An initial attempt to interpret Kantian transcendentalism in psychological terms was made by the Friesian empiricist Jürgen Bona Meyer in his Kants Psychologie (1870; “Kant’s Psychology”). Later, a more important contribution in this field was made by the Göttingen philosopher of ethics and law Leonard Nelson and published in the Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (1904 ff.; “Acts of the Friesian School”). Even this title suggests an intimate agreement with the Kantianism of Fries’s Neue Kritik der Vernunft (1807; “New Critique of Reason”), and Nelson, indeed, is regarded as the founder of the Neo-Friesian school. At a time when other Kantian schools were concerned with the transcendental analysis of objective or outer knowledge, Nelson held that, in the analysis of the subjective or inner self, the transcendental equipment of the mind—the a priori—is directly revealed. It thus fell to psychology to lay bare this equipment, which belongs in itself to the metaphysical order. It was upon this basis that the Marburg theologian Rudolf Otto, in his book Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy), ventured a type of religious phenomenology that proved very successful.
A discipline known as the Kant Philologie, concerned with the history, development, and works of Kant, preempted a considerable portion of philosophical historiography after 1860. These studies began with the immense commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason produced in 1881–92 by Hans Vaihinger, known for his philosophy of the “As If” (which stresses human reliance on pragmatic fictions), and with the founding in 1896 of the new journal Kantstudien (“Kant Studies”) and in 1904 of the Kant-Gesellschaft (“Kant Society”)—both still extant. The most conspicuous result of this philological movement, however, was undeniably the monumental edition of all of Kant’s available works prepared (1900 ff.) by the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, initially under the editorship of the champion of humanistic studies, Wilhelm Dilthey.
Non-German Kantianism
The Kantian awakening, in no wise limited to Germany, extended throughout Western philosophy. Its principal initiators were as follows: France was the first to open to its influence, beginning with the eclectic thinker Victor Cousin, who had studied German authors and made several trips to Germany. The relativistic personalist Charles Renouvier then defended a rather personal critical philosophy, which exerted an enduring influence through its impact upon the extreme idealist Octave Hamelin of the Sorbonne, upon the metaphysician and cofounder of French neospiritualism Jules Lachelier, and upon his pupil, the philosopher of science Émile Boutroux.
The English-speaking countries, on the other hand, were not disposed to assimilate the critical philosophy as they did Hegelian idealism. Except for the Scottish religious absolutist Edward Caird (The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 1889), who was chiefly a Hegelian, there was in Britain at the close of the 19th century only another Scot, the critical realist Robert Adamson, who was a Kantian. After him, however, can be cited the commentary, published in 1918, of Norman Kemp Smith, producer of the standard English translation of Kant’s first Critique, and later the remarkable exposition by the Oxford Kantian Herbert J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (1936). Kantian methods could also be discerned in a later work of the prominent Oxford philosopher Peter F. Strawson, titled Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959).
Kantianism became known in the United States toward 1840 primarily through the New England transcendentalist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was not, however, a Kantian himself. The physicist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce owes his pragmatism largely to Kant’s role as a counterweight against Hegelianism. The American philosopher William H. Werkmeister represented a type of Neo-Kantianism inspired by the Marburg school (The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, 1948).
Italian scholars, on the other hand, became vigorously engaged in Kantian studies once the initiative was taken by Alfonso Testa. The chief Neo-Kantian in Italy, however, was the realist Carlo Cantoni, who took an anti-positivist stance. Later, in the period from 1900 to 1918, Kantianism was represented by the extreme realism of the theist Francesco Orestano. A school of Kantian philology formed at Turin around the erudite Christian idealist Augusto Guzzo and his journal Filosofia. More independent in spirit was the work of the critical ontologist Pantaleo Carabellese, Giovanni Gentile’s successor at Rome.
Assessment of Kantianism
Problems of Kantianism
As far as epistemology is concerned, the critical philosophy constitutes a theory of science that agrees with current trends, for science must have a base that is empirical though also real. On the other hand, the transcendental or a priori is implicated, and severe complications ensue whenever the question is posed whether a type of apprehension can be acquired apart from experience that conveys, however, some new and genuine knowledge—whether, in short, synthetic a priori judgments can be made. Significantly, the founder of phenomenology, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, came back to the fold of Kantian transcendentalism after previously opposing it bitterly. As against the Kantian position, traditional empiricism entirely rejects the possibility (and even the meaning) of the synthetic a priori. The pioneering philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein imposed upon philosophy the obligation to limit reason (or the transcendental element in knowledge)—a semi-Kantian position, which he nonetheless later renounced. As for existentialism, one of Germany’s foremost philosophers, Martin Heidegger, presented in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) a highly personalized interpretation.
A student of Cohen at Marburg, the metaphysician Nicolai Hartmann, became the harbinger of the realistic approach, elaborating in his Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntniss (1921; “Outline of a Metaphysics of Knowledge”) on an ontological relation that he discerned to obtain between two forms of being: thought and reality. Accordingly, the principles of thought correspond, in his view, to those of reality—a position at odds with Kant (even when he is interpreted as a realist). Moreover, Hartmann treated the problems of mathematics in a manner that was again completely opposed to Kant; in particular, he questioned the validity of Kant’s a priori intuition (or positing) of the spatio-temporal framework in terms of which humans think about the world, challenging Kant at this point not merely to accommodate the non-Euclidean geometries (with curved space) that afforded a realist alternative to the a priori but above all to reflect the distinctly logistic position regarding the foundations of mathematics to which he adhered.
Although discussion of the status of the thing-in-itself in human knowledge of the real remained on the philosophical agenda both during and after Hartmann’s time, it invoked the same indecision as it always had. At a time when Hartmann was accepting the thing-in-itself almost naïvely, empiricism (in all its forms) rejected it categorically and attempted to construe the real in terms merely of what Kant had called phenomena. In the realm of ethics, phenomenologists and existentialists were dissatisfied with the purely formal character of Kant’s ethics—i.e., with its lack of specificity—and substituted a “material” ethic, of concrete duties, which was no less absolute than that of Kant. Meanwhile, logical empiricists (or logical positivists) were interested only in the analysis of expressions of moral judgment, which they reduced to imperative statements that are emotive and aimed at winning adherents.