The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  This shift from a psychological to a logical understanding of epistemology anticipates the contemporary understanding of Kant and the discipline. Windelband went on to elaborate his new logical conception through the concept of ‘normativity’, a concept fashionable today. Here, if anywhere, we can see the debt of contemporary philosophy to neo-Kantianism. So the question is worth asking: why the move from psychology to logic in neo-Kantianism?

  Already in the 1860s cracks began to appear in the wall of psychological orthodoxy. Fischer and Liebmann had noted that Kant’s transcendental philosophy could not be simply psychology, because its task was to investigate the possibility of all forms of empirical knowledge, of which psychology was one. If transcendental philosophy were only empirical psychology, it would be circular, presupposing precisely what it should investigate. It was only a matter of drawing the implications of these criticisms to see that transcendental philosophy could not be psychology alone. But such was the authority of the empirical sciences that these implications were not drawn.

  One reason for the shift toward logic came from an inherent tension in the neo-Kantian programme. The neo-Kantians wanted philosophy to be autonomous, a science in its own right; but they also wanted it to follow the methods of the natural sciences. If philosophy were to be empirical psychology, then it would forfeit its autonomy. Hence the need for autonomy forced philosophy in a more logical direction. The reason this inference was not drawn much earlier has to do with the ambiguous status of psychology in the nineteenth century. Sometimes psychology was the discovery of the laws of psychic processes, sometimes the analysis of mental contents. When psychology became more of a natural science, its differences with philosophy became clearer. Autonomy then demanded emphasizing the more logical side of epistemology.

  Beyond this basic point, the reasons for the move from psychology to logic are murky. The obscurity lies partly on the individual level, with what particular thinkers thought in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and partly on the global level, with the philosophical and cultural Zeitgeist. On neither level is there a clear vista, hard and simple facts on which to build a solid case or even a likely story. Crucial for an understanding of this change was the thinking of the young Hermann Cohen in his happy and heady Summer of 1870. It was during those inspired months that Cohen wrote his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which set forth the new epistemological interpretation. Yet what Cohen did and thought then is poorly documented, and, given the destruction of his family archives, we are not likely to know more. What moved Windelband in the early 1870s to abandon his syncretic approach to epistemology, which combined psychology with logic, and to affirm a strictly logical approach, is also obscure.

  On the global level two factors deserve mention, though it is almost impossible to pinpoint their exact impact on the thinking of the neo-Kantians. One factor is the well-attested influence of Hermann Lotze on the late nineteenth century. In the third volume of his Mikrokosmus (1864) and in his 1874 Logik, Lotze had made a clear distinction between matters of fact and validity.29 According to that distinction, it is one thing to determine whether something is a matter of fact, whether it exists or not in the world, but it is quite another to determine whether or not a proposition is true or valid. A proposition could be true or valid even though it corresponds to no matter of fact. This was the case for hypothetical counterfactual and mathematical propositions, even scientific generalizations. This realm of validity, so different from the realm of existence, Lotze called ‘the most wonderful thing in the world’, and he hoped that philosophers would take it more into account. No vain hope, this. Lotze’s distinction became part of the mainstream of German philosophy in the 1870s. Later generations fully recognized Lotze’s role in changing the climate of thought.30 Psychologism, which seemed to conflate the realms of validity and matter of fact, was now passé.

  The other factor is the influence of Herbart. Although Herbart had jumped on the psychological band wagon in the early 1800s, insisting that Kant’s epistemology had to be refashioned as empirical psychology, he had never ceased to distinguish between matters of logic and psychology.31 He was always a good enough Kantian to insist that logic is a normative matter about how we ought to think, and that it has nothing to do with psychology, how we as a matter of fact do think. It is an important, though little appreciated, fact that Cohen, Windelband, and Riehl had all been avid students of Herbart in their early days. Indeed, for a while they were more Herbartian than Kantian. For them to make a sharp distinction between logic and psychology they only had to heed their revered teacher.

