer semester of 1879 on average eight per cent more lectures were delivered on Aristotle than on Plato, whereas after it (to
The phase of differentiation 1890) up to twenty per cent more courses were offered on the latter than on the former! Beside the' turning to practical philosophy' to be observed in the specific case of the neo-I<.antians there thus appeared, as a general occurrence pertaining to all German-speaking universities, a 'turning to Plato'. But this phenomenon, too, is of course not one that can be understood in isolation - any more than Windelband's change of mind can be understood biographically, the decline in publishing activity on the part of the neo-I<.antians explained as an outcome of mere chance, or this sudden lapse of interest in all three of the most read classics ascribed to a purely philosophical cause. But what, then, had happened? How is it that all these events can be dated so precisely to the years I 878-9 ? 'Nothing, surely, has so engaged the minds of all of us this year', Jurgen Bona Meyer replied to these questions at the Bonn Bildungsverein on 9 November 1878, 'as the alarming appearance of socialist ideas disseminated in our nation and the threat presented by their influence. Each of us will consequently have been engaged with this subject more than we have been previously.' What Meyer was referring to was the subject of his address: 'Fichte, Lassalle and Socialism'. But he was also referring above all to 'the appearance of socialist ideas ... and the threat' they presented which the philosopher Meyer, together with Bismarck and the majority in the Reichstag, believed they could recognise in the assassination attempts on the I<.aiser. Only thirty-nine days after the Socialist Law inspired by these attempted assassinations had come into effect, and six months after the first attempt on Wilhelm I, Meyer maintained that a state of excitement and outrage existed in the public whose cause he very quickly - much too quickly detected in the threat presented by the influence of socialist ideas. It was from this excitement and outrage on the part of the public that there arose also the change of orientation referred to on the part of German academic philosophers. It is true that the years 1878-9 were years of crisis at many different levels - economic, social, parliamentary, party political and legal - but assigning all the blame to the social democrats, who were thus to become the scapegoats for the crisis, could count on a certain popular acceptance. This was a further instance of the ineptitude in the explanation of historical and social processes which had already distinguished the reactionaries of the post-March period: then, too, ideas had been held to blan1e ~ ideas were supposed to have produced effects of the worst kind, and it was on the basis of these effects - revolutions and attentats - that the 'value' of these ideas was determined. What could thus be more obvious than to approach the' causes' - the ideas - and combat them?! Meyer began with an analysis of the Fichtean 'rational state', was able to present more or less pertinent observations against it, and, as he himself declared, thought he had therewith refuted the 'socialist utopias of Lassalle and his followers' - which in itself would be of more than merely anecdotal
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value if, arguing as a professor of philosophy, he had not at the same time also given expression to notions very typical of the world at large: 'Fichte's ideas', he asserts are false legally and impractical socially, because in the last resort they everywhere run counter to human nature. This assertion shall be demonstrated ... Consider only the most primitive relationship of man, the relationship between parents and child. The Fichtean primeval right to the absolute freedom and inviolability of the body, i.e. that it shall be subject to no direct action or constraint, does not in any way apply even to this primal relationship. It might be said, rather, that the child has a natural right to demand such action and constraint on the part of its parents, that without it the child could not live or grow to full manhood either physically or spiritually; consequently the parents certainly have the duty to defy the Fichtean primeval right and refuse to recognize the absolute freedom and inviolability of the child's body, but on the contrary to make continual demands upon it even to the point of physical chastisement.
And this was certainly not meant in a purely pedagogic sense, for the liberal school-reformer and in 1877-8 tutor to Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (the later I
This appeal to the 'nature of man' accordingly also sufficed to refute the Fichtean concept of property, which was in part an anticipation of the social Darwinism of the I 880s and 1890S but in part only a repetition of the liberalist credo that the state had 'nothing to do' with questions of property: the 'dangerous doctrine of the philosopher Fichte, according to which anyone who has no property ought to have the natural right to seize the property of anyone else, lacks, thank God! all foundation in law. The moral basis of all law
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still commands that each shall have his own'. Whether to Cohen and the Marburg school Kant and Fichte were the true 'founders of socialisn1', or whether Meyer sought to discredit' socialist ideas' of any kind by means of a refutation of Fichte - the argument always revolved around new or reinterpretations of authorities in the realm of theory and doctrine without the real changes and problems affecting the world of society being touched upon at any point. Social reality - from child labour to slum dwellings, from class conflict to militarism - failed to find a place in these deliberations. Indeed, they did not need to and could not find a place in them, because what was at issue was not a search for comprehension but political polemics and denunciations of one's opponent. Thus Meyer's address, too, is in the last resort no more - but no less than a demonstration of the general insecurity and helplessness described by Hans Rosenberg in his study The Great Depression and the Age of Bismarck: The German social democrats of that time were not anarchists or terrorists. Neither did they have the least intention of mounting barricades or even inciting riots. The unjustified theory that they represented a direct revolutionary threat to the existing order cannot endure closer inspection. It is a historical lie. The orgies of superstition indulged in, and the hysterical fear evoked in the owning classes by the electoral and propaganda successes of the social democrats, which Bismarck exploited to the full to establish control over the political scene and artificially intensified in his electoral manoeuvres, were founded on a phantom.
But even phantoms can produce a powerful effect: so powerful that it was, for example, at just this moment that the interests of academic philosophers suffered an alteration throughout the entire German-speaking world, and that some philosophers from the ranks of the neo-I<:'antians also felt the need for a fundamental reassessment of their position. Thus Meyer's criticalism of the 185 as degenerated in this climate of a general 'mood of panic' to an apologia for the status quo which, like Bismarck, did not shrink even from invoking 'common sense': 'Whoever believes', said Bamberger in the Reichstag on 16 September, that it is possible to bring about in the world a different form of production, distribution and consumption through legislation rather than through spontaneous action will find himself on the slippery slope that leads from socialism to social democracy. And Prince Bismarck, Bennigsen and L6we-Calbe were equally right to emphasize in the Reichstag that this future state of the social democrats would have to be the most unendurable authoritarian state, ... for the future state of the social democrats would have to be one in which the state determines what every individual eats and drinks and what clothes he wears so that production can be determined accordingly, and in which earnings are assessed not by work performed but by the effort involved in it; in which the weakling, who can possibly live on moonlight or on bread and milk but who has to make greater efforts if he is to produce anything at all, earns more than someone with plenty of brain and muscle ... And Bennigsen also hit
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the nail on the head when he observed that such a state would have to be so completely a police administration, with the abolition of all individual freedom, that the worst ages of police rule in a state could not endure comparison with this future state ... In any event, as Prince Bismarck observed, simple common sense has to laugh at the folly of such ideas of the future; but with many people common sense at times gets quite lost in the sand, and nowadays we often seek for it in vain.
The level of philosophical discussion in the contention with 'socialism', or with what one wished to believe was socialism, could hardly have been lower, and the excitement caused by the events of the day was proportionately all the greater. Even before the en1ergency bill was passed Hermann von Helmholtz reacted just as Meyer had done, though without expressly placing the responsibility for recent events on socialist ideas: he said in an address on 3 August 1878 The older among us are old enough to have known the men of that period, who once were the first to join the army of volunteers, always ready to plunge into discussion of metaphysical problems, well read in the works of Germany's great poets, still burning with passion when the first Napoleon, when enthusiasm and pride, when deeds done in the War of Liberation were spoken of. 'How things have changed!' we may well exclaim in amazement, in an age when cynical contempt for every ideal of the human race swaggers in the streets and in the press and has culminated in two abominable crimes which were plainly directed at the person of our I
The enthusiasm for the nation 'exhibited by all classes' in 187 I had now plainly already been forgotten as completely as many' political and humane endeavours to secure a more carefree and dignified existence also for the poorer classes' seemed to have been in vain. 'It seems to be in the nature of mankind', Helmholtz concludes these gloomy reflections, 'that beside much light there is always to be found much shadow; and the chief effect of political freedom is to present base motives with more opportunity for boundless indulgence and mutual encouragement so long as they are not confronted by a public opinion equipped energetically to oppose them. ' If all was not to be 'lost beyond hope' it was the duty of everyone 'to look around within the circle in which he has to work, and which he knows, to see how things are there situated' in regard to 'the labour for the eternal goals of mankind'. Helmholtz was later to say that, when he delivered his celebrated lecture on I<'ant in 1855, he 'had been a more faithful I<'antian' than he now was in 1894, but it is plain that he had already distanced himself from criticalism a long time before that: in this address of the summer of 1878 he 'recalls' the' penitential sermons' Fichte had in difficult times delivered to the German nation, fails to specify in any detail what the' eternal goals of mankind' might be, and remains true to his earlier critical principles only to the extent that he regards realist
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and idealist 'opinions' as to the existence and knowability of things as mere 'hypotheses' which, 'so long as they are recognized as such, are perfectly entitled to be called scientific, however harmful they may be if they are represented as dogmas or as ostensible necessities of thought'. Then, however, he suddenly also speaks of so-called 'metaphysical hypotheses' which together with the whole era of German idealisn1 deserve rehabilitation: there is 'something attractive' about the German idealists 'when contrasted with arid, calculating egoiSlTI', for it would 'unquestionably mean ruin if, absorbed in subordinate and practically useful tasks, our generation should have lost sight of the eternal ideals of mankind'. And although Helmholtz, inasmuch as he sought to demonstrate in opposition to IZant the untenability of the' transcendental nature of the axioms of geometry', employed precisely this lecture to confess his adherence to an empiricist theory of knowledge, he now laid claim to that same concept of 'hypotheses' derived from Riemann and employed to construct the foundations of geometry when he demanded certain practical courses of action: Science must discuss and consider all admissible hypotheses, so as to maintain a complete survey of all attempt at explanation and understanding. Hypotheses are even more necessary when it comes to acting, for we cannot always wait until an assured scientific decision has been reached but must decide for ourselves, whether on the basis of probability or on that of aesthetic or moral feeling. In this sense of the word no objection could be raised to metaphysical hypotheses either ...
