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HISTORY AS the ORGANON of PHILOSOPHY: a LINK BETWEEN the CRITICAL METHOD and the PHILOSOPHY of HISTORY Jacinto Páez

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HISTORY AS the ORGANON of PHILOSOPHY: a LINK BETWEEN the CRITICAL METHOD and the PHILOSOPHY of HISTORY Jacinto Páez HISTORY AS THE ORGANON OF PHILOSOPHY: A LINK BETWEEN THE CRITICAL METHOD AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY Jacinto Páez Abstract: In recent years, the Neo-Kantian movement has received wide acknowledgment as the hidden origin of several contemporary philo- sophical discussions. This paper focuses on one specific Neo-Kantian topic; namely, the idea of history put forward by Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915). Even though this topic could be seen as one of the better- known Neo-Kantianism themes, there are certain unnoticed elements in Windelband’s treatment of history that merit further discussion. While the texts in which Windelband deals with the logical problems of the historical sciences have been studied at length, other texts, those in which history is studied in connection with the problem of the philosophical method, have not. This paper argues that, for Windelband, history is not merely an object of epistemological reflection but rather a key component of transcendental philosophy. Introduction This paper analyzes one aspect of Wilhelm Windelband’s idea of history; namely, the claim that history serves as the proper organon for the system of philosophical knowledge. In addressing this topic I have two goals in mind. On the one hand, I aim to clarify Windelband’s conception of the relationship between philosophical research and historical thinking. On the other hand, I intend to explain how Windelband came to ascribe such a preponderant role to history. By doing so, I will develop a critique of the way in which this Neo-Kantian author is commonly interpreted, and, more importantly, I will set the grounds to assess Windelband’s original contribution to the understanding of the transcendental method. It is generally assumed that the interest in history manifested by the representatives of the Southwestern School of Neo-Kantianism1 is strictly concerned with the task of philosophically grounding the historical sciences.2 According to this view, philosophers of this school deal with the new problems originated in the nineteenth-century concept of historical consciousness using the tools provided by modern epistemology.3 Thus, it is commonly held that in the philosophical theory of Windelband, the forerunner of the Southwestern © Idealistic Studies. Volume 50, Issue 2 (Summer 2020). ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 121–142 DOI: 10.5840/idstudies2020914120 IDEALISTIC STUDIES School, the treatment of history is strictly limited to the logic of the historical sciences, that is, to a field of the theory of knowledge. Contrary to this view, I argue throughout this paper that the idea of history plays a constitutive part in Windelband’s Neo-Kantian program. Windelband’s recognition that history has to serve as the organon of critical philosophy is precisely an indication of this constitutive role and a proof of the inadequacy of the traditional inter- pretation of his thinking.4 The problem that motivates and justifies this idea of the organon of philosophy is not related to the methodological problems of the historical sciences but to the methodological problems of philosophy itself. Thus, the question concerning history tackled by this paper is not how this Neo-Kantian author attempted to ground the historical sciences but why his definition of critical philosophy points necessarily to history. Regarding the structure of this paper, the first section deals with a recent and deeper variant of the traditional interpretation, put forward by Alan Kim in the 2015 paper “Neo-Kantian ideas of history.”5 After this discussion, I tackle Windelband’s idea of the critical method and his identification of his- tory with the organon of critical philosophy. The centrality of history was, in Windelband’s case, the result of a long reflection on the nature of transcen- dental philosophy and the legacy of German Idealism, and not something given from the start. This development is attested in a generally overlooked amendment to the methodological essay “Critical or Genetic Method?,” whose original version from 1884 assigned the role of philosophy’s guiding principle not to history but psychology. Accordingly, two questions will be raised in connection with the content of this essay: Why does philosophy need an or- ganon? Why was this organon originally identified with psychology and later with history? With this shift from psychology to history, Windelband came close to asserting a problematic identity between history and philosophy. He sought a concrete possibility of harmonizing transcendental philosophy and historical consciousness; thus bridging, through his theory, the gulf between transcendental logic and the concrete historical realm. In the third section, I will attempt, in the light of my findings, to asses the general output of Wind- elband’s program. In this sense, I believe that the study of Windelband’s idea of history is useful for considering the possibility of historical philosophy. 