8. On Cassirer

Intention: clarification of the common endeavor!

Question: Why cannot Cassirer stick to the ground I picked (p. 3)?
1) Is the problem of metaphysics to be unfolded and grounded in a different way?
2) Is Kant not factically moving along this same ground?
3) Or is only the extent to which he consciously or primarily did this debatable?

With respect to 3), I confess without further elaboration, that my interpretation is violent and excessive, but particularly with regard to the assumptions from 1) and 2)!!

The intention pertains to Kant — and the problem of metaphysics!

9.

The popular quotation of the well-known letter to M. Herz indeed requires that we finally for once question its correctness. It is too seldom noticed that after Kant said he believed he would be ready “within about three months,” in fact he required almost ten years.

There must indeed have been something else that broke down in the interim. In the letter, the problem is still all too traditional, although already critically oriented toward the question concerning the possibility of pure abstract knowledge, as if it simply existed for-itself. Although he noticed sensuality, finitude was certainly not properly central.

10. Cassirer

The merely anthropological and the law of sensual content, appearance and the thing-in-itself. Instead of Being and Time, Being and Duty.

But: Idea — itself Schema! (analogue). Law — intrinsically represented.

11.

Being in the modality of ought-to-be [Sollseins]

12.

The practical reality of freedom. This is [something] intelligible but even theoretically it is not comprehenSible.

Finite rational essence — affected by sensuousness. This as such is not merely anthropological, but is instead the whole essence. Precisely this separation — sense-content and the merely “psychological” — is to be overcome.

APPENDIX VI

On the History of the Philosophical Chair since 1866

The time frame of this account coincides with the establishing, strengthening, working-out and reorganization of philosophical research at Marburg University, which already has its fixed and unequivocal place in the history of Philosophy as the “Marburg School.”

By the middle of the 19th century, the breakdown of the Hegelian school led to a general decline of philosophy. Within the confines of the contemporary, towering positive sciences (history and the natural sciences), philosophy altogether lost its prestige. Where it was well kept up, it took place in the midst of an ignorance and perversion of its proper essence. It was able to obtain validity before the predominant scientific consciousness by means of an assimilation of itself, which ran counter to itself, with the positive sciences as natural-scientific “philosophy” (psychology), that is, as philosophical history.

The uplifting renewal of scientific philosophy underway since the [18]60s undertook, even if in a groping way, to win back an understanding of the original philosophical problematic. The concern with the object, the manner of treatment, and the systematic unity of philosophy received decisive impetus and made fundamental advances through the research conducted at Marburg University. First of all, this [research] sought to secure once again the scientific essence of Philosophy by means of a new appropriation of Kant’s “critical” work. In fact, during the 60s, through the work of Ed. Zeller (Professor of Philosophy in Marburg, 1849-62), Otto Liebmann, Herm. Helmholtz and Fr. A. Lange (Ordinarius in Philosophy at Marburg, 1873-75), the call was loudly sounded: back to Kant! First, in his work Kant’s Theory of Experience (1871), H. Cohen had placed the re-appropriation of Kant that was already underway upon a scientifically decisive ground, and in so doing he influenced the subsequent playing-out of “Neo-Kantianism” in both a positive and a negative way. During this same time, two works appeared, W Dilthey’s Leben Schleiermachers I (1870) and Fr. Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt I (1874), in which tendencies other than a renewal of Kant were maintained.They became, however, the point of departure for Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, which was oriented with respect to the problem of Dasein’s historicality, and provided the impetus for the development of phenomenological research, which was grounded in [the work of] E. Husserl. In both instances, which today have systematically begun to be fused, the way was paved for the overcoming of Neo-Kantianism, indeed to such an extent that they encouraged the strengthening and reorganization of the “Marburg School.”

In his major philosophical work Geschichte des Materialismus (1865), Fr. A. Lange had assigned a fundamental philosophical meaning to Kant’s critical idealism, to the extent that in [Kant’s critical idealism], Materialism as “the simplest, regulative world view” must be overcome. Lange immediately knew the importance of Cohen’s work, based on an understanding of Kant he had laboriously worked out for himself, and he did not hesitate to insert a renewed examination into his own Kant interpretation. Lange arranged for Cohen’s habilitation in Marburg (November 1873). After Weißenborn’s death the following year, Cohen was the sole candidate to be nominated for Ordinarius. In fact, he did not get this appointment; but as of Easter 1875 he was appointed Extraordinarius Professor, and upon Lange’s death (November 1875) he assumed [Lange’s] Professorship, which he would hold until 1912. Following his appointment to Emeritus status, Cohen relocated to Berlin where, in addition to writing actively, he held lectures and classes at the Jewish theological academy there until his death (April 1918).

