The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Echoes of the Kantian Mode of Conception

[ 1 ] In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were only a few personalities who, by immersing themselves in the Hegelian mode of ideas, sought a certainty for the relationship of a conception of the self-conscious ego to the general world view. One of the best is Paul Asmus (1842-1876), who died too early and published a paper in 1873 entitled "Das Ich und das Ding an sich". He shows how, in the way in which Hegel viewed thinking and the world of ideas, a relationship of man to the essence of things can be gained. He astutely demonstrates that man's thinking is not something alien to reality, but something full of life, primordially real, into which one need only immerse oneself in order to arrive at the essence of existence. He illustrated in an illuminating way the course that the development of the world view has taken in order to move from Kant, who regarded the "thing in itself" as something alien and inaccessible to man, to Hegel, who believed that thought encompasses not only itself as an ideal entity, but also the "thing in itself". However, such voices were hardly heard. This was expressed most sharply in the cry that became popular in a certain philosophical current after Eduard Zeller's Heidelberg University speech "On the meaning and task of epistemology": "Back to Kant". The partly unconscious, partly conscious ideas that led to this call are something like this: Natural science has shaken our confidence in independent thinking, which wants to penetrate to the highest questions of existence on its own. However, we cannot rest easy with the mere results of natural science. For they do not lead us beyond the outside of things. There must still be hidden reasons for existence behind this outside. After all, natural science itself has shown that the world of colors, sounds, etc. that surrounds us is not a reality outside in the objective world, but that it is produced by the arrangement of our senses and our brain. (Cf. above p. 422ff.) One must therefore ask the questions: To what extent do the results of natural science point beyond themselves to higher tasks? What is the nature of our cognition? Can this cognition lead to the solution of these higher tasks? Kant had posed such questions in a penetrating way. One wanted to see how he did it in order to take a stand against them. They wanted to reflect on Kant's train of thought in all its acuteness in order to find a way out of their perplexity by continuing his ideas and avoiding his errors.

[ 2 ] A number of thinkers struggled to reach some kind of goal from Kant's starting points. The most important among them are Hermann Cohen (1842 to 1918), Otto Liebmann (1840-1912), Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915), Johannes Volkelt (1848-1930), Benno Erdmann (1851-1921). There is a great deal of acumen to be found in the writings of these men. A great deal of work has been devoted to investigating the nature and scope of human cognition. Johannes Volkelt, who, insofar as he is active as an epistemologist, lives entirely in this current, has also himself delivered a thorough work on Kant's epistemology (1879), in which all questions determining this type of conception are discussed, gave a speech when he took up his teaching post in Basel in 1884 in which he stated that all thinking that goes beyond the results of the individual factual sciences must have the "restless character of searching and tracing, of trying, defending and conceding"; "it is a going forward that nevertheless partially recedes again; a yielding that nevertheless grasps again to a certain degree". (Volkelt, Über die Möglichkeit einer Metaphysik, Hamburg and Leipzig, 1884.) - The more recent connection to Kant appears sharply nuanced in Otto Liebmann. His writings "Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit" (1876), "Gedanken und Tatsachen" (1882), "Klimax der Theorien" (1884) are true prime examples of philosophical criticism. A caustic mind ingeniously uncovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals half-measures in seemingly certain judgments and thoroughly reproaches the individual sciences for what they contain that is unsatisfactory when their results are placed before a supreme tribunal of thought. Liebmann reckons up Darwinism's contradictions; he shows its not entirely well-founded assumptions and its gaps in thought. He says that there must be something that overcomes the contradictions, that fills in the gaps, that justifies the assumptions. He once concludes the consideration he devotes to the nature of living beings with the words: "The fact that plant seeds do not lose their germination capacity despite lying dry for eons, that, for example, the grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy coffins, after having been hermetically buried for thousands of years, thrive most excellently today when sown in damp fields; that, furthermore, rotifers and other infusoria, which one has collected completely dried up from the gutter, swarm around revitalized when moistened with rainwater; yes, that frogs and fish, which have frozen into solid lumps of ice in the freezing water, regain their lost life when carefully thawed; - this circumstance allows completely opposite interpretations. .. . In short: any categorical denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism. Therefore we break off here." This "Therefore we break off here" is basically, if not in word, then in spirit, the final thought of every Liebmann observation. Indeed, it is the final result of many new followers and adaptors of Kantianism. - The adherents of this school do not go beyond emphasizing that they take things into their consciousness, that everything they see, hear, etc., is not outside in the world, but inside themselves, and that consequently they can make nothing of what is outside. There is a table in front of me, - says the New Kantian to himself. But no, it only seems that way. Only those who are naïve about worldviews can say: There is a table outside me. Those who have shed their naivety say to themselves: Something unknown makes an impression on my eye; this eye and my brain turn this impression into a brown sensation. And because I have the brown sensation not only in a single point, but can let my eye wander over a surface and over four pillar-like structures, the brownness forms itself into an object, which is the table. And when I touch the table, it offers me resistance. It makes an impression on my sense of touch, which I express by ascribing a hardness to the structure created by the eye. I have thus created the table out of myself on the occasion of some "thing in itself" that I do not know. The table is my imagination. It is only in my consciousness. Volkelt places this view at the beginning of his book on Kant's theory of knowledge: "The first fundamental theorem that the philosopher must bring to clear awareness consists in the realization that our knowledge initially extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our ideas are the only things that we experience directly; and precisely because we experience them directly, even the most radical doubt cannot wrest knowledge of them from us. On the other hand, the knowledge that goes beyond my imagination - I take this expression here everywhere in the broadest sense, so that all physical events fall under it - is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond the imagination must be explicitly placed as doubtful." Otto Liebmann also uses this idea to defend his assertion: Man can no more know whether the things imagined by him outside his consciousness are not than he can know whether they are. "Precisely because, in fact, no imagining subject can leave the sphere of his subjective imagination; precisely because he can never, ever, by leaping over his own consciousness, by emancipating himself from himself, grasp and state that which may or may not exist beyond and outside his subjectivity; precisely because it is inconsistent to want to maintain that the imagined object is not there outside the subjective imagination." (O. Liebmann, On the Analysis of Reality, p. 28.)

