Beiser's Neo Kantians (6): Natorp

In Beiser’s story of neo Kantianism, Paul Natorp stands at an important turning point. He is not as dramatic a figure as Hermann Cohen, nor as colourful as Kuno Fischer, but Beiser treats him as someone who quietly carries the movement from its early, exploratory phase into a stable, institutional form. Natorp helps turn neo Kantianism into something a university can teach, support and reproduce, and he does so by extending its concerns into pedagogy, education and the communal life of science.

To see Natorp’s significance in Beiser’s account, it helps to remember the broader background. After Kant, philosophy enters a crisis. The grand speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel collapse in credibility. At the same time the natural sciences grow in authority. Many popular writers announce that the sciences reveal matter as the only reality and that philosophy is now obsolete. Neo Kantians step in by arguing that philosophy still has a task, but a different one. Instead of building systems about the world as a whole, it should analyse the conditions that make scientific knowledge possible. In other words, philosophy should become a discipline that clarifies how science, morality and culture achieve objectivity and meaning. The first wave of neo Kantians that Beiser recovers, the line of Fries, Herbart and Beneke, framed this task in psychological and anthropological terms. They wanted to understand knowledge by studying the mind as a natural phenomenon. Cohen, in the second wave, insisted instead on logic. The categories and principles that make knowledge possible are not features of the human brain. They are norms of valid judgement. Natorp belongs to the third generation. He inherits the anti speculative stance and the respect for science, yet he gives the movement a new social and educational dimension.

Beiser describes Natorp as someone who sees that knowledge does not emerge from solitary minds working in isolation. It emerges through schools, universities and scientific communities. Because of this, education itself becomes a philosophical concern. Teaching is not, for Natorp, the transmission of facts, but the cultivation of a capacity to think conceptually and critically. The aim of teaching is to help learners grasp the conditions that make knowledge possible. This is why Natorp writes both about epistemology and about pedagogy. For him the two belong together. One of the consequences of this, which Beiser emphasises, is that Natorp pushes neo Kantianism still further away from a psychological interpretation. If knowledge rests on the formation of concepts within a community of inquiry, then the key questions concern the rules that guide concept formation, the ideals that regulate scientific method, and the educational structures that shape the growth of understanding. These are normative matters, not empirical descriptions of mental events. Natorp therefore continues Cohen’s anti psychologistic line, but he embeds it in the real practices of teaching and scholarship.

Imagine a group of people making a map of a coastline. One way to approach the project is to focus on the mental processes of the individual map maker. That was the approach of the early neo Kantians. Another approach, which Natorp adopts, is to look at the entire map making enterprise. What are the conceptual tools that the group assumes? How is their training organised? What methods and standards allow them to coordinate their observations? Natorp’s philosophical interest lies in these shared conditions of knowledge formation. In this way he links epistemology to education and the social organisation of inquiry.

Natorp’s work also develops the Kantian theme of the synthetic a priori, but in a way that removes the last psychological traces. A synthetic a priori truth, for Kant, adds new knowledge but is known independently of specific experiences. Natorp uses this idea to explain how scientific concepts work. Infinitesimal calculus, for example, depends on the idea of quantities approaching zero. No one has ever experienced an actual infinitesimal. It is an ideal construction that guides scientific reasoning. Natorp sees such constructions everywhere in science and argues that philosophy must explain their role without reducing them to mental habits. They belong to the logic of inquiry, not to the biology of the brain.

Beiser points out that this emphasis on conceptual construction moves neo Kantianism into more overtly social terrain. If scientific concepts arise within shared practices, then philosophy must pay attention to the institutions that sustain those practices. This is why Natorp becomes a major figure in educational theory. He sees schooling as the place where the conceptual capacities required for scientific thinking are first formed. To teach well is to help students participate in the community of rational inquiry, not just to help them remember material. In this way, Natorp makes neo Kantianism less a set of abstract doctrines and more a lived intellectual culture. Philosophy becomes a reflection on modern science and modern education at the same time. Beiser treats this as the moment when neo Kantianism grows into a complete programme rather than a loose trend. Earlier figures revived Kant. Cohen gave the revival a logical centre. Natorp gives it a practical home in schools, universities and shared scientific work. For Beiser, the most important point is that Natorp shows how philosophy can resist two temptations at once. It can avoid returning to speculative metaphysics, and it can avoid reducing knowledge to mere empirical psychology. By focusing on conceptual norms and educational practices, Natorp protects the autonomy of philosophy while connecting it to real institutions. Philosophy is neither an attempt to legislate the nature of reality nor a laboratory science of the mind. It becomes a discipline that clarifies the rules that govern knowledge, value and culture, and that helps societies form the capacities needed for rational life.

If we step back and look at Natorp through Beiser’s account, a clear picture emerges. Natorp is a builder rather than a revolutionary. He helps take the critical spirit of Kant and the anti speculative insights of the early neo Kantians and anchors them in the social world. He sees that thinking is not only something individuals do. It is something communities cultivate, teach and refine. In doing that, he gives neo Kantianism the institutional shape that allows it to dominate German philosophy for several decades.

The lesson Beiser draws is that Natorp’s work marks the moment when the movement gains stability. The early figures set the direction. Cohen sharpened the method. Natorp completed the transition from an intellectual rebellion into a structured school, one that connects epistemology to science, pedagogy and communal rationality.