Beiser's Neo Kantians (10): What Beiser Says They Are

Beiser’s picture of neo Kantianism begins from something quite simple. In nineteenth century Germany there is a huge success story, the natural sciences, and a huge crash, the collapse of the big speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the middle is philosophy, suddenly unsure what it is for. Scientists say that matter and evolution explain everything. The churches defend revelation and tradition. Philosophers face an identity crisis. Are they still needed, and if so, for what?

Beiser’s claim is that neo Kantianism is the main attempt, over several generations, to answer this crisis by going back to Kant, but in a much more varied and inventive way than the old story suggests. His book is not mainly about the familiar late nineteenth century “schools” with neat labels. It is about the messy origins from the 1790s to about 1880, before the movement becomes a network of chairs and programmes. He defines neo Kantianism quite straightforwardly as the nineteenth century German movement to rehabilitate Kant’s philosophy, and notes that it becomes dominant in German universities between about 1860 and the First World War. By 1870 most German universities have at least one professor who is recognisably neo Kantian. Training in philosophy means serious work on Kant. The movement spreads to Italy, France, Britain and Russia. But Beiser immediately warns against reducing it to three neat schools, Marburg, Baden and neo Friesian. Those groupings form late, after the main ideas have been hammered out, and several important figures stand outside them.

The first unifying thread in Beiser’s story is his insistence that neo Kantianism does not start in the 1860s with Otto Liebmann’s famous slogan “Back to Kant.” That slogan is real, and Liebmann’s book is important, but it caps earlier calls rather than starting the movement. The roots, he argues, go right back to the 1790s, before Kant dies. The founding generation, in his view, is what he calls the “lost tradition”: Jakob Friedrich Fries, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Friedrich Eduard Beneke. The three Freds call themselves Kantians and argue that German philosophy has betrayed Kant by rushing into new rationalist systems. They defend the spirit of critique against post Kantian idealism. They keep Kant’s dualisms, the limit of knowledge to experience, the separation between theoretical and practical reason, and they insist that philosophy must follow the sciences, not try to boss them.

Here Beiser puts forward one of his big theses. After Kant, there are really two post Kantian lines, not one. The line we all know is the frissoning speculative rationalist one, running through Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. It presses systematic unity, dialectical method and the ambition to derive everything from a first principle. The other is the empirical psychological line, the lost tradition, which stresses experience, the sciences, anthropology and psychology. It keeps the sharp borders in Kant. We are finite knowers. We only know what can appear in experience. There is a thing in itself, but we do not try to describe it. Ethics has its own domain. Religion has its own appropriate language.

Fries, Herbart and Beneke all try to re-found Kant’s critical philosophy by using psychology as a kind of preparatory science. They read the Critique as, at least in part, an analysis of what the human mind does when it knows. Fries treats the Critique as an investigation of our mental activities and wants to ground transcendental philosophy in an empirical psychology of inner experience. Herbart wants to rebuild theory of knowledge on a mathematical psychology of “ideas as forces” yet remains deeply attached to Kant’s idealism and his separation of knowledge from things in themselves. Beneke pushes empiricism and psychologism still further, trying to reduce all knowledge to laws of mental life. This first generation preserves something crucial for later neo Kantians. It rejects speculative metaphysics, respects the sciences, and keeps Kant’s sense of limit. Critique is not a gateway to absolute knowledge, it is a check on philosophical overreach. Beiser thinks this tradition dropped out of textbook histories because those histories were largely written by Hegelians and friends of absolute idealism. The speculative line wrote the story in which it alone was the true successor to Kant.