1. Neo-Kantian Ideas of History This section presents a survey of Alan Kim’s paper on the Neo-Kantian ideas of history, since, as I have said, it is the most complex exponent of the prevailing view on Southwest Neo-Kantianism.6 Kim’s paper has the enormous value of recognizing the importance of the idea of history for Neo-Kantian philosophers in general.7 Prior to its pub- lication, there was a strong tendency in the literature to exclusively ascribe interest in the mathematical sciences and physics to the representatives of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, in contrast to the restricted focus 122 HISTORY AS THE ORGANON OF PHILOSOPHY on history of the members of the Southwest School.8 Indeed, this was the opinion held by such an authoritative figure as Ernst Cassirer in the fourth volume of his The Problem of Knowledge.9 In contrast, Kim’s paper convinc- ingly argues that history plays an important role in the theories developed by the representatives of both schools, although in a completely different sense. Regarding the Southwest School, the paper states that the main philo- sophical interest of its representatives was to philosophically ground the historical sciences:: The Southwest School sees these unresolved questions regarding an impor- tant and undeniable real epistemic activity—historiography—as indicative of a theoretical crisis that the sciences themselves lack the resources or perspective to resolve. Only philosophical critique can hope to elucidate the so-called logic of the historical or cultural sciences, and this clearly defined both the respective subject matter and methodology of the Natur- und Geistwissenschaften.10 Windelband’s and Rickert’s philosophies of history, both of which are analyzed in Kim’s paper, could have could pass for a chapter missing from Kant’s Prolegomena concerning the question: “How is history possible as a science?”11 Therefore, the whole scope of these theories is reducible to the field of epistemology and, more particularly, to the philosophy of histori- ography. In the context of Kim’s paper, this interpretation stems from a conten- tious assessment of the Neo-Kantian idea of history. It is used to establish the philosophical primacy of the idea of history developed by the representatives of the Marburg School, whose philosophy, as mentioned, was generally as- sumed to be strictly oriented toward mathematics and the natural sciences. The philosophers from the Marburg School held a sophisticated vision of the relation between history and philosophy because they did not consider history merely a scientific endeavor but a dimension of philosophical think- ing. Thus, Kim correctly states: History enters the Marburg’s work not as a faktum of intellectual or academic reality, but rather as an intrinsic part of analyzing and bringing to reflective clarity the act of thinking, for this activity unfolds over time.12 Simply put, for Windelband and Rickert, history is thus an object of reflec- tion, the index of a restricted ground-laying task, whereas, for the Marburg Neo-Kantians, history is the field through which philosophers reflectively discern the creative laws of reason. This reference to the historical stems from the peculiarities of the philosophical method, which, as Paul Natorp explains, “cannot locate the law of objective formation anywhere else but in that objective formation itself, in the creation of human cultural life that is always at work and never concluded.”13 In contrast to the alleged Neo-Kantian 123 IDEALISTIC STUDIES reduction of history to the philosophy of historiography, this treatment of the idea of history evidently provides a wider and more fruitful scope of analysis. Although Kim does not explicitly endorse a criticism widely held against the Southwest Neo-Kantians, that is, that they have trivialized the philo- sophical problems raised by historical consciousness during the nineteenth century,14 this conclusion is difficult to avoid if one follows his reconstruc- tion. What Windelband and Rickert attempted, so the critique goes, was to pour new wine into old wineskins. They reduced the topic of historical thinking to a mere epistemological problem and thus focused exclusively on the methodology of history, while also disregarding the pressing concerns that historical consciousness raised for philosophical reflection. The position ascribed to the Marburg thinkers, on the contrary, implies the assumption of a temporal unfolding of reason. For these Neo-Kantians, the historical process is, so to speak, the testimony of the continuous efforts of reason to free itself from the obstacles and contradictions blocking its path toward its main goal: self-knowledge. This doctrine brings their theories closer to the recognition of the historicity of philosophical thinking and also to a positive reappraisal of Hegel’s metaphysical interpretation of history. In a nutshell, while one of the schools understood the philosophy of history in the limiting terms of a logic of the historical sciences, the other provided a more substantive ap- proach to the discipline, pointing at the still relevant metaphysical question of the relation between thinking and time.
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