In the crisis of 1878-9 Meyer employed the expedients of demagogy, while Helmholtz lit upon a re-evaluation of German idealism and became the advocate of an empiricism which, from pragmatic motives, demanded above all a construction of hypotheses in the domain of ethics which might, by all means, also borrow from the old idealist and metaphysical systems, provided the aesthetic and moral feelings were in accord. Unlike in the 185 os, even Helmholtz now no longer wrangled over idealism or materialism, dogmatism or criticalism: there appeared instead a singular compromise solution which in the realm of theoretical philosophy advocated more vigorously than ever a purely empirical foundation even of geometrical axioms, while in the domain of practical philosophy every solution, even up to metaphysical hypotheses, was regarded as right provided it could be shown to be appropriate for the attainment of those 'eternal goals of mankind'. A few years later, in 1882, the establishment of norms of every kind was then expressly elevated to a theme and chief interest of philosophy when in his lecture' What is Philosophy?' Wilhelm Windelband set philosophy the task of becoming the' critcal science of universally valid values and standards'. This lecture, which contains programmatically Windelband's whole philosophy and is therefore placed first in his collection Praludien (1884), no longer takes its start, as had been the case only a few years previously, from an attempt to
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism elucidate the given through an exposition of its genesis, but now poses the question whether there is such a thing as science, i.e. a thinking which possesses with universal and necessary validity the standard of truth; whether there is such a thing as morality, i.e. a willing and acting which possesses with universal and necessary validity the standard of the good; whether there is such a thing as art, i.e. a contemplation and feeling that possesses with universal and necessary validity the standard of beauty.
The questions Windelband poses in this essay are rhetorical ones, but they are questions that purport to draw the consequences of the dilemma philosophy gets into when it seeks to explain the cause or emergence of norms in logic, ethics and aesthetics because in doing so it is everywhere obliged to have recourse to psychology: 'Ideas come and go; how they do so may be left to psychology to explain: philosophy inquires into what value they can be accorded.... The manner in which, in accordance with psychological laws, we form certain ideas, as individuals, as peoples, as the human species, and come to believe in their correctness, determines nothing as to their absolute truthvalue.' Philosophy' is not explanation but critique' he adds laconically, thus contradicting the viewpoint adopted by ethno-psychology, by the Vierteljahrsschrift and formerly by him himself. Only the exclusion of all psychology and history could make of philosophy an autonomous science or a science at all; in the absence of this it threatened to decay' into a "work of fiction" composed of concepts' or 'into a ragout gathered up out of psychological and cultural-historical refuse': 'Philosophy can remain or become an independent science only if it is the full and pure determination and expression of the I
The phase of differentiation in accordance with which the judging consciousness comprehends it. Every act of judging presupposes as its assessment of itself a certain end, and it possesses meaning and significance only to him who recognizes this end.
It was precisely to this extent that Windelband seemed to want to remain true to his former relativism, and this distinction, too, served first and foremost only the end of separating judgments from evaluations in order to show the latter to be the object of philosophy: 'The distinction between judgment and acts of judging is ... of the highest importance because it is on this that there rests the sole remaining possibility of defining philosophy as a distinct science strictly demarcated from the other sciences simply by its object of interest. For all other sciences have to establish theoretical judgments: acts of judging constitute the object of philosophy.' The historical, descriptive and explanatory sciences - the classification of the sciences into idiographic and nomothetic first established more precisely in 1894 can already be discovered in 1882 - were based on the formation of judgments of objects, and here there was nothing left for philosophy to do. The tasks of description and explanation were what constituted the individual sciences, and even the explanation and description of the acts of judging that arose were exclusively the duty of psychology or cultural history and of the social sciences. Philosophy, on the other hand, was the science of values and standards. Values and standards counted as valid, and only insofar as they were perceived and recognized did philosophy possess in them an object which distinguished it as an individual science. It was true that' the true, the good, the beautiful' were first and foremost also, 'as empirical facts of the individual or the universally human spirit', merely' a necessary natural product of given laws and conditions. And yet this is the fundamental fact of philosophy - with all this natural necessity of all acts of judging and their objects without exception, we are unshakably convinced there are certain acts of judging which are valid absolutely even if they are in fact not universally recognized at all.' This constituted a leap into irrationality: in logic, ethics and aesthetics there were absolutely valid - but undemonstrable norms whose universal validity was not a factual but an 'ideal' one: 'one which is not actual but ought to be'. Windelband continues his apologia for the status quo: We believe in a higher law as that of the necessary natural genesis of all our acts of judging, in a just power that determines their value. I say we all believe in this. Am I forgetting those theoreticians of relativism who see in all these decisions and convictions nothing more than necessary natural products of human society? But they desire, not to introduce their theory as it were as a casual opinion, but to maintain and prove it. And what does' to prove' mean? It means to presuppose that above these necessities that determine every stimulation of ideas there stands a higher necessity which everyone ought to recognize. Whoever proves relativism destroys it. Relativism is a theory in which no one has ever seriously believed, in which no one can seriously believe ...
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The refutation of 'relativism', of all pragmatic, empirical and POSIt1VIst theories, which Windelband achieves in so ingeniously simple a fashion, operates with a circular conclusion in which that which is 'proved' is that which had been presupposed: the belief that something ought to be accepted as universally true, good and beautiful, whereby one can of course in turn only believe in this acceptation. The postulate that values ought to be universally valid is foisted on 'relativist theories', although the latter do not ask for anything remotely like a demand for universal validity. The desire to be accounted universally valid everywhere to be observed in the individual's 'impulse to convince' is imputed to these theories in order to found the new science of values. That, on the other hand, truth-claims could be confined to individual theories, to attempts at the explanation of facts, to the domain of , judgments', has plainly never entered Windelband's head, for to him there exists a triad of equal demands (and desires) for validity in logic, ethics and aesthetics in which he 'believes' not merely for the purpose of asserting the autonomy of philosophy but from highly practical motives. His irrationalism represents an authoritarian ideology. This is shown most clearly in his construction of a 'normal consciousness' in relation to which deviating convictions consequently belong to the' pathology of human thought': Everywhere ... that the empirical consciousness discovers in itself this ideal necessity of that which ought to be accounted universally valid we encounter a normal consciousness whose nature consists for us in the fact that we are convinced that it ought to be actually realized, quite regardless of whether it actually is realized in the necessary natural development of the empirical consciousness. However small may be the degree and extent to which this normal consciousness penetrates the empirical consciousness and finds acceptance there, all logical, ethical and aesthetic acts of judging are nonetheless erected on the conviction that such a normal consciousness exists and that we have to raise ourselves to it if our acts of judging are to lay claim to necessary universal validity ...
For all these reasons philosophy was nothing other than' reflection on this norn1al consciousness' and it had the task of discovering in this chaos of individual or in fact universal values those to which there adheres the necessity of the normal consciousness. This necessity can in no case be derived from anywhere, it can only be exhibited; it is not produced [an allusion to Cohen], only brought to consciousness. The only thing philosophy can do is to make this normal consciousness leap forth out of the fermentations of the empirical consciousness and to trust in the immediate evidentiality with which, once it has emerged into clear consciousness, its normality proves as efficacious and valid in every individual as it ought to.
