“Back to Kant!” - it was under this slogan that a new trend was formed. He was called neo-Kantianism. This term is usually understood as the philosophical direction of the beginning of the twentieth century. Neo-Kantianism paved the way for the development of phenomenology, influenced the formation of the concept of ethical socialism, and helped separate the natural sciences and the humanities. Neo-Kantianism is a whole system consisting of many schools founded by followers of Kant.
Neo-Kantianism. Start
As already mentioned, neo-Kantianism is a philosophical trend in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The direction first arose in Germany in the homeland of the eminent philosopher. The main goal of this trend is to revive Kant's key ideas and methodological principles in new historical conditions. The first about this venture was Otto Liebmann. He suggested that Kant's ideas can be transformed into surrounding reality, which at that time was undergoing significant changes. The main ideas were described in the work “Kant and Epigones”.
Neo-Kantians criticized the dominance of positivist methodology and materialistic metaphysics. The main program of this trend was the revival of transcendental idealism, which would emphasize the constructive functions of the knowing mind.
Neo-Kantianism is a large-scale movement that consists of three main areas:
- "Physiological". Representatives: F. Lange and G. Helmholtz.
- Marburg School. Representatives: G. Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer.
- Baden School. Representatives: V. Windelband, E. Lask, G. Rickert.
Revaluation Problem
New studies in the field of psychology and physiology have made it possible, on the other hand, to examine the nature and essence of sensory, rational knowledge. This led to a revision of the methodological foundations of natural science and became the cause of criticism of materialism. Accordingly, neo-Kantianism was to overestimate the essence of metaphysics and develop a new methodology for cognition of the "science of the spirit."
The main object of criticism of the new philosophical trend was the teachings of Immanuel Kant about "things in themselves." Neo-Kantianism regarded the "thing in itself" as the "ultimate concept of experience." Neo-Kantianism insisted that the subject of knowledge is created by human notions, and not vice versa.
Initially, representatives of neo-Kantianism defended the idea that in the process of cognition a person perceives the world differently from what it really is, and this is due to psychophysiological research. Later, the emphasis shifted to the study of cognitive processes in terms of logical-conceptual analysis. At this moment, schools of neo-Kantianism began to take shape, which examined Kant's philosophical doctrines from different angles.
Marburg School
The founder of this trend is Herman Kogen. In addition to him, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, Hans Feichinger contributed to the development of neo-Kantianism. Also under the influence of the ideas of the Magbu neo-Kantianism were N. Hartmani, R. Corner, E. Husserl, I. Lapshin, E. Bernstein and L. Brunswick.
Trying to revive the ideas of Kant in a new historical formation, representatives of neo-Kantianism pushed themselves away from the real processes that took place in the natural sciences. Against this background, new objects and tasks arose for study. At this time, many of the laws of Newtonian-Galilean mechanics were recognized invalid, respectively, philosophical and methodological guidelines are ineffective. In the period of XIX-XX centuries. There were several innovations in the scientific field that had a great influence on the development of neo-Kantianism:
- Until the mid-19th century, it was generally accepted that the laws of Newtonian mechanics were the basis of the universe, time flows evenly from the past to the future, and space is based on ambushes of Euclidean geometry. A new view of things was opened by the Gauss treatise, which speaks of surfaces of revolution of constant negative curvature. The non-Euclidean geometries of Boya, Riemann, and Lobachevsky are considered consistent and true theories. New views on time and its relationship with space have been formed, and Einstein's theory of relativity, which insisted that time and space are interconnected, played a decisive role in this issue.
- Physicists began to rely on the conceptual and mathematical apparatus in the process of planning research, and not on instrumental and technical concepts that only conveniently described and explained the experiments. Now the experiment was planned mathematically and only then it was carried out in practice.
- Previously, it was believed that new knowledge multiplies old, that is, they are simply added to the general information box. The cumulative system of views reigned. The introduction of new physical theories has caused the collapse of this system. What used to seem true has now moved into the field of primary, incomplete research.
- As a result of the experiments, it became clear that a person not only passively reflects the world around him, but actively and purposefully forms objects of perception. That is, a person always brings something from his subjectivity to the process of perceiving the world around him. Later, this idea turned into a whole "philosophy of symbolic forms" among the Neo-Kantians.
