Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Trancendental Phenomenology

1. Neo-Kantianism: Between Science and Worldview

1 Neo-Kantianism: Between Science and Worldview N eo-Kantianism, a movement with roots deep in the nineteenth century, dominated German academic philosophy between 1890 and 1920. Though it carried the impulse of German idealism into the culture of the twentieth century and set the agenda for philosophies which displaced it, the movement is little studied now. One encounters it primarily in liberation narratives constructed by those whose own thinking took shape in the clash between neo-Kantianism and the “rebellious ” interwar generation spearheaded by Jaspers and Heidegger. Thus before Heidegger—so Hannah Arendt—“philosophy was not so much communicated as drowned in a sea of boredom.” And with Heidegger—so Hans-Georg Gadamer—“the complacent system-building of neo-Kantian methodolgism” gave way; its “calm and confident aloofness . . . suddenly seemed to be mere child’s play.”1 Here neo-Kantianism is the terminus a quo of a “liberation from the unbreakable circle of reflection” toward recovery of the “evocative power of conceptual thinking and philosophical language.”2 It thus enters the lore of continental philosophy as the father who had to be slain in order that philosophy might live. No doubt testimony from those who were there reflects well enough their experience of the matter, even if it leads some (like Gadamer) to stigmatize neo-Kantian motifs in Heidegger’s thought as inauthentic. Meanwhile, however, projects such as fundamental ontology or philosophical hermeneutics, which heralded the liberation, have revealed internal aporias which suggest that reassessment of their triumphal claim to have transcended the dead-end questions obsessing their neo-Kantian fathers may be in order. It is a commonplace of contemporary continental philosophy, for example, that epistemology (the neo-Kantian project of 23 24 H U S S E R L , H E I D E G G E R , A N D T H E S P A C E O F M E A N I N G ultimate grounding) is dead. Already in 1962 a writer could characterize the time as one in which “epistemology is seen as the ultimate stage of philosophy ’s degeneration,” so pervasive was the ontological (Heideggerian) revolution.3 Heidegger’s claim, however, was not that knowledge needed no grounding, but that it needed ontological grounding. Subsequently, Ernst Tugendhat questioned the adequacy of this position, and KarlOtto Apel began to interrogate the “hermeneutic turn” in light of the neo-Kantian philosopheme “validity” (Geltung). Heidegger had been deeply concerned with such questions. His antifoundationalist heirs— the deconstructionists, the pragmatists, the hermeneuticists—find in this concern only residual “philosophy,” an incomplete liberation. Rorty rightly ties the rhetoric of the “end of philosophy” to the collapse of the neo-Kantian program which sought, by becoming theory of science, to establish an autonomous place for philosophy among the positive (empirical and mathematical) sciences.4 Depending on one’s sympathy for what is announced in that rhetoric, one might well feel that the neo-Kantian paradigm has not been altogether superseded. A balanced assessment of neo-Kantianism might reveal questions with which the onto-hermeneutic turn is burdened by its very nature but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer. The present chapter will neither carry out such an assessment nor pretend to encompass the movement as a whole. In reconsidering the neo-Kantian heritage, one should be aware that continental philosophy defines itself through a largely distortive and reductive reading of the neoKantians , but here the aim is simply to indicate something of what is at stake in such readings by situating a few theses characteristic of “classical” neo-Kantianism within the horizon of a particularly contested point, namely, the dispute between the neo-Kantians and their phenomenological critics over the autonomy of philosophy. Both movements lay claim to the mantle of “scientific philosophy,” but neo-Kantianism differs from phenomenology in maintaining a continuity between positive science and philosophy. As theory of science, neo-Kantian epistemology wants to provide grounds for a principled (“scientific”) weltanschauung. Phenomenology (here, Husserl and the early Heidegger), on the contrary, establishes the autonomy of philosophy precisely through a discontinuity with positive science and the aims of worldview formation. 1. The Neo-Kantian Movement In 1912 Heidegger, the student of Heinrich Rickert, opened his review of current trends in the philosophy of logic by referring to a long- 25 N E O - K A N T I A...