The appeal to the' imn1ediate evidentiality' of laws of thought, duties and acts of judging that are supposed to count as normative first and foremost restores to philosophy an object and a foundation which it had in the meantime lost,
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but as an instrument for the critique of other philosophical - and not only philosophical opinions it forthwith also acquires an ideological function: for Windelband also purports to know what constitutes the 'normal' and supposedly' healthy': 'We could no longer treat logically or scientifically with anyone who denied the validity of the laws of thought; we could not come to a moral understanding with anyone who rejected any kind of duty. Recognition of the noril1al consciousness is the precondition of philosophy ... ' One could of course believe that this theory of 'normative evidentiality' which maintains itself to be ' completely identical ... with the I<'antian philosophy' was conceived in a state of comparative innocence, or represents at worst a theoretical blunder or is even, as all the historians of philosophy maintain, only a theoretical further development of 1<'ant' s practical philosophy - if Windelband's 'axiological' or 'normativist criticalism' itself had not already been a product of the mood of panic that informed the years 1878-9, and if the' normal consciousness' had not been intended as a concept with which to combat all democrats, republicans and socialists indiscriminately. For the history of philosophy has, in the matter of Windelband, overlooked not only the ethno-psychological essay in Steinthal's journal referred to above but in addition a whole series of further essays from which the breach in his development and thinking can easily be made more clearly apparent and which even makes it possible to date his transformation from Saul to Paul with greater precision: thus, for example, he published in 1878 in the journal 1m Neuen Reich an essay' On Experimental Aesthetics' in which he still said that' so-called good taste is not something that exists objectively and as it were once and for all, it is rather a product of human evolution and of a continual if not constant enhancement of receptivity in the course of history'. Still thinking as he was wholly on the lines dictated by ethno-psychology, this seemed to him 'to be the point upon which n10dern aesthetics ought essentially to concentrate its work' - published in 1878, at the beginning of May, and written presun1ably not later than the February or March of the same year before his turning away from relativism. In another essay, the last to appear in the Vierteijahrsschrift - his inaugural address at Freiburg 'On the Influence of the Will on Thinking' - he pursues the influence of interest on knowledge at various levels and con1es to the interesting conclusion that probably' nowhere' other than in the domain of' moral hopes and endeavours' is anything so firmly regarded' as certain' which should merely' be strongly hoped to be of the highest value'. This is, of course, a critique of the viewpoint he himself later adopted, taken from a passage which, Windelband's own assurance that no changes had been made to the texts notwithstanding, was omitted when the essay was subsequently included in the Prdludien, no doubt because, though it had been suited to the 'sophistical Vierteljahrsschrift', it could not form part of a science of values which was to claim 'immediate
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certainty' and' evidentiality' as the ultimate court of appeal. In any event, this or the essay on experimental aesthetics was the last publication by Windelband not to be directly determined by the events of the day. A few weeks after this contribution to the liberal weekly 1m Neuen Reich - it was to be his last - an anonymous writer gave in it a very impressive description of the agitation that infected the summer of 1878: 'In the brief space of a week,' he wrote on 10 June, a tremendous transformation has taken place in every aspect of our dornestic affairs, and each new day brings new events which show that we are entering a period of the most earnest and heated political struggle. This development has produced all the greater impression in that it had been brought about so suddenly and so forcibly. From the relative peace enjoyed by our domestic political life we have been instantly transported into the midst of the most violent struggle. For the second shameful assassination attempt on our revered I<:'aiser is nothing other than a declaration of war by an infamous revolutionary party which must at once call all patriotic parties to arms.
The item was headlined' The need for unity against socialism', and this unity, which had not yet produced the desired majority in the Reichstag following the first assassination attempt on I I May, was now in fact produced by new elections. How and by what n1eans 'public opinion armed itself' (Helmholtz, 3 August) is made clearly apparent in the same article in this liberal weekly: Everyone feels that our highest interests are in peril, and that it is each man's duty to act in person in defence of these highest interests. During the first few days following the attempted assassination the dominant feeling among the people was, to be sure, one of dismay, the most fantastic rumours circulated in the city, fearful and anxious crowds restlessly thronged the streets. Then, however, composure and the strength for selfdefence supervened, and it grew with every passing day and will certainly emerge victorious from the struggle with the party of revolution ... With socialism we stand confronted by terrorism, by crude naked force, which has conspired to bring about our destruction. Hitherto this view has on the whole not been shared by the public, even though the government has repeatedly reiterated it to the people's representatives.
The majority Bismarck needed for the enactment of his law he achieved through this fictitious 'threat to the security of the country', for 'The slogan for the elections can surely never have been so easy to give as it is today, never has the situation been more favourable for finally assembling all parties around a single banner. And this opportunity must be seized if a great misfortune is to be averted. ' The moulding of society succeeded, and a victory was won over the 'phantom '. True, there was an absence of total unity as to whether in socialism the right phantom had been brought down, for many believed with Treitschke that 'the Jews are our n1isfortune'; but the liberalism of the still youthful German Reich was at an end: 'So it has again come about', Hermann Cohen deposed in 'A Confession on the Jewish Question', 'that we are obliged to confess our religion. We younger men had the right to hope we would
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gradually succeed in entering into the "nation of IZant" ... that 1n time it would become possible unconstrainedly to acknowledge within us our love of our fatherland and to feel a conscious pride in being allowed to work as equals at the tasks of the nation. We have now lost this assurance; the old fear and anxiety have returned. ' After first the Catholics, then the social democrats had been excluded from the society of 'good Germans', in the anti-Semitic contention in Berlin ignited by Treitschke with his article' Our Prospects' in the Preussische Jahrbucher an offensive was trumpeted against another domestic foe, for ] udaism has incontestably a large share in the lies and deception, the insolent greed that characterize the Grunderzeit, a heavy portion of the blame for that base materialism of our days which regards any kind of work only as paid employment and threatens to stifle the old cheerful joy in work that characterizes our nation; in thousands of German villages there sits the Jew, usuriously buying up his neighbours ... What is most dangerous, however, is the iniquitous preponderance of Judaism in the press ... For ten years public opinion in many German cities has been' formed' chiefly by Jewish pens; it was a misfortune for the Liberal Party and one of the reasons for its decline that its press accorded much too great a latitude to the Jews ...
Thus what was more obvious than to pose the 'racial question' and to propagate the' socialism of fools' (Bebel) ?! And to do so even if only for the purpose of striking at one's political opponents, in the way Bismarck had calculatedly employed the supposed danger to the nation represented by the Catholic centre and the social democrats for the achievement of his political ends. In this situation Windelband, too, appropriated the goals of Bismarckian politics, and as early as the end of November 1878 he, too, recognized a 'danger to society' which he first adopted as his subject in a lecture 'On Friedrich Holderlin and his Fate'. Concealed behind a deceptive title, amply enveloped in general cultural-critical reflections, he warned of the consequences of divison of labour and of the' lack of an all-round education', but above all of their 'surrogate': Incapable ... of penetrating the content of education down to its depths and in all its individual details, the modern individual has recourse to a superficial dilettantism which skims the froth off everything but leaves the content alone. This dilettantism is comic when it gives itself airs in the conversation of the salon; but when it is preached in the streets it is tragic. We laugh when we hear the flapper uttering her impertinent opinions of the merits of Nietzsche and Wagner: but it is a dreadfully serious matter to see the popular orator parading undigested scraps of scientific theory and casting among the people as truth what he himself has not understood.
As protector of universal knowledge and traditional values, academic philosophy excludes the other two provinces of philosophy - the philosophy of the salons and that of the streets - from the decent society of science, but
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then for its part does not, as one would have expected from the neo-I<.antian programmata of the post-March period, foster formal philosophy and theory of knowledge and of science, but takes up its own entrenched position: Throughout Europe the movement of politics is towards parliamentarianism : whatever political or historical view of it we may take, one thing has to be admitted: it is the form of government of dilettantism. It is the form of government by virtue of which any sophist [!!!] and ranter whatever, with the mandate of a foolish mob in his pocket, believes himself called to deliver ex officio his irresponsible judgment on everything that concerns the interests of public life, and feels it is not only his right but also his duty to set himself up as a judge of the acts of the experienced specialist, the conscientious official, the statesman of genius.
For this reason he holds up Holderlin's 'social sickness' as a warning, for the modern individual, too, was no longer a 'unitary human being': ... the modern individual is the resignatory individual. We are all 'the Renouncers' of the Wanderjahre. I am speaking, not of that resignation of personal desires which has at all times been a duty of moral man, but of the conscious resignation of an allembracing knowledge of the total content of culture. We no longer have any philosophy and will never again have one that brings all the knowledge possessed by the sciences together into a single world-picture.
