The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  14.2 REACTION AGAINST SPECULATION

  The original motivating force behind neo-Kantianism was the reaction against the speculative idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This reaction began with Fries, Herbart, and Beneke in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were critical of speculative idealism chiefly on methodological grounds. The methods of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel seemed to them a serious violation of Kant’s critical teachings, a relapse into dogmatic pre-Kantian rationalism. The source of Fichte’s and Schelling’s rationalism lay in the methodological writings of Karl Leonhard Reinhold,12 who had advocated a foundationalist programme for philosophy in the early 1790s. To establish itself as a secure science, Reinhold taught, philosophy should begin with a single self-evident first principle, and from it derive all its results through rigorous deduction. Only by this means, he believed, could philosophy avoid scepticism and create a system organized around a single idea. Fries, Herbart, and Beneke saw this method as unworkable and unreliable.13 They fired a salvo of objections against it: that it does not show how we acquire the first principle; that no single first principle on its own can have significant consequences (because a syllogism requires at least two premises); that no abstract and general first principles can derive concrete and particular results; that it imposes a priori constructions and schemata upon experience. As an antidote to this ‘speculative method’, they advocated an empirical method modelled on Kant’s Prize Essay.14 Philosophy should imitate the positive sciences: it should follow an ‘analytic’ method, which begins with the particular and then ascends to the more universal; the first principles of philosophy should be the result, not starting point, of investigation. Fries, Herbart, and Beneke never renounced the value of a ‘synthetic’ method that begins with the universal and descends to the particular; but they insisted that it should follow the analytic method, that the first principle should be formulated only after collecting facts from experience. While the synthetic method is fine for exposition, the analytic is necessary for discovery. In beginning with the synthetic method, Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling were leaving their first principle too much to chance, to lucky ‘intellectual intuitions’, which often proved fanciful and arbitrary.

  The reaction against the methods of speculative idealism became a defining motif of neo-Kantianism. In the 1850s Hermann Helmholtz announced his own programme for a return to Kant, one very close to that advocated by Fries, Herbart, and Beneke decades earlier.15 He too rejected the speculative method, and he too insisted that philosophy follow the method of the empirical sciences. A close relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences had been the hallmark of Kant’s philosophy, Helmholtz maintained, and it had broken down in the age of speculative idealism; it was only by fostering that relationship again that philosophy could achieve reliable and lasting results. In the 1860s Fischer, Zeller, Meyer, Liebmann, and Lange, following Helmholtz’s example, championed a similar programme. By the 1870s and 1880s the reaction against speculative idealism had become so engrained and enshrined in neo-Kantianism that it was regarded as a virtually self-evident axiom.16 By then the spirit of speculative idealism had been safely laid to rest in its grave.

  The reaction against speculation was crucial to neo-Kantian identity, so much so that it is the source of the ‘neo’ in ‘neo-Kantianism’. Neo-Kantianism could be ‘neo’ only if it followed a period when Kant’s fortunes were in decline. That decline came with the era of speculative idealism, the decades from 1800 to 1830, when Kant seemed to be surpassed, a mere footstool for the heights climbed through speculation. While it is natural to assume that the reaction came at the end of the idealist era, sometime after Hegel’s death, it in fact came much earlier, at the very beginning of that era. Fries and Herbart had attacked Fichte and Schelling in unpublished fragments in the 1790s, and published their ideas by the 1800s.

  The term ‘neo-Kantian’ is an anachronism, an historian’s device. It is important to see, however, that to whom one applies it is a matter of controversy. Since Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel also claimed to be the true heirs of Kant, they too could be described as ‘neo-Kantian’, reacting against the distortion of the Kantian legacy by Fries, Herbart, and Beneke. They too claimed to think in the spirit of Kant, and they too cited many texts in their behalf. After all, was it not Kant who had claimed to follow a synthetic method in the first Kritik, who had stressed the importance of systematic unity, who had praised the dogmatic method, and who had insisted that the first principles of a science are a priori? While Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel admitted to having gone beyond Kant’s regulative strictures in giving constitutive status to the idea of an organism, they insisted that they did so only for the sake of the critical philosophy itself. It was only by giving that idea constitutive status, they argued, that they could overcome the dualisms preventing the solution of the problem of knowledge. Hence they saw themselves as more effective transcendental philosophers than those who insisted on upholding Kant’s dualisms.

