Beiser - Normativity in Neo Kantianism. Its Rise and Fall

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Normativity in NeoKantianism:
Its Rise and Fall
a
Frederick C. Beiser
a
Syracuse University, USA
Available online: 14 Feb 2009
To cite this article: Frederick C. Beiser (2009): Normativity in NeoKantianism: Its Rise
and Fall, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17:1, 9-27
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 17(1), 927
Normativity in Neo-Kantianism:
Its Rise and Fall
International
10.1080/09672550802610941
RIPH_A_361262.sgm
0967-2559
Original
Taylor
102008
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FBeiser@syr.edu
FrederickBeiser
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Francis
(print)/1466-4542
Francis
Journal of Philosophical
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Frederick C. Beiser
Abstract
This article discusses the historical background to the concept of normativity
which has a wide use in contemporary philosophy. It locates the origin of that
Downloaded by [University of Saskatchewan Library] at 15:21 05 June 2012
concept in the Southwestern Neo-Kantian school, the writings of Windelband,

Rickert and Lask. The Southwestern school made the concept of normativity
central to epistemology, ethics and the interpretation of German idealism. It
was their solution to the threats of psycologism and historicism. However,
Windelband, Rickert and Lask found difficulties with the concept which even-
tually forced them to abandon it. These difficulties might be of interest to
contemporary philosophers who find the concept of normativity appealing.
Keywords: Normativity; Southwestern Neo-Kantianism; Rickert; Lask;
Windelbcand
1 Of Scholars and Refrigerators

In his charming Kindergeschichten Peter Bichsel tells the story of an inven-
tor who goes to live in isolation in the mountains so that he can devote
himself entirely to his own genius. After many years alone, he finally rejoins
humanity to bestow upon it the gift of his labours. He has indeed been very
ingenious, and he has indeed created something of great value for humanity.
What has he invented? The refrigerator! It is a primitive refrigerator, to be
sure, but a working one all the same. The only problem is that, during his
seclusion, other people have invented refrigerators, and they have been
working on improving the design for decades. Alas, the refrigerator of our
seclusive genius can scarcely compete with all the improved designs.
It seems to me that Bichsels story applies very well to so much contem-
porary Anglophone scholarship in the history of philosophy. Because so
many Anglophone scholars work in cultural isolation, limiting themselves to
English sources or translations, and because so many of them are ignorant
of past scholarship, especially that from non-English sources, they just
keep inventing primitive refrigerators. Their works are often ingenious; but
they are seldom a match for what has already been done and discussed for
International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 09672559 print 14664542 online 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09672550802610941
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
generations. Rather than building on the past, they start from scratch, as if
they were the prophets of new truths.
Nowhere is this more evident, I believe, than in contemporary Anglophone
scholarship about German idealism. The many champions of the normative
interpretation of German idealism Henry Allison, Robert Brandom,
Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Charles Larmore, to name a few do not seem
to realize that this interpretation is very old, and that it has been worked out
before with greater sophistication and subtlety. What is even more troubling,
however, is that past labourers in the vineyards of normativity discovered
serious problems with this interpretation problems so deep that they, in
good conscience, abandoned it. This leaves us with some unsettling questions:
Have contemporary partisans of normativity seen these problems? Have

they solved them? Or have they, blissfully ignorant of the past, blundered
into a minefield?
The mighty dead whose tales I now wish to tell are three neo-Kantian
philosophers: Wilhelm Windelband (18481915), Heinrich Rickert (1863
1936) and Emil Lask (18751915). They were luminaries in their day, but
they are now almost completely forgotten, at least in the Anglophone
world. Although Lask still has not received the recognition he deserves,
Windelband and Ricket have a respectable place in the history of philoso-
phy. Windelband is famous as the founder of Southwestern or Heidelberg
neo-Kantianism, while Rickert is renowned as the chief spokesman for the
philosophy of value, once a respectable position in the early-twentieth-
century German intellectual landscape. What is especially interesting
about Windelband and Rickert for us today is that they were the founders
of the normative conception of philosophy, and indeed the normative
interpretation of German idealism. The concept of normativity was for
them the key to understanding Kant, and indeed philosophy in general. If
normativity is a buzz word today, it was a mantra in the 1880s. By the
1920s, however, normativity had lost its resonance and had ceased to excite
philosophers.
What I would like to do now is to place the normative conception of
philosophy and German idealism in a little historical perspective by exam-
ining its origins in Windelband, Rickert and Lask. I want to explain not
only why this conception was so attractive to them, but also the problems
they found with it, their attempts to solve them, and what went so terribly
wrong in the end. My method here will be narrative rather than discursive.
I am not really going to make arguments; I am only going to tell stories,
one each of Windelband, Lask and Rickert. But my stories are rich in
philosophical morals. They are dialectical dramas, a very Hegelian genre,
where the protagonist ends by passionately affirming, through torturous
self-examination, a position he once passionately denied. But just how
these philosophical morals apply to any contemporary scholar is a compli-
cated matter that I will not pursue here and will have to leave to your
10
NORMATIVITY IN NEO-KANTIANISM: ITS RISE AND FALL
better judgement. If I have placed contemporary discussions about norma-

tivity in some historical perspective, I will have achieved my end.
2 Windelband and the Normative Conception of Philosophy