[ 3 ] However, both Volkelt and Liebmann endeavor to prove that man finds something within his imaginary world that is not merely observed, perceived, but is thought in addition to what is perceived, and that at least points to the essence of things. Volkelt is of the opinion that there is a fact within the imaginative life itself that points beyond the merely imaginative life, to something that lies outside this imaginative life. This fact is that certain ideas impose themselves on man with logical necessity. In his 1906 publication "The Sources of Human Certainty", we read (p.3) Volkelt's view: "If we ask what the certainty of our cognition is based on, we come across two origins, two sources of certainty. No matter how intimate the interaction of both modes of certainty may be necessary if knowledge is to arise, it is nevertheless impossible to trace one back to the other. The one source of certainty is the self-certainty of consciousness, the awareness of the facts of my consciousness. As true as I am consciousness, my consciousness testifies to the existence of certain processes and states, certain contents and forms. Without this source of certainty there would be no cognition at all; it gives us the material from the processing of which all knowledge emerges in the first place. The other source of certainty is the necessity of thought, the certainty of logical compulsion, the factual awareness of necessity. With this something is given that is absolutely new, which cannot possibly be gained from the self-certainty of consciousness." Volkelt speaks about this second source of certainty in the following way in his earlier mentioned writing: "Direct experience does indeed allow us to experience that certain conceptual connections carry with them a highly peculiar compulsion, which is essentially different from all other kinds of compulsion by which ideas are accompanied. This compulsion forces us not only to think of certain concepts as necessarily belonging together in the conscious imagination, but also to assume a corresponding objective, necessary belonging together that exists independently of the conscious imagination. And furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in such a way that it tells us that if what it prescribes did not take place, our moral satisfaction or our inner happiness, our salvation, etc. would be at stake, but its compulsion contains this, that objective being would have to cancel itself out in itself, would have to lose its possibility of existence, if the opposite of what it prescribes were to exist. The distinguishing feature of this compulsion therefore consists in the fact that the thought that the opposite of the necessity that imposes itself on us should exist manifests itself to us directly as a demand that reality should rebel against its conditions of existence. We call this peculiar, directly experienced compulsion a logical compulsion, a necessity of thought. The logically necessary reveals itself to us directly as a statement of the thing itself. And indeed it is the peculiar meaningful significance, the rational illumination, which contains everything logical, whereby the factual, real validity of the logical connection of concepts is testified to with immediate evidence." (Volkelt, Kant's Epistemology, p. 208 f. ) And Otto Liebmann, towards the end of his essay "The Climax of Theories", confesses that, in his view, the entire thought structure of human cognition, from the ground floor of observational science to the loftiest regions of the highest worldview hypotheses, is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception, and that the "fragments of perception must first be supplemented, connected, and strung together in a fixed order by an extraordinary amount of non-observed things in accordance with certain modes of the understanding." But how can one deny human thinking the ability to recognize something from within itself, through its own activity, if it already has to call upon its own activity to help it order the observed facts of perception? Neo-Kantianism is in a peculiar position. It wants to remain within consciousness, within the life of the imagination, but must admit to itself that it cannot take a step within this "within" that does not lead it out to the left and right. Otto Liebmann concludes the second of his booklets "Thoughts and Facts" as follows: "If on the one hand, viewed from the standpoint of natural science, man would be nothing more than animate dust, then on the other hand, viewed from the directly given standpoint accessible to us alone, the whole of nature appearing in space and time is an anthropocentric phenomenon."

