Beiser's Neo Kantians (4): Cohen
In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Hermann Cohen is the point where the movement takes on a recognisable public shape. The early figures, Fries, Herbart and Beneke, look a little like pioneers who open a path and then get half forgotten in the rush of later developments. Cohen stands at the next bend in the track, where a loose trend is turned into a school, the Marburg school, with a programme, students and successors. If you only read later summaries, you might see Cohen as the “orthodox” neo Kantian, a somewhat stiff champion of logic and science. Beiser’s reconstruction gives him a more interesting profile. Cohen is not just a rigorous logician. He is someone who takes up many of the questions raised by the earlier psychological line and answers them by pushing Kant toward a purely logical reading.
A useful way to start is to see the problem Cohen thinks he is facing. After Kant, speculative idealism had dominated German philosophy. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel tried to build huge systems from a first principle, often the I or the absolute, and to deduce the structure of reality by pure thinking. By the middle of the nineteenth century that project looks exhausted. At the same time the natural sciences are expanding and deepening. Physics, chemistry and physiology are explaining more and more of the world. Popular materialism grows up around this, the view that everything is just matter in motion and that philosophy, ethics and religion are relics. Beiser thinks that neo Kantianism as a whole is a response to this crisis. What is philosophy for if the sciences are so successful? they ask. How can it resist materialism without sliding back into speculative metaphysics? These are deep questions.
The first wave of neo Kantians that Beiser writes about, the lost boys Fries, Herbart and Beneke, had already tried an answer. They turned back to Kant, rejected speculative system building, and tried to rebuild philosophy on a psychological and anthropological basis. Philosophy should become critical of knowledge, they said, and should take the sciences as guides, but the way to do this was to study the human mind as part of nature. Psychology, for them, was the basic discipline. Cohen belongs to the second wave. He takes over the anti speculative spirit and the respect for science, but he rejects the psychological foundation. In his hands Kant becomes not an anthropologist of the human mind, but a logician of pure thought.
Cohen’s favourite starting point is the phrase “the fact of science.” The phrase sounds formal, but the idea is simple enough. We have successful mathematical natural sciences. Mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, and so on. They predict, explain and unify phenomena with extraordinary reliability. That is a fact about our situation. Whatever philosophy does, it should not pretend that these sciences need permission from it. They are already working. So the question for Cohen is not “What is the mind like as a natural object?” That is a psychological question. His question is “What must our concepts and principles be like if such science is possible at all?” That is a logical and what Kant calls transcendental question.
Think of someone handed a working iphone with no manual. One approach is to ask what sort of people normally hold such a phone, whether they are big or small, tired or energetic, rich or poor. That is like a psychological approach, it studies the user. Another approach is to look at what the phone does, for instance that it plays music and sends messages, and then to ask what sort of circuitry and software must be inside for that to be possible. Cohen wants philosophy to be like that second investigation. He takes the functioning of science as given and asks regressively what has to be presupposed in thought for it to work. This is what he thinks Kant is doing in the Critique of Pure Reason, and Beiser emphasises that point. Kant does not start from a neutral survey of all possible forms of mental life. He starts from the accomplished fact of mathematical physics and then argues back to the pure forms and concepts that must shape experience if such science is to arise. The word “transcendental” for Cohen, as for Kant, does not mean mystical or otherworldly. It means “concerning the conditions of possibility of experience and knowledge.” A transcendental argument begins from a fact, such as the presence of natural science, and works backwards to what must be true if that fact is to be possible.
The contrast with the earlier psychological line becomes sharp at this point. Fries and Beneke had read Kant’s categories and forms of intuition as something like built-in structures of the human psyche. They thought introspective psychology could uncover these and that this was a proper route into critical philosophy. Cohen rejects that whole way of framing things. For him the categories are not features of a human nervous system or habits of association. They are logical functions, rules according to which we judge if we want our judgements to be objectively valid. The concept of cause provides a good example. Kant treats “every event has a cause” as a principle that is not derived from experience. It is one of the rules that structure what we call an event in the first place. We do not first gather millions of cases where something seems to happen after something else and then generalise. Rather, in order to be able to talk about objective events at all, we already bring with us the rule that an event is something that stands in necessary succession to something else under a law. For Cohen, that means cause is a norm for objective judgement, not a psychological story about how most humans tend to think. It is part of what it is to judge about nature in a scientific way.