Today, now that Kant scholarship has become just another academic
subject, it is difficult to understand its urgency and importance in the late
nineteenth century. Then, much was at stake in the proper interpretation of
Kant. It was not only an historical, but also a philosophical, even cultural,
issue. For many philosophers, Kant seemed to provide the path out of the
crisis of philosophy, and indeed of all modern culture.1 Kant was for them
the philosopher, and the Kritik der reinen Vernunft their Bible. Having the
right interpretation of Kant was therefore one and the same as having the
right conception of philosophy itself. To understand why this is so, we have
to go back in history and understand the predicament of German philoso-
phy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In those days philosophy in Germany suffered from a severe identity
crisis. Its very purpose and legitimacy as a discipline seemed threatened by
the rapidly advancing sciences. Whatever legitimate intellectual work could
be done, it seemed, was better done by psychology or physics. Philosophers
faced the grim prospect of obsolescence. The source of this crisis, oddly
enough, was the very thinker many thought would lead them out of it:
Immanuel Kant. It was one of the most troubling lessons of Kants philoso-
phy that the only legitimate knowledge is limited to experience, and that
philosophy can no longer be metaphysics in the classical sense of the term,
i.e., a rational or demonstrative knowledge of the unconditioned or abso-
lute. This meant that philosophy would have to forfeit its traditional role of
providing answers to the fundamental questions of life, such as the existence
of God and immortality. Kants negative teaching seemed confirmed by two
developments around the 1850s: the increasing growth of the empirical
sciences, and the collapse of Hegels and Schellings absolute idealism. Such
developments seemed to drive home the lesson that all knowledge has to be
acquired from experiment and observation. The truly scientific philosopher,
it seemed, would have to become a psychologist or physicist.
If this were not bad enough, there was another danger facing philosophy
in the second half of the nineteenth century, one so grave that it threatened
even the critical philosophy itself. All scholars agree that one of the most
remarkable, indeed revolutionary, developments in the nineteenth century
is the rise of the stature of history. Prior to the late eighteenth century,
history was seen more as an art than a science. History dealt with particular
and contingent facts from the past, while the paradigm of science, which
came from mathematics, demanded nothing less than universal and neces-
sary truths. The new critical history of Niebuhr and Ranke, however,
seemed to show that history too could be a science, and that, through the
11
careful examination of primary sources and documents, it could provide

results no less certain than those of physics and chemistry. It is certainly a
telling sign of the new prestige of history that neo-Kantian philosophers
would place Ranke and Niebuhr on the same footing as Liebig and
Helmholtz. There was, however, something deeply troubling for philoso-
phers about the growth of this new historical science. The more history
advanced, the more it seemed that it could explain everything within the
human world all the arts, sciences, laws, religions as the product of
history, as the effect of a specific time and place. But that, of course, held for
philosophy too. The new history seemed to show, but now through scientific
means, what Hegel had already proclaimed in the 1820s: that philosophy is
nothing more than the self-consciousness of its own age. In short, the new
history posed the problem of relativism, or, to use the nineteenth-century
term for it, historicism. Armed with their historical sense, the new critical
historians began to undermine sometimes deliberately, sometimes
unwittingly the possibility of even the critical philosophy. All its claims to
possess the universal standards of criticism, to speak for the tribunal of an
eternal reason, were now thrown into question. The new historians loved to
condemn the historiography of the Enlightenment, because it judged the
past by the standards of the present, and because its apparently universal
and cosmopolitan standpoint was only a disguise for the values of its own
culture and age. But that raised a troubling question for the critical philos-
opher: Was not his critical tribunal too solely the conscience of his age?
Such was the predicament faced by the young Wilhelm Windelband in the
early 1880s. In his remarkable essay Was ist Philosophie?,2 first published
in 1882, Windelband sketched his strategy for solving the identity crisis of
philosophy. He begins his essay by giving a vivid portrait of that crisis. The
decline of traditional metaphysics, combined with the rise of history and the
natural sciences, he noted, has left philosophers bereft. All the special
sciences had grown out of philosophy, but now philosophy had nothing to
do. Philosophy, he wrote, is like King Lear, who has bequethed all his
goods to his children, and who must now resign himself to be thrown into
the street like a beggar (I, 19). How could philosophy avoid such a dire
fate? The only remedy, Windelband believed, was to return to Kant. The
very man who had brought on the crisis would also be its redeemer. Philos-
ophy could retain its identity as a distinct discipline, and it could still be a
science, Windelband argued, if it only became what Kant had originally
conceived it to be: namely, a critical philosophy, i.e., an investigation into
the conditions and limits of the first principles of knowledge. All the special
sciences, morality and the arts, presuppose first principles that they cannot
investigate; and the defining task of philosophy should be to investigate just
such principles. If philosophy only limits itself to this task, Windelband
proposed, it could still be a science; but it would be a specific kind of science:
namely, a second-order science whose peculiar task is to investigate the logic
12
of the first-order sciences. The danger of obsolescence arises because

people continue to see philosophy as some kind of first-order discipline that
studies the most general features of man and the world. But all first-order
investigation should be the task of the special sciences; the specific task of
philosophy is strictly second-order: to determine the logic of such first-order
investigations.
It is of the utmost importance to see, however, that Windelband did not
rest his argument here. He knew all too well that philosophy could not
resolve its identity crisis simply through becoming epistemology or
Erkenntnistheorie.3 This was a necessary, not a sufficient condition of solv-
ing the problem. Everything hinged on exactly how one conceived episte-
mology or Erkenntnistheorie. In denying that epistemology alone is

sufficient, Windelband was tacitly taking issue with another neo-Kantian
philosopher, Eduard Zeller.4 In his famous 1862 lecture ber Bedeutung
und Aufgabe der Philosophie.5 Zeller had already sketched the classical
neo-Kantian argument for why philosophy should become epistemology. It
was only as epistemology, Zeller argued, that philosophy could uphold its
claim to be science. But Zeller went on to insist that the method of philos-
ophy should be the same as the methods of the empirical sciences.6 He
contended that the philosopher could not reliably establish anything about
reality from a priori construction, by beginning from general principles and
attempting to derive particular conclusions from them; instead, he had to
proceed inductively, beginning from particular observations and ascending
to general principles. The philosophers starting point is self-consciousness,
just as Kant had taught, but self-consciousness comes from introspection
and observation, from reflection on inner experience and the analysis of
the facts of consciousness. Accordingly, Zeller saw epistemology in essen-
tially psychological terms, as the investigation into the origins and genesis
of our representations. The laws of sensibility, understanding and reason
were for him essentially psychological necessities about how people
happen to think.7 Windelband was alarmed, indeed horrified, by Zellers
argument, because it made philosophy collapse into psychology. To be a
science in its own right, Windelband believed, philosophy must follow a
specific method, one differing toto caelo from that of the empirical
sciences.
What is that method? Windelband explains by making a clear and sharp
distinction between two methods: the genetic method of psychology and
history, and the critical method of epistemology or philosophy. The task of
the genetic method is to investigate the causes of knowledge, how it origi-
nates from experience and the innate activity of the mind, whereas the task
of the critical method is to determine the reasons for knowledge, the
evidence for its validity. The main question behind the genetic method is
quid facti?, i.e., the question of which facts explain the origin of my repre-
sentations, whereas the chief question behind the critical method is quid
13
juris?, i.e., the question of what right I have for my belief. This distinction
goes right back to Kant, of course, and Windelband stressed that it was
nothing less than his Grundgedanke (I, 24, 29). If philosophy is to be a
distinctive science, Windelband advised, it must follow the critical method
alone. It must limit itself to determining the reasons or justifications for our
fundamental principles, and it must forgo any attempt to determine their
natural or historical causes, which is the proper task of psychology or
history.
Armed with this distinction, Windelband now believed that he had all the
tools he needed to keep historicism at bay. The source of historicism was its
confusion of the quid facti? with the quid juris?, the causes with the reasons
for knowledge. Since the historicist confounds the conditions of validity of

