Beiser's Neo Kantians (5): Fischer

In Beiser’s map of neo Kantianism, Kuno Fischer is the figure standing right in the middle of the crossroads. He is not quite a neo Kantian in the later, school sense, yet without him, Beiser insists, the later movement would not have taken the shape it did. Fischer is the man who makes Kant exciting again for a wide public, who teaches a generation of students to see the Critique as a living drama, and who, in the process, blurs some of Kant’s strict limits in ways that later neo Kantians have to correct.

Beiser describes two sides to Fischer’s work. On the one hand he is a historian of philosophy with extraordinary narrative talent, writing multi volume histories of modern philosophy in which the great figures are presented as protagonists in a story about the growth of reason. On the other hand he is a systematic thinker, developing his own position in treatises on logic and metaphysics. The two sides lean on each other. The history provides the sequence of problems and solutions. The system gives a standpoint from which the sequence can be read as rational. This double role already marks Fischer as a mediator. He is formed in the Hegelian world, absorbing the idea that philosophy is a grand story with an inner logic, and then turns to Kant to find a new discipline for that story. He wants Hegel’s sense of architectonic unity, the idea that all the main concepts fit together in a single structure, without Hegel’s attempt to derive the whole content of the world from pure thought. He wants Kant’s critique of metaphysics, the insistence that we cannot legislate reality from the armchair, without Kant’s strict refusal to speak about things in themselves. Beiser calls the result a “poised instability”. Admirers can see it as a fruitful tension, critics as a standing inconsistency.

Fischer’s career is marked by conflict with authorities. His early lectures at Heidelberg attract students but also attract suspicion from the theological faculty, who fear that his lucid presentation of Spinoza, Kant and Hegel is really propaganda for unorthodox views. He is eventually banned from teaching there, lives for a time from private teaching and writing, and then returns to academic life at Jena and later again at Heidelberg with growing prestige. Beiser emphasises that Fischer’s lecture style matters as much as his printed work. Students flock to hear him because he can make Kant intelligible and Hegel persuasive, turning abstract arguments into parts of an inner drama. His histories of modern philosophy are written as monographs on individual figures, each treated as a live option rather than as a museum piece. What he models, for a whole generation, is that you can read Kant not as a dead classic but as someone asking your own questions, especially about how scientific knowledge is possible. This pedagogical success has a philosophical cost. Fischer rarely keeps apart simple exposition of Kant, historical reconstruction of why Kant wrote as he did, and his own constructive use of Kantian ideas. The sliding between these levels, Beiser notes, is precisely what infuriates some of his critics, above all Trendelenburg. Yet it is also what makes Fischer so influential. You come out of his lectures feeling that Kant belongs to the present, that the problems of securing objectivity and meaning in a scientific age are fully alive.

Beiser situates Fischer in the 1860s, the crucial decade when neo Kantianism becomes a mass academic phenomenon. It is easy, in hindsight, to say that the revival begins with Otto Liebmann’s slogan “back to Kant.” Beiser argues that by the time Liebmann writes, the soil has already been prepared by people like Fischer and Zeller. Fischer, in particular, has made Kant again a central reference point, both in teaching and in print. To see what is distinctive about Fischer, we need to look at two linked themes in Beiser’s account: his treatment of the “thing in itself” and his reading of Kant’s third Critique, especially the ideas of purposiveness and freedom. These are technical phrases, but the underlying issues are quite approachable if we take them step by step. In Kant’s vocabulary, the “thing in itself” is shorthand for reality as it is independently of our way of experiencing it. Kant thinks we only ever know appearances, things as they are for us, shaped by our forms of intuition (space and time) and our categories (such as cause, substance, community). The “thing in itself” marks a limit: we must think that there is something which affects us, but we cannot describe it in the ordinary way, because all description uses the very forms that belong only to appearances. Beiser shows how, in the 1860s, this becomes a pressure point. The post Hegel world wants both to respect Kant’s warning not to talk glibly about the absolute and to avoid a complete agnosticism. Fischer tries to soften the issue by treating the thing in itself as a “boundary concept”. That means it does not name an object with describable properties but functions like a line on a map saying “beyond here our concepts no longer apply.” It marks the limit of what we can say, not a hidden object we could ever capture with predicates. At the same time, Fischer is not content with a cautious limit doctrine. Beiser’s key claim is that he gradually reads more content into the boundary than Kant allows. This becomes especially clear in the famous Fischer–Trendelenburg dispute. 

