Neo-Kantianism

He received his PhD in 1932, actually on Herman Cohn and on the thinking of Herman Cohn.

And Herman Cohn was part of the Marburg school of neo-Kantian thinkers.

And Hermann Cohen was looking at the role within Judaism of pure thought and ethics.

Thought and ethics, he said, Hermann Cohen maintained, was more important to Jewish thought than mystical thought or than metaphysical speculation.

And so it is out of the struggle with the proletariat that bourgeoisie invents, like, alternate irrationalist worldviews.

And one of the hallmarks of the irrationalist worldview comes out of Neo-Kantianism, and we can kind of elaborate some of the main thinkers of this Neo-Kantian current.

Many of them are not as well known to us today.

Um, but suffice it to say, one of the kind of core, uh, propositions that they put forward are things such as history is fundamentally unknowable from a subjective standpoint.

Right? Insofar as what the Hegelian wager is saying is no, no, no, there's actually a kernel of rationality, a kernel of reason that animates social life, and human groups are sort of in a dialectical relationship to it.

That proposition when applied to Marxism becomes, um, kind of the secret weapon for a type of class consciousness, like in the Lukácsian sense.

And this is why, um, I think that Lukács will say that Neo-Kantianism, not Kant, because Kant for Lukács is sort of like an open field.

Kant is sort of the originator of a series of problems that are subsequently taken up by, uh, German idealism and Western philosophy as such that don't necessarily restrict us to dogmatic, um, silos as Neo-Kantianism sort of does.

We don't have the visual language.

It's a kind of neo-Kantian view.

Yeah, that definitely is a neo-Kantian view.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

That's brilliant.

So we are talking about the, the 1920s.

You have phenomenology, you have Neokantianism and, and emerging the e- existentialism of Heidegger, people like Heidegger.

So at the beginning, let's start with Neokantianism, which was very important at the time.

And I will say most of these Kyoto School members, or at least the students that came to the Imperial Kyoto University to study under Nishida after reading his famous book, Sen no Kenkyu, Inquiry into the Good, right? So many of these young students were attracted by this book, moved to Kyoto to study with Nishida.

And at Kyoto University, Neokantianism was very popular.

So many of them actually go to Germany to study under these figures.

For example, Heinrich Rickert, that was the case of Miki, for example.

And a lot of this is influenced by, by Kant.

It's actually a neo-Kantian philosopher who's probably the most important, named Herman Lotze, who has a...

Uh, he influenced a German theologian named Albert Ritschl, who wrote a work, um, on the history of the doctrine of justification or reconciliation, and, uh, applied some of these categories to his reading of Luther and union with Christ.

But essentially, this boils down to the fact that there was a philosophical shift to where when people read the, the notion of union with Christ, like in Luther and then in scripture, uh, they started thinking of this not in categories of, like, the divine essence indwelling, like a true indwelling of God, uh, w- within, you know, the, the human essence.