a belief with its causal or genetic conditions, he assumes that a principle is
valid only under the conditions under which it arose. But this is a non
sequitur: the fact that a belief arose only under certain circumstances does
not mean that it is valid only under those circumstances.8 Hence historicists
were guilty of, though Windelband does not use the term, the genetic
fallacy.
The general conception of philosophy that emerges from Windelbands
Was ist Philosophie? is that philosophy is a normative discipline. Philosophy
differs from the sciences precisely because its chief concerns are to determine
the fundamental norms governing our beliefs, and to assess whether partic-
ular beliefs conform to them. Its task is not to know what is the case, as with
the other sciences, but to judge what ought to be the case according to norms,
where norms are essentially rules of judgement (Regeln der Beurteilung).9
Hence Windelband defined philosophy as a system of norms (ein System
von Normen), or as the science of the necessary and universally valid deter-
minations of value (Wertbestimmungen) (I, 26).
On the basis of his normative conception of philosophy, Windelband
then proceeds to provide an interpretation of Kant that is thoroughly
normative. The unity of apperception, or consciousness in general, turns
out to be not a noumenal entity but an ideal or norm to measure the
validity of empirical knowledge (I, 4445). Similarly, the thing-in-itself is
not a mysterious entity lying beneath or beyond appearances, but only a
regulative goal, the ideal of complete knowledge of appearances.10 Finally,
Kants dualism between noumena and phenomena is not a distinction
between kinds of entity but a distinction between kinds of discourse,
namely, the normative and the natural, or the critical and genetic. Windel-
band pushed this point so far that he wanted to eliminate the noumenal
realm entirely, and he believed that the distinction between normative and
natural discourse is sufficient to preserve moral responsibility, even if all
moral actions are completely determined.11
Windelband realized that Kant himself did not always formulate his
own philosophy in these precise terms, and he complains that Kant often
14
slid back into older, more metaphysical or psychological language. But

the spirit of Kants philosophy, its ultimate intent and Grundgedanke,
Windelband believed, rested with its grasp of the normative, its recogni-
tion of how questions about values are fundamentally different in kind
from questions about facts. A genuine understanding of Kant would be
one that kept true to this insight and interpreted the entire critical philos-
ophy in its light. Kant verstehen, he wrote in some famous lines, heit
ber ihn hinausgehen.12
3 Windelbands Retreat and Defeat

Such, in sum, was Windelbands conception of philosophy, and his interpre-

tation of Kant, which he first outlined in 1882. Over the years he would
continue to refine this conception and interpretation. To his great credit, he
did not shirk difficult issues, and struggled constantly to resolve them.
One of these problems concerned the nature of the normative itself.
What, precisely, do we mean by a norm? And how does it differ from the
merely factual? On various occasions and in different essays Windelband
made several distinctions between the normative and natural. (1) The most
basic distinction is between two forms of necessity: natural necessity is about
what must be the case, normative necessity is about what ought to be the
case (I, 42). (2) Another distinction is between two kinds of principles or
laws: those that explain facts and those that evaluate them. There are laws
that determine causal regularities, and laws that judge performances.
Norms are essentially rules of judgement (Regeln der Beurteilung).13 (3) Yet
another distinction is between two forms of consciousness: empirical
consciousness of a specific individual and consciousness in general, which
represents the ideal for all individuals.14 (4) Finally, there are two methods
of justification of fundamental axioms: the factual method, which shows how
they are actually involved in how we know, value and taste; and the
teleological method, which shows how they are necessary means to achieve
the end of a discipline.15 Although Windelband does not sustain this last
distinction, which runs counter to his view that factual methods cannot
justify axioms, its interest lies in the idea of teleological justification as the
essence of normative justification. Normative justification is teleological for
Windelband in the sense that it shows how assuming an axiom is a necessary
means to achieve an end, where this end is nothing more than the increase
of knowledge. It does not hypostasize this end, as if it were something actu-
ally existing in nature or history, but treats it solely as a rule that prescribes
what we ought to do (II, 10910). Windelband stopped short, however, of
calling teleological justification pragmatic.16
Besides the problem of defining normativity, there was another issue that
troubled Windelband, one that eventually proved so disturbing that it
made him reconsider his whole position. The problem is very simple to
15
understand but very difficult to solve: What is the connection between the
normative and the natural? After making so many sharp distinctions
between the normative and the natural, Windelband is now faced with the
problem of connecting them. It is necessary to assume that there is some
connection between them, because the whole purpose of norms is for
people to act according to them. Ought implies can, so that if people
cannot act on norms they lose all their validity. This problem first became
apparent to Windelband in the context of his discussion of freedom.
Morality cannot be fully explained by norms alone, Windelband realized,
for the very simple reason that people have to act on them. The problem of
freedom arises precisely regarding the interconnection between the norma-
tive and the natural; the issue is whether we can do what we ought to do.
Attempting to respond to this problem in his 1882 essay Normen und
Naturgesetze, Windelband attempted to bridge the gap between the norma-
tive and natural by making norms not only reasons for but also causes of
actions and beliefs. We have an awareness of norms, and we feel a constraint
to follow them, so that they enter into our very being. Through this aware-
ness and feeling of constraint, the norm becomes a part of the process of
mechanical necessity by which we act in the real world (Vol II. 87).
It is obvious, however, that, in making norms causes as well as reasons,
Windelband was blurring his original distinction between the normative and
natural. There is indeed a real paradox here, because as soon as the norm
becomes realized it acquires factual status and loses normative status.
Somehow, it joins the kingdom of is and leaves behind, for ever, the king-
dom of ought. There is not a gradual continuous transition from the
normative to the natural, but a sudden miraculous transformation, some-
thing on a par with the transformation of the wine and bread into the blood
and body of Christ. It should be obvious here that we have a new and
strange version of Kants problem of explaining the connection between the
noumenal and the phenomenal. Whether the original dualism is between
kinds of entity or kinds of discourse makes little difference to the basic
mystery of accounting for the connection between them.
In struggling with this problem over the years, Windelband began to
make concessions and confessions, indeed so much so that he virtually aban-
dons his earlier conception of philosophy as a strictly normative discipline.
Let me describe here, briefly, two of the main concessions.
The first appears in a series of lectures on freedom of will, ber Willens-
freiheit, which Windelband published in 1905.17 Here Windelband qualifies
his earlier purely methodological distinction between the noumenal and the
phenomenal in Normen und Naturgesetze. Since he realizes that norms
obligate the will only if it can act on them, he has to attribute some ontolog-
ical status to the will itself. Since, furthermore, this will has to be held
responsible for its actions, and since we attribute responsibility only to those
causes that are not the effect of other causes, we must assume that the moral
16
will has an independent being above the phenomenal world. The will now
has a kind of twilight existence in Windelbands ontology; it is a Zwitterding
that stands between the realm of norms and nature.
The second concession is more remarkable, and amounts to a virtual
reversal of his earlier position. It appears in his essay Nach hundert Jahre,
a lecture he delivered in 1903 on the occasion of the centenary of Kants
death.18 Here Windelband finally has a concrete proposal for linking the
normative and the natural, for joining together in holy matrimony what
he had once so sacrilegiously sundered. What joins the normative and the
natural, he now suggests, is the concept of historical development. The
concept of development seems to link the normative and the natural
because it is directed toward goals or ends, which represent norms. The

