2. On Cassirer’s Critique

A basic question in two respects. Essence of knowledge:

1) that knowledge is “primarily” (see text) intuition (not knowledge = intuition), but infinite: “only” intuition (finitude as construction).

“Primarily” refers to “secondarily” — and the latter is not unimportant, but rather is essentially just as necessary, but in the structure of the subordinance [Dienststellung]; that this subordinant [Dienende] — as finite — mistakes precisely itself, which still is no proof for infinitude, but rather the reverse. Kant himself did not develop this Phenomenon.

2) From all of this, then, knowledge is a) neither intuition nor thinking “by itself,” b) but also not: intuition as well as thinking, both together, but rather c) the third, but this as also the more originary, the power of imagination and “time”; but with this we still have a problem!

3. Cassirer

What should we make of the teaching as to the spontaneity of the understanding, where for me it is precisely the power of the imagination which has been brought to center stage.

But Cassirer says nothing about the fact that this emphasis on the understanding is indeed ambiguous, that the Marburg [School] undertook something quite different — only understanding and only logic and intuition are simply a disagreeable residue that should not be part of the infinite process. Space and Time as Concepts of the Understanding!!

I never assert that the Understanding simply brings out something after the fact which is, as it were, superfluous! (Schleppe).

And what Cassirer wants with the torchbearer is thus only an image and says absolutely nothing concerning the essence of the relation of thinking to intuition; but that is precisely what is concealed as a problem in the phenomenon of the Power of Imagination. 

4. On Cassirer
Essence of the Understanding and Finitude

 The understanding serves as torchbearer, serving in any case, and what does bearing a torch mean — to illuminate!

It is essentially not what gives the light [Licht], but rather what needs the clearing [Lichtung]; as understanding, it is simply to determine. It only illuminates as schematic Understanding; from itself, in fact, it is not even able to serve.

Cassirer sticks to the letter and overlooks precisely the problematic of pure understanding and logic.

5. “Finitude” (Cassirer)

To be sure — a problem, but the decisive question is in fact: why? and how!

To philosophize only in this way concerning finitude, because at one time or another it emerges in the moment as a kind of hangover, but this is certainly no philosophical motivation.

It looks like Cassirer had the central theme and yet completely passed it by!

6. Cassirer (Universal)

Cassirer adheres to his wonderful principle — compliance with Intention (“finitude”? Yes and no!): Question of Being and question concerning man, so that even this becomes problematic — thus the whole problem of consciousness is in motion; Marburg [School]: Intuition and Thinking, even the third!

No! Neither this problem nor the entire interpretation of this question has been understood and assessed. In its place: objections from various sides that have awkward or fallacious aspects but that are all in part correct. Cassirer completely misunderstands that what is decisive for interpretation is the working-out of a problem, and indeed that this problem must first be made visible, and that this comes about through recollection of Kant. In this way an interpretation was demanded. This determines the historical objectivity. A Kant in-itself — which presumably “does not concern” us, or is indeterminate in all respects (Ebbinghaus) — is a fundamental misunderstanding.

But Cassirer also works with the hidden idea of a correct interpretation of this sort.

7. On Cassirer

Agreed: not to cover the entire scope of the problematic (17). Also the intention was never this: to interpret just a part, but instead from one [part], even from the grounding problem, [the intention is] to reveal in Kant the “problem of metaphysics,” and precisely on the basis of the “part,” which was prevented by its customary interpretation as simply “theory of knowledge.”

In this part, the perspective should be pursued in the direction of the problem of metaphysics, which even Kant fundamentally changed — the basis and location for this change.

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.