This resignation of November 1878 was in 1880 followed, after a period of silence, by another address, this time on Socrates, which exhibits a notable agitatedness of style; but in it there is also for the first time perceptible the principal features of Windelband's new philosophy and Weltanschauung, the science of values. This address represents far more than a mere curiosity of scholarly history, even though it is no less a person than the now recovered I<.aiser who lends Socrates his lustre: Of the things great and sublime taking place within the soul of the aged accused his judges suspected nothing: they sensed perhaps more than he desired they should do - only that the old opponent of democracy held them in evident contempt. Passion was unleashed, there was no longer any question of a just examination of the case; a greater part of the voices which would have found him innocent fell easily to his opponents and, enraged by the manly courage exhibited by veracity, the plebeian of Athens, the 'begetter of justice', condemned the most innocent man among them to death
as he had also so to speak condemned the I<.aiser to death, for Windelband quite expressly postulates a struggle between two types of Weltanschauung, one of which is represented by 'sophistry', the other by the forces of reason, of 'reflection on the enduring, the universal, the lawgiving, the normal': He [Socrates, for whom substitute Bismarck, the I(aiser or Windelband] erects above the frenzy and intoxication of individuals grown autocratic the new faith in a reason that is above the individual. In it he finds again what the age has lost: binding authority. The sophistical Enlightenment dissolved the mythic figure of the divine, unbelief reigns, and the opinions of individuals diverge from one another: here
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Socrates [Windelband] renews the dominion of authority, but he discovers it in reason, which rules over all and to which each subordinates his judgment. This process is typical [I] ... From subjection to the general consciousness through the independent judgment of individuals to the comprehension of reason this is the prescribed path of the human spirit. This law of history [I] is represented with magnificent simplicity by the cultural nation par excellence, the Greeks, in the progress it made from the sophists to Socrates. Every other nation, and the whole complex of nations constituting European civilization, have repeated this evolution in their own ways and with increasing power. And if a thoughtful observation of the present today [! ! !] again sees before it a chaotic vortex of confused opinions, a dissolution of the most sacred convictions and the arrogance of a misunderstood superficial culture - then the Socratic word for our days has either not yet been spoken or the age has not heard it.
And so Windelband had to speak it himself, first of all in this address, then in more detail two years later in his arraignment of 'Sophistry'. But this arraignment, too, is to be found for the first time - as is the idea of the construction of a 'normal consciousness' and that of a foundation in reason or in 'normative evidentiality' in this address 'On Socrates': To the sophists [the VierteljahrJschrift] there is only the product of nature which appears in everyone as his absolutely necessary opinion: to Socrates [Windelband] there is a norm in accordance with which the value of these products of nature is determined. This higher necessity which comes to light in the striving after truth in the dialogues we call the legislation of reason: and in this sense it is true to say that Socrates is the discoverer of reason.
Windelband has in the meantime become animated by the 'belief in reason' and this so-called reason defines 'the enduring, the universal, the lawgiving, the normal'. Within philosophy it is intended as an instrument against all nonidealist philosophical tendencies, outside it is on principle anti-democratic and anti-socialist and authoritarian through and through. The' danger to society' which seemed to become apparent in 1878 made of the' relativist' Windelband a combative' value-scientist' who aggressively championed the interests of the authoritarian Bismarckian state. Through the examples of Windelband, Heln1holtz and Meyer the' turning to practical philosophy' - to idealism - and the turning away froITl· all relativism, empiricism and positivism associated with it are clearly recognizable as consequences of the social crisis. And even Benno Erdmann, a philosopher usually so circumspect and critically inclined towards the Zeitgeist, in 1879 confirmed the' grave fact' that contemporary philosophy was characterized by a 'general indifference to ethics'. He, however, saw the reasons for this to lie on one hand in the technological successes of natural science, which have rendered gigantic the egoistic forces of trade and industry; then in the artificial exclusion from the consciousness of the age which the church has, quite erroneously, thought necessary
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism for its self-preservation; at the same time, however, also in that superficial dogmatic unbelief with which materialist philosophy has decked itself and which it has transmitted to every stratum of the populace from the highest to the lowest.
It was this threefold suppression of ethics that had made it possible that at more than one German university in recent years not a single lecture has been delivered on the problems of ethics. The same applies to literary production. In the little that has been produced, however, what is noticeable is how far the real task of ethics, the determination of the maxims which ought to regulate the conduct of the individual and dominate the life of society, has retreated before psychological clarification of the motives that do in fact determine our actions. Almost the only things discussed are the psychological views whose existence is given a helping hand by the Darwinian theory, modern anthropology and the theories of the affects.
Erdmann, too, recommends a reassessment of ethics in this crisis situation: at the same time, though, he was no demagogue, and if he pursued political ends he did so at most subconsciously. Even where he declares the' historic task of the age' to be the creation of a new' general conception of the world' towards which the 'in itself unpleasing characteristics of the age, the eclectic dismemberment of thought and the increasing shallowness of ethical and religious feeling', point, he exhibits no ressentiment and does not demand ethics from a n1ere need for authority. Ethics is here primarily a means of renewing the vitality and effective power formerly possessed by philosophy without this implying that it must at the same time place itself in the service of politics. Because it was believed that the sole cause of faulty developments in society was false or misleading ideas and theories, it was consistent to seek to change society by starting with the consciousness and seeking to transmit to it a new content and new values. Nevertheless, the year 1879, also poor in neo-I(antian publications, as yet saw no ethical programmata. It is true that the themes of practical philosophy were pursued though in isolation - with renewed vigour, but at this early period it had not yet become clear that what was involved here was a quite general trend. Only when in 1882 Johannes Volkelt said in an essay on the 'Revival of I(antian Ethics' that' in recent times a change has begun to make itself felt in our IZantian n10vement' did a contemporary hint for the first time that the neo-IZantianism of the 1880s was to be very different from that of the previous decade. I<'ant is no longer valued so one-sidedly as he recently has been only as the author of the critique of pure reason, but is also taken to our hearts as the proclaimer of the categorical imperative and the founder of an ethically consolidated ideal world. Last year was the centenary of the Critique of Pure Reason, that is to say of the epistemological foundation of I<'antian philosophy, and yet the year saw the appearance of many writings which, partly in express antithesis to the customary one-sided preference for the critique of reason, endeavour to produce a vital and fruitful awareness in our contemporaries of the high significance of I<'antian ethics.
The phase of differentiation
This end was also that served by Volkelt's essay, and in it he gave voice to what had in fact already determined the academic posture of the leading neoI<'antians since the crisis of 1878-9: We may no longer regard the' return to IZant' one-sidedly as a recourse to the epistemological foundation of his system, which leads to diffidence and scepticism [!]; the task of philosophy today [1882] is to make the slogan also come true in a second highly important sense: in the sense of a restoration of our awareness of the enduringly true import of IZant's fundamental ethical ideas and their en1ployment for the construction of an ethics and metaphysics which would, to be sure, lead us far beyond Kant.
Indeed, the programme for a renewal of metaphysics also goes back to the insecurity of the last years of the 18 70S, and it could break through only where the 'most threatening dangers that lie in the present development of our feelings and beliefs' had stepped clearly into view: which was why' everyone who grasps his moral experience energetically and without prejudice must have an immediate certainty that where it is a question of duty, virtue, respect, responsibility, repentance, punishment, etc., a new world is appearing on the horizon: a world of obligation, of free self-determination, of inner worth'. After Fischer, Liebmann and Cohen - after Meyer, Helmholtz, Windelband and Erdmann - V olkelt, too, confessed to being convinced of the existence of a 'world of values distinct from all that belongs to nature', to a new metaphysic of values, duties, norms and principles separated by an unbridgeable chasm from the world of nature, from the natural egoistic and self-willed individual determined by drives and needs - and guarded and protected against it. Whatever the theory or philosophical tendency might be - materialist, empiricist, positivist in Comte's sense or in Mill's, neo-I<.antian sense-physiological, ethno-psychological, milieu-theoretic, sociological, pragmatic or psychological - if it sought to surmount this chasm between the world of ideals and the natural world, or even to comprehend it, from 1878-9 the various tendencies within neo-I<.antianism regarded it as an enemy on principle. During the 1870S the meaning, limits and interpretation of the a priori within the domain of theoretical philosophy were, as the examples of Windelband, Riehl and Paulsen - but also those of Cohen, V olkelt and Erdmann - in particular show, freely discussable: but no discussion of the a priori was any longer possible in the domain of practical philosophy, for there existed a firm conviction that the events of the latest crisis, too, were attributable to intellectual and n10ral errors. An ethical programma and an intensification of teaching and instruction in this domain were the response such a mode of thought had consistently to make to events that had led to a mood of panic, or at least to a strong sense of insecurity, throughout the population.
