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Normativity in NeoKantianism:
Its Rise and Fall
a
Frederick C. Beiser
a
Syracuse University, USA
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
17
FBeiser@syr.edu
FrederickBeiser
000002008
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1466-4542
Francis
Journal of Philosophical
(online) Studies
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
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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:
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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
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
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
NORMATIVITY IN NEO-KANTIANISM: ITS RISE AND FALL
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
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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-
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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
NORMATIVITY IN NEO-KANTIANISM: ITS RISE AND FALL
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
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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
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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
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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
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
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.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
NORMATIVITY IN NEO-KANTIANISM: ITS RISE AND FALL
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.
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.
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
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
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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
NORMATIVITY IN NEO-KANTIANISM: ITS RISE AND FALL
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
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27