If the 1860s mark the breakthrough of neo-Kantianism, the 1870s is its decade of consolidation. It was during the 1870s that neo-Kantianism began to emerge as the predominant philosophical movement in Germany. There are several telling facts, all carefully assembled by Klaus Christian Köhnke,1 that attest this predominance. After 1862 the number of writings on Kant grew every year in geometric proportion, and the lecture courses on Kant in the 1870s (189) more than trebled from the 1860s (54). Indeed, more lectures were given on Kant than on all other modern philosophers. By the late 1870s there was also at least one neo-Kantian professor in ten major German-speaking universities, more than any other school or line of thought.2 From the 1870s until 1900, Kant had become such a powerful presence in journals and lecture halls that Köhnke has referred to these years, with no exaggeration, as “the neo-Kantian period of German university philosophy”.3
What accounts for the extraordinary success of the neo-Kantians? Naturally, political and social factors played an important role. Part of the reason lies with the more liberal political atmosphere of the 1870s. The Maigesetze of 1873 brought with them increasing separation of church and state, and the ensuing independence of academic life from church control gave academics greater freedom on the podium. Gone were the bad old days of the 1850s when even referring to David Friedrich Strauß, or espousing pantheism, was enough to bring dismissal. What Fischer and Zeller went through in the 1840s and 1850s was now a thing of the past.
Another part of the reason rests with the growth of the German university system. Beginning with the Reichsgründung in 1871, there was a hiring spree in German universities, which Köhnke has referred to as a “Berufungsboom”.4 There was a great demand for university teachers, partly as a result of the building of new universities, and partly as a result of the need to make up for the lack of hiring in the 1850s. These were years of opportunity for any talented young man intent on an academic career. While in the 1850s a candidate would have to wait, on average, fourteen years to become an ordinary professor, in the 1870s one would have to wait only eight years. Following this trend, from 1876 to 1878, Liebmann, Cohen, Riehl and Windelband all became ordinary professors.
Of course, these factors only go so far in explaining the rise of neo-Kantianism. They are reasons why any philosophical movement, or any academic discipline, would have flourished in the 1870s. The reasons for the success of neo-Kantianism specifically have to do with its intellectual or philosophical qualities in comparison with other intellectual movements of its day. The two selling points behind neo-Kantianism in the 1860s had lost none of their appeal in the 1870s.5 Neo-Kantianism was not only a powerful bulwark against materialism but it also had the best account available about the role of philosophy in the modern scientific age. The thesis that philosophy should be first and foremost epistemology, the examination of the logic of the sciences, seemed to ensure the survival of philosophy. It not only gave philosophy a distinctive vocation, so that it could not be rendered obsolete by the sciences, but it also made it a valuable adjunct to the sciences. For these reasons, Windelband, Riehl and Paulsen will continue to advocate the conception of philosophy first worked out by Fischer, Zeller and Meyer in the 1860s.
Apart from these selling points, there was also the growing weakness of old adversaries. Hegelianism was a rapidly fading memory; and while Lotze and Trendelenburg struggled to preserve the idealist legacy, specifically its teleology and organic conception of nature, they were mainly fighting a rearguard action. Materialism too began to disappear as an intellectual movement by the 1870s. Lange tells us in the second edition of his Geschichte des Materialismus that discussion of Darwinism had completely overshadowed materialism.6 There were still readers of Büchner’s writings, but none of their latest editions roused the hue and cry they once did; Vogt was rarely mentioned, and Moleschott was almost completely forgotten. The old fearsome dragon of the 1850s now lay slain in a heap, presided over by two triumphant knights in shining armour (named Helmholtz and Lange).
But if the 1870s mark the establishment of neo-Kantianism, they also reveal flaws in its foundation and the first signs of its dissolution. There was an inherent tension in the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy, which would become the source of controversy in the later 1870s and 1880s. That conception rested on two inconsistent ideals: the demand that philosophy be autonomous, a discipline in its own right; and the requirement that philosophy imitate the model of the natural sciences. The more philosophy imitated the sciences, the more it became like them, forfeiting its autonomy and hastening its obsolescence. This tension was especially evident in the case of psychology, which was meant to be the model of scientific epistemology; but the more psychology became scientific, the less it needed philosophy, which became superfluous. We have already seen this problem at work in the 1860s, but it became more apparent in the 1870s and 1880s.
