1
Bennett Gilbert
March, 2013
On Wilhelm Windelband’s History and Natural Science
Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (“History and Natural Science”) is the subject, and
hence the sub-title, of the “Rede zum Antrittdirektorats” (“Rectoral Address”) that the
philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) gave on May 4, 1894 at the Kaiser-WilhelmsUniversität Strassburg. A bibliographically distinct monograph, it generally is referred to by
its topical eading rather than by its formal name.1 History and Natural Science is a miniature
battle-ground of philosophical issues that were turning into ever-tighter corners in
Windelband’s day, its ideas both wide bridge and narrow door to the roads philosophy was
to take in pulling away from these tight corners. The issues survived the turns of modern
thought, just as they also pre-dated modernity. Although Windelband was well fitted to the
caricature of hulking-tome Germanic philosophy, he like many others urgently and
passionately helped to forward the greatest questions of philosophy from one era behind to
the next era ahead. Most of the important philosophers of the day commented on this work.
They all were moved by the consequences of philosophical ideas, and their many personal
relations comprise a part of the living intellectual history of the time.
It is a short work, delivered live—we forget how much philosophy came to pass in
this way even in the bibliologically rich world c. 1900, as it did in Athens and still
1
It appeared in two editions in German, the first in 1894, without place or printer; and the second, as
“zweite unveränderte auflage” under the headline “Rectoratsreden der Universitäts Strassburg,”
printed at Strasburg by Heitz. It was presumably the second version that was reprinted in the five
editions of Windelband’s papers and addresses published under the title Präludien, which he
frequently revised for each new printing. Furthermore, the contents of the Präludien changed from
edition to edition. All editions of the Präludien used the second monographic edition. I have used
the text in third edition (Tübingen: Mohr, 1907), pp. 355-379. The German text is also online at:
http://psych.ucalgary.ca/thpsyc/windelband.html.
2
does—with one leading idea. Windelband manages to draw the greatest cultural and
intellectual themes of the day into that single idea. I will try to set it in its antecedent and
successor contexts while explaining this idea, along with its strengths and weaknesses, by
means of a close look at the text. The chief points I wish to make are that: (1). Windelband
expresses certain specific attitudes toward the social control of knowledge; (2), as an incident
in intellectual history of the social sciences Windelband’s address is concerned with the
possibility of or grounds for intellectual history; (3). its main idea was rapidly reflected in
German philosophy; and (4). evaluation of this idea reveals interesting inner anxieties and
one possible though inconspicious strength.2
The occasion is the “commemoration day” of the University. May 4 is not the date of
the founding of the gymnasium in 1538 or of the university in 1621; it is the date in 1872 on
which the old university was incorporated into the Imperial system of Kaiser-Wilhelm
Institutes, the date therefore of the school’s formal entrance into the rationalized
administrative and disciplinary organization and into the power structure of the Prussian
system.3 When Windelband says that his privilege on this day is to ask the university to
focus on an issue within his own “province,” he invokes the authority of his position and of
the Empire but also of philosophy as a magister of forms of enquiry and knowledge.4 But he
does not skip a beat in pointing out that this lordship is so grand as to be a burden and a
2
For the English text, I have used the translation by Guy Oakes of Windelbands “Rectorial Address
Strasbourg, 1894,” in History and Theory, vol. 19, no. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 169-185, to which he
provided an introduction printed as a separate article in the same journal on pp. 165-168. Oakes uses
the text of the Tübingen 1924 Präludien. In 1998 the historian of neo-Kantianism James T. Lamiell
published another English translation in Theory and Psychology (vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 5-22), stating in
his preface “To the best of my knowledge an English translation...has until now never been
published.” Occasionally I refer to Lamiell’s wording. In the following, I abbreviate or avoid some of
the many interesting issues Windelband raised in order to concentrate on my theses, and for the sake
of brevity. Also, I read this paper without knowledge of the author’s many other works but one,
3
Promptly upon the removal of the German Army in 1918 it was once again named the Université de
Strasbourg.
4
Windelband, Op. cit., p. 169.