280
The dissemination of neo-Kantianism
The crisis of 1878-9 (see Table 3) thus also became a segment of the current era in the development of philosophy, and, as Hans Rosenberg has rightly said, it was therefore in fact very 'much more than a transient counterblow aimed at liberal domination and the rise of the industrial social strata'. It was the beginning of the end of the' age of liberalism', and it was also the end of the Falk era of a distinctive liberalism in academic and educational policy within and through which early neo-I<.antianism had grown and developed. The' nation of 1<'ant , (Treitschke) no longer called Jews to full professorships (until 1903), Cohen' returned to Judaism' (Liebeschutz) and this time but also for the first time declared the chief task of practical philosophy to be 'to vivify and realize literally' the 'central truth of belief in God, love of one's neighbour, that is to say the regeneration of the people by means of the ethical ideal of socialism'. Except perhaps for Paulsen, who had by now acquired a professorship in pedagogics and was increasingly involved with practical philosophy and the history of education, only Riehl continued to adhere to a more or less positivist or realist neo-I<.antianism, for even Vaihinger's 'fictionalism' and' philosophy of" as-if'" did not accord with the tendency of the early theorizing of 'scientific philosophy'. Thus did neo-I<.antianism as a whole undergo a profound transformation at this time: for it was not only because it had by now become differentiated into various schools and established itself as a philosophical movement, but above all through its posture in relation to the various Zeitgeist-philosophies and social movements and innovations, that it transformed itself from a 'critical' philosophy and, at any rate between the 185 os and 1870s, one whose tendency was always oppositional, to a positive philosophy which again laid claim to its own systems, to the absolute validity of its foundations, metaphysics, an unassailable apriorism, and theories of ethics and values. This is why it is only fron1 the beginning of the 18 80S that military metaphors could be employed - and employed correctly to characterize a neo-I
The phase of differentiation
281
Table 3. Chronicle of the crisis
11.5
2.6 10.6
3. 8
z 1. 10
9.1 I 29. J I
SS 1879 July 14·7
summer 13. 12
1880
24. I
SS
1881
SS
7·5 8.10
Afrer the death of Pius IX election of the more conciliatory Pope Leo XIII First assassination attempt on the Kaiser Second assassination attempt (Karl Nobeling) INR: 'The need for unity against socialism' Helmholtz laments' cynical contempt for all the ideals of the human race,' demands' hypotheses for action' Reichstag debate on 'The public danger represented by social democracy' The so-called' Socialist Laws' come into force J. B. Meyer: 'Fichte, Lassalle and Socialism' Windelband: 'On Friedrich Hblderlin and his Fate' (antidemocratic polemic) Windelband lectures 'On Freedom of the Will' for the first time Treitschke leaves the National Liberal Party Falk's resignation ushers in the end of the Kulturkampf B. Erdmann laments' ethical indifference' and lack of interest in philosophical ethics Cohen to Treitschke: 'What has to be explained is not the chronic nature of the Jewish question but its acute eruption' Cohen to Treitschke: 'We have to combat materialism of every kind. But nothing could be more unjust and at the same time less appropriate than to call it Judaism' Windelband: 'On Socrates ' (outline of the future' science of values ') Cohen: 'A Confession on the Jewish Question' Windelband lectures for the first time on 'Ethics and the History of Moral Philosophy' and' On the Meaning of Darwinism' Centenary of the Critique oj Pure Reason: celebrations, commemorative articles; WS 1881-2 twenty courses on Kantian philosophy Windelband holds first seminar on Plato's Phaedo; Paulsen lectures for the first time on 'Ethics, including the Principles of Political Science and Sociology' Volkelt announces the completion of a 'critical metaphysics' Cohen designates 'the regeneration of the peoples by means of the ethical ideal of socialism' the chief task of practical philosophy
Kantian movement to the point at which critique of German idealism changed into a new idealism.
INDEX
absence of presuppositions, 28-30 absolute idealism, 248 academic philosophers, 74 Schopenhauer on, 72 academic philosophy, 71, 74, 76, 77-8, 92, 275
and neo-Kantianism, 7, 227 aesthetics transcendental, 58, 168, 173, 177 Windelband on, 270, 27 1, 27 2, 273, 274 age at marriage among the sceptical generation, 94, 95 Allihn, F. H. T., 91-2 anthropologism, 84, 127, 128, 136 in Prantl, 80, 8 I, 96, 128 Apelt, E. F., 38, 104 apperception, concept of, 232-3, 259, 260, 261 apriority in Fischer, 133, 134 theories of, 179-80, 184-5, 186,227-36, 239
Aristotle,
II,
23,24,25,41,80,101,152,
19 2, 26 4
and scientific philosophy, 256 university courses on, 2°5, 249, 263-4 Arnoldt, Emil, 250, 25 I Auerbach, Berthold, 122 Austria, 108, 121 Avenarius, Richard, 254, 259, 260, 261, 262 Bacon, Francis, 25,51,129,13°,192 Baier, Alwill Hermann, 206 Bain, Alexander, 256 Bamberger, Ludwig, 267-8 Barach, Carl Sigmund, 108 Bauch, Bruna, xii Baumann, Julius, 93, 203, 250 Baumgarten, A. G., 43 Beneke, F. E., xi, 36, 37,43-55, 62, 63, 69, 70,94, 125,254, 260
and the absence of presuppositions, 30 and the concept of Erkenntnistheorie, 39 Bennigsen, Rudolf von, 267 Bentham, J., 4 6 Berger, Erich von, II, 12, 13, 14-15, 16, 17, 19, 26, 27, 28, 43, 57, 63, 70
and scientific philosophy, 96, 97 and system-thinking, 70 Bergmann, Julius, 22 I Berkeley, George, 114 Bismarck, Otto von, xii, 105, 106, 120, 154, 26 5 Rosenburg on, 267 Bloch, Ernst, 3, 96, 107 Bobrick, Eduard, 15 I Bohme, Jacob, 58 Bois-Reymond, Emil du, 98 Brandis, 122, 151-2 Braniss, 21, 90-I, 92, 122, 124, 250 Bratuscheck, Ernst, 12, 13, 17-19, 26, 176, 25 8
Brentano, F., 225, 250 Buchner, Eduard, 157, 179, 208 Buhr, Manfred, 4 Calinich, E. A. E., 53, 54-5 Campo, Mariano, x-xi Carriere, Moriz, 4 2, 65, 79, 146 Cassirer, Ernst, xii, 4, 37, I 17, 18 5, 199, 200, 280
categorical imperative, 143, 144, 146, 21 5 Catholic church and neo-K.antianism, 219-21 and Riehl, 222-4 Christ, von, 81-2 Christian Weltanschauung, 93, 95-6, 162 Christianity, 82, 225 Lange on, 166 clericalism, 209, 226 cliometrics, ix, xi Cohen, Hermann, x, xii, xiii, 25, 175-97, 198, 199, 200, 201, 279
academic career, 201-2, 205, 221 'A Confession on the Jewish Question " 274, 280 Erdmann on, 247 on experience, 1 82 and the Fischer-Trendelenburg debate, 16 9-7 0 , 175- 8
on Lange, 167, 169-70, 179, 190, 256 and socialism, 267, 280 Systematic Concepts in Kant's Pre-Critical
Index Writings in their Relation to Critical Idealism, 240-1 and the theory of apriority, 184-5, 227-34 Comte, A., 51,88,89,1°3-4,179,255,257 university courses on, 249 Conflict over the Constitution, The (Lange), 15 3 consciousness unity of, 232-3 Windelband's construction of normal, 27 1- 2, 276-7 constructive motion, concept of, 14, 168, 175, 18 9 Cousin, Victor, 59 crisis of 1878-9,279,280 Critical History of Philosophy (Diihring), 244, 245 critical philosophy, 82, 83 Fischer on, I 32 criticalism, 96 Diihring on, 244-6 Erdmann on, 247-9 Fischer on, 128-9, 133 Helmholtz on, 268-9 Lange on, 101 Liebmann on, 140, 141-4, 147 Meyer on, 100-4, I I I , 112, 116,267 neo-criticalism, 200 value-theoretical, 237 Windelband on, 272-3 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 172, 178, 228 and apriorism, 228, 23 I and Cohen's critique of experience, 182, 183, 186, 187, 188 and Cohen's interpretation of I(ant, 178-80, 181 Erdmann on, 247-8 Lange on, 151, 163 Liebmann on, 140, 141
