Educational Philosophy and Theory

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Neo-Kantianism as philosophy of culture: Cassirer,

Simmel, and the Bildung tradition in contemporary
German intellectual thought

Dustin Garlitz

To cite this article: Dustin Garlitz (2021): Neo-Kantianism as philosophy of culture: Cassirer,
Simmel, and the Bildung tradition in contemporary German intellectual thought, Educational
Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1879052

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1879052

Published online: 14 Mar 2021.

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1879052

EDITORIAL

Neo-Kantianism as philosophy of culture: Cassirer, Simmel,

and the Bildung tradition in contemporary German
intellectual thought
Dustin Garlitz
Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Neo-Kantianism was a movement in the history of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy
that shaped the philosophy of culture and philosophy of education in Germany and the rest of
the world. The philosophers prominent in Neo-Kantianism were primarily concerned with tran-
scendental arguments, and asked questions such as how is knowledge and history possible.
Another intellectual theme of Neo-Kantianism, as related to epistemological arguments, was the
theory of concept formation in the human, social, and cultural sciences.
The philosophy of Neo-Kantianism treated almost all knowledge as a science. Accordingly,
there were the human sciences that philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey examined in Berlin, the social
sciences that sociologist Max Weber pioneered in Heidelberg, and the cultural sciences that phil-
osopher Ernst Cassirer focused on studying in Marburg. One of the major intellectual projects of
Neo-Kantianism was the forming and articulation of a philosophy of culture (Cassirer, The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Four Volumes [Volume Two, Mythical Thought], An Essay on Man:
An Introduction of a Philosophy of Human Culture; The Logic of the Cultural Sciences; Language
and Myth, translated by Susan Langer, author of Philosophy in a New Key; Edward Skidelsky. Ernst
Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, 2008; Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap,
Cassirer, and Heidegger, 2000; Peter Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, 2010).
The philosopher Emil Lask proposed a Neo-Kantian legal philosophy (Lask, Legal Philosophy,
1905, reprinted in The Legal Philosophies of Lask, Radbruch, and Dabin, 1949) as did Rudolf
Stammler before him. Weber focused on developing a philosophy of social science. Georg
Simmel was concerned with philosophical culture, writing essays such as ‘The Stranger’, ‘The
Metropolis and Mental Life’, the book The Philosophy of Money, and cultural critiques such as
‘The Crisis of Culture’, ‘The Tragedy and Concept of Culture’ and ‘On the Essence of Culture’, the
latter which were his contribution to German cultural pessimism, and all of which are reprinted
in Simmel on Culture, 1997. The Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism, comprised of philosophers
Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Lask, concerned itself with approaching philosophy
through the arts and humanities. The Marburg School, comprised of philosophers Hermann
Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Cassirer, concerned itself with approaching philosophy through the nat-
ural sciences and mathematics. Both schools of Neo-Kantianism were concerned with asking
philosophical questions about history (proposing and elaborating a philosophy of history), such
as how is historical knowledge possible. A culture concept, including the aforementioned project
of a philosophy of culture, was elaborated by both schools of Neo-Kantianism. In regards to his
reconstruction and connection with the great schools of legal thinking, Cassirer had contacts
with the Scandinavian realists while in Go €teborg.

CONTACT Dustin Garlitz dustin.garlitz@gmail.com

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
ß 2021 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
2 EDITORIAL

