Historical Philosophy and Neo-Kantianism

Jacinto Páez

One spread statement regarding the nineteenth century tells us that it can be characterized as an age dominated by the interest in history. One token of this is the development of the history of philosophy as an autonomous scientific discipline, which experienced during this century its “classical epoch”. Additionally, this development was not in isolation with the general evolution of systematic philosophy. It was the center of an attempt to overcome the so-called “identity crisis” in philosophy through the focus on historical and hermeneutical practices. However, the mentioned general interest and this specific attempt soon raised an obvious problem to philosophers. The dissolutions of the barriers between historical and philosophical consciousness could endanger the essence of philosophy since it seems to imply a blatant contradiction with the traditional aim of philosophy: universal truths. Philosophers such as Kuno Fischer (1824-1907), Friedrich Überweg (1826-1871) or Eduard Zeller (1814-1908) represented a new model of professional strongly concentrated on concrete historiographical research and on the reflection on the fundaments of the history of philosophy. Therefore, their works point to one of the possible meanings of the historicization of philosophy during the nineteenth century, namely, a professional involvement with the history of philosophy. The problem with this approach is the fact that mere historical criticism does not establish directly a program for systematical thinking. As Charles Bambach points out, this approach “did not encourage innovative or energetic solutions to philosophy’s perceived identity crisis”. This generation of philosophers however was more concerned with the creation of a scientifically sound history of philosophy than the question regarding its impact on philosophy as such. In any case, the problem of the so to say “disadvantage” of the history of philosophy for philosophy was left for the future generation. This is precisely where the connection between historical philosophy and Neo-Kantianism emerge. See for example Paulsen (1899:402). 1 Hartung and Pluder (2015:3). 2 Bambach (2015:25). 3 In 1866 for example Johann Erdmann expressed this vague hope regarding a future solution the predicament: “Der 4 Klage gegenüber also, dass nicht mehr philosophiert, sondern nur Geschichte der Philosophie getrieben werde, aus Philosophen Historiker geworden seyen, liesse sich geltend machen, dass die Philosophiehistoriker selbst zu philosophieren pflegen, und so vielleicht auch hier dieselbe Lanze, welche verletze, auch Heilung bringen kann” (Erdmann 1866:798).

Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) and Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) were direct heirs of the works of Fischer and Zeller and they engage, in several articles and essays, the questions bequeathed by the consolidation of the history of philosophy as an autonomous discipline. Windelband tried to find a place for the history of philosophy inside the system of philosophy through the idealist assumption that history was a medium for reasons self-awareness. This thesis is in a certain sense shared by his former student Heinrich Rickert, who says in one of his essays that “only through history philosophy can follow the path to what is supra-historical. Philosophy has to bring the values as values to consciousness only by the means of the historical material”6. Although he elsewhere also expresses concerns about a pure historical philosophy: “the philosopher can never be merely a historian; philosophy must never remain caught in its history. We should know the past well, for we can only practice philosophy as a science when we orient ourselves around it. But we want to study the past with a purpose: so that we might more readily overcome it”.

In view of this thematic context, our proposal will be to consider, through an analyze of the sources, the evolution of the problematic from the early discussions on the possibility of a scientifically history of philosophy to the judgment of its philosophical validity. We will pay special attention to the status of the systematicity of philosophy as a key to understand the problems in the aforementioned evolution. It is the idea of system what is put in jeopardy by the adoption of a historical standpoint in philosophy and it is also one of the main theses of the Neo-Kantians that system and history can be somehow accommodated.