  Clearly, Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and Hegel’s dispute with Fries, Herbart, and Beneke played off the two sides of Kant against one another. The former party stressed his rational side, the latter his empirical side. Who, then, were the real neo-Kantians? Both, because each had one side of Kant; or neither, because Kant’s system was meant to be a synthesis of both sides? Fortunately, we do not have to decide this dispute. History has done so for us, for better or worse. It has awarded the term to the progeny of Fries, Herbart, and Beneke. We should be aware, though, that whenever we use the term ‘neo-Kantian’ we are begging questions in an old dispute. As Kuno Fischer pointed out long ago,17 there were two Kantian traditions in Jena, and never were they at peace.

  14.3 CRISIS AND CONTROVERSY

  Although the reaction against speculative idealism was a defining event for neo-Kantianism, it was not a sufficient cause of its generation. Rejection of the methods of speculative idealism appears in other intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, viz., materialism and positivism, and is not unique to neo-Kantianism. The reasons for the emergence of neo-Kantianism specifically appear only in its responses to two cultural crises of the mid-nineteenth century.

  One of these was the so-called identity or obsolescence crisis of philosophy, which began in the 1840s after the decline of speculative idealism. At stake in the identity crisis was the very survival or existence of philosophy itself; hence Germans would sometimes call it ‘die Existenzfrage’. After the collapse of speculative idealism, philosophy seemed to have nothing to do and nowhere to go. No one believed anymore that philosophy could give knowledge of the absolute, or that it could give a priori knowledge of nature as a whole. The positive sciences had carved up the world among themselves, and there seemed nothing left for philosophy. Since the sciences had become successful on their own, they had no need for a philosophical foundation. As Jürgen Bona Meyer summed up the plight of philosophy:

  Philosophy as a science seems a thing of the past; its solvable problems have become the province of particular sciences. The daughters of a common mother now demand independence and do not want to be inspected or corrected; they prefer that their old and moody mother just laid down to rest in her grave.18

  In the early 1860s two neo-Kantians, Kuno Fischer and Eduard Zeller, came forward with an effective strategy for resolving this crisis.19 They had a very clear conception of philosophy that not only distinguished it from the positive sciences, but that also avoided the problems of metaphysics. According to their conception, philosophy should be first and foremost epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie), and indeed a special kind of epistemology, namely, the critical examination of the logic of the sciences. As such, philosophy was a second-order discipline whose special task was to investigate the methods and principles of the sciences. The particular sciences were all first-order disciplines, whose business was to explain the world itself, not the methods and principles by which we explain it. They used these methods and principles but never ma
de them the object of investigation. That was the specific task of philosophy. In formulating this conception of philosophy, Fischer and Zeller made no claim to originality; and they were happy to acknowledge the source of their inspiration: Immanuel Kant. It was Kant’s conception of philosophy as criticism, as transcendental enquiry into the necessary conditions of scientific knowledge, that showed the way out of the crisis. What better proof was needed, then, for the old sage’s continuing relevance and vitality?