  14.5 THE CHALLENGE OF PESSIMISM

  The neo-Kantian definition of philosophy as epistemology seemed, at least at first, a very effective strategy to solve the identity crisis of philosophy. It not only gave philosophy a distinct vocation, but it also brought it into connection with the positive sciences. But toward the end of the 1870s it became clear to many leading neo-Kantians—Windelband, Riehl, Volkelt, and Paulsen—that this definition of philosophy is much too narrow. It seemed to give no place to ethics, politics, and aesthetics, which had been traditional concerns of philosophy. The neo-Kantians had been so concerned that philosophy be a science that they focussed almost exclusively on its theoretical side. But what about its practical side? What about ethics, politics, and aesthetics? Could these too be a science? These were important questions, which the neo-Kantians had not faced until the late 1870s.

  The neo-Kantians were forced to address these issues chiefly because of one very challenging development: the rise of pessimism. There were two thinkers behind this phenomenon, two major champions of pessimism: Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann. Though Schopenhauer’s main work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,32 had first appeared in 1819 and been ignored for decades, it was rediscovered in the 1850s and had virtually become a cult classic by the 1860s. Hartmann’s chief work, Die Philosophie des Unbewussten,33 which was first published in 1869, was a huge and immediate hit, going through many printings and spawning a flood of polemical literature. The success of Schopenhauer’s and Hartmann’s work spoke for a new cultural phenomenon: pessimism was now Zeitgeist.

  This was a challenge the neo-Kantians could not ignore. They soon rose to the occasion. Almost every major neo-Kantian had something to say about pessimism. From the mid-1860s until the early 1900s, Kuno Fischer, Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, Friedrich Paulsen, Rudolf Haym, Alois Riehl, Johannes Volkelt, Hermann Cohen, and Wilhelm Windelband wrote articles, essays, or book chapters about it. Such, indeed, was the interest in Schopenhauer that Fischer, Haym, Volkelt, and Meyer wrote some of the first monographs on him.34 By the late 1870s, pessimism had replaced materialism as the neo-Kantians’ bête noire. Schopenhauer and Hartmann had replaced Büchner and Vogt.

  The rise of pessimism, the popularity of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, challenged the neo-Kantians in two ways. First, it showed them that their epistemological definition of philosophy was much too narrow. Schopenhauer and Hartmann had insisted that philosophy is first and foremost reflection on the ‘puzzle of existence’, the grand question of the meaning, purpose, and value of life. This was one of the chief reasons for the popularity of their work. The neo-Kantians recognized that they had to address these interests of the public if their lectures were to be attended and their books read. Second, Schopenhauer’s pessimism undermined the neo-Kantians’ deepest moral and political convictions. All the neo-Kantians were, without exception, believers in the value of social and political action, the power of human beings to make the world a better place. Nowhere was this activism more in evidence than in their enthusiastic participation in the Fichte-Feier—the celebrations of the centenary of Fichte’s birth—that took place throughout Germany in 1862.35 What they admired in Fichte was not his Wissenschaftslehre but his political heroism, his resistance to the French occupation and his call to action for the German nation to rise against its oppressors. No one more despised political activism, though, than Arthur Schopenhauer, who
se philosophy was fundamentally quietistic, devoted to accepting the world as it is and transcending its travails through mystical experience. It was Schopenhauer’s quietism that especially disturbed the neo-Kantians and motivated their many polemics against him.