3
weakness : because philosophy cannot rely on “more general principles and
perspectives”—apodictic and a priori claims—it is vulnerable, despite the privilege of being
of “general interest,” to the colossal problems of establishing the principles of all human
knowledge. Everyone, he implies, gets to take a shot at philosophy from behind a safe duckblind, and philosophy must take each hit as part of its mission.5 Since 1848 philosophy in
Germany bore this bull’s eye on a firing-range, though in one form or another philosophy
always has made and received the crisis of all enquiry. For every little thing leads to
ultimate things. Windelband wishes to “entice” (reizt) his audience to philosophy, but
philosophy—backed for the occasion by the Kaiser—has the power to martyr all of them.6
Windelband says that philosophy exists in connection with all other discourses and
not in an ether of its own, but he busily establishes just such an ether by means of taking as
his problem
...the attempt to establish conceptually determinate lines to delimit the single
provinces within the heterogeneous manifold of the fully developed domain of
human knowledge.7
The failures producing this problematic are the ambitions of various sciences (such as
dialectic, mechanism, psychology, and evolution) to taxonomize the rest under their
chiefships. At the end of the nineteenth century they are ever more mobilized, growing
under the protection of Kant while increasingly surpassing the Kantian settlement, unstable
but logical and civilized.8 Windelband’s reference to “taxonomy” and his exemplification of
sciences such that he refers to what we now call “discourses” shows that he was thinking of
Kant’s anthropology and not of logic simple. He has focused on the dynamics of critical
thought as it struggles to align our sense of our inner selves and our own apperceptions of
5
Loc. cit.
6
Ibid., p. 170.
7
Ibid., p. 171.
8
Ibid., p. 172.
4
the world. We attempt to freeze a reconciliation of identity and difference in the logic of
taxonomy, but our finitude limits the permanence of every atemporal order we dream up.
To define ourselves out of time must be an easy thing to do compared with taking ourselves
as historical beings. Windelband has stated in neo-Kantian terms what Foucault said, also in
response to Kant, in his dissertation on Kant’ Anthropology: that discourse fractures logic.9
This reading gives Windelband a lot of credit, which is due; but his deep
commitments and concerns were also directly connected with the territorial conflicts of
disciplines in the institutions he taught in and governed and in which he worked for his
entire life.10 He wants to set aside passions—“actual, psychogenetic occasions” (tatsächliche,
psychogenetische Anlass) and “empirical motives”—for both himself and on behalf of his
colleagues in favor of “the general axiomatic principles” that we use to verify facts in the
empirical sciences.11 Science uses principles, logic, and facts. This observation makes it a
true (giltig) foundational claim (“from the start,” danach) that philosophy, treating of
principles, mathematics, treating of logic, and empirical sciences, treating of facts, are
“juxtaposed” to one another:
...die Philosophie und doch wohl noch immer auch die Mathematik den
Erfahrungswissenschaften gegenüberstellen.12
Both translators use forms of “juxtapose” for gegenüberstellen.13 One can take the German
for a relation of mutual transfers or for the overlay of one thing on top of others, though
even in the latter case the sense of domination is not strong. This is as far as Windelband
goes under the terms of “the old names of the rational sciences.”14 He is about to introduce
9
Michel Foucault, trans. Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 76.
10
Windelband, Loc. cit.
11
Ibid., p. 173.
12
Ibid., p. 172.
13
“Can be juxtaposed to” (Oakes), “we can juxtapose” (Lamiell).
14
Loc. cit. The phrase is from Lamiell; Oakes has “archaic denomination,” which is stronger but less
clear.
5
his own invention for arranging forms of enquiry.
By doing so Windelband makes it clear that he regards the old system of control of
discourses (artistic as well as scientific, as we shall see) under their master, philosophy, as
worn out. As university rector he is also questioning the logic by which disciplines are
arranged under systematic conspectus. Certainly he wants to suggest a new peace treaty that
protects most of what he is concerned for, but he will describe it in the rest of the paper
primarily in terms of what it is not, of what must be left behind, and what must be ceded to
established methodology, rather than in terms of far-reaching new concepts. It is in one
sense a mere irony that though his ideas are timid the two neologisms by which he
designates them are his most famous idea, but in another sense an almost comical lesson: that
small ideas if they have but a strain of something new in them can become great new ideas
in the hands of brilliant thinkers.
He will try to re-shape the authority of philosophy, for reasons derived from deepest
philosophical concerns, by having conceded that its present authority has become weak. So
although he wants to protect disciplinarity and institutions, he foreswears domination for
something like unspecified juxtaposition, in this essay at least. Nonetheless, the historian of
neo-Kantianism, Kohnke, argues that Windelband desired to keep knowledge suppressed
under the authority of the political and social order he lived in. The deeper argument is that
any kind of foundationalism becomes essentialism, becomes nonsense about noumena, and
becomes the ideology of repression.15 The reason for this unhappy regress would be that
since there are no essences the essentialist philosopher must come to rely in fact on the
conventions of his society. Windelband died before the great test of this came to German
philosophy. His pupil, Heinrich Rickert (1963-1936), who decisively transformed the key
idea of this lecture into something of great influence, did eventually accept convention as
15
Klaus Christian Köhnke, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 269-275.