Darwin, Charles, I 18, 234 Democritism, I 10, I I I Democritus, 190, 19 2 Descartes, Rene, 30, 60, 19 1, 249 Deussen, Paul, 250 Deutsche Nationalverein, 121-2 Diemer, Alwin, 37, 54 Diesterweg, Adolf, 53 Dilthey, Wilhelm, II, 13, 21, 23, 26, 56,80, 81,85,91,93,95,1°5, 111, 2°3
Dressler, J. G., 52, 53 Drobisch, M. W., 79, 88, 118, 120, 2°5 Droysen, J. G., 85, 89 Diihring, Karl Eugen, 22, 24, 208, 2 I I, 244-5, 24 6
duty, concept of in Liebmann, 144, 146-7 Ebbinghaus, Julius, 74
ego Fichte's deductions of the, 232 in Kant, 120, 236 in Riehl, 223 empirical sciences and apriorism, 230-1 and philosophy, 18-19, 262-3 empiricism and Beneke, 46-7 Cohen's critique of, 178, 18o in Germany, 5 and neo-Kantianism, 240, 261-2 Schelling on, 59 in Trendelenburg, 24 Engels, F., 212 epistemology, xi, 114-15 and neo-I(antianism, 261-2 rationalist, 242 renewal of, I I 3 Trendelenburg on, 15 see also knowledge Erdmann, Benno, 201, 205, 211,212,239, 24 6- 8 assessment of Riehl, 243-5 on ethics, 277-8, 28 I Erdmann, J. E., 74-5, 76-7, 79, 90, 92 Erkenntnistheorie, concept of, 37-44,108-17, 199, 200, 201
and ethics, 193-4 in Beneke, 43-4 in Fischer, I 34 and logic, 4 1, 43, 44-5 and science, I I 5- 16 ethical ideal-realism, 1°9-10 ethical materialism, 157, 158, 160,223, 224
ethics Cohen on, 193-7 Erdmann on, 277 I(antian, 277-9 Lange on, 192, 195, 257 Liebmann on, 144, 147 and scientific philosophy, 25 7-8 validity in, 270, 271 Ethics of Pure Will (Cohen), 195 ethno-psychology, 233, 237, 254, 270 Windelband on, 236-8 Eucken, Rudolf, 250 evidentiality, 133, 137 evolution, theory of, 262 Ewald, Herr Hofrat, 65 experience Cohen's critique of, 178-89, 197, 228 concept of, 23 I Falckenberg, Richard, 250 Falk, A., 2°4, 220, 22 I, 222, 224, 280 Fetscher, 1., 89
Index Feuerbach, L. A., 56, 69, 70, 88, 112, 127, 162, 219
Fischer on, 125-6 and Prantl, 80-1 Fichte, 1. H., 5,7,77,79,94 and the absence of presuppositions, 30 and Beneke, 44, 45 and the concept of Erkenntnistheorie, 38 on Herbart, 76 and the philosophers' congress, 62, 65 and scientific philosophy, 96, 98 and speculative theism, 56-8, 59, 60, 61, 62-3
and system-thinking, 70 Fichte, J. G., xii, 5, II, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24, 7 1, 80, 84, 170, 23 2, 249, 268
celebrations, 120-I, 122, 124, 135, 206 identification with Kant, 127 and Kantian-Fichtean philosophy, 123-4 Liebmann on, 13 8, 139, 143 and socialism, 265-7 Fischer, Kuno, xii, 5, I I, 24, 94, 96, 99, 100, 108, 123, 125-35, 142, 146,201
academic career, 205 Anti- Trendelenburg, 168, 174 critique of, by Cohen, 241 Erdmann on, 247 on an 'inconsistency' in Kant, 139-40 lectures, 119-20 presentation of Kant, I 16, I 19 and religion, 82- 3 System of Logic and Metaphysics, 169, 172-3 Fischer-Trendelenburg debate, 167-78, 186 Flint, R., 255 Fortlage, Carl, 52, 62, 65, 77, 79, II 9, 12 3, 12 4, 139 Four Months before Paris, 187°-I: Diary of a Siege, 141-3, 144 Frauenstadt, Julius, 71-3, 74, 79, 99, 109
freedom Fichtian-liberal concept of, 96 Idea of, 194, 195 and idealism, 126, 175 and neo-Kantianism, 2 I ° freedom of opinion in Germany, 253 freedom of will, 99, 10 I, 124, 137, 252 in Fischer, I 3~5 in Lange, 164 Freytag, Gustav, 121 Fries, J. F., 12, 24, 38, 200 Liebmann on, 13 8, 139, 140 university courses on, 249 Frohschammer, Jacob, 117, 250 Gabler, G. A., 30 Galileo, 188 Gans, Eduard, 92
Gauss, K., 27 Geisteswissenschaften, concept of (humanities), 21, 54-5, 87, 88
George, Leopold, 2 I, 55, 122 German idealism, 37, 44, 60, 19 8 discrediting of, 38, I 36 and Erkenntnistheorie, 39 Harms on, 84-5 Liebmann on, I 38-9 and neo-Kantianism, 6, 7 and Prantl, 8 I re-evaluation of, 268-9 German nationalism in Liebmann, 144-5 Germany Austrian or Prussian domination, 120-1 socialism in, 26 5-8, 274-5 Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, 79, 80 God Fichte's conception of, 57, 58, 59,60,61 Idea of, in Lange, 163-5 and objective idealism, 13 and the organic conception of the world, 20 Goethe, J. von, 9 8 Goring, Carl, 250, 25 2 Gotha, philosophers' congress in, 64-6 Great Depression and the Age of Bismarck, The (Rosenburg), 266 Grunder, K., 24 Gruppe, O. F., 25, 254 Guttler, J
Hartmann, A., 56 Hartmann, Eduard von, 208, 2 I 3, 2 I 5 Hartmann, Nicolai, xiii Haym, Rudolf, 94,96, 104-6, 107, 108, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127, 196, 201
essay on Schiller, I I 8 receives professorship, 202 Hegel, G., x, I, 4, 13, 37, 7 2, 76, 9 8 , 249 and Beneke, 46 and Erkenntnistheorie, 39 Fischer on, 127 Haym's critique of, 1°5, 106 and Kantian philosophy, 48 Lange on, 151, 161 Liebmann on, 138, 139, 140 phenomenology of, 43 and Prantl, 80 Rosenkranz on, 107 and speculative thought, 3 I Trendelenburg on, I I, 15, 28-3 I, 32-4 von Berger on, 14 Young Hegelians, 90 see also Left Hegelians
Index 'Hegel and his Age' (Haym), 105 Heidelberg School of neo-Kantianism, xi, xii, xiii Heine, H., 83, 142 Heinze, Max, 93, 203, 257 Helferich, Adolf, 122 Helmholtz, Hermann von, ix, xii, 84, 93, 94, 95,96,97,98-100, 102, 104, 12 3, 13 8, 164, 281 and criticalism, 268 and scientific philosophy, 254, 255 and socialism, 274 Herbart, J. F., 12, 15, 16, 24,46, 14°,23° Lange on, I 5 1 Liebman on, 13 8, 139 philosophy of, 75, 76-7 university courses on, 249 Herbartian philosophy, 234, 235 Herbartian psychology, 245-6 Herder, J. G., 249 Hermann, Conrad, 250
Herding, Georg von, 1 1 Hillebrand, Joseph, 72 historicism, 82 in Prantl, 79, 80, 8 I history philosophy, of, 85 science of, 2 History of Materialism (Lange), 97,
I 51, 15 5, 157, 160, 162, 167, 191, 192,201, 212 Paulsen on, 2 I 0-1 I History of Modern Philosopf?y (Windelband), 26 4 history of philosophy, 1-3, 65, 74 and neo-Kantianism, 137-8 and Prussian universities, 83-4 and scientific philosophy, 253 university courses, 261 Windelband on, 272-3
history of science Beneke on, 46-7 Hobbes, Thomas, 256 Holderlin, Friedrich, 275-6 Hulsen, Christian, 16 Humboldt, Alexander von, 130 Humbolt, W. von, 80 Hume, David, 53, 182, 24 8, 25 6 Duhring on, 244, 245 Paulsen on, 242 and scepticism, 129 university courses on, 249 hypotheses, concept of, 269 ideal-realism, 1°9-10 idealisrn, . 198 absolute, 248 critical, 24 I, 247 Erdmann's discussion of, 76-7
in Feuerbach, 125-6 in Fischer, 129 and freedom, 126 in Lange, 210-1 I, 256-7 and materialism, 102, 103, 112, II3-14, 19°-1
and natural science, 98 objective, 13, 82, 96, I 12 and pessimism, 2 14 and realism, 5, I I 3, 129-3°, 259 and scientific philosophy, 25 2 subjective, III, 112, 177, 189, 191 transcendental, 177 Trendelenburg's critique of, 172-3, 175 turning to (1878-9), 262-81 Ueberweg on, 1°9-1°, I I I see also German idealism; neo-idealism idealist scepticism, 173 ideas and ideals in Liebmann, 143-4 individualism, 72, 74 Jacobi, F. H., 80 Jaeger, Werner, 23 Jewish question in Germany, 274 J odl, Friedrich, 250 Joel, Karl, 17 journals, philosophical, 77-8, II7-18, 121, 257
