The Legacy of Kant: Classical Neo-Kantianism

Paul Guyer (Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania) opened the conference with a discussion of Kantian and Neo-Kantian aesthetics, asking (as his paper was titled) “What Happened to Kant in Neo-Kantian Aesthetics?” Guyer elucidated two aesthetic theories emerging from classical late nineteenth-century Neo-Kantianism; that of Hermann Cohen, as presented in his work Begründung der Ästhetik, and that of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose aesthetic theory appears in his writings on poetics and hermeneutics.  Each of these philosophers created their own distinct synthetic theory of aesthetic experience, responding to and recasting Kant's account thereof.  But, as Guyer pointed out, Cohen and Dilthey often strayed far away from the letter of Kant's own writings, and were clearly just as engaged with the aesthetic theories of the nineteenth century. 

Rational consciousness can, according to Cohen's reading of Kant, move in two directions: the scientific and the moral.  Science is interested in how things really are, while morality is interested in how things should be; in Guyer's words, there is "the knowledge of reality on the one hand and the determination to change the will of reality on the other hand."  But if art is to have a particular content, the cognitive and practical concepts that guide scientific and moral realms cannot be said to capture all elements of human experience.  When aesthetic experience is concerned with knowledge or morality, it is interested in the underlying feelings upon which those forms of thought are built.  It is therefore the dynamic of consciousness itself that becomes the content, an experience of self-sensing, self-feeling consciousness that precedes rigid determination.  Guyer explained how Cohen intended this to dovetail with Kant's theory of the free play of the faculties: "What animates the mind to free play is an awareness of a range of un-conceptualized feelings.”

Guyer went on to contrast Cohen's theory with that of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose aesthetics went in a very different direction from Cohen and Kant by insisting on the historical specificity of aesthetic experience. Dilthey argued that aesthetic experience is, in both its creation and reception, a rarified intensification of the poet's own experience in historical time.  The different between writer and reader of the poem is only a matter of degrees.  Being bound to an historically located individual (the poet) the cumulative modes of relaying aesthetic experience remain historically determined, and a different set of formal tools would be available to poets living at different times. As commentator Peter Gilgen pointed out afterwards, a certain "willful misunderstanding of Kant" was necessary to pursue these theories. (Paul Buchholz)

Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s talk (Philosophy, Humboldt University Berlin) “Hermann Cohen on Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic” provided the stimulus for one of the conference’s most detail-oriented discussions, continuing the focus on one of the most prominent Neo-Kantians begun by Paul Guyer. Horstmann’s argument hinged on a nuanced reading of Cohen’s interpretation of one of Kant’s central doctrines: the “thing-in-itself,” or the realm of the noumena. For Horstmann, Cohen was one of the few (perhaps the only) Neo-Kantian who refused to do away with this doctrine. The other leading Neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century believed that any investigation into the thing-in-itself invariably led to psychologistic interpretations of Kant, pan-logicism, or simply bad metaphysics.

But Cohen, argues Horstmann, aims at siphoning out the “spirit” of Kant’s philosophy, and comes close to achieving it in his work Kants Theorie der Erfahrung. It is here where Cohen identifies Kant as, above all, a theorist of experience. According to Cohen, Kant identifies a priori elements to be the foundation of experience, in part because experience is grounded in space and time. Cohen understands the elements of the a priori as being comprised of three distinct levels: a metaphysical one, which consists of space and time, and two transcendental levels, the first being the necessary conditions for empirical cognition, and the second being the mathematical justifications that sustain such cognition. The point of contention in this formulation is that space here is assumed to be a priori, which as Horstmann reminded, Cohen takes to be a “given.” Cohen’s emphasis on the a priori conditions of cognition leads him to accept the epistemological claim of the thing-in-itself, which Cohen sees as a postulate, and even more so, as a task. This move, argues Horstmann, is wholly consistent with Cohen’s realist reading of Kant’s first Critique.