6
the organon of normativity. He universalized völkisch intuition and became a Nazi.16 Paul
Natorp, another neo-Kantian, did so as well, not to mention Heidegger, who succeeded
Rickert in his chair and was always close to Rickert. For his part, Windelband in 1914, after
struggling with the creation of norms to facts, confessed sadly but openly to having to
become what he most loathed: a Hegelian.17
The groundwork Windelband required for his new concept for the organization of
knowledge required him to do some interesting neo-Kantian housekeeping. Nature and
mind are different objects of cognition, as are trees and houses, and the cognizing mind is
one entity and not several. The Kantian plan is to explain how the mind (or human person)
remains one while its contents are heterogeneous and plural. Herman Lotze (1817-1881),
the first in the line of neo-Kantians and Windelband’s mentor, argued that investigation of
the psyche revealed a structure both firm and flexible in sufficient measures as to take
charge, so to speak, and subjugate the manifold to its purposes and values. His outlook was
monism based on an axiology. The neo-Kantians of the 1860s through 1880s investigated
psychology, taken as the study of the functions and values of the mind, into two directions:
one in which psychic structure is understood by its functional values as known through
empirical investigation—this is the “Marburg” school—and one in which the psychic
structure is understood by its inner logic of validity, also as known by empirical investigation
but prior to determinations—this is the “Baden” (or “Southwestern” or “Heidelberg”)
school.18 “Psychology” became the necessary way to study how mind works in observing
16
Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical
Thought 1860-1914 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), p. 142.
17
Frederick Beiser, “Normativity in Neo-Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall,” in International Journal of
Philosophical Studies, vol. 17, no. 1 (February, 2009), pp. 17-18.
18
To my mind the best overall history of neo-Kantianism and its surrounds is an older source, Herbert
Schnädelbach’s Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984). Willey, Op. cit., carefully discusses the political affiliations of each
philosopher and the political implication of their thoughts. Köhnke, Op. cit., is concerned with the
entire social, cultural and political situation that conditioned neo-Kantianism prior to 1848, withy an
excellent chapter on Lotzethough, as noted, he has very firm opinions about Windelband and others
7
nature and itself. Neo-Kantianism, especially in Marburg, looked ready to leave a rump of
philosophy as an epistemology in service to psychology. When Windelband looked at this
situation, he felt that if we divide knowledge by these two objects of inquiry, which I have
called “functional values” and “inner logic,” we would have two kinds of knowledge,
whereas there is in fact only one reason and one transcendental structure.19
Both psychology and history appeared on the scene as empirical investigations into
human understanding, accounting for human values in empirical terms. Before turning to
history, Windelband was concerned that if psychology were understood as anything other
than an empirical investigation, its abusers could, since it “is the foundation of all the other
sciences of the mind,”20 establish the notion of “‘inner perception’ as a special, autonomous
mode of knowledge.”21 This phrase, and Windelband’s manner of proceeding in the lecture,
expresses an anxiety that has not been much commented upon. As concerned as
Windelband was about scientific discourse with no use for values, he was also concerned
about discourses with no use for reason. He was writing at the end of what Gilbert Seldes
called “the stammering century” in commenting on the American scene:22 a century of
ebullient and crazy ideas about the unseen—secret societies, secret powers, mystic spheres,
ghosts and faeries, libido, a bloody-minded proletariat, primitivist art and lifestyles,
theosophy, and brand new hierophants—often intermingled with valuable and powerful
new conceptions from depth studies. In pulling mind too far from nature, a tremendous
while demurring their work as subsequent to the period he covers, having written the book precisely
to ground neo-Kantianism in historical circumstances rather than in philosophical ideas, which was
Windelband’s way; he makes a strong statement for history over philosophy in history of philosophy
over (pp. 1-8).
19
Windelband, Op. cit., p. 174.
20
Ibid., p. 174.
21
Ibid., p. 173.
22
Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century (New York: John Day, 1928; reprinted by NYRB in 2012),
devoted to mystical political and religious utopias in nineteenth-century America is a foundation
work in developing the study of popular culture.