Another greater challenge to the new orthodoxy concerned the tenability of the epistemological conception of philosophy. Though entrenched, salient and prevalent, this definition came under increasing stress during the late 1870s and thereafter. Granted that this definition was very strategic in helping philosophy overcome its crisis of obsolescence, nagging doubts remained that it was too narrow. If philosophy is simply epistemology in the strict intended sense, that is, the second-order examination of the logic of the sciences, then it has to forfeit its traditional role as a worldview, that is, an attempt to answer the most basic questions about the meaning and purpose of life. These questions had been placed at the centre of philosophy since antiquity, and were they to be simply ignored? Was it not the purpose of philosophy to answer them, to try to resolve “the riddle of existence”? That there was a price to ignoring them had been made clear by the great popularity of Schopenhauer and Hartmann in the 1870s. If the neo-Kantians were too strict and stern about limiting philosophy to epistemology, they were in danger of losing the interest of the public. Their philosophy would become esoteric, the preserve of a few trained specialists. But is not such esotericism a sign of irrelevance? And is not irrelevance the first step on the slippery slope to obsolescence?
One of the defining phenomena of neo-Kantianism in the 1870s was its close alliance with positivism. In the final quarter of the 19th century, positivism had become a force in German philosophy.7 Among its leading exponents were Richard Avenarius (1843–1896), Ernst Laas (1837–1885), Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and Eugen Dühring (1833–1921). The mouthpiece for the new positivist movement was the Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie,8 which was edited by Avenarius, Karl Göring, Max Heinze and Wilhelm Wundt. The neo-Kantian alliance with the positivists, which was for the most part tacit and implicit, mainly took the form of their writing articles for the Vierteljahrschrift. Friedrich Paulsen, Hans Vaihinger, Otto Liebmann, Eduard Zeller and Wilhelm Windelband were among the contributors, and for a short while Alois Riehl even helped with its editing.
Prima facie the agenda of the Vierteljahrschrift was one the neo-Kantians would be happy to endorse. According to Avenarius’s introductory article,9 the journal would be devoted to “scientific philosophy”, whose task is to investigate the logic of the sciences. Scientific philosophy would attempt to solve the traditional problems of philosophy, but only insofar as they were empirically refutable or verifiable. But many traditional problems were “pseudo-problems”, Avenarius said using a redolent term, because they went beyond the limits of experience. Several themes of this agenda—hostility to metaphysics, experience as the limits of knowledge, philosophy as the logic of science—rang true to the Kantian conception of philosophy worked out in the 1860s.
Yet the alliance with the positivists was flawed, flimsy and fragile. It was more tactical than doctrinal. It served to keep at bay some of their common enemies: the protagonists of metaphysics (Lotze and Trendelenburg); the old reactionary forces of church and altar; and the new popular irrationalist forces (Schopenhauer and Hartmann). But this tactical alliance could work only by pretending to ignore fundamental philosophical differences. The neo-Kantians were highly critical of the positivist’s extreme empiricism, their naive faith in given facts, and their belief in the complete autonomy of the sciences, as if they had no metaphysical presuppositions at all. These issues had begun to emerge in the late 1870s. In the first volume of his Der philosophische Kriticismus, which appeared in 1876, Riehl engaged in a tacit polemic against the positivists when he criticized the empiricism of Locke and Hume.10 By 1878 they had become explicit when Carl Schaarschmidt declared positivism “false criticism” because of its naive and dogmatic empiricism.11 And by the 1880s they had become explosive. We have already seen how, in 1884, Liebmann threw a bomb in the positivist camp with his Die Klimax der Theorieen.12
The most important issues dividing the neo-Kantians from the positivists were not, however, epistemological. They concerned the very identity of philosophy itself. In the late 1870s the neo-Kantians became more and more dissatisfied with the strictly epistemological definition of philosophy, which excluded enquiry about the meaning of life and ethical values. This dissatisfaction became apparent in several ways: in Volkelt’s call for a renewal of Kant’s ethics;13 in Windelband’s turn towards ethics;14 in Riehl’s recognition of, and increased interest in, practical philosophy;15 and in the new agenda of the Philosophische Monatsschrift, which was now devoted to “the systematic knowledge of the highest and most general ideas, and thus the highest and most general goals of humanity.”16 The more neo-Kantians pushed against the narrow epistemological conception of philosophy and stressed the need for ethics and practical enquiry, the more they moved themselves outside the orbit of positivism. Of course, the positivists had their own ethics, which are empiricist in principle. But the neo-Kantians were even more dissatisfied with empiricism in ethics than in epistemology, because they were convinced that it leads down the slippery slope to relativism and nihilism. As Friedrich Paulsen summarized this common attitude: “Is it not a firm axiom that empiricism leads to materialism, and in the end to complete scepticism, which leads to moral nihilism?”17
According to Köhnke, there was one sudden dramatic event that took place in the late 1870s which precipitated the break between positivism and neo-Kantianism.18 This was the assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I in May and June of 1878. These led to the anti-socialist hysteria of 1878, which was exploited by Bismarck, and which then led to anti-socialist legislation in the Reichstag. It was these events, Köhnke contends, that motivated the neo-Kantian concern with the practical, whose task was to create a new authoritarian ethics to keep the masses in control and to counter the dangers of democracy and socialism.