  It was chiefly pessimism, then, that led to the neo-Kantian concern with the practical in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This new concern took several forms: Volkelt’s call for a return to Kantian ethics; Windelband’s new promotion of world-views; Riehl’s claim that the practical is the better half of philosophy; the new anti-positivist direction of the Philosophische Monatshefte, which stressed the importance of ideas in philosophy. Yet the turn toward the practical was more programmatic than productive, more intention than deed. For the neo-Kantians found themselves in a quandary. Virtually no neo-Kantian held that the categorical imperative is a substantive foundation of ethics.36 While they accepted universalizability as a necessary requirement for the form of a maxim, they realized that it is compatible with any content, and so cannot provide a criterion to choose between particular maxims. Yet, with few exceptions, the neo-Kantians accepted Kant’s critique of empiricism in ethics, which, they believed, led down the slippery slope toward relativism.37 Friedrich Paulsen expressed the sentiment of many when he wrote in 1880: ‘Is it not a firm axiom that empiricism leads to materialism, and in the end to complete skepticism, which leads to moral nihilism?’38 But if the foundation of morals cannot be found in the rational criterion of the categorical imperative, nor in any empirical criterion, where can it be found?

  Regarding the foundation of morals it has to be said that neo-Kantianism is a disappointment. For the neo-Kantians made no progress in re-formulating Kant’s criterion, and they otherwise had no new strategy for a rational foundation of ethics. Consider the following failures:

  •In Kants Begründung der Ethik (1877), Cohen saw the solution to the problem of formalism in a substantial criterion of morality he called ‘the community of rational beings’, which is essentially the Kantian ‘kingdom of ends’ where all people treat one another as ends in themselves.39 Although such a criterion would perhaps solve the problem of emptiness, Cohen did not explain why we should act on it, or why the ideal of an ethical community is ‘rational’.

  •In his ‘Vom Prinzip der Moral’ (1883),40 Windelband admitted that the fundamental principle of morality, as expressed in the categorical imperative, is only formal, and that its specific content is relative and historical, depending on the specific time and place. He argued that we could give a more specific account of our duties if we presuppose a definite ideal of the highest good; however, he admitted that this ideal could not be demonstrated and that its content too would vary with history.

  •In his Rechtsphilosophie (1905),41 Emil Lask sketched a programme for jurisprudence that would be the via media between the relativism of the historical school of law and the metaphysics of the natural law tradition. That middle path was the philosophy of value of Windelband and Rickert. This philosophy would address the quid juris?, which had been evaded by the historical school, and it would not require the metaphysics of the natural law tradition. But Lask stopped short of showing how this programme could be fulfilled; he does not treat, by his own admission, the methodology for a philosophy of value.

  •Last but not least, there were Heinrich Rickert’s attempts to solve the problem. In his 1896 Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung Rickert proposed a transcendental ethics that would determine the universal and necessary conditions for having values; but he conceded that, because these conditions are very general and formal, their content would have to derive from history.42 Then, in his 1904 Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, he had another proposal: a philosophy of history that would show how the universal principles of morality appear in the constant purposes and common ends of different cultures in world history; but he recognized that history alone proves nothing about universal values (because empirical premises cannot yield universal conclusions, and because nothing about what is the case determines what ought to be the case), and so he admitted that their real proof would have to come from metaphysics.43 In his later years Rickert admitted failure: he argued that there cannot be any proof for the principles of morality; and he sharply distinguished between ethical value, which depends on the will and practice, and logical validity, which is the province of reason.44

  14.6 DEATH AND DECLINE

  Although neo-Kantianism had been the dominant philosophical power in Germany from 1860 to 1914, it went into rapid decline at the end of the First World War. By 1918 Cohen and Windelband, the leaders of the Marburg and Southwestern schools, were dead; Riehl and Rickert were still alive, but their best days were behind them. The most creative and productive neo-Kantian was Ernst Cassirer, though he was now fighting a rear guard action against mounting ‘forces of darkness’. His famous dispute with Heidegger at Davos in 1929 was really the last stand of neo-Kantianism.45 It was surely an ominous sign that the youth attending that conference were more sympathetic with Heidegger than Cassirer.