On this reading Kant’s categories become aspects of “pure thought.” Cohen does not mean a strange ghostly thinking apart from actual thinkers. He means the system of concepts and rules that define valid scientific judgements considered in their own right, as things that can be correct or incorrect. Psychology might study how people actually get to such judgements, how they learn and err, but that is a separate business. The norms themselves do not depend on those psychological facts. Beiser underlines that here Cohen is not simply slapping the label “psychologism” on earlier neo Kantians. Fries and Herbart already understood that logical norms were not the same as statistical facts about what people believe. What Cohen does is to refuse to use psychology even as a preliminary route into Kant. He wants to keep the logical and the psychological on different levels altogether. This anti psychologistic stance becomes one of the defining commitments of what later gets called “orthodox” neo Kantianism. Beiser presents it as one pole of a long running tension.
On one side stands what he calls the Marburg rationalist pole, centred on Cohen, which grounds Kant’s philosophy in pure reason and the logic of science. On the other side stands the Friesian anthropological pole, which interprets Kant as essentially about human finitude and the structure of finite cognitive beings. Every later Kant scholar, he suggests, is somewhere between these poles.
Cohen’s detailed work on Kant, especially his book on Kant’s theory of experience, is a continual attempt to show that a logical reading is faithful to Kant’s intentions. He rereads central passages, such as the Transcendental Deduction, as regressive proofs from the unity and objectivity of scientific experience back to the necessary functions of judgement. He also sharply downplays some elements that earlier interpreters had emphasised, particularly anything that sounds like a passive receiving of a raw manifold in intuition. For Cohen there is no bare, uninterpreted “given” that stands opposite thought. He often speaks as if what is given is already thoroughly formed by conceptual activity. The object of knowledge is not a ready made thing simply “there” for us. It is a task for thought, an ideal limit of a process of ever more refined determination.
A simple analogy for this way of thinking about objects is to consider the notion of water. In ordinary life, “water” means the familiar liquid in rivers, glasses and rain. For early chemistry it is an element. Later it becomes H₂O, a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Then physical chemistry distinguishes between heavy water, water with impurities, and so on. The concept of water changes as science advances. When we say that all this different talk is about the same thing, we are not saying there is a rigid lump of reality behind the concepts waiting to be pointed at. We are saying that there is a rational task of unifying and refining our judgements so that they form a consistent system. Cohen thinks all scientific objects are like that. They are not given blocks, they are points of convergence of lines of inquiry.
In this sense he radicalises something that was already present in Kant. The world of experience for Kant is not simply received, it is constituted through the cooperation of sensibility and understanding. Cohen pushes hard on the side of understanding, on concepts and rules, and gives sensibility a much less central role. Objectivity is, for him, achieved through an unending work of pure thought that clarifies its own principles by engaging with the sciences. Beiser’s portrayal makes clear that even Cohen’s sharp edges are best understood as part of this attempt to give philosophy a firm identity after the collapse of speculative systems. Philosophy will not tell physicists what nature really is in itself. Instead it will clarify what it means to call something a law, a cause, an object.
Cohen later develops his system in three major arcs. First comes the “logic of pure knowledge,” where he takes the methods of modern science as his central example of pure thought at work. Second comes the “ethics of pure will,” where he takes the modern idea of the moral personality and of the state governed by law as the basic fact. Third comes the “religion of reason,” where he turns to Judaism and asks what rational content lies in its best ethical and theological ideas. The same basic pattern runs through these domains. In logic, he begins from the existence of mathematical physics and argues that its method is essentially constructive and idealising. Science does not copy appearances. It abstracts, simplifies and constructs mathematical models, then confronts these with observation. Reality, in his view, is not a mass of brute data but a system of law, and this system is approached as an infinite task. There is always further refinement of concepts, new constants, new equations. There is no final stage at which the object is completely given. The thought that objects are infinite tasks for reason links his logic to his ethics and religion. In ethics, Cohen begins from the fact that we treat persons as bearers of rights and duties under a shared legal and moral order. He asks what must be presupposed for this to make sense. His answer is again cast in Kantian terms. Moral laws are not generalisations from what people happen to do. They are rational requirements that any being must accept if it is to count as a moral agent. Like Kant, he stresses that morality is not about pursuing happiness in a certain way, but about acting from principles that respect the dignity of persons. Unlike some readings of Kant, however, Cohen gives great weight to the social and legal form of these principles. The moral law is not just something in the inner forum of the conscience. It appears in structures of rights, duties and institutions that give ethical life an objective shape. A simple case, such as the duty to keep promises, can illustrate the flavour of his approach. One way, following Kant, is to universalise the maxim and see that if everyone broke promises whenever convenient the practice of promising itself would break down. For Cohen, an equally important point is that a community of equal persons under law presupposes that promises have binding force. If you remove that, the status of persons as reliable partners in law collapses. The obligation is not a mere feeling of guilt. It is woven into the logical structure of an ordered community.