Cohen looked for the center of the Kantian problematic in the original synthetic unity of transcendental apperception. He saw the problem of the constitution of reality in general as contained in the question concerning the origin of the objectivity of the objects of mathematico-physical knowledge in the coherent execution of pure thinking. With the task of a transcendental-logical grounding of the scientific knowledge of nature understood in this way, philosophy should maintain an original complex of problems that is fundamentally inaccessible to the exact sciences. The boundary between theoretical knowledge on the one hand, and the moral-practical and artistic-formative conduct of the subject on the other, presses for a correspondingly far-reaching interpretation of Kant, which Cohen presented in his works Kants Begründung der Ethik (1877) and Kants Begründung der Ästhetik (1889).

Within this threefold, transcendental laying of the ground for the “world of objects” lies the question of the systematic unity of the entire transcendental grounding itself. In his text Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode und seine Geschichte (1883), Cohen developed the first and, for his future work, decisive discussion of the idea of system. In the subtitle, it is described as “A Chapter on the laying of the Ground for the Critique of Knowledge.” The change of the expression “Critique of Reason” to “Critique of Knowledge” expresses one of Cohen’s principle convictions, which later dominated his own attempts at constructing a system: knowledge is science, or more precisely, mathematical natural science. Accordingly, critical Idealism becomes “scientific” first and foremost by taking “the fact [Tatsache] of science” to be the object of the transcendental grounding. “In science alone are things given and palpably at hand [vorhanden] for philosophical questions.” “The knowing consciousness . . . only has in the fact [Tatsache] of scientific knowledge that reality to which a philosophical investigation can refer.” As a consequence of this narrow fastening together of transcendental philosophy with the scientific fact [Faktum], it also came to pass that ethical and aesthetic objects as scientifically known became a problem. In fact, Cohen postulated jurisprudence [Rechtswissenschaft] as the alleged science for ethics, while in aesthetics he was oriented directly toward the works of art and not, as the idea of system would have it, toward the science of the works. The systematic of the basic concepts of logic, ethics, and aesthetics, oriented in such a manner, gets worked out in Cohen’s three-part system (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, 1902; Ethik des reinen Wollens, 1904; Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls, 1912). While so far Cohen had dissolved the philosophical problem of religion into that of ethics, in his text Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (1915) he sought to determine the unique meaning of the phenomenon of religion.

Although Cohen never published a great work in the history of philosophy other than his works of Kant interpretation, nonetheless from the beginning his systematic work was nourished and guided through constant engagement with the Pre-Socratics, Plato and Nicholas Cusanus, Descartes and Leibniz.

Cohen’s long-time co-worker and friend, Paul Natorp, carried out a more concrete, thorough, and insightful examination of ancient and modern philosophy by means of a systematic understanding of the problems. In the autumn of 1881, Natorp habilitated at Marburg University; in 1885 he became a lecturer at the university; in 1893, as successor to J. Bergmann (see below), he became Ordinarius Professor of Philosophy. In 1922 he became Emeritus, in spite of the fact that he was still active with lectures and classes. Natorp died shortly after his 70th birthday in August 1924. Because Natorp’s philosophical work initially took place scrupulously in the same spirit as Cohen’s, he could later see the essential gaps and one-sided aspects of the system more clearly, and he could bring it to a more originally grounded, independent level of development. Natorp’s earliest investigations were concerned with the loosening up of ancient philosophy through the history of [philosophical] problems. The work Forschungen zur Geschichte des Erkenntnisproblems im Altertum (1884) had a strong influence on science. The work Platos Ideenlehre. Eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1903) indeed met with fierce opposition. Regardless of the tenability of individual interpretations, it performed the urgent task of clarifying that the history of Philosophy cannot dispense with a systematic understanding of the problem as a hermeneutical presupposition of its work. In a treatise that is too seldom considered, called Über Thema und Disposition der aristotelischen Metaphysik (Philos. Monatshefte, vol. XXIV, 1888), Natorp anticipated results and problems in which the present age first became more accessible.