The dispute centres on Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic, the part of the Critique where Kant argues that space and time are not properties of things in themselves but forms of our sensibility, ways in which we necessarily perceive any object. Trendelenburg insists that Kant’s arguments do not strictly rule out a “third possibility”, namely that space and time might be both subjective forms of intuition and also have an objective correlate in things as they are. Fischer resists this. He reads Kant as decisively excluding any claim that space and time belong to things in themselves. Fischer’s reason is not purely exegetical. Systematically, he wants a firm distinction between appearance and thing in itself. His reconstruction of Kant’s achievement is that he secures the objectivity of science without appealing to a mysterious realm behind appearances. Beiser shows Fischer trying to hold together two thoughts. First, for the sake of science, the a priori forms, space and time, must be wholly on our side, contributed by the subject. Second, for the sake of morality and metaphysics, there must still be some sense in which reality has an inner depth beyond those forms. The thing in itself becomes the pivot point. Fischer calls it a boundary concept, but he also, especially under the influence of Schopenhauer, tries to give that boundary a positive content in terms of will.

Here we reach his reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, the third Critique, where Kant discusses beauty and purposiveness. Kant introduces the idea of purposiveness as a way of talking about how things look organised “as if” they were made for ends, especially in biology. A living organism seems to have parts that exist for the sake of the whole. Kant says we cannot prove that nature is really ordered by purposes in itself. Purposiveness is a principle of judgement, a way we have to look at things to make sense of them when mechanism alone seems inadequate. He calls it “regulative” rather than “constitutive”. Regulative means it guides our inquiry, like a useful rule of thumb. Constitutive would mean it tells us how things are in themselves. Beiser stresses that Fischer, in effect, lifts this “as if” into an “is”. He reads Kant’s cautious use of purposiveness as pointing to an underlying reality in which will or freedom is the inner essence of both nature and morality. Fischer sees in the third Critique an opportunity to unify Kant’s system under the sovereignty of freedom. The idea is tempting: in the second Critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant had said that freedom has a kind of primacy, because it is through the moral law that we first encounter ourselves as belonging to an intelligible world. Fischer extends this into a metaphysical claim. The thing in itself, he suggests, is at bottom will. Nature is then the appearance of will’s self unfolding. If this sounds very close to Schopenhauer, that is because it is. Schopenhauer explicitly identified the thing in itself with will. Fischer clothes the same move in more Kantian language, but the structure is similar. Beiser notes that Fischer can point to various Kantian texts to give his reading some support: Kant speaks of “intelligible character”, of autonomy as self legislation, of the primacy of the practical, of seeing nature as if ordered to our moral vocation. But none of these, taken in context, authorise the jump from a practical postulate, something we must assume for the sake of morality, to a piece of theoretical knowledge about what reality in itself is like.

In Kant, a postulate of practical reason is a kind of necessary assumption for moral life. For example, Kant argues that we must postulate freedom, God and immortality as conditions for taking the moral law seriously, even though they cannot be objects of theoretical knowledge. Fischer smooths this distinction. He pulls the postulates into the theoretical side, treating them as telling us something about what really exists. Beiser calls this a “romance of reconciliation”. The romance is to read the apparent direction of history and nature as the outward manifestation of freedom, so that science, ethics and religion all become chapters in one story. The cost, from a Kantian point of view, is that the hard distinction between what can be known and what must be merely thought for action begins to dissolve.

Beiser’s account of the Fischer–Trendelenburg quarrel shows these tensions in detail. Trendelenburg accuses Fischer of sliding between historical commentary on Kant and systematic construction. When Fischer insists that the discovery of a priori forms in Kant saves the possibility of objective science without any thing in itself, Trendelenburg presses the point that Kant himself seems to keep open a correlation between our forms and some unknown ground. Fischer’s replies shift between saying “this is what Kant really meant” and “this is what Kant should have meant.” For Beiser, this sliding is precisely what makes Fischer both fascinating and problematic. The issue comes to a head in the question of freedom. Kant famously draws a strict line between appearances, where causality reigns, and the noumenal realm, where freedom, as self legislation according to the moral law, belongs. We are to see ourselves, from one standpoint, as natural beings subject to causes, and from another, as members of an intelligible order of ends. Fischer wants to dissolve the sharpness of this dual standpoint by making freedom the essence of reality. Nature itself becomes the gradual appearing of freedom. Beiser tracks the consequences. At first this looks like a gain. If nature is the appearance of freedom, then our moral vocation has a place in the world story, and pessimism, of the Schopenhauerian kind, can be resisted. But if we push this line far enough, the very distinction that gave the moral law its authority starts to blur. If everything is, at bottom, an expression of will, then natural necessity becomes just a mode of that will’s self expression, and the hard edge of “you ought” softens into a kind of descriptive narrative about development. Kant’s severe contrast between what is and what ought to be loses its bite.