Part of Beiser's project is to rewrite that story so that the psychological, empirical line is seen as equally legitimate and in some ways closer to what would later be called neo Kantianism. Imagine two types of “Kantian” after Kant. On one side is the storyteller who wants a grand tale from first principle to everything, who does not like loose ends and thinks reason must give a complete map of reality. On the other is the careful observer who says, we only know through experience and our concepts, we must respect the sciences, and we must not claim insight into the absolute. Both claim to follow Kant. Beiser’s lost tradition is the second type. The later neo Kantian victory, he suggests, is really the delayed victory of this second, empirical tendency. This brings us to the second unifying thread, which is more cultural. Beiser argues that neo Kantianism grows strong because it offers a persuasive answer to two nineteenth century debates, besides filling the vacuum left by Hegel’s fall. One is the identity crisis of philosophy after the sciences rise. The other is the materialism controversy. On the first, the question is blunt. What is philosophy for, now that physics, chemistry and biology explain so much? The neo Kantian answer, in many different versions, is that philosophy should become epistemology in a strict sense. It should not try to be the queen of the sciences that hands down axioms from an armchair. Instead it should examine the methods, presuppositions and limits of the sciences as they actually work. Philosophy becomes a reflective study of conditions of knowledge, in Kant’s sense of “transcendental” inquiry, not a rival explanatory science. On the second debate, popularisers of science proclaim materialism as the new worldview. Everything is matter in motion. Consciousness is a product of the brain. Free will, morals and religion are illusions. Neo Kantians argue that materialism is both shallow and self undermining. It takes “matter” for granted without asking how the concept is formed. It cannot account for the normativity of knowledge and ethics, the fact that judgements can be right or wrong, not just caused. It also confuses the success of a method for dealing with part of reality with a licence to speak about reality as a whole. So neo Kantianism stands, in Beiser’s synthesis, between speculative metaphysics and crude scientism. It critiques the ambitions of the first and the reductionism of the second. It backs the sciences robustly but insists that they do not exhaust rational life. There are also ethics, law, art and religion, each with its own conditions and standards. Here Beiser’s own interest in the separation of spheres shows through. Neo Kantians keep faith with Kant’s dualism between theoretical and practical reason. They insist that the domains of knowledge, morality and aesthetics have their own structures and should not be collapsed into one another, for example by turning art into moral preaching or by treating ethics as a branch of biology.

Within this broad picture, Beiser traces three phases. First is the lost tradition of Fries, Herbart and Beneke, which he sees as already embodying a neo Kantian programme. Second is what he calls the “coming of age” in the 1860s, when Kant becomes once again central in the universities. Third is the “new establishment”, with figures such as Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Windelband and Alois Riehl, who build the more familiar schools. In the coming of age phase, historians like Eduard Zeller and teachers like Kuno Fischer prepare the soil by making Kant vivid again for students and readers. They write long histories of philosophy in which Kant is presented as a turning point in the story of reason. They show how his critical method arises from earlier problems and how it confronts the question of science and belief. Otto Liebmann then gives the famous slogan “Back to Kant”, criticising the “epigones” of speculative idealism and arguing that the way forward is not more system building but a renewed critique of knowledge. Friedrich Albert Lange, in his History of Materialism, uses Kantian themes to show that naive materialism fails both historically and philosophically, and that transcendental idealism offers a way beyond the stale fight between materialism and old style metaphysics.

By the late 1860s and 1870s you then get what Beiser calls the new establishment. Here the differences inside neo Kantianism become very sharp, yet the common Kantian inheritance still unites them. Hermann Cohen at Marburg reads Kant as a logician of pure thought. For him the key is the “fact of science”. We have successful mathematical physics, that is not in doubt. Philosophy’s job is to ask what conditions of thought must hold for such science to be possible. The categories and principles are not psychological habits but logical rules. Psychology belongs to empirical science. Epistemology is about validity, not about how people happen to think. On the other side stands the anthropological and psychological line, still inspired by Fries, which insists that transcendental conditions are rooted in human finitude and that psychology and anthropology cannot be banished from Kantian critique. For Cohen, the danger in that line is “psychologism”, the confusion of norms with facts, and he draws a strict line to avoid it. For his opponents, the danger in Cohen’s line is an overly abstract picture of reason that floats free of human life. Beiser presents this opposition as one of the central tensions that structure later Kant scholarship. Every reader of Kant, he suggests, is somewhere between a Marburg rationalist pole that grounds everything in pure reason and a Friesian anthropological pole that grounds it in human nature. Cohen’s anti psychologism then feeds into the standard story of neo Kantianism in the twentieth century, where the movement is often remembered mainly as pure logic of science, which Beiser thinks is one sided. 

Alongside Marburg stands the Baden or South western school, represented by Windelband and Rickert. They agree with Cohen that philosophy must be critical and anti materialist, but they shift the focus from natural science to the human sciences and values. Windelband introduces the well known distinction between “nomothetic” disciplines, which seek general laws, and “idiographic” disciplines, which interpret unique events, especially in history. He argues that history and cultural studies cannot be forced into the mould of physics. Their object is meaning, not just regularity. Rickert goes further and says that the human sciences select and form their objects through value judgements. What counts as historically significant is not given by nature but by value relevance. So philosophy must develop a theory of values to underwrite the objectivity of cultural knowledge.

