The Father Who Had To Be Slain

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

Two Neo-Kantianisms, and the One Theology Inherited

Steven Galt Crowell opens his account of neo-Kantianism with an observation about how the movement is remembered rather than what it actually held. Neo-Kantianism dominated German academic philosophy from roughly 1890 to 1920, and yet within a generation it had been reduced almost entirely to a foil — the orthodoxy that phenomenology and existential ontology had to overthrow in order to exist. As Crowell puts it, neo-Kantianism "enters the lore of Continental philosophy as the father who had to be slain in order that philosophy might live." Heidegger and Jaspers are the story. Neo-Kantianism is the thing they escaped.

The three essays preceding this one have already complicated a closely related story — the one theology tells about its own relationship to Kant. They showed that the construal of Kant theology received and still largely presupposes — totalizing antirealism about the supersensible, the prohibition on ontological assertion, the relocation of theological content into symbol, grammar, or existential possibility — was not re-derived from Kant's own text by the theologians who built on it. It was received, largely unargued, at the point each system needed it most. And they showed that this construal is not the one contemporary Kant scholarship defends.

This essay adds a complication of a different kind, and it matters because it cuts against the most natural way of misreading the first three essays. It would be easy to conclude from them that theology simply absorbed "neo-Kantianism," understood as a single settled position, and that the work of correction is therefore a matter of theology versus philosophy — theology catching up to what philosophy has since revised. That is not quite right, and the slippage is worth naming precisely. There was never one neo-Kantianism. From the 1870s onward there were two schools, both claiming Kant as their authority, both insisting they alone had grasped what the critical philosophy actually required — and they did not agree with each other about the question that matters most for theology: what, if anything, survives the critical restriction as a candidate for objective truth that is not simply the product of the mind's own constructive activity.

Theology did not choose between Kant and not-Kant. It chose — mostly without noticing it was choosing — between Marburg and Baden. And it overwhelmingly chose Marburg.

Marburg: Thought All the Way Down

The Marburg School took its name from the university where Hermann Cohen held the chair of philosophy from 1873, joined later by Paul Natorp and, through them, Ernst Cassirer. Cohen's founding move was to read Kant's first Critique not as an inquiry into the furniture of an independently existing world but as what Crowell calls a "theory of science." On this reading, philosophy cannot deduce truth speculatively from its own first principles, the way the precritical metaphysicians had tried to do. What it can do is reflect on the principles already governing the independent sciences — physics above all — and uncover, through transcendental logic, the categories by which those sciences construct their objects. Unity is not found in the world prior to inquiry. It is achieved, progressively, by the sciences' own constructive work, and philosophy's task is to make that achievement explicit.

Natorp pressed this further than Cohen had been willing to. Where Cohen left some ambiguity about how far the constructive activity of thought extended, Natorp closed it. Being, for Natorp, becomes a function of thinking — not metaphorically, but as a methodological thesis. Since the object of knowledge is constituted in and through the categories, one cannot meaningfully ask after the thing-in-itself apart from the process of knowing it; the question does not identify a real but inaccessible referent, it simply self-destructs, because "apart from the process of knowing" turns out to name nothing at all. The thing-in-itself, on Natorp's reading, is not a reality screened off from cognition by the limits of finite access. It is, in his own phrase, merely "the limit of the infinite process of objectification" — a placeholder for whatever the sciences have not yet finished constructing, not a name for something that already determinately is, waiting to be reached.

Natorp went further still, and the further step is the one that matters most for what theology eventually inherited. He denied that intuition supplies any raw material — any independent "stuff" — for the categories to form. There is, on his account, no dualism between the universality of form and the particularity of matter, no given content standing over against the constructing activity of thought and constraining it from outside. Some interpreters have suggested this makes Natorp's position less neo-Kantian than neo-Hegelian, since it dissolves precisely the dualism Kant's own architecture depended on. Whatever the right label, the effect is the same: there is no remainder. Whatever is real is real because thought has constructed it as an object according to law. What has not yet been constructed is not a hidden reality awaiting access from a being with better epistemic equipment. It is simply not yet known, and there is, on Marburg's own terms, no further fact about what it is "really like apart from the knowing of it" for any future inquiry to discover. The question is not difficult. It is malformed.