Professor Michelle Koch (Cornell) responded with some interesting objections to Horstmann’s presentation. She essentially questioned whether Cohen, in his claim to fidelity, was truly faithful to Kant in his potentially crude equations of the thing-in-itself with larger concepts like the “absolute idea,” “experience,” or the “transcendental object,” which is what Horstmann was suggesting. In doing so, Koch wondered whether Cohen actually achieved what Horstmann claimed he did, which was the avoidance of either a psychologistic or pan-logistic reading of Kant. The verdict is still out. (Ari Linden)

Peter Gordon (History, Harvard University) offered an intellectual historian’s perspective on Neo-Kantianism that placed the debates of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in the political context of the interwar period. Introducing the dialogue of the two philosophers through their watershed meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Gordon’s paper “Neo-Kantianism and the Politics of Enlightenment” focused on the intellectual exchange between Cassirer and Heidegger—a several-year debate often characterized as that between existentialism and Neo-Kantianism—to explore how political tensions in the interwar years affected inflections of Enlightenment thought.

In 1932, Cassirer published The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, a book that, in contrast to Heidegger’s supposedly radical critique of modern philosophy, insisted on the relevance of Enlightenment thought as the paradigm for modernity. Gordon focused his close reading of Philosophy through Cassirer’s notion of mental spontaneity and its distinction to Heidegger’s concept of ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit). This notion of spontaneity identified the origin of creativity in thought itself. For Heidegger, however, faith in such a form of mental spontaneity was one of the main obstacles distracting man from accepting the passive nature of his existence. Gordon characterized the fundamental disagreement in this way: “whereas for Heidegger the defining flaw of philosophical modernity was its unwarranted confidence in the human subject as the creative force behind all things, for Cassirer it was just this confidence that most distinguished the Enlightenment and merited its ongoing defense.”

The onset of National Socialism in Germany saw many Jewish professors forced to leave their employment at universities. Likewise, advocates of Enlightenment philosophy—long aligned with Judaism and Jewish intellectuals—suffered the complications of anti-Semitic political sentiment, as Neo-Kantianism became a philosophical “scapegoat.” Gordon concluded his argument by identifying this philosophical-political tension in Cassirer’s reaction to Heideggerian existentialism. In Cassirer’s final publication, The Myth of the State, written during his exile in the United States, he accused the concept of Geworfenheit of “helping to corrode the modernist’s trust in mental spontaneity and it had thereby contributed to Germany’s political disaster.” With a final reminder that his distinctions between the two philosophers’ works were coarse at best and that each philosophy merited discussion in its own right, Gordon closed by noting the historical irony that Heidegger himself was grounded in the very Neo-Kantian teachings that political influences would encourage him to turn against. (Katrina Nousek)

Day Two:

Desmond Hogan ( Princeton University) argued that Kant’s theory of freedom supports the account theory of noumenal affection that some have f ound found in his mature works. The neo-Kantians Cohen, Natorp and Cassirer all asserted that noumenal affection (the doctrine that we are affected by supersensible entities ) is incompatible with Kant’s system.  Hogan argued, on the other hand, pointed out that Kant implicitly endorses noumenal affection in his mature works,  and that this rai ses sing the problem of compatibility with Kant’s doctrine of noumenal ignorance (the doctrine that we have no knowledge of the supersensible). Hogan did not try fully to resolve th e problem , but he did show how .  Subsequently, Hogan showed how a certain view of noumenal affection the supersensible could play a key role in establishing allowing for the the individual ’s free will of persons vis-à-vis the causal determination of phenomena. For In the philosophy of Leibniz, the individual person is a “spiritual automaton , ” whose actions are entirely determined by quasi- mechanical , internal drives . This system , which in turn preserve s s a perfect conformity amongst all non-interacting substances. Kant holds by contrast that “in animals as in machines” there is “an external necessitation , ” but t his does not hold for the free, conscious actions of human beings s , in whom the soul is free . Of course, ; humans are aware of others’ bodily behaviors actions , but there is no causality that determines the action of each individual from outside . Action cannot be known in the way that phenomen a on are known ; no determining ground of conscious action can be established through representation , and thus comprehension of human action through perception or pure reason is impossible. Instead, the reality of the human ity being in its capacity for free activity consciousness is regarded known , according to Kant, “as noumenon in the midst of its mechanism as phenomenon .” (Paul Buchholz)