Alois Riehl, another figure from Beiser’s later chapters, gives yet another twist. He wants to hold on more firmly to the reality of things in themselves and to a sort of critical realism. He agrees that we only know appearances, but he thinks the post Kantian tendency to thin out the noumenal realm into a mere “boundary concept” goes too far. There must really be a mind independent world, not just as a word marking a limit. Riehl tries to show that one can keep Kant’s limits on knowledge and still argue responsibly for a robust external reality. Across all these differences, Beiser picks out several shared features that justify talking about “neo Kantianism” at all. One is loyalty to Kant’s critical method. Philosophy must ask about the conditions of possibility of knowledge, not pretend to read off the structure of the absolute. Another is respect for the autonomy of the sciences. Almost all neo Kantians reject the idea that philosophy can give a foundation for physics in the sense of more certain first principles. Instead they take the sciences as “facts” and analyse their logic. A third common feature is the separation of spheres already mentioned. Theoretical reason deals with what is. Practical reason deals with what ought to be. Aesthetic judgement deals with the beautiful. Neo Kantians revise and argue about these divisions, but they almost all keep them. This matters for ethics and aesthetics. Beiser notes, for example, that neo Kantian reasons for keeping ethics and aesthetics apart are methodological. You cannot turn a judgement about beauty into a disguised moral command without wrecking both. Each activity has its own aims and standards. Philosophy’s role is to clarify these, not to merge them. A fourth feature is their stance toward metaphysics. They do not all reject metaphysics in the same way. Some, like Cohen, are very cautious, treating any talk of reality beyond experience as mere “ideal” or “regulative” ideas. Others, like Riehl, keep more substantial ontological claims. But almost all agree that the old rationalist dream of deducing the nature of God, soul and world from pure concepts is over. Any metaphysics that survives must respect the limits of possible experience and the autonomy of science.

Beiser also spends time clearing away myths. One myth says neo Kantians were just dry scholars of Kant, doing textual work without much original thought. He replies that they were often harsh critics of Kant and used him for their own constructive projects. Another says they were safe academic conservatives, while the real rebels were figures like Marx and Nietzsche. He notes that many neo Kantians were outsiders, blocked from posts, teaching under suspicion, or caught up in politics. Beneke’s career, ending in probable suicide after decades of exclusion, is a particularly harsh example. A third myth says they built philosophy on a picture of the mind as a mirror of nature that provides foundations for all science. Beiser counters that most neo Kantians deny this. They reject foundationalism and see philosophy as clarifying presuppositions, not as giving the sciences a new, deeper basis.

Imagine a series of workshops over three generations where different groups of philosophers are all trying to answer two linked questions. First, how is science possible, and what does that tell us about reason? Second, how can philosophy still talk meaningfully about morality, culture and perhaps religion, in a world where science is strong and the old systems have collapsed? The first workshop is the lost tradition. Fries, Herbart and Beneke take Kant very seriously, especially his message that there are limits to what we can know and that experience has an essential role. They want to ground this in careful study of the mind, using psychology and anthropology. They trust the sciences and distrust grand systems.The second workshop is the coming of age in the 1860s. Historians and teachers revive Kant for a new generation. Liebmann and Lange make the case that the age of system building is over and that Kant’s critical project is the way forward. Kant becomes again the central reference point for serious philosophy.

The third workshop is the new establishment. Here philosophers like Cohen, Windelband, Rickert and Riehl argue among themselves about how to read Kant and how to relate philosophy to science and culture. Some lean towards pure logic and away from psychology. Some lean towards values and human sciences. Some keep more metaphysics, some less. Yet they all share the basic Kantian conviction that philosophy must be critical, that it must respect the sciences, and that it must protect the autonomy of ethics and other spheres of value. Beiser’s synthesis shows neo Kantianism as something much richer than a dry school doctrine. It is a long, multi voiced attempt to reinvent philosophy for a scientific age without surrendering either to speculative dreams or to reductionist materialism. It begins earlier than the textbooks say, in a lost tradition that kept Kant’s sense of limit alive. It reaches a peak in the 1860s and 1870s, when “Back to Kant” becomes a rallying cry. It then spreads into logic of science, logic of culture, ethics, religion and aesthetics, producing a landscape of debates that still shape how many people read Kant today.