Neo-Kantianism had a great impact on the Sein und Sollen distinction in continental philoso-
phy of social science and its connection to the legal philosophy, with ramifications for the epis-
temology of law, ontology of law, and for a range of practical matters for philosophers of law.
Neo-Kantianism also came to play an important role in the development of the continental crit-
ical traditions of sociology of law, in the wake of Dilthey and Rickert. To€nnies’ conception of the
community and society distinction was quite important for different aspects of philosophy of
law, including discussions pertaining to institutionalism. We would be much more interested in
understanding Hart and the post-Hartian debate to the epistemological assumptions of Neo-
Kantian discussions of the nature of law.
Ernst Troeltsch elaborated a religious theology that was informed by the philosophy of Neo-
Kantianism. Commentators in continental philosophy such as Frederick Beiser have turned their
focus in scholarship on Neo-Kantianism at times to aid them in delineating a Historicism in
German intellectual history (Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition, 2012; The Genesis of Neo-
Kantianism, 1796-1880, 2015). Other commentators such as Sebastian Luft have been preoccupied
with the theme of philosophy of culture in the movement’s various works, as well as how the
movement relates to early phenomenology and other trends in continental philosophy (Luft, The
Space of Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of Culture, 2015; The Neo-Kantian Reader,
2015; Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, 2009). The notion of value was one of the
central concerns of Neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement, and comprised a significant
component in its intellectual project of an ethics. Sociologist Gillian Rose incorporated Neo-
Kantianism in her scholarship, as related to social theory. In addition to broad concerns with val-
ues, the various philosophers of Neo-Kantianism also proposed a distinct ethics, as the case with
Nicolai Hartmann and Hermann Cohen. Other forms of value theory elaborated by Neo-Kantian
philosophers included aesthetics and the philosophy of history, in addition to the aforemen-
tioned philosophy of law and philosophy of culture. Social scientist Ferdinand To €nnies developed
sociology with the methodology of Neo-Kantianism along with Weber. Works of Weber’s that
were explicitly Neo-Kantian included his Critique of Stammler and Roscher and Knies. French Neo-
Kantianism also played a significantly role in developing the social sciences as distinct from phil-
osophy, with Emile Durkheim (Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, 1953) (Durkheim, On
Institutional Analysis, 1978) further developing the Neo-Kantian themes of philosophers Emile
Boutroux and Charles Bernard Renouvier.
In the Neo-Kantianism of Lask’s ‘Legal Philosophy’ (Lask, [1905]1949), the German Southwest
thinker provides a conceptual framework that includes a substrate (substratum), and a fact/value
distinction, the latter as related to objectivity in law. In the Neo-Kantianism of Kelsen’s ‘Pure
Theory of Law’ methodology and its ‘Grundnorm’ (Ground Norm, or Basic Norm), he works top-
down in the manner that an individual cannot start with a direct accessing of the ‘Grundnorm’ of
society, an universalizable collective representation to work down from, one that she or he
would be able to make sense of in its lower hierarchies of further constructed collective and
individual representations. This ‘Pure Theory of Law’ methodology described, which is conceived
to be followed by the jurist, is Kelsen’s Neo-Kantian attempt at a purification of concepts, and is
how is explains normativity in his philosophy of law.
The model for Marburg School Neo-Kantianism was physics, and the larger movement of
Neo-Kantianism treated all knowledge as a science, with many Neo-Kantian thinkers attempting
to distinguish the Natural Sciences from the Human Sciences, and the Human Sciences from the
Cultural, or Social, Sciences. The Southwest School’s Rickert was concerned with concept forma-
tion between these different sciences and philosophers that reacted to Neo-Kantianism such as
phenomenologist Edmund Husserl attempted to study all of philosophy as a ‘rigorous science’.
This theme of scientism derived from the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism is what would go on to
inform the analytic/continental divide in 20th century philosophy. In this vein, Cassirer and other
Neo-Kantians studied Einstein’s theory of relativity, as well as that of Renaissance science.
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3

In addition to philosophy, scholarship on Neo-Kantianism has also appeared by scholars work-

ing in the history of ideas. In contemporary analytic philosophy, philosophers such as Wilfrid
Sellars and John McDowell have developed Neo-Kantian themes in their work, as related to
aspects that Cassirer studied and juxtaposed with science, such as myth, which appears in Sellars
work as the Myth of the Given. Michel Foucault has explicitly elaborated a Neo-Kantian philoso-
phy, one that rests on Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and which reinterprets
the discursivity of traditional Kantian concepts into that of discursive practices.
Detecting traces of Neo-Kantian thinking in contemporary scholarship and worldviews among
the philosophy of education is not an easy task. It appears that Critical Pedagogy scholarship has
been influenced by Neo-Kantian philosophical thought. The theoretical foundations of critical
pedagogy have been informed by the cultural sciences, human sciences, and social sciences that
Neo-Kantian thought was preoccupied with, especially Max Weber’s social thought from
Heidelberg and the Southwest (Baden) School of Neo-Kantianism in Germany, and Durkheim’s
French Neo-Kantian social thought as related to education and pedagogy, namely moral educa-
tion. Durkheim’s had a joint academic appointment in the French University System among
Sociology (from a Philosophical point of view) and Education (Pedagogy), which gave him the
opportunity to articulate a Neo-Kantian philosophy of culture and education.

ORCID
Dustin Garlitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9409-5121