8
danger of obscurantism threatened society and its academic guardians. This is implicit in
Windelband, not explicit, and it was a perfectly well founded fear in Germany. The larger
context of these ideas and our author’s corresponding fears was the state of the
understanding of life and the body. One of Windelband’s targets in this talk was vitalism, or
Lebensphilosophie.23 His critique of irrationalism is not direct in this work but is almost
everywhere present upon close inspection. Lotze was a vitalist, in a Leibnizian manner;
vitalism was a strain in neo-Kantianism; but mostly it was becoming then as now an excuse
for crackpots. Windelband argued that only the reliable structure of reason in
understanding the mind or self in relation to nature or the manifold could also account for
our cognition of general laws and of single occurrences.24 That the majority of this paper is
devoted to re-enforcing a civilized empiricism for the natural sciences , though it is most
referred to for its comments on history, indicates Windelband’s need to fend off
irrationalism by rejecting positivism, which was the provocation for and target of
irrationalism.
Having declared that psychology must always be empirical and not speculative, he
now took on the other great issue the century had produced for philosophy:
history—particularized, sensuous, irrational history. This is where he applied his leading
idea. Instead of organizing discourses by the objects of knowledge, he suggested we organize
knowledge by the methods of inquiry. Again, “discourses” is not his term but it works well,
as he several times reminds readers that his idea is concerned not with knowledge itself but
with methods of study.
In view of the foregoing considerations, we are justified in drawing the
23
The influence of “vitalized nature” on the social sciences in Germany in the eighteenth-century is
under-appreciated. Peter Hanns Reill, “The Construction of the Social Sciences in Late Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Century” (in Johan Heilbron, et al., eds. The Rise of the Social Science and the
Formation of Modernity. Conceptual Change in Context, 1750-1850 [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998], pp.
107-140) emphasizes it and even suggests its role in Windelband’s bifurcated concept.
24
Ibid., pp. 174-175.
9
following conclusion. In their quest for knowledge of reality, the empirical sciences
either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form
of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the
form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with
the unique, immanently defined content of the real event. The former disciplines are
nomological sciences. The latter disciplines are sciences of process or sciences of the
event. The nomological sciences are concerned with what is invariably the case. The
sciences of process are concerned with what was once the case. If I may be permitted
to introduce some new technical terms, scientific thought is nomothetic in the
former case and idiographic in the latter case. Should we retain the customary
expressions, then it can be said that the dichotomy at stake here concerns the
distinction between the natural and the historical disciplines....25
Just as psychology in one way or another treats each and all forms of cognition, so all
knowledge has its own historical as well as universal content. Psychology and history both
vitiate the division of studies by object of study. The nomothetic and the idiographic are, he
says, “characters” or “forms of thought.”26 The “most decisive preference” in logical theory is
the nomothetic,27 and he devotes more words to confirming but also boxing in the
nomothetic than he does to explaining the idiographic, this being one of the symptoms of his
anxiety about pseudo-science. Because everything has a history, an “archaeologist of nature”
is possible, in the phrase Windelband took from Kant.28 His contemporaries quickly
criticized him on the grounds that the concepts of nomothetic and idiographic do not allow
one to distinguish between human history and non-human history. Today we might regard
that as an advantage because in theory it allows a closer historiographic integration of
25
Ibid., p. 174.
26
Ibid., p. 176.
27
Loc. cit.
28
Loc. cit.
10
mankind into our setting the natural world of both the planet and the universe in which
great forces work.
History, as Windelband understands it, is as much based on facts as is natural science,
and it relies equally on refined, specialized technique, and trains of hypotheses logically
constructed from critical presupposition.29 History must be like the natural sciences in these
ways in order to take its place in the neo-Kantian temple. Historiographic method, he
observes, is underserved by critical reflection, but it is not the need for greater attention that
restrains history from collapsing altogether into natural science. History, like science, is a
matter of concepts, but idiographic thought when applied to history works on understanding
individual things in full distinction from one another, while the sciences seek phenomena
that are alike in order to state laws. The historian applies solely the idiographic method. He
seeks exact reconstruction of individual things. Both study causality, and one may apply
both methods to the same materials.
Somehow Windelband has got scientific history, and by extension all the human
sciences, into a position in which it both investigates the entire sensuous manifold and also
seeks logical forms. The former must be “mutually consistent” with the latter.30 Any
deviation of particulars from laws will at the end of the line violate causality.
Consider this essential objective of the single datum of knowledge: its incorporation
into a more extensive whole. There is no sense in which this aim is restricted to the
inductive classification of the specific datum under the generic concept or the general
proposition. This objective is met equally well in a case in which the individual
feature is incorporated as a significant component of a total organic conception.31
Windelband has restrained causality by subjugating it to its uses: one uses it either to provide
insight into “a general nomological regularity” or “to acquire an ideal actuality or
29
Ibid., pp. 177-178.
30
Ibid., p. 178.
31
Ibid., p. 181.