normative does not transcend the activity but is somehow immanent within
it, serving as both explanation and justification. In proposing such a solution
Windelband is following Kants precedent in the third Kritik. There is,
however, an important difference between Windelband and Kant: contrary
to Kants regulative strictures, Windelband assumes that the concept of
historical development needs to be given constitutive rather than just regu-
lative status; in other words, it is not enough simply proceeding as if there is
historical development; it is necessary to assume that there is such develop-
ment. Windelband now begins to advocate the great value of the concept of
teleology, which he thinks should be revived not only in the historical but
also in the natural sciences. The irony is that Windelband now begins to
embrace the very philosopher neo-Kantianism had once made a virtue of
spurning: Hegel. For Windelband, the great value of Hegel is not that he
discovers the realm of normativity that was Kants Verdienst but that
he discovers the connecting link between normativity and nature through
the concept of teleology.
And so, in the older but wiser Windelband, neo-Kantianism comes full
circle. The philosopher it had once loved to hate it now hates to love. So
much time and energy were spent on burying Hegel, and now that it sees
the point of his teleological metaphysics, he must be solemnly resurrected.
Confession and contrition now became a virtual ritual for Windelband,
which give him credit for it he enacts in public. The most remarkable
of these mea culpas is his 1910 lecture Die Erneuerung des Hegelianis-
mus.19 Windelband takes note of the revival of Hegelianism taking
place,20 and he now wants to join the club. He is a bit embarrassed about
it all. For was not Hegel the thinker who re-established what Kant
destroyed speculative metaphysics and who destroyed what Kant
established critical philosophy? Windelband tries to save face by saying
that he wants to place some limits on this revival. The limits are that
admitting the role of the historical in philosophy should not be made an
excuse for historicism. But in placing these limits Windelband is not really
taking issue with Hegel himself, because he is at pains to stress that Hegel
17
was never an historicist, and that the great merit of his philosophy is that,
though he thinks values are realized in history, he never surrenders to the
relativism of historicism.
Given his new appreciation of Hegel, it is not surprising to find that Wind-
elbands interests now turn toward the philosophy of history. It is now the
philosophy of history that will provide a new foundation for value. Norms
will now not transcend history but become the general laws of historical
development itself. Windelband began to explore this line of argument in
his final lectures just weeks before his death.21
4 Emil Lask and the Crisis of Normativity

While Windelband was wrestling with all his problems in the early 1900s,
another challenge arose for the neo-Kantian conception of normativity.
This challenge was even more daunting than the normnature dualism, and
it came from unexpected quarters: the publication in 1900 of Edmund
Husserls Logische Untersuchungen. On many points Husserl and the neo-
Kantians were close allies: Husserl too was intent on upholding the scientific
status of philosophy; he too opposed psychologism and historicism; and he
too wanted to distinguish questions of validity from empirical fact. But in
the first volume of the Logische Untersuchungen Husserl had subjected the
neo-Kantian normative conception of validity to profound criticism.22
While Husserl never explicitly targeted the neo-Kantians, no one could fail
to see that his criticisms applied to them. Husserls criticisms were simple
and brief, but also telling. Considered in themselves, he argued, logical laws
are not normative propositions that tell us how we ought to judge. Rather,
they are theoretical truths that tell us that something is the case, even
though they are not about empirical matters of fact. A syllogism of the form
All A is B; S is A; therefore, S is B has no normative element, because it
does not prescribe how we ought to think but describes what must be the
case. To be sure, we can base a norm upon such a syllogism; but that does
not amount to the content of the syllogism itself. We must distinguish
between the content of a logical law what it actually explicitly states and
the norms that derive from it. After insisting on this fundamental point,
Husserl went on to criticize the lingering elements of psychologism in the
neo-Kantian conception of norms.23 We cannot identify logical laws with
norms, he argued, because norms make sense only with respect to the
psychological activities that they regulate; but logical laws are valid even if
no one ever thinks of them. Although the neo-Kantians were critics of
psychologism, Husserl complained, they would still resort to psychological
language themselves; hence they would talk about concepts of understand-
ing, principles of reason, and so on.
Sometime in the early 1900s Emil Lask, the gifted student of Windelband
and Rickert, read Husserls Untersuchungen.24 Quick to see the point of
18
Husserls criticism, Lask was immediately thrown into a crisis. In his earlier
work he had formulated a legal philosophy based on the neo-Kantian
conception of normativity; and he had sketched a philosophy of history
following neo-Kantian principles.25 After reading Husserl, though, Lask
could see that there were fundamental, indeed insuperable, problems with
the neo-Kantian conception of normativity. Normativity was now exposed
as too psychologistic, and at best a derivative conception; it simply could not
account for the basic fact that logical validity is independent of all thinking.
There was no gainsaying the basic Husserlian point: syllogisms are valid even
if no one ever existed, even if no one thought according to them, and, indeed,
even if people thought contrary to them. The fundamental challenge Husserl
posed for Lask was how to square this basic point with his allegiance to
Kants Copernican Revolution. The Husserlian point means that truth is
essentially objective, independent of all thinking; but the Copernican
Revolution means that truth is basically subjective, because it consists in the
conformity of objects with concepts rather than concepts with objects.
The task of Lasks mature thought was to reconcile the Kantian Coperni-
can Revolution with Husserls theory of logical validity. His most sustained
effort in this direction was his 1912 Lehre vom Urteil. Here Lask attempts to
explain the thought-independence of validity by interpreting it along quasi-
Platonic lines in terms of a realm of prototypes or archetypes. Lask revives
something of a correspondence theory, according to which the truth of
judgements has to be measured by their conformity to these prototypes. He
criticizes traditional correspondence theories on the grounds that they
cannot explain validity (II, 386). They cannot answer the question: Why
should the concept correspond with an object? We cannot derive the value
of correspondence from the simple fact of correspondence itself. We can
avoid these problems, Lask argues, only when we see that value already lies
in the object itself (II, 387). Otherwise, correspondence with the object
would have no point or value.
But how does Lask square his new transcendent theory of validity with
his allegiance to the Copernican Revolution? Lasks answer to this ques-
tion in the Urteilslehre is somewhat astonishing: The insertion of logicity
into objects also makes possible the injection of validity and value into
them (II, 387). All correspondence theories are justified by the Coperni-
can Revolution, he argues, because it alone permits us to introduce values
into them (II, 389). Rather than the Copernican Revolution, this seems to
be the exact opposite, a Leibnizian counter-revolution: concepts seem to
revolve around objects again, in the classical rationalist manner. Rather
than placing value in the rules for judging objects, Lask had now placed it
in the object itself. Not surprisingly, Rickert accused his old student of
lapsing into hypostasis, of making the object of knowledge into a transcen-
dent entity to which our cognitions had to correspond.26 That Lask knew
that he was taking his Kantianism to the breaking point here is apparent
19
from his last letter to Husserl, written on 24 December 1911, when he

