the former have meaning, structure, or validity in their own sphere. Hermann
Cohen, founder of the Marburg school, resurrected Kant’s distinction of tran-
scendental foundations and subsequent empirical investigation. When in 1875
Cohen repudiated the physiological interpretation of Kant, he was rejecting
the intrusion of Helmholtz’s medical science into philosophical terrain. At the
same time that Helmholtz’s former assistant, Wundt, was going full blast with
his imperialist naturalism, the Marburg school launched a program of inves-
tigating the constitutive logic of the disciplines, from mathematics to jurispru-
dence.
Philosophy was not reduced to psychological research, but remained alive
on its own terrain. Zeller’s pupil Dilthey formulated a “critique of historical
reason.” Dilthey’s distinction of Geisteswissenschaften from Naturwissenschaf-
ten proclaimed new lines of alliance, putting history and philosophy, along
with the newer cultural and social sciences, on the side of spirit, where they
are investigated with the methods of hermeneutic interpretation, against the
sciences of dead matter and their methods of causality. Windelband, leader of
the so-called Baden school of Neo-Kantianism, in turn pointed out that the
distinction between nature and spirit did not fit the actual procedures of the
existing disciplines, especially the new psychology, which applied experimental
methods to the spirit. Windelband instead distinguished the disciplines accord-
ing to the aspect under which they investigate reality: nomothetic search for
general principles or idiographic description of particularities. His protégé
Rickert in turn proposed that when we take an idiographic interest, our
knowledge depends not on objects themselves but on their value-relevance,
which guides concept formation. Culture is the mode in which we see the world
as a totality of value-relevances; nature is the mode in which we see it in
relation to laws.
Almost everything in Germany at turn of the century was touched by
Neo-Kantianism. Simmel (a pupil of Dilthey and Brentano and friend of the
Baden school) introduced the philosophy of forms and the tones of hermeneutic
empathy into sociology. Max Weber, another of Dilthey’s pupils, and a friend
of Rickert, explicitly advocated Neo-Kantian methods in carving out a territory
for the new discipline around the time Weber helped found the German
Sociological Association in 1908. Cohen’s pupil Cassirer rejected the separation
of natural science from the domain inhabited by the humanistic disciplines;
Windelband’s ideographic-nomothetic distinction does not hold, he said, since
a judgment always unites both universality and particularity. Cassirer gave
license for philosophers to range widely in the general investigation of symbolic
forms, which he proceeded to do with studies ranging from relativity physics
to seeking the universal and perennial across the history of philosophy and
the arts.
692 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths