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in social and political terms. Moreover, as Willey portrays them, they
expressed less a narrowly bourgeois ideology of class defense, as has
often been alleged, than a fervently held hope for class reconciliation in
an increasingly polarized world. In short, "nothing more quickly
dispels the notion that the Second Reich was an era exclusively of
Volkisch
neoromanticism, ambivalent social democracy, and state–
worshiping liberalism than a study of neo-Kantianism."
In attempting to establish this point, Willey shows himself to be a
highly skillful cicerone of the neo-Kantian movement, which he traces
from its origins in the l850s to its demise in the First World War. He
provides lucid, but not overly technical accounts of the thought of the
movement's major figures, as well as lively summaries of their careers.
Beginning with Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Otto Liebmann (who coined
the phrase "Back
to
Kant"), Kuno Fischer, Eduard Zeller, and Fried–
rich Albert Lange, Willey proceeds through the dominant schools of
the 1890s in Marburg and in Baden, and concludes with the more
familiar figures of the movement's waning years, Weber, Troeltsch;
Meinecke and Cassirer. He follows I.M. Bochenski 's lead in isolating
four common premises shared by the seven distinct neo-Kantian
schools:
I) They use the transcendental method as opposed to the psychologi–
calor empirical, that is, they seek the prior conditions of knowing
and willing. 2) They are
conceptualists,
by which is meant that they
deny intellectual intuition as a source of genuine knowledge and
believe in the capacity of reason "for constructing a whole for its
parts, " the capacity for synthesis. Knowledge of contents or essences
is ruled out. 3) Their epistemologies are
idealist.
"Knowledge is not
the grasp but the construction of the object." 4) To understand Kant
is
to
go beyond him. For instance, they all reject the unknowable
ground of experience, the notorious thing-in-itself.
Willey adds a fifth premise, the primacy of practical reason within a
{still dualistic framework, which was so crucial to their highly moralis–
tic posture. In spelling out the implications of these assumptions as
they were developed by the major figures and schools, Willey provides
a guidebook more comprehensive and accessible than any other in
English; here is a case of the proverbial gap in the literature really
being filled.
But
Back to Kant 's
larger claim to importance lies in its attempt to
defend neo-Kantianism as a historically significant antidote
to
that
unpolitical "vulgar idealism" identified by Stern and many others as