noted with some humour that his former teacher now accused him of
surrendering Kant and of a reactionary return to antiquity.27 Nevertheless,
Lask was unrepentent and persistent, refusing to abandon his old loyalties.
He continued to see himself as a Kantian because he saw the object as
having a logical form and value and not as being beyond logic. He contin-
ued to adhere to the older view, which he attributed to the rationalist tradi-
tion, that the object is meta-logical, i.e., completely without a logical form
(II, 419). So Lask sees the fundamental thought behind the Copernican
Revolution as the thesis that objectivity is logical rather than a-logical. We
must see objectivity as transcendent as something existing beyond
subjectivity but there are two ways of viewing it: as either logically or
a-logically transcendent. According to Lask, the Kantian view is that the
object is logically transcendent, whereas the traditional non-Kantian view
is that it is a-logically transcendent.
It takes only a little reflection to see, however, that Lasks Kantianism at
this point was little more than a pious gesture, a desperate measure to
secure the appearance of consistency to his older neo-Kantian views. We
can quarrel with Lasks account of the rationalist tradition, because the
rationalists did see truth as a Platonic realm that is logically transcendent. It
is hard to see the difference between Lask and the older rationalism. More
importantly, Lasks transcendent conception of truth, his reinstatement of a
dualism between concept and object and a correspondence theory, made
little sense of Kants transcendental idealism, which was intended as the
negation of such a conception of truth. A Copernican Revolution without
transcendental idealism seems a contradictio in adjecto.
It is not surprising to find that in his final 1912 lectures in Heidelberg Lask
virtually broke with his neo-Kantian heritage.28 He now argued that truth is
radically transcendent, and that it is a fundamental mistake to think of it as
dependent on the concepts we have of it. Where Lask was taking this
radically objectivist conception of truth, however, will for ever remain lost
to us. After these lectures, he left behind little more than scattered notes.29
When war was declared in 1914, he immediately volunteered; he was killed
in May 1915, scarcely 40 years old, at the very height of his powers.
5 Rickert and the Philosophy of Value

The problems of the normative conception of philosophy that troubled
Windelband and Lask fell upon the shoulders of Windelbands student and
Lasks teacher, Heinrich Rickert. It was Rickerts mission to rescue the
Kantian conception of normativity in the face of the challenges posed by
Windelbands dualism and Lasks demand for objectivity. Rickert was thor-
oughly trained in, and deeply committed to, the neo-Kantian conception of
philosophy developed by his teacher, Windelband. The main impetus
20
behind Rickerts work, what he spent most of his life exploring and unrav-
elling, came from Windelbands doctrine of normativity. Rickert developed
Windelbands doctrine into a systematic philosophy of value in two central
works, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (1892) and System der Philosophie
(1921). It was also Windelband who provided Rickert with the guiding
theme for his interpretation of Kant. Thanks to Windelband, Rickert saw
Kants philosophy primarily as a critical doctrine of norms.
Rickerts Gegenstand der Erkenntnis is really the locus classicus for the
normative interpretation of the critical philosophy.30 This work was
immensely successful in its day, going through no fewer than six editions; it
is all the more astonishing, therefore, that it should be so forgotten today. It
is really the unacknowledged ancestor of Henry Allisons interpretation of