judging, acts of Windelband on, 269-71, 272-3 judgments in Fischer, 132 justice Cohen on, 197 Kant, 1. and Aristotle, 23 Beneke on, 47-8, 50-1 critique of pure reason, 44 realist versus idealist interpretation of, 116-17
and speculative theism, 60-2 Kant und die Epigonen (Liebmann), 138 Kant's Analogies of Experience (Laas), 250 Kant's Epistemology (Volkelt), 229 Kant's Foundation of Ethics (Cohen), 193 Kant's Theory of Experience (Cohen), 176, 177, 179-80, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 19 8, 230, 241 Kierkegaard, S., 1 I, 56
knowledge concept of, in Locke, 39-40 integration into philosophy, 22-3 theory of, 2, 37 see also epistemology Konig, G. L., 12 I
Index
286 K.rause, K., 249 Krug, W. T., 43 Kiilpe, Otto, 3, 249 Kulturkampf, 5, 202, 220, 221-2, 224, 225, 226, 254 Kym, Andreas Ludwig, 86-7, 88, II I, 112, 115, 122
Laas, Ernst, 26, 93, 112, 186, 203, 250, 25 I, 25 6
Lambert, J. H., 245 Lange, Friedrich Albert, ix, xii, 4, 25, 33, 93, 94,96,123,151-67,167-8,191-2
academic career, 203, 2°4, 205 and the Catholic church, 2 I 9 Cohen's critique of, 167, 169-70, 179, 190, 25 6-7
conception of the a priori, 189-90 on criticalism, 101 education, 151-2 on ethics, 195 Heinze on, 25 7-8 on idealism, 210-1 I, 256-7 influence on students, 210-II, 2II-12, 213 on materialism, 97, 157-9, 160, 164-6 and Plato's idealism, 190 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 15 5, 215, 26 5 Lasswitz, Kurd, 258 Lazarus, Moriz, 104, 146,233,234 Leese, K., 56 Left Hegelians, 56,7°,71, 125, 128 Lehmann, G., 56 Leibniz, G., 40, 58, 105, 129, 249 Leo XIII, Pope, 281 Liberal Party (Germany), 153, 154, 274 liberalism, 196, 221-2, 279-80 end of age of, 279-80 and neo-Kantianism, 225-6 Lichtfreunde movement, 52, 53 Liebig, J. von, 89 Liebmann, Otto, xii, 128, 138-48, 163, 164, 184,196,198,199,201,2°3,225,258, 279 AnalYsis of Reality, 226
and Lange, 1 51 lectures, 25 8-9 receives professorship, 202 review of Kant's Analogies of Experience (Laas), 251 on science and philosophy, 227 at Strassburg university, 204, 205 Lindemann, H. S., 64 Lindner, Theodor, 73 Lipps, Theodor, 250 Locke, John, 31, 39-4°,41,42,44,58,182, 19 2, 245, 25 6
university courses on, 249
logic Beneke on, 48-50 and the concept of Erkenntnistheorie, 4 1, 43, 44-5
Fischer on, 126-7 in the Fischer-Trendelenburg debate, 171 Lange on, I 5 1 Liebmann on, 147 and metaphysics, 14, 20-2 Prantl on, 79-80, 82 Sigwart on, 237 and theory of science, 20-8 Ueberweg on, 49- 5° Ulrici on, 260 validity in, 270, 271, 272 in Windelband, 238-9 Windelband on, 236 Logische Untersuchungen (Trendelenburg), 1 I, 14,15,19,20-1,31,33-4, IIO, III, 112, I I 5
and the Fischer-Trendelenburg debate, 168, 169, 170, 17 1, 172, 175
Lott, Franz Karl, 250 Lotze, R. H., 79, 104, 234, 270 Lowe, J. H., 250 Lowe-Calbe, 121, 122,267 Lowith, Karl, 3, 56 Liibbe, Hermann, 6 Lukacs, Georg, 3, 6, 73-4 Luxemburg, Rosa, 160 Mann, Gala, 76 Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, xii, xiii, 176, 178, 186, 267
Marggraff, Hermann, 121 Marquard, Odo, 85, IIO marriage among the sceptical generation, 94, 95 Marx, Karl, 56,208,212 and Lange, 154-5, 157, 15 9-60 material idealism, 18o materialism, xii, 55,69,73,79,86,91, 97-100, 101, 102-3, 106, 136
Cohen's critique of, 179, 18o criticism of, 2 I 2-13 Fischer on, 127 Harms on, 84-5 and idealism, 102, 103, 112, I I 3-14, 190-1 Lange on, 157-9, 160, 164-6, 190, 192 and positivism, 88-90 mathematics and Cohen's theory of experience, 188-9 May Laws (1873), 220 Mehring, Franz, 74 metaphysical hypotheses, 269 metaphysics, 252, 26 3, 279 Aristotelian, 23-4
Index Avenarius on, 260 Beneke on, 48-9 Cohen on, 193 in Hegel, 105, 106 Kant's critique of, 5° Lange on, 151, 161, 162 and logic, 14, 20-1 programme for renewal of, 278-9 ~ethodic idealism, 191 IMeyer, J urgen Bona, x, xii, 5, I I, 26, 93, 94, 96, III, 112, 146,222,225,281 I II, II2, II6, 26 7
and criticalism, 100-4,
Kant's p.rycholOgy, 185 receives professorship, 202 and religion, 224-5 and socialism, 264-6, 267 Michelet, Carl Ludwig, 79, II6, II7, 199 Mill, J. S., 5I, 87, 88, 89, 104, 12 3, 179, 254-5, 257
university courses on, 249 Moleschott, J, 98, 99, 100, 157, 179 moral community, 18 morality, see ethics Morality and Dogma (Riehl), 222-4 motion, concept of, I 3, 14, 3 I Muller, Johannes, 98 Muller, von (education minister), 220, 221 Natorp, Paul, x, 181, 183, 200,211,212,25°, 280
nature, Fichte's conception of, 16 N aturwissenschaften, concept of (natural sciences), 53-4, 87 neo-Aristotelianism, 24, 25 neo-criticalism, 200 neo-idealism, I 36-7, 163 Fischer on, 173, 174, 175 neo-idealist neo-Kantianism, 140 Newton, Isaac, 100 Nietzsche, F., 56, 94, 145-6, 160, 208, 21 3 Noack, Ludwig, 108, 124-5, 133, 135, 161
Paulsen, Friedrich, 11,24,112,17°,201,212, 218,234,245,246,25 8,280
academic career, 2°4, 261, 279 Attempt at a History of the Evolution of Kantian Epistemology, 24 1-3, 244 on contemporary foreign philosophy, 254-5
Erdmann on, 247 on I(ant, 248-9, 259-60 on Lange's History of Materialism, 210-II on religion, 225 and scientific philosophy, 25 1- 2, 253, 256, 25 8
pessimism, 71, 73, 208, 209, 213-19, 226 Petersen, Peter, 25 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), x Philosophische Monatshejte, 38, 176, 190, 235, 244, 25 8-9, 26 3 Pius IX, Pope, 219, 220, 281 Plato, 111,126,190,191,256,264,281 Cohen on, 18 3-4, 193 and the concept of the Idea, 192 university courses on, 205, 249, 264, 265 Plato's Theory of Ideas Developed P.rychological(y (Cohen), 183-4 Platonism, I 10, I I I Poetic Imagination and the Mechanism of Conscioumess (Cohen), 233 political philosophy, 7 I in Lange, 153-61 in Liebmann, 144-6 positive philosophy, 5I positivism, xii, 5, 17,22,24-5,79,82, 13 6 Cohen's critique of, 179, 180 and criticalism, 103-4 critiques of, 87-90 and materialism, 88-9 and neo-Kantianism, 240, 25 I, 254-6, 262-3, 264
see also scientific philosophy post-Hegelian philosophy, 56 practical philosophy, 71, 161, 252, 262, 264, 26 5
object, concept of the, 181-2 objective, concept of the, 177, 178 objective idealism, 13, 112 Prand on, 82, 96 objectivity, Trende1enburg's concept of, 185, 18 9-9 0
Oesterreich, T. 1(., 198, 199, 200, 201, 205 Ollig, Hans-Ludwig, 6 Opzoomer, C. W., 89 organic conception of the world, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 24
pantheism, 62, 82, 91, II 0, 224, 253-4 in Fischer, 83
and Kantian ethics, 277, 278 and the organic conception of the world, 18
and Trendelenburg, 33, 34 Prand, Carl, xi, I I, 64, 79-82, 84, 86, 88, 94, 96, III, 112, 125, 128
receives professorship, 202 presuppositions, absence of, 29-30 proof, philosophical and von Berger, 15 property, Fichtean concepts of, 265-7 Protestant churches, 219, 22 I Prussia and the German question, 120-1
Index
288 Prutz, Robert, 101 psychologism, 56, 69, 79, 26 I, 262, 26 3 and Beneke, 5 I in Germany, 5 Schelling on, 59 psychology and Beneke, 5 I, 54 Lange on, I 5 I von Berger on, 28 public opinion and philosophy, 74 pure reason in Fischer, 133-5, 172 and Kant, 129, 180 pure thought, 84, 133, 260 Cohen, on, 197 Fischer on, 171-2 rejection of, 114 and system-thinking, 69 Trendelenburg's critique of, 28-35