There are, however, serious problems with Köhnke’s hypothesis. There is insufficient evidence about the political attitudes of the neo-Kantians in the 1870s. He generalizes from the cases of Meyer and Windelband, but, as we shall see,19 it does not really apply to Windelband. But quite apart from this, the chief difficulty is that the neo-Kantian concern with the practical antedates the events of 1878. Rather than a response to the dangers of socialism, they were more a reaction to the alarming popularity of pessimistic doctrine in the 1860s and 1870s.20 One of the reasons for the popularity of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, as we have seen, was that they had directly addressed “the question of existence”, the problems of the value and meaning of life. This problem had been ignored or neglected by neo-Kantians and positivists, who were recommending a more scholastic concern with the logic of the sciences. The neo-Kantian turn towards the practical, and the ensuing break with positivism, was more a response to the challenge of pessimism than the political events of the late 1870s. The motivation for this turn was mundane enough: if a philosophy does not appeal to the public and students, its books do not sell and its lecture halls do not fill; the income of Dozenten, and the reputation of professors, rested not least on book sales and full lecture halls.
The 1870s marks a sea change in the interpretation of Kant from the 1860s, and indeed from the entire neo-Kantian tradition hitherto. The three major neo-Kantians of the 1870s—Hermann Cohen, Alois Riehl and Wilhelm Windelband—reacted against the psychological interpretation of Kant, which had been first formulated by Fries in the 1790s and which had become virtual orthodoxy ever since. They all insisted una voce that the critical philosophy is primarily an epistemological enterprise whose main concern is with the validity rather than causes of synthetic a priori knowledge. The emphasis of Kant interpretation had shifted, therefore, away from the quid facti?—‘What are the origins and causes of knowledge?’—to the quid juris?—‘What makes judgements true and reasoning valid?’ The psychological interpretation was now rejected as a misconception, a misinterpretation based on the mistaken assumption, flatly contrary to the texts, that Kant’s main concern was to answer the quid facti? rather than the quid juris? This new orthodoxy declares that transcendental enquiry is second-order, concerned with our knowledge of the world rather than the world itself, while psychological enquiry is first-order, dealing with the world itself. After all, psychic events, like physical events, are still in the world; and there is a vast difference in logical type between talking about the world and talking about talk about the world.
What was the source of this change, this reversal in interpretation? We have already seen how, in the 1860s, cracks began to appear in the wall of the psychological interpretation.21 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 just one form. If transcendental philosophy were only empirical psychology, then it would be circular, presupposing precisely that which it should investigate. It was only a matter of drawing the implications of these criticisms to see that transcendental philosophy could not be simply a matter of psychology, and that it was necessary to develop a new understanding of its purpose and logical status. But such was the authority of the empirical sciences in this age that these implications were not drawn. These criticisms led to no open rebellion against the psychological interpretation, which was instead doomed to a slow and lingering death.