Kant, and it is all the more a pity it is so unknown because it has all the
strengths of Allisons interpretation and none of its weaknesses. Almost a
century before Allison, Rickert attempts to find a via media between meta-
physical and psychologistic interpretations of Kant. That via media lies for
Rickert in the concept of normativity, a richer and more resonant concept
than Allisons own vague and problematic epistemic condition. Rickerts
work is not a commentary on Kants philosophy, but, as its title suggests, an
investigation into the concept of objectivity. Rickerts central thesis, which
he takes to represent the heart of Kants teaching in the transcendental
deduction of the first Kritik, is that the concept of objectivity is essentially
normative. Truth consists not in the correspondence of representations with
objects outside them, but in their conformity to norms. Rickert comes to this
conclusion essentially through an analysis of the act of judgement. When we
judge something to be true or false, he argues, what we are essentially doing
is appraising its value (pp. 1868). We are determining whether the repre-
sentation conforms to a norm. The concept of objectivity is then dissolved
into that of an obligation or ought (Sollen) (p. 213). Rickert describes his
Copernican standpoint as follows: the subject does not revolve around
reality, so that it attains theoretical value, but the subject revolves around
theoretical value, so that it knows reality (p. 205). In other words, value is
not the consequence but the condition of cognition (p. 205).
Such, very crudely, was the concept of truth that Rickert had worked out
by 1904 in the second edition of Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. After read-
ing Husserl and conversing with Lask, however, Rickert too began to lose
confidence in his theory. His first attempt to respond to the problems raised
by Husserl and Lask is his 1909 Zwei Wege der Erkenntnistheorie.31
Rickert now admits that there was something wrong with his first formula-
tion of the concept of objectivity in the second edition of Der Gegenstand
der Erkenntnis. There he attempted to derive normativity from the analysis
of acts of judgement, a method he calls the transcendental-psychological
approach in epistemology. But he now realizes that, as it stands, that method
is too psychologistic. There is indeed a terrible circularity in that method:
21
since acts of judgement are psychological events, we can give them norma-
tive status only by reading norms into them, an obviously circular proceed-
ing. To escape the circle, Rickert now proposes another method, what he
calls the transcendental-logical approach. This approach by-passes acts of
judgement and derives norms directly from their transcendental-logical
validity. This, he says, is the path favoured by Husserl and Lask, which avoids
psychologism and the circularity of the transcendental-psychological
approach. But Rickert then takes issue with Husserl and Lask by pointing
out that the transcendental-logical approach does not really work either.
The problem is now the converse one: moving from the realm of value back
into the world of fact. The transcendental-logical approach treats value as if
it has no relation whatsoever to actual acts of cognition; it examines the

object of knowledge for its own sake regardless of any actual attempt to
know it. But Rickert finds this an arbitrary and artificial abstraction:
I cannnot know what the object of knowledge is if I do not also know how
I know this object. The concept of the object of knowledge loses all sense
without the concept of the knowledge of this object (p. 217).
How, then, are we to hurdle the divide between values and facts? In Zwei
Wege Rickert recommends a combination of both approaches. The problem
of the transcendental-psychological approach surreptitiously reading
values into acts of judgement can be rectified through the transcendental-
logical approach, which demonstrates that there are transcendent values
and so justifies reading them into psychological acts of judgement. The
hypostasis of the transcendental-logical approach can be cured if only,
following the transcendental-psychological approach, one understands
values as norms or rules that regulate acts of judging. Here, then, the
concept of normativity shows its abiding use and value. Although Rickert
thinks that the two methods are complementary, the thrust of his argument
in Zwei Wege is that the transcendental-logical approach of Husserl and
Lask has to be complemented by the transcendental-psychological
approach. On its own, the prevalent transcendental-logical approach is an
extreme that leads to the hypostasis of value, and that fails to see how values
have their point only with respect to the attempts of knowers to realize
them. Once we see that values have meaning only with respect to actual
attempts of subjects to know them, we also see the purpose of the concept
of normativity, which regulates or guides these subjects. Transcendental
psychology still has much to offer, Rickert contends, because it shows us
how the realm of values applies to actual knowers; this realm should not be
seen as utterly self-sufficient and transcendent because it has to supply
norms or standards for actual attempts to know. Against Husserl and Lask
Rickert warns: without respect to actual knowledge transcendental logic
will be in part quite empty (p. 226).
So far it appears as if Rickert thinks that his problem solved. With a little
brotherly co-operation between the two approaches to epistemology, it
22
seems, the dualism between value and fact can be overcome. But it is one of
the most interesting and indeed astonishing results of Rickerts Zwei
Wege der Erkenntnistheorie that he admits that the problem is really unsolv-
able. It turns out that both methods, even if they co-operate, cannot explain
the connection between the realm of values and the realm of facts. The
transcendental-logical approach leaves values in a transcendent realm
apparently having no application to actual human thinking, whereas the
transcendental-psychological approach cannot derive norms from psychic
acts taken strictly as facts. There seems to be, Rickert acknowledged, noth-
ing less than an unbridgeable chasm between the realms of value and fact,
between what ought to be and what really is. What could be the bridge
between such apparently heterogeneous realms? Rickert admits that he has