Dina Emundts ( Humboldt University Berlin) discussed Emil Lask’s theories of logic, judgment, and truth in her paper entitled “Emil Lask on Judgment and Truth.” Emundts first drew the audience’s attention to Lask’s understanding of logical categories, in which he tried to rewrite Kant’s original theory of transcendental logic. Linking Lask’s theory of judgment to those of Husserl and Rickert, Emundts illustrated how Lask attempted to answer the question of how we can understand as a guideline for truth something that is independent of the subject. Emundts located the bridge between subject and object in the domain of judgment, where a predication could be based upon the object. This allowed Lask to reduce different judgments to their original predications and to overcome grammatical judgment. This concretized Lask’s idea that thought is not a metagrammatical predication, but a result of judgment about structure. By arguing that predications are true when they correctly represent relations between the subject and object, Lask sought to save Kant’s spirit from the critique of subjectivism. Frederick Beiser ( Syracuse University) began his commentary on Emundts’ talk with a brief overview of Lask’s short life. Beiser then pointed out that in his 1912 Die Lehre vom Urteil (The Doctrine of Judgment), Lask had completely desubjectified the conception of validity, and had stretched Kant to a breakpoint. According to Lask, Beiser pointed out, thinking and judging are processes of taking apart and rebuilding, and one judges wrongly when one rebuilds wrongly. Beiser suggested that Lask, having thus desubjectified validity, could not easily be regarded as Kantian. (Gizem Arlsan)

Following was the paper by Vasilis Politis (Philosophy, Trinty College Dublin) entitled “Invoking the Greeks on the Relation between Thought and Reality: Trendelenburg’s Aristotle—Natorp’s Plato.” Politis approached Neo-Kantian receptions of Greek philosophy through his primary interest in Plato and Aristotle, arguing that Natorp's reading of Plato's theory of forms in Platons Ideenlehre can contribute to the understanding of Plato. At the same time, Natorp neglects certain questions that are arguably central for the understanding of Plato, namely how Plato’s forms are related to explanations (aitiai), to sense-perception, and epistemological concerns. Politis discussed these issues in the context of Plato’s account of explanation in the Phaedo, and of the argument for change and changelessness (kinesis and stasis) in the Sophist. Politis also posed the question of whether Adolf Trendelenburg’s criticism of Kant in his Logische Untersuchungen and his defense of a distinctive alternative to transcendental idealism can contribute to the understanding of Aristotle. (Grace Gemmell)

Michael Friedman (Stanford University) concluded the conference with his lecture entitled Ernst Cassirer & Thomas Kuhn: The Neo-Kantian Tradition in History and Philosophy of Science, which emphasized Thomas Kuhn’s indebtedness to Neo-Kantian philosophy. Friedman began with a short summary of Kuhn’s main thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Kuhn, scientific paradigms shift suddenly and rapidly, and the gathering of empirical evidence is not a necessary pre-condition for such shifts. Friedman likened Kuhn’s ideas about scientific paradigm shifts to the Marburg School’s historicized interpretation of Kant in which the ‘a priori’ is replaced by a developmental or genetic idea of science. According to Friedman, Ernst Cassirer introduced the first full articulation of a genetic idea of science in his text Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. The convergence in question in this developmental model would need to take place within scientific structures and not simply inside the mind, but is also primarily a functional rather than substantial category. Kuhn rejects all convergence to a concept of knowledge as absolute and in this way shares certain features with the Marburg school’s conception of knowledge. Cassirer, however, would conceive of all theories in a sequence as continuously converging in a final theory, such that all previous theories are approximate special cases of that final theory, such that reality would be the pure ideal limit of such a structure. This notion is quite Kantian, but Kuhn would not likely share it.

Friedman connected this observation to Cassirer’s understanding of science as a mathematization of nature, i.e. as the every increasing application of mathematics to empirical nature. This notion of Cassirer’s reveals another important difference between Cassirer and Kuhn. Where Kuhn is a follower of Meyerson when he embraces a substantialist ontological view of nature, Cassirer remains a relativist by accepting the continuity of mathematical structures as sufficient. Friedman finished his lecture by arguing that the integration of Einsteinian physics into Kant’s universe poses substantial difficulties, but he also insisted that such integration is still possible. (Jens Schellhammer)