The transcendental laying-of-the-ground for logical, ethical and aesthetic conduct has its “highest point” in the subject. Thus the ground-laying itself first comes to the ground through a thematic consideration of consciousness in the sense of a nonempirical Transcendental Psychology. Natorp communicated his first experiments in this direction in his Einleitung in die Psychologie nach kritischer Methode (1888). During the following two decades, in the course of his debate with the more spirited, well-formed, fundamental conception of  psychology (Dilthey and Husserl), the importance of which psychology itself can only grasp today, Natorp pushed forward to a radical formulation of the problem. The new position was in evidence in the re-casting of the earlier Einleitung, which appeared in 1912 as Allgemeine Psychologie nach kritischer Methode I. In this work, as was the case with all of his philosophical work, Natorp increasingly aimed for a systematic unfolding of the systematic unity of philosophy. In order to overcome a superficial and after-the-fact condensation of the transcendental philosophical disciplines, which had always fundamentally remained standing for Cohen, it was above all a matter of breaking away from the leveling, which Cohen forced, of all possible ways of comportment of Spirit to the sciences of these ways of comportment. With the elimination of the methodical priority of the sciences, theoretical comportment draws “along-side” the “atheoretical,” i.e., the moral, the artistic, and the religious. The idea of logic was freed from the confines of a laying of the grounds for the sciences, that is, from a “theorizing,” and along with the “practical” and the “poetic,” it was pre-classified as universal doctrine of categories. The freer posing of philosophical questions concerning the originality of the individual areas of spiritual life, prepared for in this way, resulted in a more open interpretation of spiritual history. At the same time, it made possible the positive evaluation of the fundamental meaning of a phenomenological categorical analysis of “subjective” and “objective” spirit. Natorp’s own Vorlesungen über praktische Philosophie, which were still being readied for publication and which first appeared after his death (1925), offered a concrete glimpse into the new and comprehensively systematic tendencies in his thought.

From the Philosophical Seminar that was established in 1900 a series of valuable investigations have emerged which, since 1906, have been assembled in Philosophische Arbeiten, edited by H. Cohen and P. Natorp.

The continuation and re-casting of the “Marburg School” is manifest today in the work of Ernst Cassirer (Ordinarius Professor in Hamburg) and Nicolai Hartmann (habilitated in Marburg in 1909, außerordentlicher Professor 1920, Ordinarius Professor as Natorp’s successor 1922, since Autumn of 1925 in Cologne). While A. Görland (Professor in Hamburg) and W. Kinkel (Professor in Gielßen) for the most part held to the position established by Cohen, for years Cassirer strove to lay out a universal “Philosophy of Culture” on the basis of Neo-Kantian questioning. His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Part 1, Language, 1923; Part 2, Mythical Thinking, 1925) attempted to layout the comportment and shaping of spirit, guided by the idea of the “expression” of a systematic interpretation. Cassirer converges with Natorp’s efforts in a particular way, which has its importance more in the universal categorial founding of the system, and not in the concrete interpretation of the individual “symbols” of spirit.

Hartmann’s investigations (Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 1921, and Ethik, 1926) move in the direction of a fundamental change in the problematic of the “school.” The understanding of the ontological problem, which was newly awakened and guided by phenomenological research and the theory of the object, and which since Antiquity has determined the great tradition of scientific philosophy, led Hartmann to attempt to twist not only epistemological questioning, but rather philosophical questioning in general, out of the narrow confines of the idealistic-critical horizon. In so doing, he nevertheless held fast to the traditional standing of the philosophical disciplines and the prevailing perspectives on problems that they held. As a consequence of this systematic reformation of the “Marburg School,” a new understanding is awakened for the history of universal and special ontology. Through his investigation into the ontological antecedents of Kantian philosophy, H. Heimsoeth (habilitated in Marburg, 1912, since autumn of 1923 Ordinarius Professor in Königsberg) advanced in an essential way the knowledge of the development of metaphysics.

Outside of the “school,” Julius Bergmann, as Ordinarius in Philosophy from 1874-93, exhibited an urgency and independence in his teaching. As of October 1, 1893, he resigned and relinquished the stipend earned from his lecturing obligations, but he still remained in full possession of his rights as a faculty member until his death in 1904. Bergmann was a student of Lotze and Trendelenburg. His work in the area of the logic of metaphysics (Allgemeine Logik, 1879; Sein und Erkennen, 1880; Die Grundprobleme der Logik, 1882; Untersuchungen über Hauptpunkte der Philosophie, 1900) left an impression just as unobtrusive as it was strong: Bergmann established the journal Philosophischen Monatshefte in 1868, which was the leading technical journal during the final decade of the last century and which was merged with the “Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie” in 1894.

In 1908, those who managed to attain Extraordinarius in Philosophy were P. Menzer (in Marburg since 1906, called to Halle in 1908 as Ordinarius); H. Schwarz (1908-10, after being Ordinarius in Greifswald); G. Misch (1911-17, after being Ordinarius in Göttingen); M. Wundt (1918-20, after being Ordinarius in Jena); N. Hartmann (1920-22).