no answer. Rather than proposing solutions, he attempts to make us see and
feel the difficulty. He notes how intentional states or epistemic attitudes
connect the psychological and the normative, but he admits that he has no
explanation for how this can happen. When we judge something to be true
or false, the psychological act of judging takes place in time, but it does so
according to timeless transcendent standards. When we prove a geometric
theorem, we are thinking in time but about an eternal structure. As objects
of intentional states and attitudes, these transcendent norms or eternal stan-
dards somehow become immanent within our consciousness. The realm
of pure norms enters into the realm of existence through our thinking about
them. So there is something remarkable and strange about epistemic atti-
tudes and intentional states: they have the power to straddle two ontological
realms. But here, Rickert confesses, we stand before a mystery. The unity of
norm and fact in the act of cognition is a fact; but there cannot be any concept
or explanation for it. It is impossible to explain how a transcendent value
appears in actual consciousness, Rickert argues, because explanation works
only within the realm of being, which is only one of the realms that is to be
connected (p. 219). Since it is the basis of all conception and explanation, the
unity of value and fact cannot be conceived or explained itself. Before such
a mystery, Rickert, after writing many pages, could advise only silence.
After coming to this startling conclusion in 1909, Rickert did not abandon
hope but resolved to put more effort into resolving the problem. His next
important essay is his 1911 article, Vom Begriff der Philosophie, the very
first article in the new journal Logos.32 Here Rickert sets the agenda for the
rest of his philosophical career. The thrust of his essay is that the chief prob-
lem of philosophy is not how to explain the whole of reality, but how to
explain the connection between values and reality. It now turns out that the
debate between idealism and materialism about the ultimate nature of the
whole of reality is of little consequence compared to the deeper problem of
the connection between norms and existence. Hence the difficulty Windel-
band tried to resolve since the 1880s has now become the chief problem of
philosophy itself.
23
Rickerts main attempt to solve this problem is his massive but incom-
plete System der Philosophie.33 In this work he sketches a systematic philos-
ophy of value, investigating in detail the nature of value and its connection
with reality. He now develops a proposal suggested in his earlier essay: that
there is a third realm of intentionality that mediates between values and
existence. This is not the place, of course, to go into an examination of
Rickerts proposal. Suffice it to say that some 500 painstaking pages later
he never resolves the earlier doubts that he had in 1909 in Zwei Wege der
Erkenntnistheorie. The main problem is that intentionality does not really
connect the realms of value and fact after all. Although intentional attitudes
are indeed very odd kinds of facts, which cannot be objectified and
explained by normal psychology, they are still facts and therefore have no
normative status. This becomes evident as soon as we consider that an inten-
tional state can be true or false, good or evil, and still be the same state; it is
not normative itself, but that which has to comply with a norm. Of course,
there is a close connection between the acts and the values in the mind of the
speaker or agent; the speaker thinks that his sentence is true, the agent
believes that his action is right; but these are still facts and do not permit any
inference that the sentence really is true or that the agents intention is
really good. So Rickerts third realm connects facts and values only by
begging the question: it assumes that what the speaker thinks is true or good
is really true or good.
Apart from its inherent difficulties, Rickerts attempt to solve his prob-
lem loses all credibility when he again admits that he is at a loss to explain
it. In his System der Philosophie he confesses, just as he did in Zwei Wege
der Erkenntnistheorie, that the connection between value and fact is a
mystery, and that it transcends all conceptual formulation. Rickert advances
several arguments all of them familiar from the idealist tradition for why
the unity of value and fact transcends conceptual formulation. First, this
unity is prior to all conceiving, explaining or demonstrating, because it is a
necessary condition for these activities; because any attempt to conceive,
explain or demonstrate it presupposes it, it eludes conception, explanation
and demonstration itself. Second, our intellect is essentially analytical,
understanding things by taking them apart into independent terms; it there-
fore grasps the indivisible only by dividing it, i.e., it cannot understand the
indivisible at all. Third, the intellect also proceeds heterologically, as Rick-
ert puts it, so that it grasps one concept only through another contrasting
concept. It would understand a concept like value, therefore, only by its
opposite, reality, so that it becomes impossible to explain their unity. Once
we distinguish fact and value through theory, Rickert argues, we cannot
reunite them through theory (pp. 249, 293).
It would seem, then, that if we are to know the unity of fact and value, we
should quit the realm of theory entirely. Rather than thinking the unity of
value and reality, it appears that we should content ourselves with intuiting
24
or feeling it instead. Though this is the proper conclusion of Rickerts argu-

ment, he is not happy to admit it. The source of his reluctance is not that
such a position is close to that of Lebensphilosophen, whose irrationalism
he had condemned all his life.34
In the end, then, Rickerts philosophy of value, by his own admission,
collapses in the face of the problem of how to connect the normative with
the natural. No less than Windelband, Rickert finds it impossible to solve
this problem without retracting his earlier disavowal of metaphysics.35 There
are no embarrassing public mea culpas in his case, because his retractions
are never explained as such, and they appear in obscure articles and books
rather than in public lectures.36 There is also no resurrection of Hegel, whom
Rickert could not abide.37 He does, however, begin to see the necessity of a
metaphysics to solve the fundamental problem facing him. Only a new meta-
physics, he admits in a later essay, would be able to explain how the realms
of value and fact, which are so different from one another, still form one
world.38 But the older and wiser Rickert was too tired, too frail, too weary,
to embark upon such a new intellectual adventure. He would leave that to
his most talented student: Martin Heidegger.39
Such are my tales from the realm of normativity. From them it should be
clear that normativity is not a new kingdom where all is simple and sweet.
Rather, it is an old kingdom, filled with shipwreck and sorrow. All the central
thinkers of Southwestern or Heidelberg neo-Kantianism came to grief in it.
The morals of these stories are threefold. First, it is difficult to square the
concept of normativity with the objective status of logical truth. Second, it
is also not easy to explain the connection between value and fact. Third,
dealing with each of these problems requires engaging in a discipline most
normativity theorists love to hate: metaphysics. Hence Windelband
returned to Hegel; Lask to the pre-Kantian theory of truth; and Rickert to
the intuition of Lebensphilosophie. They show us, once again, that embar-
rassing old truth: that philosophers who spurn metaphysics often have to
return to her later for favours.
Just how and whether these lessons will benefit contemporary norma-
tivity theorists I will have to leave to your judgement. My job as an historian
is now at an end.
Syracuse University, USA
Notes
1 This is the main theme of Rickerts Kant als Philosoph der modernen Kultur
(Tbingen: Mohr, 1924).
2 See Prludien: Aufstze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte,
siebente und achte Auflage (Tbingen: Mohr, 1921, 2 volumes), I, 154. All
references in parentheses above are to this edition.
25
3 Richard Rorty confuses matters by attributing to Zeller the view that philosophy
is an autonomous enterprise independent of empirical science and metaphysics.
See his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 134.
This was not really Zellers view because he believed that epistemology should
become psychology. The neo-Kantian position that Rorty discusses appears first
in Windelband, whom he never mentions.
4 Windelband made his differences with the earlier neo-Kantian conception clear
only much later, in his Philosophie im deutschen Geistesleben des 19. Jahrhun-
derts (Tbingen: Mohr, 1909), pp. 807. Although it is not so explicit, much of
Was ist Philosophie? should be read as a critique of Zeller and Lange.
5 Vortrge und Abhandlungen, Zweite Sammlung (Leipzig: Fues, 1887, 2 volumes),
II, 47996.
6 See Zeller, ber die Aufgabe der Philosophie und ihre Stellung zu den brigen
Wissenschaften, Vortrge und Abhandlungen II, 464. Cf. ber die gegenwrtige
Stellung und Aufgabe der deutschen Philosophie, Vortrge und Abhandlungen
II, 474: Unsere Philosophie soll sich, soweit es die Natur ihrer Gegenstnde
erlaubt, das genaue Verfahren der Naturwissenschaften zum Muster nehmen.
7 See the Zusatz to ber Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Philosophie, Vortrge
und Abhandlungen II, 502.
8 As Windelband put it in his Einleitung in die Philosophie (Tbingen: Mohr,
1920): So mu man sich deutlich machen, da die Art der Entstehung kein
Kriterium fr die Wahrheit der Vorstellung ist (p. 210).
9 See Normen und Naturgesetze, Prludien II, 67; Kulturphilosophie und tran-
szendentaler Idealismus, Prludien II, 283; and Was ist Philosophie?, Prludien
I, 47.
10 See Windelbands Prinzipien der Logik (Tbingen: Mohr, 1913), pp. 5860.
11 This was the argument of his early 1882 essay Normen und Naturgesetze,
Prludien II, 5998.
12 These much-cited lines are from the foreword to the 1883 edition of Prludien,
I, iv.
13 See Normen und Naturgesetze, Prludien II, 67.
14 See Was ist Philosophie?, Prludien I, 44 and Kulturphilosophie und transzen-
dentaler Idealismus, Prludien II, 2823.
15 See Kritische oder Genetische Method?, Prludien II, 10910.
16 Windelband was highly critical of pragmatism. He believed that the ends of
enquiry should be ends in themselves, and that truth is a value independent of
utility. See his critique of pragmatism in Einleitung in die Philosophie, pp. 2023,
and his 1909 lecture Der Wille zur Wahrheit (Heidelberg: Winter, 1909). In the
lecture Windelband explicitly mentions Royce (p. 6), who had visited Heidelberg.
Though he does not mention James by name, he refers to his work (p. 16). In
Rickert the neo-Kantian critique of pragmatism would reach its heights and
depths.
17 ber Willensfreiheit: Zwlf Vorlesungen (Tbingen: Mohr, 1903).
18 Nach hundert Jahre, Prludien I, 14767.
19 Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus, Prludien I, 27389.
20 On that revival, see Paul Hnigsheim, Zur Hegelrenaissance im Vorkriegs-
Heidelberg, Hegel-Studien, 2 (1963), pp. 291301.
21 See his Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine Kriegsvorlesung. Fragment aus dem
Nachlass. Kant-Studien Ergnzungsheft 38 (1916).
22 See Logische Untersuchungen (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928, 2 volumes), I, 1578,
1645.
23 Ibid., I, 5960, 124.
26
24 In his letter of 25 December 1910, Lask wrote Husserl that he had been introduc-
ing his conception of validity into his lectures for the past five years. See Edmund
Husserl, Briefwechsel, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994, 10
volumes), V, 31. This would place his reading of Husserl sometime before 1905.
25 See Lasks Rechtsphilosophie, in Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Eugen
Herrigel (Tbingen: Mohr, 1923), I, 275331. Lasks philosophy of history is his
Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte, Gesammelte Schriften, I, 1274, 3
volumes. All references to Lask in parentheses are to this edition, abbreviated as
GS.
26 This criticism appears in the third edition of Rickerts Der Gegenstand der
Erkenntnis (Tbingen: Mohr, 1918), p. 284. Rickert had already taken issue with
Lask and Husserl in his Zwei Wege der Erkenntnistheorie, Kant-Studien, 14
(1909), pp. 169228, esp. 21328. Rickert was responding to Lasks earlier 1908
lecture Gibt es ein Primat der praktischen Vernunft in der Logik?, GS I,