In his work on religion, Cohen turns to the sources of Judaism and reads them through this lens of reason. He does not treat revelation as a set of extra facts about the universe that science has somehow missed. He sees biblical and rabbinic texts as symbolically expressing rational ethical ideals, above all the unity of God as the unity of law and the unity of morality. Monotheism here does not mean simply that there is one powerful being. It means that both nature and morality are ultimately intelligible as parts of a single rational order. Prophetic concern for the poor, the stranger and the widow becomes, for Cohen, an expression of the rational demand that the community of law should include and protect all persons, especially the vulnerable. God in his philosophy is not a hidden object. It is a regulative ideal, a way of holding together the infinite task of understanding nature and the infinite task of realising justice.
Beiser uses Cohen to mark the second phase of neo Kantianism, where the movement broadens from pure theory of knowledge to ethics and “world views.” This broadening partly responds to cultural shifts. Schopenhauer, with his emphasis on will, suffering and art, had become hugely popular. There was a sense that a purely cognitive account of reason left out important dimensions of human life. Neo Kantians like Cohen try to show that reason is not only at work in science. It is also active in law, morality, art and religion. In each case the method is similar. You start from a fact of culture, such as the existence of modern science, or the modern state, or a religious tradition, and you work back to the rational structures that must be in play. Within neo Kantianism, Cohen’s Marburg school sits alongside the Baden or Southwest school of Windelband and Rickert. The Baden thinkers stress value and the differences between natural sciences and cultural sciences. They argue that history and society require concepts keyed to meaning and value rather than to law and causation. Cohen tends to emphasise the unity of reason, the idea that the same kind of conceptual activity underlies both natural science and cultural life. Beiser’s map shows these as two branches of the same tree, rather than rivals in a different forest. From the vantage point of later philosophy, Cohen appears at a crossroads. Neo Kantian debates about logic, science and consciousness form the background to both early analytic philosophy and phenomenology. Concerns about psychologism, about whether logic can be reduced to psychology, run through Frege and Husserl, and their language often resembles the Marburg insistence on the normativity of thought. Cohen also stands at the start of a distinct line of modern Jewish philosophy, where critical reason and religious tradition are not seen as enemies but as partners. His Religion of Reason becomes a touchstone for later figures who try to think seriously about both rational ethics and religious sources.
If we step back and try to sum up Cohen as Beiser presents him, a fairly clear image emerges. The early neo Kantians had already said that philosophy should become a critical reflection on knowledge and that it should respect the success of the natural sciences. They still tried to do this by looking closely at the human mind as a natural, psychological object. Cohen keeps the first part and drops the second. He puts Kant’s critical philosophy on a purely logical footing. The central questions become: what has to be true of thought for science to be possible, what has to be true of will for an ethical community under law to be possible, what has to be true of religious life if it is to express rather than deny reason? In each case the answer is given in terms of pure concepts, norms and infinite tasks, not in terms of inner feelings or brain processes.
Imagine again the scientist with no manual, studying the workings of a machine that already functions, trying to infer the inner principles. That is how Cohen sees philosophy in relation to science. Imagine a map of a coastline that can always be refined, with more detail, more inlets and rocks, yet never finished. That is how he sees knowledge of nature and, by extension, the object of science. Imagine a community of persons under law, always trying to extend justice more fully, to include those left out. That is how he sees moral and religious life. For Cohen, reason is at work in all three images, not as something that looks down on the sciences and the world from outside, but as something that is already active within them, shaping their forms and pointing them beyond anything already achieved.