  The other crisis was the materialism controversy, a dispute of the greatest importance for German intellectual history in the nineteenth century. The problem it raised was a defining issue for every philosophical party. The controversy began in September 1854 when Rudolph Wagner, the head of the Physiological Institute in Göttingen, gave his opening address to the 31st Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte. Wagner’s address raised a very provocative question: is natural science heading toward materialism? It seemed to Wagner, a convinced Christian, that some physiologists had taken their methods too far, because they were now questioning free will, the existence of the soul, and the origins of humanity from a single couple. One of these physiologists, Wagner insinuated, was a haughty young man named Carl Vogt. Indignant that Wagner charged him when he was not present to defend himself, Vogt responded with a blistering polemic, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft.20 Yes, Vogt replied, science was leading to materialism, but that was a good thing. Only superstitious and bigotted Christians would find it bad. The more we investigate nature, Vogt argued, the more we find evidence against the old fashioned beliefs in the existence of the soul and an original couple. The net effect of the heated exchange between Wagner and Vogt was a drastic and dramatic dilemma: either a scientific materialism or an irrational faith in God, freedom, and immortality. This dilemma was reminiscent of that posed some 70 years earlier by F. H. Jacobi, who claimed in his famous dispute with Moses Mendelssohn that the new natural sciences were leading inevitably toward the atheism and fatalism of Spinozism, then the most rigorous form of naturalism. Jacobi confronted his contemporaries with the dilemma: either a naturalistic atheism and fatalism or a salto mortale, a leap of faith in a personal creator and freedom. With no less urgency and bluster, Wagner and Vogt were posing the same dilemma for their generation.

  Vogt’s spat with Wagner was only the beginning of a much longer and more complex controversy, which would eventually pull every major thinker into its vortex. As it happened, Wagner’s warnings backfired. Rather than frightening the materialists, he provoked them. Out of their closets they came, now marching headstrong, banners waving, in a thick phalanx to challenge the establishment. 1855, the very year Vogt published Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft, also witnessed the appearance of two mighty materialist tomes: Heinrich Czolbe’s Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus and Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff.21 What Vogt had announced in a polemical context—that the natural sciences are heading inevitably toward materialism—Czolbe and Büchner would now defend in a more general and systematic manner. These works laid out the basic principles for a materialist worldview, arguing that it is based on nothing less than the empirical findings of the new natural sciences. Thus Wagner’s worst nightmare had become reality. The sons of Lucretius were now dancing on the streets of Germany.

  Who had the intellectual might and muscle in those desperate days to push back the materialist phalanx? No one, of course, but Immanuel Kant. For the critical philosophy exposed the utter naivety of the materialists’ chief presupposition: that we have knowledge of a material reality. The materialists failed to learn the first lesson of the critique: that what is given to us in our experience is very much the product of the cognitive activities by which we know it. They were one and all transcendental realists of a naive and dogmatic stripe. No one in the 1860s saw the polemical value of this point with more clarity than Friedrich Albert Lange, who made it a guiding motif of his Geschichte des Materialismus.22 Lange not only exposed the naivety of the materialists’ main assumption, but he also took his argument against them one step further. Taking into account the new physiological researches of Johannes Müller and Helmholtz, he argued that the fundamental thesis of the critical philosophy—that the subject forms the object of its cognition—had been confirmed by the latest experiments. The theory of specific nervous energies advanced by Müller and developed by Helmholtz showed that what we perceive depends on the specific qualities of the nerves by which we perceive them. This argument completely trumped the materialist’s most powerful card, for it showed that the new sciences were not vindicating but undermining materialism. Thus the materialists had been beaten at their own game.