34756, which is already critical of the subjectivity inherent in the Kantian
conception of normativity. Lask responded to Rickerts criticism in Die Lehre
vom Urteil, GS II, 230, 447.
27 Husserl, Briefwechsel, V, 34.
28 Lask, Zum System der Logik, GS III, 57170.
29 Lask, Zum System der Philosophie, GS III, 171236; and System der Wissen-
schaften, GS III, 23793.
30 All references to this work, in parentheses above, are to the sixth edition, Der
Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (Tbingen: Mohr, 1928).
31 Zwei Wege der Erkenntnistheorie, Kant-Studien, 14 (1909), pp. 169228. This
article was published separately in the same year by C. A. Kaemmerer in Halle.
It has been reprinted by Knigshausen & Neumann, Wrzburg, 2002. All refer-
ences in parentheses are to the original article.
32 Vom Begriff der Philosophie, Logos, 1 (1911/12), pp. 134.
33 System der Philosophie (Tbingen: Mohr, 1921). All references in parentheses
are to this, the only, edition. Rickert intended this to be one volume of a much
larger, multivolume, work; but he abandoned the project after the first volume.
34 See his polemic Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tbingen: Mohr, 1920).
35 See the introduction to the second edition of Die Grenzen der naturwissen-
schaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Tbingen: Mohr, 1913), pp. 911. Here Rickert
does not maintain that metaphysics is impossible, but he is sceptical whether it
can validate its speculations. Prudence advises him to stick with epistemology:
Erkenntnistheorie ist fr uns Sache des guten Gewissens geworden (p. 11).
36 Note, for example, how metaphysics reappears, without fanfare, in System der
Philosophie, p. 138. Also see the passages in the essay cited below, note 38.
37 See his comments on Hegel in System der Philosophie, pp. 2467.
38 See his 1927/9 essay Das Erkenntnis der intelligibeln Welt und das Problem der
Metaphysik, Logos, 16 (1927), pp. 162203 and Logos, 18 (1929), pp. 3682.
Here Rickert admits that only a new metaphysics will bring together the world
of value and fact (16, pp. 182 and 18, pp. 82). However, he does not develop that
metaphysics. He promised a third part of this long essay, which would explain it;
but he never published it.
39 The story of their relationship is best told by their correspondence. See Martin
Heidegger/Heinrich Rickert, Briefe 19121933, ed. Alfred Denker (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1902).
27

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concept in the Southwestern Neo-Kantian school, the writings of Windelband,

1 Of Scholars and Refrigerators

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Have contemporary partisans of normativity seen these problems? Have

better judgement. If I have placed contemporary discussions about norma-

2 Windelband and the Normative Conception of Philosophy

careful examination of primary sources and documents, it could provide

of the first-order sciences. The danger of obsolescence arises because

mology or Erkenntnistheorie. In denying that epistemology alone is

for knowledge. Since the historicist confounds the conditions of validity of

slid back into older, more metaphysical or psychological language. But

3 Windelbands Retreat and Defeat

Such, in sum, was Windelbands conception of philosophy, and his interpre-

because it is directed toward goals or ends, which represent norms. The

4 Emil Lask and the Crisis of Normativity

from his last letter to Husserl, written on 24 December 1911, when he

5 Rickert and the Philosophy of Value

is really the unacknowledged ancestor of Henry Allisons interpretation of

it has no relation whatsoever to actual acts of cognition; it examines the

between such apparently heterogeneous realms? Rickert admits that he has

or feeling it instead. Though this is the proper conclusion of Rickerts argu-

Syracuse University, USA

lecture Gibt es ein Primat der praktischen Vernunft in der Logik?, GS I,

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