Neo-Kantianism

At the end of the nineteenth century, various philosophers critical of Hegel's metaphysics, Nietzsche's vitalism, and Marx's materialism, proposed to return to Kant's epistemology, focusing on the problematic relationship between knowledge and reality, concepts and experience. This so-called neo-Kantianism was also prompted by the emerging social sciences, psychology and sociology in the first place, and their search for a logic and methodology that could match those of the natural sciences. Neo-Kantianism was an influential stream of thought and research until 1933 when the rise of Nazism put an end to it. After World War II, it was surpassed by French and German existentialism, Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, and phenomenology.

Neo-Kantianism is a label for often vastly different currents of thought and research, but usually two main schools are distinguished: the Marburg School and the South-West German, or Baden School. Wilhelm Windelband (1846–1916) is generally viewed as the founder of the latter. He commanded a comprehensive knowledge of the history of philosophy and was a fierce opponent of speculative, metaphysical systems of philosophical thought. He searched above all for a logic of the sciences (Wissenschaftslehre) that would avoid the pitfall of scientism or positivism, which models such a logic after the natural sciences. In his view, the world of historical values and meanings (i.e., the world of the Geist) needed method of scientific scrutiny that differs from the way nature ought to be investigated. In other words, there is not an essential difference between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft (i.e., between humanity and science) but, rather, a logical and methodological difference. In Geisteswissenschaft, history in the first place, there is a focus on what is unique, different, and individual. It is a predominantly descriptive, idiographic approach of reality. In Naturwissenschaft, the focus is rather on what is general, repetitive, and lawlike. This is a nomothetic approach to reality. Windelband's successor, Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), elaborated this idea in the much broader context of a philosophy of values. To avoid the introduction of psychology into the logic and methodology of social sciences, as was recurrently done by his contemporaries, Rickert proposed to replace the word Geisteswissenschaft by the concept of Kulturwissenschaft. Geist after all, is easily associated with “psyche” or “soul,” while Kultur refers to the immaterial reality of values and meanings. The basic idea of his rather complex logic is that the natural-scientific approach, characterized by the search for general laws of development, will run up against its limits the moment one has to deal with values and meanings, which, after all, function within specific, historically unique, and individual contexts. His opus magnum, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Sciences: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences (1896–1902), is an attempt to design a methodology for the historical discipline and the related “cultural sciences.” In Rickert's view, social sciences such as psychology and sociology can legitimately be executed in a natural-scientific manner and thus search for general laws of psychic and social developments, but the moment they also want to focus on values and meanings—that is, on culture—they will have to work with individualizing, historical methods. This idea had a decisive influence on the logic and methodology of Max Weber, who always tried to combine a generalizing, “natural scientific” approach (see his Economy and Society) with an individualizing, historical method (see his essays on the economic ethics of the world religions).

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