It also has to be emphasized that the break with the psychological interpretation was never clear, clean and dramatic. Cohen, Windelband and Riehl had been in their early years enthusiastic students of Herbart’s psychology, and they had insisted that psychology too had a basic role to play in understanding the processes of cognition. It was no accident that they were contributors to Steinthal’s and Lazarus’s Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft,22 whose aim was to advance the psychological understanding of group interactions and culture. As much as Cohen and Windelband would stress the sui generis status of logical enquiry, they would also emphasize that logical rules regulate and refer to psychic events; and never would they forget Fries’ old point about the distinction between the order of discovery and the order of justification. It was only later in the 1880s that Cohen, Windelband and Riehl dropped their interest in empirical psychology and would devote themselves to explaining the strictly logical or epistemological side of transcendental philosophy.
Much of the reason for the slow death of psychologism has to do with the ambiguous status of psychology itself. Some psychologists, namely, Fechner, Ernst and Eduard Weber, had understood their discipline as a straightforward natural science whose task was to determine, through observation and experiment, causal relationships between psychic or psycho-physical events. However, other psychologists, most notably Brentano and the young Dilthey, saw psychology as something more: as an attempt to investigate not only psychic events and their causes, but also psychic contents and their meanings. If psychology were understood in the latter sense, then its difference from epistemology was diminished, if not negligible. For were not the logic of these contents, these intentional objects, the essential subject matter of epistemology? The confusions engendered by this ambiguity are most visible in the case of the young Alois Riehl, who first defined philosophy in psychological terms as a science of consciousness, but who then turned around to insist that it was psychology in a new and different sense, the interpretation of psychic contents rather than causes.23 He then went on to make a drastic distinction between philosophy and psychology understood as the attempt to determine the natural laws of psychic life.
These are all reasons for thinking that the change was gradual, but they still do not explain why it took place. But to give clear reasons for the change is no easy matter. Here the philosophical historian enters a murky realm, the dimly lit castle of the past where he or she is more likely to stumble than to see. 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 of the age. On neither level is there any clear vista, any 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 weeks that Cohen wrote the outlines of his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which laid down the basis for the new epistemological interpretation.24 Yet what Cohen did and thought in that summer is poorly documented, and, given the destruction of his family archives, we are not likely to know more. What moved Windelband in the 1870s away from his originally syncretic approach to epistemology, which combined psychology with logic, to his more strictly logical approach, is also obscure. It is important, however, that we attempt, as best we can, to peer through the fog, for it was during the 1870s that Windelband developed one of his most important and influential concepts, a concept that has a redolent meaning in all contemporary philosophy: normativity.25
On the global level two factors deserve mention, though it is almost impossible to pinpoint and weigh their exact impact on the thinking of the neo-Kantians. One factor is the well-attested influence of Hermann Lotze on his age. In his 1874 Logik, but even before then in the third volume of his Mikrokosmus (1864), Lotze had made a clear distinction between matters of fact and validity.26 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 reasoning is valid. A proposition could be true, or reasoning valid, even though they correspond to no matter of fact or anything existing in the world. This was the case for hypothetical propositions, counterfactual propositions, mathematical propositions, and even scientific generalizations. This realm of truth and validity, so different from the realm of fact and 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.27Psychologism, which seemed to conflate the realms of validity and matter of fact, had now become passé.
Another factor is the influence of Herbart. Although Herbart had jumped on the psychological bandwagon in the early 1800s, insisting that Kant’s epistemology had to be refashioned as an empirical psychology, he had never ceased to distinguish between matters of logic and psychology.28 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 was an important, though too little appreciated or recognized, fact that Cohen, Windelband and Riehl had all been avid students of Herbart in their early days. They were as much Herbartians as they were Kantians. For them to make a sharp distinction between logic and psychology they only had to heed, and see the implications of, Herbart’s teaching.
In the three chapters of Part III we will do our best to find our way through the castle of history, so dark and miasmic in its passageways, and so haunted with the ghosts of a glorious past. We will attempt to determine the sources of the revolution in neo-Kantian thinking by a detailed look at the philosophical development of Cohen, Windelband and Riehl. We will note the important effect that this revolution had on their conception of philosophy, and how they developed that conception in the course of their philosophical development.