11
contemporaneity” for “some structure of the past.”32 In another passage he states the
difference in terms of the “goals” of the cognizing subject.33 The capacity of reason to form
both universals and particulars takes up the strain of reconciling the one and the many as it
unfolded in the neo-Kantian drama. To our eyes Windelband’s manoeuvre does not lessen
the strain. Even simply as an historiographic theory, particularized objects of study have not
shaken off the strain. They are either too atomized to fit together or they are all lawful
results of the fundamental, overriding, but finally unintelligible force we name causality.34
In respect to his antecedents, Windelband will seem to have made little progress out
away from the antinomies. He still pumped the bellows of the great Kantian Wurlitzer. He
played it with the precision of his colleagues in their small world, each turn perfectly
necessary and yet winding their enterprise into smaller and tighter corners. Windelband’s
argument is weak. It leads to many vexations I have not detailed. Just when Windelband
seems to resort to the argument of utility,35 yet another element appears that made the
32
Ibid., p. 178.
33
Ibid., p. 179.
34
Historians of this episode in the history of modern thought take very different views of it. The late
Gilian Rose, in her Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981) sees it as prt of the struggle of
sociologists to create a new ontology for social objects, under the star of Hegel. Beiser, op. cit.,
recounts the nomothetic/idiographic concept almost as a children’s story—which is a good way to
tell an intricate and ponderous story clearly. He views the idea as concerned with the is/ought (or
fact/value) distinction and as quite fruitless. He develops this as an account of the history of the idea
of normativity in his recent The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), pp. 365-421, the most extensive treatment in English. Guy Oakes takes a more generous view,
pointing out that what seems to have been an “extravagant” polemic includes all the issues “that
continue to dominate the conversation about the character of the social science” a century later, and
he gives a fine list of current issues, from explanatory theories to rationlity to narrativity to power
and knowledge, that “were lso the main issues” of the Methodenstreit—the debate that followed
Windelband’s lecture (“Value Theory and the Foundation of the Cultural Sciences. Remarks on
Rickert,” in Peter Koslowski, ed., Methodology of the Social Sciences, Ethics, and Economics in the
Newer Historical School.... [Berlin: Springer, 1997], pp. 59-79).
35
Ibid., p 180. The usefulness of an inquiry stems from its conforming to the law of noncontradiction (die letzten Prinzip) which affirmatively provides for what Windelband calls in a
curious phrase erkenntnismässige Verwertung der Tatsachen, translated by Lammel as “knowledgeappropriate use of the facts” and more flatly by Oakes as “the cognitive or theoretical use of facts”
12
leading idea of this lecture far more important to subsequent developments than it was to the
neo-Kantians.
However we are not really concerned with utility in this sense. We are more
interested in the immanent value of knowledge [inneren Wissenwert].36
Something deeper than utility or popularity is afoot, and our author at last turns to it:
In opposition to this standpoint,37 it is necessary to insist upon the following: every
interest and judgment, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular
and the unique. Simply consider how swiftly our emotions abate whenever their
object is multiplied or becomes nothing more than one case among thousands of
others of the same sort. “She is not the first,” we read in one of the most terrifying
texts of Faust. Our sense of values and all of our axiological sentiments are grounded
in the uniqueness and incomparability of their object....38
Every dynamic and authentic human value judgment is dependent upon the
uniqueness of its object. It is, above all, our relationship to personalities that
demonstrates this. It is not an unbearable idea that yet another identical exemplar of a
beloved or admired person exists? Is it not terrifying and inconceivable that we might
have a second exemplar in reality with our own individual peculiarities? This is the
source of horror and mystery in the idea of the Doppelgänger—no matter how great
the temporal distance between the two persons may be.39
What follows became both important as a part of the intellectual history of the human
(178). Both translations miss the force of verwertung because the root wert expresses Windelband’s
fundamental interest in value theory.
36
Ibid., p. 180.
37
I.e., the characteristically modern attempt “‘to make history into a natural science’—the project of
the so-called positivist philosophy of history” (Ibid., p. 181).
38
Ibid., p. 182.
39
Ibid., p. 182.
13
science and also important for the idea of intellectual history.40
The emotion in this passage erupts singularly in Windelband’s hands. His fears are
those of most people, of the irrational shadow burning down our houses and, on the other
hand, of so much control that the safety it brings defeats our spirit. Windelband realized
that by his day the notion the individual consciousness had become fully vulnerable to
reductions whether as subject or as object of cognition. In taking study of the spatiotemporal particular as a uniquely human method of enquiry, he encountered a different risk:
that of atomizing and, as a result, detaching persons from their own acts and events or of
detaching acts and events what we know to be the real by virtue of its conformity to the law
of non-contradiction and all the logical forms following from it. That would be to enter the
irrational, whereas the hyper-rational would makes persons copies of one another because
the laws of nature do not function without uniformity. The idiographic method, this
practice of intelligence in comprehending full and factual particularity, is nothing other than
the exercise of autonomy. Windelband’s fear and worry was much like Kant’s fear, or even
panic, when confronted with Hume’s critique of self and of moral thought and law. All the
neo-Kantians shared this, but here Windelband has brought it to a fine, pointed crisis within
neo-Kantian terms.
