Prinzip und Faktum: Transzendentalphilosophische Untersuchungen zu Zeit und Gegenständlichkeit im Anschluss an Richard Hönigswald (review)

364 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Prinzip und Faktum: Transzendentalphilosophische Untersuchungen zu Zeit und Gegenstdndlichkeit im Anschluss an Richard HOnigswald. By Norbert Meder. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1975. Pp. 172) This book is an attempt to give an interpretation of the philosophy of Richard H6nigswald, or at least of the central core of his system. H6nigswald (1875-1947) is not exactly a household word among English-speaking philosophers, so I imagine that just about the only Americans who know his work are those with a special interest in neo-Kantianismor those who happened to encounter him during his last years, which were spent in the United States. HOnigswald does not seem to be in the mainstream of even German philosophy. He is best characterized as a kind of independent neo-Kantian, by which I mean that he cannot be identified with any of the numerous schools of neo-Kantianphilosophy that dotted the German landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, e.g., the Southwest German, Marburg, G6ttingen, and Heidelberg schools. HOnigswald studied philosophy first with Meinong at Graz and then with Alois Riehl at Halle, where he took his doctorate in 1904. Two years later he habilitated at the University of Breslau, where he taught for many years before going to Munich in 1930 only to have his teaching career cut short by the political events of 1933. Vestiges of Meinong's influence on H6nigswald are shown by the fact that he, too, has a "Gegenstandstheorie," and it may well be the Meinongian influencethat accounts for the parallels several commentators have seen between aspects of H6nigswald's philosophy and Husserl's (for there certainly are similarities between Husserl's early philosophy and Meinong's), even though there is no direct influence of phenomenology or of phenomenologists on HOnigswald, nor vice versa. (When Edith Stein went home to Breslau after having been Husserl's private assistant for several years at Freiburg, she attended some of H6nigswald's lectures and found nothing whatsoever of interest in his kind of philosophizing.)' The real determininginfluenceon H6nigswald seems to have been the neo-Kantianism of his teacher Riehl, although, as Lewis White Beck points out, 2 Riehl was more of a "metaphysical neo-Kantian" while H6nigswald's neo-Kantianismwas of a more psychological kind, reminiscentof Helmholtz and Lange in that it largely ignored the transcendental and logical aspects of Kant's work. Before I go on to discuss briefly the main thesis of Meder's book, I should warn the reader that this book is really Meder's unrevised doctoral dissertation. Now doctoral dissertations, typically, are first attempts at extended scholarly writing; but a good first attempt at X is seldom a good X. Meder's dissertation does not seem to me to be an exception to this rule. The person who has done the most work on the philosophy of Richard H6nigswald is Gerd Wolandt; he has interpreted it in various places~and has edited several posthumous volumes of H6nigswald's writings. According to him, H6nigswald is critical of Kant's failure to emphasize sufficientlythe concrete subject, and out of this criticism developed H6nigswald's own theory of concrete subjectivity or psychology of thought. According to this interpretation of H6nigswald it is only in the concrete subject that principle and fact coincide, become one and the same. In Prinzip und Faktum Meder is taking issue with Wolandt's interpretation of H6nigswald's philosophy . Meder believes that Wolandt has given a misleadinginterpretation that makes HOnigswald appear to be more of an ontologist in the mode of Nicolai Hartmann than he really was. Meder claims, further, that by so interpreting HOnigswald Wolandt has obscured the central core of his thought, namely, a methodological claim about the nature of philosophy itself. It is the claim, says Meder, that philosophy is "the science of itself" (p. 159); it is self-justification, which is to ' Private communication from Dr. Erna Biberstein,Edith Stein's sister. 2Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edwards ed., s.v. "Neo-Kantianism." 3 "Problemgeschichte, Weltentstehungsmythosund Glaube in der Philosophie Richard HOnigswalds," Zeitschrift fiir philosophische Forschung 12 (1958); Gegenstiindlichkeit und Gliederung: Untersuchungen zur Prinzipientheorie Richard H~nigswald (Cologne, 1964);Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. "H6nigswald, Richard; and...