All these scientific changes required serious philosophical reflection. The neo-Kantians of the Marburg school did not stand aside: they offered their own view of the emerging reality, based on the knowledge gained from Kant's books. The key thesis of the representatives of this trend said that all scientific discoveries and research activities testify to the active constructive role of human thought.
The human mind is not a reflection of the world, but is capable of creating it. He brings order to an incoherent and chaotic being. Only thanks to the creative power of reason, the world around us has not turned into a dark and dumb non-existence. Reason gives things logic and meaning. Herman Kogen wrote that thinking itself can generate being. Based on this, we can talk about two fundamental points in philosophy:
- Fundamental antisubstantialism. Philosophers tried to abandon the search for the fundamental principles of being, which were obtained by the method of mechanical abstraction. The neo-Kantians of the Magbur school believed that the functional relationship was the only logical basic scientific proposition and thing. Such functional connections bring to the world the subject who is trying to know this world, has the ability to judge and criticize.
- Anti-metaphysical installation. This statement calls for stopping the creation of various universal pictures of the world, it is better to study the logic and methodology of science.
Adjusting Kant
And yet, taking the theoretical base from Kant's books as a basis, representatives of the Marburg school subject his teachings to serious corrections. They believed that Kant's misfortune was the absolutization of an established scientific theory. Being the rkbank of his time, the philosopher took seriously the classical Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry. He attributed algebra to a priori forms of sensory contemplation, and mechanics to the category of reason. Neo-Kantians considered this approach fundamentally wrong.
From the criticism of Kant's practical reason, all realistic elements and, first of all, the concept of “thing in itself” are consistently emanating. Marburgers believed that the subject of science appears only through the act of logical thinking. There can be no objects that can exist on their own, in principle; there is only objectivity created by acts of rational thinking.
E. Cassirer said that people learn not objects, but objectively. The neo-Kantian view of science identifies the object of scientific knowledge with the subject, scientists completely abandoned any opposition from one to the other. Representatives of the new direction of Kantianism believed that all mathematical dependencies, the concept of electromagnetic waves, the periodic table, social laws are a synthetic product of the activity of the human mind, with which the individual orders reality, and not the objective characteristics of things. P. Natorp argued that not thinking should be consistent with the subject, but vice versa.
Neo-Kantians of the Marburg school also criticize Kant's judgment of time and space. He considered them forms of sensuality, and representatives of the new philosophical trend as forms of thinking.
On the other hand, Marburgites must be given credit for the conditions of the scientific crisis, when scientists doubted the constructive and projective abilities of the human mind. With the spread of positivism and mechanistic materialism, philosophers managed to defend the position of philosophical reason in science.
Right
The Marburgers are also right in the fact that all important theoretical concepts and scientific idealizations will always be and were the fruits of the work of the mind of a scientist, and not extracted from human life experience. Of course, there are concepts that it is impossible to find analogues in reality, for example, “perfect black body” or “mathematical point”. But other physical and mathematical processes are understandable and understandable thanks to theoretical constructs that can make any experimental knowledge possible.
Another neo-Kantian idea emphasized the crucial importance of the role of the logical and theoretical criteria of truth in the process of cognition. Basically, this concerned mathematical theories, which are an arm of the theoretician, and become the basis for promising technical and practical inventions. Further more: today, computer technology is based on logical models created in the 20s of the last century. In the same way, a rocket engine was thought out long before the first rocket flew into the sky.
The Neo-Kantians' idea that the history of science cannot be understood beyond the internal logic of the development of scientific ideas and problems is also true. Here, there can even be no talk of direct socio-cultural determination.
In general, the philosophical worldview of the Neo-Kantians is characterized by a categorical rejection of any varieties of philosophical rationalism from the books of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to the works of Bergson and Heidegger.
Ethical doctrine
The Marburgers advocated rationalism. Even their ethical doctrine was completely saturated with rationalism. They believe that even ethical ideas have a functional-logical and constructively ordered nature. These ideas take the form of the so-called social ideal, in accordance with it, people must construct their social being.