Having resorted to methods rather than objects, Windelband finds that he cannot
define a method by the content of the knowledge it gains, nor can he leave it purely as the
useful or psychically necessary choice by the subject. Instead he has to place autonomy into
a province occupied by neither subject nor object, by neither mind nor nature. This is the
realm of values. Nothing is left to constitute Kantian autonomy except a tertium quid, and
happily, Windelband must have felt, it is something omnipresent, exceedingly useful, utterly
40
The terms nomothetic and idiographic have had a separate life in sociology, partly through the
influence on Max Weber. The channels by which they were introduced into sociology, especially
American sociology, are discussed by Russell T. Hurlburt and Terry J. Knapp, “Müunsterberg in 1898,
Not Allport in 1937, Introduced the Terms ‘Idiographic’ and ‘Nomothetic’ to American Psychology,”
in Theory & Psychology, vol. 16, no. 2: 287–293. See also Lamiel, Op. cit.
14
necessary, and sufficiently elastic to enable the philosophical theorist of values—the
axiologist—to forward it around or over known obstacles. He concludes his central
deductive exposition of the necessity of an independent existence and knowledge of values
in this way:
General laws do not establish an ultimate state from which the specific
conditions of the causal chain could ultimately be derived. It follows that all
subsumption under general laws is useless in the analysis of the ultimate causes or
grounds of the single, temporally given phenomenon. Therefore, in all the data of
historical and individual experience a residuum of incomprehensible, brute fact
remains, an inexpressible and indefinable phenomenon. Thus the ultimate and most
profound nature of personality resists analysis in terms of general categories. From
the perspective of our consciousness, this incomprehensible character of the
personality emerges as the sense of the indeterminacy of our nature—in other words,
individual freedom.41
This ought to be seen in light of his extensive writings on the value and validity, which is
beyond the scope of this paper.
Heinrich Rickert took Windelband’s chair at Heidelberg (where Windelband had
moved from Strasbourg), and he also took up the nomothetic/ideographic concept pair as the
keystone of a systematic attempt to separate axiology from natural science. The natural
scientist is limited, in Rickert’s view, by his standards of objective valuation, which are in
fact not objective but culturally (and ideologically) determined. The historian then excels
the scientist by a turn to transcendental, universal values, made necessary by acknowledging
the role of values in all judgment. Rickert labors to equate judgment with normativity.
From this it follows that all judgements in all cultures, by their existence, stand in some
relation to a conceivable universal axiology that will truthfully explain the relationship of
41
Ibid., 184
15
values and reality.42 Both Dilthey and Husserl quickly engaged with Rickert’s work, in
substantial published debate, because they keenly saw its fruitlessness in the absence of a
more radical upending of the Kantian theory of knowledge. Kant’s anthropology from the
beginning of the nineteenth century still limited how philosophy might defend the human
sciences at the end of a century in which our knowledge of ourselves, deep inside and
worldwide, had revealed that the power of social groups determined us no less than the
lawful powers of manifold materiality. In Windelband’s terms, normativity is both “the
extensive whole” and the “incomprehensible, brute” particular essential to personhood. To
Husserl this was unscientific, being too atomized to comprehend the “life world” in which
alone nature and normativity are to be understood. To Dilthey axiology in history was not
history, because the logical formalities of axiology obscure the hermeneutic processes of
history, which are an altogether different structure by which ends are actuated and meaning
is understood.43 “History,” Dilthey said, “is life lived from the point of view of humanity.”44
For both men, Windelband’s notion of understanding the human sciences by their unique
method, both as he wrote it in this lecture and as interpreted by Rickert, illuminated a post42
Rickert’s chief work is his The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science, partially translated
by Guy Oakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See esp. Ch. 4, sec. 9, pp. 135ff. For
his final disposition of Windelband’s idea. Rickert’s way of writing is complicated by his use of “real”
to mean the empirically observable world and of “unreal” to mean the world of values, which is valid
and thereby “real” in the ordinary sense.
