The Rise of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (Ideas in Context)

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© Cambridge University Press 1991 First published 1991 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge British Library cataloguing in publication data

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 The rise of an autonomous discipline called Erkenntnistheorie

Trendelenburg was the architect of the neo-I 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?

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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'

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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

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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

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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 philosophical criSiS at the time of the' New Era'

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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

The preconditions of the rapid dissemination of neoIZantianism in the 1870S

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THE PROFESSION AL PROSPECTS OF THE' NEOKANTIAN GENERATION' AND THE DISSEMINATION OF THE STUDY OF KANT

The phase of the neo-I