Freedom, which is regulated by the social ideal, is the formula of the neo-Kantian vision of the historical process and social relations. Another feature of the Marburg trend is scientism. That is, they believed that science is the highest form of manifestation of human spiritual culture.
disadvantages
Neo-Kantianism is a philosophical trend rethinking Kant's ideas. Despite the logical validity of the Marburg concept, it had significant drawbacks.
Firstly, abandoning the study of classical epistemological problems on the relationship of knowledge and being, philosophers doomed themselves to abstract methodology and one-sided consideration of reality. Ideal arbitrariness reigns there, in which the scientific mind plays with itself in "ping-pong concepts." Excluding irrationalism, the Marburgers themselves provoked irrational voluntarism. If experience and facts are not so significant, then the mind "is allowed everything."
Secondly, the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school could not refuse ideas about God and the Logos; this made the teaching very contradictory, given the neo-Kantians' tendency to rationalize everything.
Baden School
Magbur thinkers gravitated to mathematics, Baden neo-Kantianism focused on the humanities. This direction is associated with the names of V. Windelband and G. Rickert.
Closer to the humanities, representatives of this trend singled out a specific method of historical knowledge. This method depends on the type of thinking, which is divided into nomothetic and ideographic. Nomotetic thinking is used mainly in natural science, characterized by a focus on the search for patterns of reality. Ideographic thinking, in turn, is aimed at studying the historical facts that occurred in concrete reality.
These types of thinking could be used to study the same subject. For example, if you study nature, then the nomothetic method will give a systematics of living nature, and the idiographic one will describe specific evolutionary processes. Subsequently, the differences between the two methods were brought to mutual exclusion, the idiographic method became a priority. And since history is created within the framework of the existence of culture, the central issue that the Baden school developed was the study of value theory, that is, axiology.
Problems of Learning Values
Axiology in philosophy is a discipline that explores values as the semantic foundations of human existence, which guide and motivate a person. This science studies the characteristics of the world, its values, methods of cognition and the specifics of value judgments.
Axiology in philosophy is a discipline that has gained its independence through philosophical research. In general, they were connected by such events:
- I. Kant revised the rationale for ethics and identified the need for a clear distinction between the due and the existing.
- In post-Hegelian philosophy, the concept of being was divided into “actualized real” and “desired due”.
- Philosophers recognized the need to limit the intellectualist claims of philosophy and science.
- The inevitability was found from the knowledge of the estimated moment.
- The values of Christian civilization were called into question, mainly these were the books of Schopenhauer, the works of Nietzsche, Dilthey and Kierkegaard.
The meanings and values of neo-Kantianism
Kant's philosophy and teachings, together with the new worldview, led to the following conclusions: some objects have value for a person, while others do not, so people notice or don’t notice them. In this philosophical direction values were called meanings that are above being, but are not directly related to the object or subject. Here the sphere of the theoretical is contrasted with the real and grows in the "world of theoretical values." The theory of knowledge begins to be understood as a “criticism of practical reason”, that is, a science that studies meanings, refers to values, and not to reality.
Rickert spoke of such an example as the intrinsic value of the diamond Kohinor. He is considered unique and one of a kind, but this uniqueness does not arise inside the diamond as an object (in this matter he is characterized by qualities such as hardness or luster). And it’s not even a subjective vision of one person who can define him as useful or beautiful. Uniqueness is a value that unites all objective and subjective meanings, forming what in life has received the name "Diamond Kohinor." Rickert in his main work, “The Boundaries of the Natural Scientific Formation of Concepts, ” said that the highest task of philosophy is to determine the relationship of values to reality.
Neo-Kantianism in Russia
The Russian neo-Kantians include those thinkers who were united by the Logos magazine (1910). These include S. Hesse, A. Stepun, B. Yakovenko, B. Focht, V. Cezeman. The neo-Kantian movement in this period was formed on the principles of rigorous science, so it was not easy for him to make his way in conservative irrational-religious Russian philosophizing.
Nevertheless, the ideas of neo-Kantianism were adopted by S. Bulgakov, N. Berdyaev, M. Tugan-Baranovsky, as well as some composers, poets and writers.
Representatives of Russian neo-Kantianism gravitated toward the Baden or Magbur schools, so in their works they simply supported the ideas of these areas.