Beiser’s judgement is that Fischer is at once a brilliant mediator and a warning example. He is brilliant because he shows how to re tell Kant for a nineteenth century hungry for meaning, not just for method. He links Kant’s critical project to big themes of freedom, purpose and the sense of history. He becomes, as Beiser puts it, a symbol of the Kantian revival and of its inner tensions. His lectures and histories teach students to see the history of philosophy as a live drama, culminating in critical philosophy, and then facing new tests. He is a warning because, measured by Kant’s own rules, he oversteps. The “thing in itself” stops being a thin boundary concept and thickens into a substantial will. The “as if” of purposiveness shifts into an “is”. The moral postulates slide from the practical to the theoretical side. The careful separation of standpoints nature and freedom, theoretical and practical, regulative and constitutive is eroded in the name of unity. To use Kant’s own language, Fischer lets the “architectonic” demand for a single apex in the system carry more weight than the critical demand to respect limits.

This is where Beiser links Fischer to the later neo Kantian schools. The Marburg school, centred on Hermann Cohen, reacts by radicalising the methodological reading of Kant. They refuse all talk of noumena as entities and treat the thing in itself as a task concept, a way of expressing the open ended character of scientific inquiry rather than a mysterious substrate. The Baden or Southwestern school, with Windelband and Rickert, shifts attention to value, arguing that the central distinction to protect is not between appearances and things in themselves but between validity and existence, between what ought to hold and what in fact happens. In both cases, Beiser says, the impulse is Kantian. The later schools want to save the critical distinction between questions about what there is and questions about how we are justified in claiming to know or to value. They see in Fischer a vivid example of the temptation to rebuild a metaphysics under the cover of critique. To some later neo Kantians, his version of Kant looks like metaphysics by other means. The very success of his story telling, the way he makes freedom the secret centre of nature, shows the risk. At the same time, Beiser is careful not to dismiss Fischer as merely a bad reader of Kant. Without his work, the revival of Kant in the 1860s would have lacked one of its strongest voices. He shows how a gifted historian can turn difficult texts into living options, how a lecturer can dramatise the problem of knowledge instead of reciting dogmas, and how the longing for unity can coexist with serious respect for critical limits, even if, in his case, the longing sometimes wins.

First, think of Fischer as a theatre director staging the history of philosophy. Kant, in his version, is not an austere professor mumbling about categories. He is the protagonist who solves a crisis: how to secure objective science and moral freedom after the collapse of rationalist metaphysics. The risk is that in making the drama gripping he gives Kant lines that belong to Hegel or Schopenhauer. Second, think of the “thing in itself” as a fence line at the edge of a field. Kant’s point is that we should not try to farm beyond the fence; our concepts do not apply there. Fischer paints a landscape beyond the fence and hints that he can see what grows there, calling it will or freedom. Later neo Kantians will come along and repaint the fence more starkly. Third, think of purposiveness as a way of looking at a tangled garden. Saying “let us think of the plants as if they were arranged for a purpose” can help you see patterns without claiming that the garden was really designed. Kant uses the “as if” like that. Fischer begins to treat the purpose talk as literal: the garden really is an expression of an underlying will. That makes the story richer but steps beyond what the critical method authorises. In Beiser’s overall narrative of neo Kantianism, Fischer’s place is therefore between the fall of speculative idealism and the rise of the self conscious neo Kantian schools. He is formed by Hegel and Strauss, converts to Kant, and then teaches others to see Kant as both a limit set on metaphysics and a source of unity and meaning. The later Marburg and Baden thinkers will keep much of what he revived, the sense that philosophy’s task is to clarify methods and presuppositions, not to found science from above, but they will strip away the metaphysical romance that he wrapped around Kant. What remains, after Beiser’s careful reconstruction, is a double lesson. Without some hunger for unity philosophy risks shrinking into dry technique, endlessly analysing concepts without any sense of why they matter. Without the discipline of critique that insists on the difference between knowing and merely thinking, between what is given and what is postulated, that same hunger easily leads to dogma. Fischer lives right in that tension, and it is in watching him struggle with it that we see why neo Kantianism took the form it later did.