Cassirer would later extend this same constructive logic outward from mathematical physics to myth, language, and religion themselves — the symbolic construction of all cultural unities, as he put it, alongside the logical construction of the scientific object. The categories that build the physicist's object and the categories that build the believer's God are, on this extension, instances of the same fundamental activity, differing only in which symbolic form is doing the constructing. This is Marburg in its purest and most exportable form: a single constructive logic, applicable in principle to any domain, that leaves no conceptual room for asking whether the object so constructed also exists independently of the construction. To ask that question is to misunderstand what "exists" could possibly mean once thought is understood to be doing all the work.

Baden: The Remainder Marburg Refused

The second school formed in the southwest, around Wilhelm Windelband at Strasbourg and then Heidelberg, joined by Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask, and Bruno Bauch. Where Marburg's interest ran toward the logic of the exact sciences, Baden's ran toward history, culture, and what its architects called the theory of transcendent value — Wert. The difference is not merely one of subject matter. It is a disagreement about whether Marburg's central move — being as a function of thinking, with no remainder — is actually defensible, and Baden's answer was no.

Windelband's founding claim was that logic itself is, at root, an "ethics of thought": a judgment is not merely a psychological event that happens to occur, correctly or incorrectly, in someone's head, but something normatively answerable to a standard that the psychological event itself does not contain. Behind this lies Hermann Lotze's earlier and more basic distinction between being and validity — the claim that Geltung is itself a kind of value, a category as fundamental as existence but not reducible to it. Rickert built the technical apparatus on this foundation. Cognitive judgment, on his account, has two distinct moments. There is the content of consciousness, immanent in the judging subject, alogical and irrational material that simply occurs. And there is something else: a subject-transcendent value of cognitive validity or truth that either affirms or denies what has been synthesized in that content — a verdict the content itself cannot supply, because the content is merely psychological and the verdict is not.

This is the move Marburg's logic has no room for. Validity, on Rickert's account, is not constructed by the categories the way the physical object is constructed; it is something a judgment either has or lacks, independently of whoever happens to be making it, and independently of whether anyone constructs anything at all. Baden therefore refused what Crowell identifies as Marburg's "homogeneous" picture of reality — the assumption that thought and its object are ultimately of one piece, related as construction to constructed. Rickert insisted instead on a genuine heterogeneity, an irrational remainder in reality that resists full absorption into the categories that know it. This is also why Baden's natural home was history rather than physics: a historical individual, a particular configuration of value realized once and not reducible to an instance of a general law, is exactly the kind of object Marburg's constructive logic struggles to accommodate and Baden's logic of validity was built to receive. And because validity, on this account, answers to something beyond the merely constructed, Baden remained open — in a way Marburg structurally could not be — to the primacy of the practical, to interest, position-taking, and decision as legitimate ingredients in how an object of knowledge comes to be known at all, rather than contaminants to be purged by transcendental logic.

Why the Difference Is Not Academic

It would be a mistake to overstate the contrast. The two schools agreed on more than their later partisans liked to admit, and Baden's Geltung is itself still a thoroughly idealist category, not a straightforward return to the kind of mind-independent realism the premodern tradition assumed without argument. Rickert is not a theological realist by other means, and nothing said here should be read as claiming he secretly was one. That caution will matter again before this short sequence is finished.

But the difference is real, and it is exactly the difference theology needed someone to notice. On Marburg's construal, the question "does God exist apart from the community's discourse about God" has the same shape as the question "does the thing-in-itself exist apart from the process of objectifying it" — and Marburg's own logic has already answered that question by dissolving it. There is no remainder for either question to be about. On Baden's construal, by contrast, there is a category — validity — that lets a claim be objectively binding, true independently of who currently holds it or how it came to be believed, without that bindingness being reducible to either a physical fact in the world or a psychological fact about the believer. A theological claim could, on Baden's terms, be asked to meet that standard. It is not obvious in advance that any particular theological claim would pass. But the question would at least be the right shape — answerable rather than already-decided by the framework in which it gets asked.

Theology, as the next two essays in this sequence will show in closer detail, did not receive these as two live options weighed and one chosen on the merits. It received them through particular people, in a particular building, across a particular half-century — and what got carried forward into the twentieth-century theological mainstream was disproportionately Marburg's construal, with Baden's alternative engaged, in at least one major case, and then largely set aside. The next essay traces that transmission in person: the hallway, the seminar room, and the architects who taught the theologians who taught the next generation what kind of question a question about God could be.