on the church and state, 225-6, 227 Erdmann on, 247 Riemann, G., 269 Ringer, Fritz, xi Rise of the German Mandarins, The (Ringer), xi Ritter, Heinrich, 2 I Ritter, J., 55 Rokitanski, Karl von, 262 Romantic philosophy, 16-17, 18, 33 Romantic Platonism in Fischer, 126 Romundt, Heinrich, 250 Rosenberg, Hans, 214, 267, 280 Rosenkranz, I<arl, II, 15,22, 32,46,79,83, 92 , 9 8 on Hegel, 107 and the Hegelians, I 17 on pure thought, 30-1 and Schopenhauer, 7 2 , 73 Rothacker, Erich, 6, 17, 23, 89, 106
rationalism formal, 243, 24 8 Paulsen on, 243 Schelling on, 59 realism, 82 Erdmann's discussion of, 76-7 and idealism, 5, II3, 12 9-3°,259 Ueberweg on, 1°9-1°, I I I realistic individualism in Herbart, 76 reason, Lange on, 164 Rehmke, Johannes, 250 Reinhold, Ernst, 37, 38, 40, 4 1, 42-3, 45, 56,
Sass, Hans Martin, 157, 15 8, 167 sceptical generation of philosophers, 9°-6,
65,94
and system-thinking, 70 Reinhold, Karl Leonard, I I, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17,27,257
relativism Windelband's refutation of, 270-2 religion in Fischer, 82-3 Lange on, 166 and neo-K.antianism, 224-5 Prand on, ·80-1 Riehl on, 222-4 see also Christianity; God 'Resurrection of Philosophy' period, 198-9, 201, 203, 206-7, 21 9
revolution Lange on, I 58-60 Lindemann on, 64 Ricardo, David, 158 Rickert, Heinrich, x Riehl, Alois, 19, 24,96, 170, 200, 201, 222-5, 23°-2,233,235,243-7,255,25 8 , 279 academic· career, 202, 205, 25 8
201-2
scepticism, 82, 96 idealist, 173 in Lange, 161 Schaarschmidt, Carl, 250, 258 Schaller, Julius, 79, 102 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 33,57,5 8-9,60,7 1,9 8 ,112,19 6 ,249
Liebmann on, 138, 139, 140 Schenkel, D., 82, 83 Schiel, Jacob, 89 Schiller, ]. von, xii, 105, 161 celebrations, I I 8-19, 122, 124, 152 Schleiermacher, F., x, xi, 5, 21, 24, 36, 44, 45,89
and tne absence of presuppositions, 30 Dialektik, 57, 58, 1 °9 and K.antian philosophy, 48 Schmidt, Julian, 121 Schopenhauer, A., xi, 12, 46, 71-4, 99, 100, 109, 12 9, 16 4, 170, 173 and Herbart, 76-7 Liebmann on, 138, 139, 146 and pessimism, 2 I 3 Schulz, Otto, 53, 54 Schulze, Fritz, 250 Schulze, Johannes, 46, 83-4 Schulze-Delitzsch, Hermann, 158 science classification of, 54-5 and Erkenntnistheorie, I I 5-16 history of, 46-7 of history, 85 and logic, 20-8 and neo-Kantianism, 227-8
Index and philosophy, 4, 12-14, 84-90, 96-7 philosophy as 'pure' science, 78 and system-thinking, 70, 7 I theory of, 20-8, 37, 56-7, 87, 178, 199, 230-I, 245-6
and Weltanschauung, 78, 81, 86-7, 102, 162, 164, 16 5, 16 7, 168, 194, 2 I 7-19
Windelband on, 27°-1 scientific philosophy, 71, 84, 252-62, 263-4, 280
scientific socialism, 2 I 9 scientificality in Lange, 162 sense perception and Kantian philosophy, 13-14 Seydel, Rudolf, 38, 250 Shiel, J., 87, 88 Significance of the Labour Question for the Present and the Future (Lange), 154 Sigwart, Christoph, 36,93, 23 6, 237, 250, 27° Smith, Adam, 15 8 socialism, 26 5-8, 273-5
Socrates Windelband's address on, 276-7 sophistry, 264, 276 space Cohen's conception of, 233 Fischer's concept of, 133 in Kantian philosophy, 13, 58, 168-70, 173-5, 17 6-7
'Space and Time as the First Conditions of Human Knowledge' (Fischer), 130, 13 2 -3
speculative theism, 43, 56- 66, 7°,95,259-60 Spencer, Herbert, 233 university courses on, 249 Spengler, Oswald, 72 Spinoza, B., I 10, I I I, 129, 249 Spinozism, I I I, I I 2 Stahl, F. J., 71, 90, 91, 92, 93, 108, 162, 196, 21 9 Stahl, G. E., 188 Stahr, Adolf, 122 Stammler, G., 24, 56 standards in philosophy Windelband on, 269, 270, 271 state, the and the church, 225-6 Cohen's conception of, 196-7 in Lange, I 5 3-9 in Liebmann, 144-6 and socialism,. 265-8 Steffans, Henrik, 15, 16, 18, 49 Steinthal, Heymann, 1°4,233,239,255,260, 261, 273
Strassburg university, founding of, 204-5, 206
Strauss, D. F., 75-6, 151, 158 Strumpell, Ludwig, 250 Stumpf, Karl, 250 subjective idealism, III, 112, 177, 189, 191 system-philosophy, 65-6, 228 system-thinking, 1°4, 228 discrediting of, 69-7 I systematism, philosophy as, 199 Taine, Hippolyte, 234, 256 Taubert, Agnes, 215, 216 teleology, Kant's conception of, 14 theology, 25 2, 253, 254 study of, 92-3 Thiele, Gunther, 248 'thing-in-itself', 175, 189, 229 in Kant, 140-I, 146 'things-in-themselves', 174, 175 Thomasius, C., 40 thought apriority of, 99 in Kantian philosophy, 13-14 see also pure thought time Fischer's concept of, 133 in Kantian philosophy, 13, 57-8, 169, 170, 173-5, 17 6-7
Torricelli, E., 188 transcendental aesthetic, 58, 168, 173, 177 transcendental idealism, 177, 280 transcendental inquiry, 23 I transcendental philosophy, 14, 24, 1°5, 106 Fischer on, 127, 131 transcendental reality, I 75 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 105, 121, 122, 139, 142, 143, 280, 28 I
and anti-Semitism, 274, 275 Trendelenburg, F. A., xi, xii, 5,7, II-35, 36, 43,57,63,9 6 ,23 1,257
concept of objectivity, 185, 189, 190 and the Fischer-Trendelenburg debate, 16 7-7 8
mediational concepts deriving from, IIO-I2, 113
and Meyer, 101 and positivism, 88 and the state, 196 and system-thinking, 70 Twesten, Carl, 21, 103, 122 Ueberweg, F., xi, 36, 49-5 0, 51- 2, 54, 79, 94, 95, 9 6 , 15 2, 19 8
academic career, 202, 204 ideal-realism, I I I, I I 3 on idealism and realism, 108-10 Ulrici, Hermann, 64, 65, 70, 7 I, 77, 79, 89, 9 1, 234-5, 260
universities, xii, 8, 201-6, 207, 221, 222
Index age of achieving professorships, 201-2, 202-3 courses, 205-6, 249-50, 260-2 and freedom of opinion, 253-4 and the history of philosophy, 83-4 lecturers, 95, 203-4 lectures, 258-9, 26 3-5 student enrolment (18 50S), 92-3 Vaihinger, Hans, 24, 37, 38, 39, 201, 205, 212,229,23 6,24°,255,280 values in philosophy Windelband on, 269, 270, 271 Vierteijahrsschrift fur wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 240, 25 2, 254, 255-9, 261, 262, 263, 270, 273 Vischer, F. T., 75 Vogt, Karl, 98, 100, 157, 179 Volkelt, Johannes, 200, 201, 205, 212, 214-17, 218, 229, 263, 279, 280 on the revival of Kantian ethics, 278-9 and scientific philosophy, 258-9 VorHinder, Franz, 89 Vorlander, Karl, 2 I Voss, J. H., 12 Wach, Joachim, I 10 Waitz, Theodor, 88 Weinkauff, 154, 155, 15 6, 21 9 Weisse, C. H., 7, 77, 79, 12 5, 128 and the concept of Erkenntnistheorie, 38-9 'On the Scientific Beginnings of Philosophy', 60-1 and speculative theism, 57, 58, 59-60,61, 62 Weltanschauung, 59, 60, 64, 65, 69, 85, 13 6 in Cohen, 179, 180, 181, 190, 19 1, 192-3 in Lange, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 190, 192 Christian, 93, 95-6, 162 and neo-Kantianism, 2°9-10 and pessimism, 217-18
and science, 78, 81, 86-7, 102, 162, 164, 16 5, 16 7, 194, 21 7- 18 , 233 in Trendelenburg, 16-17,20, 24, 32, 34-5, 111-12 universal, I 13, 199 in Windelband, 276 Wilhelm I, Kaiser assassination attempts on, 265, 28 I Willey, Thomas E., 6 Willm,65 Willman, Otto, I I Windelband, Wilhelm, x, xii, xiii, 5-6, 128, 134, 14 1, 162, 167, 201, 258 academic career, 202, 205 and ethno-psychology, 236-9 'On Friedrich H6lderlin and his Fate', 274-5 and Herbartian philosophy, 234, 235 lectures and essays, 25 8, 269-74, 275-7 280, 28 I on neo-Kantianism, 261-3 and pessimism, 213, 214, 217, 218 on scientific philosophers, 263-4 Wirth, J. D., 65, 77, 79 Wolf, F. C., 12 Wolff, C. von, 105, 114 Wolff, Hermann, 250 Wundt, W. M., 52, 56, 126, 128, 130, 205, 25 8 Young Hegelians, 90 Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 77-8, 79, 260 Zeller, Eduard, 37, 42, I I 3, I I 4, I 15, II6, 12 3, 13 8, 20 5, 255, 25 8 Ziegler, Theobald, 118, 162,250 Ziller, Tuiskon, 250 Zimmerman, Robert, 79, 234, 245 Z urich, Lange in, I 55-6