  Why did neo-Kantianism, after ruling the intellectual landscape for generations, go into such rapid decline? The persecution of the 1930s, which drove many neo-Kantians into exile, is not the answer. For the movement was already in decline before then. We also cannot refer to the death or senescence of its most prominent figures, because that begs the question why no one came to replace them. The answer probably lies in the traumatic effects of World War I. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, there was a profound reaction against the philosophy and politics that had led to the war. It seemed to many that an entire generation of young men had died for nothing. It did not help the reputation of the neo-Kantians, then, that they had been especially active in promoting the cause of the war. With few exceptions,46 they joined in the hysteria of 1914. They did everything in their power to join the war effort and to defend the German cause.47 Cohen, Riehl, and Natorp wrote propaganda; Riehl and Windelband signed the ‘Aufruf der 93’; and Lask paid the ultimate tribute: he fell on the Eastern Front in May 1915. To be sure, the neo-Kantians were not the only German intellectuals behind the war; but they were still the dominating force in German philosophy before the war began; and they were especially vocal and visible in its behalf, insisting that their philosophy was the best ideology to rationalize sacrifice and suffering. For was it not Kant who taught that duty is categorical, and that we should follow it despite the consequences for ourselves? And was it not a categorical imperative to defend the mother land from English, French, and Russian aggression? Yes, Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitan and pacifist, was the best regimental officer to lead the youth to slaughter.

  The deepest moral beliefs of the neo-Kantians were also shattered by the war. Although neither pessimists nor optimists, neo-Kantians did believe in the power of human action to improve the world. But it was precisely this faith the war had destroyed. Death and destruction on such a colossal scale had shown that human beings have a greater power to destroy than improve themselves. The neo-Kantians thought that, directed intelligently, the arts and sciences could improve life and morals; but technology had wiped out millions with ease. The war seemed the ultimate vindication of Rousseau’s pessimism: the arts and sciences were not improving but destroying morals. This too was Schopenhauer’s last laugh against his neo-Kantian foes. If the greatest striving leads to the greatest suffering, are we not better off trying to escape than engage the world?

  And so the most powerful philosophical movement of the nineteenth century came to a sad and inglorious end. But is it really surprising it came to this? For all its concerns with the aetherial and erudite, not even philosophy escapes its world.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Primary

  Beneke, Friedrich, Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit. Berlin: Mittler, 1832.

  Beneke, Friedrich, Die Philosophie in ihrem Verhältnisse zur Erfahrung, zur Spekulation und zum Leben. Berlin: Mittler, 1833.

  Beneke, Friedri
ch, Grundlegung zur Physik der Sitten. Berlin: Mittler, 1822.

  Bona Meyer, Jürgen, Philosophische Zeitfragen. Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1870.

  Bona Meyer, Kant’s Psychologie. Berlin: Hertz, 1870.

  Büchner, Louis, Kraft und Stoff. Frankfurt: Meidiger, 1855.

  Cohen, Hermann, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. Berlin: Dümmler, 1871.

  Cohen, Hermann, Kants Begründung der Ethik. Berlin: Dümmler, 1877.

  Czolbe, Heinrich, Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus. Leipzig: Costenoble, 1855.

  Fischer, Kuno, Die beiden kantischen Schulen in Jena. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1862.

  Fischer, Kuno, Kant’s Leben und die Grundlage seiner Lehre. Mannheim: Bassermann, 1860.

  Fortlage, Carl, ‘Die Stellung Kants zur Philosophie vor ihm und nach ihm’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, Heft IV (1838), 91–123.

  Fries, Jakob Friedrich, Reinhold, Fichte und Schelling. Leipzig: Reinicke, 1803.

  Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Ueber das Verhältniß der empirischen Psychologie zur Metaphysik’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 156–202.

  Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Propädeutik einer allgemeinen empirischen Psychologie’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 203–67.

  Fries, Jakob Friedrich, ‘Allgemeine Uebersicht der empirischen Erkentnisse des Gemüths’, Psychologisches Magazin III (1798), 354–402.