  It was no less a decisive advantage of the critical philosophy that it could also resolve Vogt’s dilemma. The transcendental idealism that undermined materialism also involved a distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, between the world as we know it through our cognitive activity and the world as it exists in itself. This meant that natural science could be limited to the realm of appearances, and that the ethical realm could be left inviolate. Kant had always intended, of course, to deny knowledge to make room for faith through his transcendental idealism, a strategy that was as relevant in the 1850s as it had been in the 1790s when Reinhold first advanced the Kantian cause.23 Yet there was still a crucial difference between the neo-Kantians’ conception of this strategy and Reinhold’s. Reinhold appealed to Kant’s dualism to defend the beliefs in God, freedom, and immortality, but most neo-Kantians had lost their faith in these old beliefs. What they wanted to uphold was something more open and general, what Lange called ‘the realm of the ideal’, that is, a space for moral and aesthetic norms. These norms, the neo-Kantians believed, were distinct in kind from the laws of the natural world. Thus Lange, Meyer, Cohen, Riehl, Windelband, Rickert, and Lask read the noumenal-phenomenal distinction not as one between kinds of entity but as one between natural laws and norms. The chief problem of philosophy was no longer to explain the relationship between mysterious entities—whether mind and body, noumena and phenomena—but the relationship between laws and norms, facts and values.24 But, however one reads that Kantian distinction, the main point is that it resolved the dilemma of the materialism controversy. Once again, Kant had proven himself the saviour of German philosophy, the Immanuel to lead it out of the wilderness and into the modern scientific age.

  14.4 FROM PSYCHOLOGY TO LOGIC

  Although epistemology was central to the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy, there was no unanimity about its goals and methods. For nearly 70 years, from 1800 to 1870, there had been a consensus among neo-Kantians that epistemology should be a form of empirical psychology. This view held that the subject matter of epistemology was the origins and faculties of knowledge, and that its method was observation and experiment. Cognition was understood in psychological terms, as a matter of psychic activities and functions, and not in logical terms, as a matter of the logical structure of propositions. The task of epistemology was to know the causes of mental processes rather than norms that guided them.

  This view of epistemology, which later became known as ‘psychologism’, was first conceived in the late eighteenth century by Fries and Schmid,25 and then developed in the early 1800s by Herbart and Beneke. Helmholtz took it a step further in the 1850s by conceiving cognition in terms of physiology. The amateurish introspection championed by Fries thus gave way to controlled observation and experiment in the laboratory. Partly due to Helmholtz’s prestige, and partly due to the influence of Fries and Beneke, the psychological tradition continued well into the 1860s. The luminaries of the 1860s—Fischer, Zeller, Liebmann, Lange, and Meyer—had all understood epistemology in psychological and physiological terms. As late as 1870 Meyer wrote a treatise defending Fries and the psychological interpretation of Kant.26

  Since Husserl and Frege, ‘psychologism’ has been a dirty word and dismissed as a serious misconception of logic and epistemology. We do well, though, to understand the original rationa
le for the doctrine. We can understand cognition either as a psychic process or as a logical structure; it all depends on what we want to know. We make fallacies only when we indiscriminately mix these approaches. The motivation of the early neo-Kantians in turning toward psychology was perfectly understandable: they wanted to make epistemology into a science, and so to bring it into line with the empirical sciences. They believed that Kant had failed to make his methods in epistemology conform to his own standards of knowledge; his methods were utterly scholastic—analysis of concepts, definitions, postulating mental faculties—while his standard of knowledge was completely empirical. On no account were the early psychologists guilty of the simple fallacies later ascribed to them. Fries himself insisted on distinguishing between the discovery and justification of knowledge, and never thought that simply knowing the origins of a proposition was tantamount to its justification.27 Bottom line: the whole Friesian programme needs re-examination.

  Whether fallacy or not, there was a remarkable shift in the neo-Kantian understanding of epistemology in the early 1870s. Cohen, Windelband, and Riehl began to understand Kant’s transcendental philosophy as more a logical than psychological enterprise. They saw Kant’s central question no longer as the quid facti?—the origins and causes of knowledge—but as the quid juris?—the justification or evidence for propositions. Initially, Cohen, Riehl, and Windelband, as good students of Herbart, continued to mix the psychological with the logical approach; but as the years passed the psychological aspect faded away. By 1876 Riehl was to declare in no uncertain terms: ‘Kant’s critical philosophy knows no psychology.’28 After Cohen’s, Windelband’s, and Riehl’s conversion, the logical understanding of epistemology became the new orthodoxy in neo-Kantianism. The psychological interpretation, after a reign of 70 years, had fully and finally come to rest.