43
The intricate debate and lines of influences among Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey and Husserl are
described in Beisser, Op. cit.; John Jalbert, “Husserl's Position Between Dilthey and the WindelbandRickert School of Neo-Kantianism,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2 (April
1988), pp. 279-296 ; and papers by Rudolf Makkreel: “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The
Distinction of the Geisteswissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften,” in Journal of the History of
Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 4 (October, 1969): 423-440; “Husserl, Dilthey, and the Relation of the LifeWorld to History,” in Research in Phenomenology, vol. 12 (1982): 39-58; and “Kant and the
Development of the Human and Cultural Sciences, in Studies in the History of the Philosophy of
Science, vol. 39 (2008): 546–553. For the contributions of the debate on Windelband’s idea in the
polemic over “historicism,” see Georg G. Iggers,” Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,”
in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 56, no. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 129-152.
44
Wilhelm Dilthey, trans. Rudolf Makkreel, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences (Selected Works vol. 3) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 275).
16
Kantian ontology into which Windelband could not step.
In 1923 Rickert ceded his Marburg chair to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976),45 who was
educated amidst the philosophical developments within the German academy of which
Windelband’s 1894 lecture was one very consequential nexus. Heidegger, according to Ingo
Farin, took the primacy of the historical over he natural from Rickert and then replaced
particular and even great events by “the unrepeatability of individual experience.” The
categories of life and therefore of existence are experiential and historical rather than
formal and transcendental.46 Like Rickert, Heidegger wanted to locate a force of value
behind all judgment, removed from the our subjective and individual conscience but
nonetheless entirely one’s own; and he knew enough to understand that such a thing bursts
the bounds f the concepts of normativity and prescription. Yet, as we have seen, it leaves the
conscience subject to society, in so far as the agent and her philosopher have no vision of
God and so seek a substitute for mystical presence of the divine.
Heidegger said that he wanted to take “the intellectual history of the mankind...as the
true organon of the understanding of human life.”47 To this end and in this regard he was as
much historian of philosophy, though confined to Occidental history, as he was philosopher.
The debate actively continues to this day as to what the good of history of philosophy and
the history of ideas are: if it is past, why should thinkers bother with it, and if it is
philosophy what use is the history; and, is it not an epiphenomenon of an economic,
physical, or social reality, to study which is deception?; and does it not require wholes or
totalities of a sort that science does not support and that pose dangers to justice or to
freedom?48 These questions are part of the perennial search for the ground of value, be it
45
In 1928 Heidegger took up Husserl’s chair at Marburg.
46
Inigo Farin, “Early Heidegger's Concept of History in Light of the Neo-Kantians,” in Journal of the
Philosophy of History, vol. 3, no. 4 (2009): 355-384
47
Ibid., p. 376.
48
A good recent specimen of the long debate is to be found in some of the debates on the website
New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science (http://www.newappsblog.com/), notably the
17
truth or the good, along the roads of which philosophy is constrained to travel because of the
ethical demands of life, Wittgenstein’s brilliance notwithstanding, and which is as
profoundly and completely addressed, in so far as philosophy is concerned, by Plato’s
analogy of the cave as by anything that has followed.49
Windelband was an historian of philosophy. His history, first published in 1892, was
printed many times, and the English translation permeated American home and library
bookshelves.50 By understanding his Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft one will readily see
that he understood in what manner the historical questions of philosophy replicate the
intellectual issues comprising philosophical work. This is how he conceived of the history of
philosophy as the history of ideas. Geschichte des Philosophie remains one of the best and
most insightful accounts, for its length, though it lacks the narrative circumstantiality and
the analysis of concepts that we now provide.51 When he said that history describes the
most precise individuality of its objects, he applied the category of fully particularized
individuality narrowly and solely to the story of concepts themselves. For these his
historiography is tight, almost Hegelian. But it excludes persons, events, and objects, so it
lacks the conflictual view of personhood and its effect on ideas that the fuller analysis of
agency established by the powerful intellectual movements of his day and afterward now
offer. There have been many phases of critique of the very idea of intellectual history as
necessarily excluding contingent sensuous history, and one does see in Windelband both the
contributions by Eric Schliesser, Justin E.H. Smith, Denis Des Chenes, Jon Cogburn, Jon Protevi, Eric
Schweitzgebel, and others in June through August, 2011.
49
My view is like that of Jalbert, Op. cit., pp. 269-270: “Despite the long history of philosophical
attention directed to this question, the debate has to a certain extent engendered the erroneous
impression that what is really at stake is primarily an epistemological and/or ontological matter.
What has been obscured is the larger, more fundamental problem that spawned the debate in the
first place. The main issue, conceived broadly, is an ethical one and concerns the possibility of a
genuinely human, that is, rational and ethical, life.”