1 See Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 314–317, 382–384.
2 According to Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 505, n.30, they were “Meyer (Bonn), Fischer (Heidelberg), Liebmann (Straßburg), Riehl (Graz), Windelband (Freiburg), Cohen (Marburg), Paulsen (Berlin), Volkelt (Jena), Erdmann (Kiel), Vaihinger (Straßburg).”
3 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 385.
4 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, p. 310.
5 See Part II Introduction, Section 1.
6 Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 240.
7 On positivism in 19th-century Germany, see Gerhard Lehmann, Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. IX Die Philosophie des neuenzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1953), pp. 114–126.
8 Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, ed. R. Avenarius (Leipzig: Fues, 1877–1901), 24 vols. In 1902 the journal appeared under the new title Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie, ed. Paul Barth (Leipzig: Riesland, 1902–1916). 15 vols.
9 Richard Avenarius, ‘Zur Einführung’, Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie I (1877), 1–14.
10 Alois Riehl, Der philosophische Kriticismus (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1876), I, 74, 84, 87. It is significant that Riehl regarded Hume as the father of positivism, so that his critique of Hume is intended to apply to positivism itself. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 374–376, regards Riehl as a positivist and stresses his affinity with Dühring, and misses the implicit critique of positivism.
11 Carl Schaarschmidt, ‘Vom rechten und falschen Kriticismus’, Philosophische Monatshefte 14 (1878), 1–12.
13 See Johannes Volkelt, ‘Wiedererweckung der kantischen Ethik’, Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 81 (1882), 37–48.
14 Wilhelm Windelband, ‘Vom Princip der Moral’ (1883), Präludien, Neunte Auflage (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924) II, 161–194.
15 See Chapter 14, Section 10.
16 See Johannes Volkelt, Review of Philosophische Monatshefte 13 (1877), in Jenaer Literaturzeitung 5 (1878), 95–96.
17 Friedrich Paulsen, ‘Idealismus und Positivismus’, Im Neuen Reich 10 (1880), 735–742, pp. 738–739.
18 Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg, pp. 404–433.
19 See Chapter 13, Section 10.
20 This is especially apparent from Johannes Volkelt’s ‘Wiedererweckung der kantischen Ethik’, which Riehl cites as evidence for his own reading. This article was not a response to any political situation in the late 1870s, as Köhnke implies. Volkelt’s call for a renewal of Kantian ethics grew out of his earlier encounter with pessimism and its decadent ethics. See his earlier articles ‘Die Entwicklung des modernen Pessimismus’, Im neuen Reich II (1872), 952–968, p. 967; and Kant’s Kategorischer Imperativ und der Gegenwart (Vienna: Selbstverlag des Lesevereins der deutschen Studenten Wiens, 1875).
21 See Introduction to Part II, Section 3.
22 Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, eds Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (Berlin: Dümmler, 1860–1890), 20 vols.
23 See Chapter 14, Section 3.
24 See Chapter 12, Sections 2–6.
25 See Chapter 13, Section 7–9.
26 On the distinction, see Hermann Lotze, System der Philosophie: Erster Theil. Drei Bücher der Logik (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1874), I, 465–497. See also Mikrokosmos, Vierte Auflage (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1888) Book VIII, Chapter 1, ‘Die Wahrheit und das Wissen’, III, 185–243.
27 The neo-Kantians fully recognized Lotze’s importance. Windelband had been the student of Lotze, to whom he paid full tribute as “the greatest thinker” of the post-idealist age. He praised Lotze for his distinction between being and value. See his article ‘Die philosophischen Richtungen der Gegenwart’, in Große Denker, ed. Ernst von Aster (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1911), II, 376. Erich Jaensch, a student of Riehl, tells us how Riehl enthusiastically endorsed his view that the decisive shift in 19th-century philosophy came with Lotze and his distinction between validity and existence. See his ‘Zum Gedächtnis von Alois Riehl’, Kant-Studien 30 (1925), i–xxxvi, pp. xix–xx. Also note the comment by Emil Lask: “Lotzes Herausarbeitung der Geltungsphäre hat der philosophischen Forschung der Gegenwart den Weg vorgezeichnet.” See his Logik der Philosophie und die Kategorienlehre, in Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923), II, 15.
28 See Johann Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (Königsberg: Unzer, 1813), §§34, 52 (Sämtliche Werke, IV, 67, 68, 78).