[ 4 ] Despite the fact that the view that the observational world is only human imagination must extinguish itself if it is understood correctly, its proponents are numerous. It has been repeated in various shades over the last decades of the century. Ernst Laas (1837-1885) vigorously defended the view that only positive facts of perception should be processed within cognition. Aloys Riehl (1844-1924) explains, because he starts from the same basic view, that there can be no general world view at all, but that everything that goes beyond the individual sciences must be nothing other than a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is only gained in the individual sciences; philosophy has the task of showing how knowledge is gained and of ensuring that thinking does not interfere with knowledge that cannot be justified by the facts. The most radical approach was taken by Richard Wahle in his book "Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende" (1894). In the most astute way imaginable, he excludes from knowledge everything that is added by the human spirit to the "occurrences" of the world. In the end, this spirit stands there in the sea of passing occurrences, seeing itself in this sea as such an occurrence and finding nowhere a point of reference to enlighten itself meaningfully about the occurrences. This spirit would have to draw on its own strength in order to sort out the events of its own accord. But then it is he himself who brings this order into nature. If it says something about the nature of events, then it has not taken it from things, but from itself. He could only do this if he admitted to himself that something essential was taking place in his own actions, if he could assume that when he says something, it also means something for the things. The spirit must not have this confidence in the sense of Wahle's world view. It must lay its hands in its lap and watch what flows around it and within it; and it would be deceiving itself if it were to give any credence to the view it forms of events. "What could the spirit, which, peering into the world and rolling around in itself the questions about the nature and purpose of events, finally find as an answer? It happened to him that, as he stood there so seemingly in opposition to the surrounding world, he dissolved and merged with all occurrences in a flight of occurrences. He 'knew" no longer the world; he said, I am not sure that knowers are there, but occurrences are there per se. They come, of course, in such a way that the concept of knowledge could arise prematurely, unjustifiably... . And "concepts" flitted up to shed light on the occurrences, but they were will-o'-the-wisps, souls of desires for knowledge, pathetic, in their evidence meaningless postulates of an unfulfilled form of knowledge. Unknown factors must alternate. Darkness was spread over their nature, occurrences are the veil of the true. ..." Wahle concludes his book, which is intended to present the "legacies" of philosophy to the individual sciences, to theology, physiology, aesthetics and state pedagogy, with the words: "May the time dawn when people will say that philosophy once was."

[ 5 ] Wahle's aforementioned book (like his others: "Geschichtlicher Überblick über die Entwicklung der Philosophie", 1895, "Über den Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens", 1906) is one of the most significant symptoms of the development of worldviews in the nineteenth century. The lack of trust in cognition, which takes Kant as its starting point, ends in complete disbelief in all world views for a world of thought such as that of Wahle.