50
The American translation by James A. Tufts first appeared in 1902.
51
Windelband said that he deliberately loeft out details of circumstance and personalities in the
history pf phlosophy but later added some sketches in response to the popularity of the work.
18
strength and the limitation of the kind of history Arthur O. Lovejoy and successors were
soon to create. By fashioning intellectual history in this manner, Windelband came not
many paces distant from equating the validity (gültig) of ideas with their value (wert)—that
is, from the kind of formal conceptual analysis pioneered by his fellow student under Lotze,
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925).52
Despite the no-material-life-allowed quality of his historiographic work, Windelband
contributed an important idea to history and theory of culture through his
nomothetic/idiographic distinction. Georg Simmel (1848-1918), who knew Windelband
well, write that
culture comes into being...by the coincidence of two elements, neither of which
contains culture in itself: the subjective soul and the objective intellectual product.53
Culture satisfies us, according to Simmel, when we have a strong inward feeling of
...its impersonality and its separation from everything within us...the objectifications
of the spirit, behind the subjective life processes which have entered into them as
causes....54
It is a lesson he might have learned from Windelband. This leads to the desire
...to unify all knowledge...symmetrically, as it were, in a regular harmonious edifice
with dominant and subordinate elements, all based on one fundamental principle. In
such a system...the edifice is regarded as proof...that existence has been truly grasped
and comprehended in its entirety.55
And that is the problem as of 1894, or earlier, and after:
52
See the very cautious but provocative short article by Gottfried Gabriel, “Fregean Connection:
Bedeutung, Value and Truth-Value,” in The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 136 (Special Issue:
Frege) (Jul, 1984): 372-376.
53
Georg Smmel, David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture: selected writings
(London and Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 1997), p. 58. All quotes here are drawn from the
anthology, organized by topic rather than by Simme’s history of publication.
54
Ibid., p. 60.
55
Ibid., pp. 85-6.
19
It is against this that life is now on the defensive, for although it is forever
creating forms, it is also forever bursting their bounds.... Life refuses to be governed
by anything subordinate to itself, but it also refuses to be governed at all, even by any
ideal realm with a claim to superior authority....56
Thus here life aspires to the unattainable: to determine and manifest itself
beyond all forms, in its naked immediacy. But knowledge, volition, and creation,
though wholly governed by life, can only replace one form by another; they can
never replace form itself by the life that lies beyond form.57
Nietzsche at last caught up with Windelband. But Simmel might well have formed the
pairing of “the fundamental principle of mechanism” and “supreme metaphysically
autonomous ideas” from Windelband’s famous invention, as it topped off the neo-Kantian
gizmo. He could have seen the deeper binary of soul in the idiographic and object in the
nomothetic. I have pointed to the defenses and anxieties that Windelband’s words,
especially the sudden ignition of feeling after quoting from Faust, in which he sees the army
of Doppelgangers falling upon us like robots, aliens, mutants dinosaurs, or zombies in science
fiction. In this way, in his own way, Windelband thought at the edges of his work what
Nietzsche had, just within the previous decade, before nourished in the heart of the vortex of
his work. He thought it and discussed it with the most important philosophers in the years
in which Nietzsche had nothing more to say.
All the historians and philosophers who write about the nomothetic and idiographic
focus on nomos (law) and idios (one’s own or the personal). None, without exception, has
written anything about the back halves of these words, “-thetic,” from tithein (to place or
arrange) and “-graphic,” from graphein (to write or to draw). Although he describes the
idiographer more glancingly than he does the law-giver, who seems to be the senior partner,
56
Ibid., p. 86.
57
Ibid., p. 90.
20
he does not fail to mention art and literature among the matters it knows or judges.58
Something in the “colorful world of the senses” has the virtues of reason. Certainly
Windelband here liminalizes events and objects, but he might have had hold of something
about persons that is outside of their Kantian virtue and is something affirmatively
productive in a way not fully comprehended by the idea of autonomy. He, like the other
neo-Kantians, explores and tries to defend one of the strongest arguments for moral
understanding ever put forward—Kant’s impartialist and internalist universal
good—knowng very well where and how it runs into troule. This even motivated
Windelband’s reflections on the the philosophy of history and the human sciences. I suggest
he views the historian in the same frame as artists of all kinds. Though he must have
suppressed or avoided this thought, the notion of picturing, by words or other media, as a
forcefully reasonable mode of cognition or judgment seems to be in his mind, though at
quite a few pacs away from the honor he must pay to solid, magisterial, academic reason as
he knew it to be.
58
Windelband, Op. cit., pp. 175, 178-9