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Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism: History and Metaphysics in Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Neo-Kantians

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There is very little material available on Neo Kantianism in English. This book, an exploration of the development of Heidegger's thought against the background of nineteenth century NeoKantianism (actually only the 'Baden' school) and historicism (Heidegger studied under the NeoKantian Heinrich Rickert ), is one of the few.

The book in general is a lucid and valuable exploration some of the roots of Heidegger's thinking; however, it strikes me that there are a number of conceptual confusions in the book. For instance, in the long opening chapter we are told on one page that modernist thought 'is punctuated by a peculiarly historicist understanding of time as a linear, rosary bead sequence of cause and effect', while only a page later we are told that 'the modern experience of history is acausal, discontinuous, and ironic'.

Likewise, we read about 'the historicist narrative of progressive and unitary time', but this seems to conflict with the relativism and attention to events in their historical singularity that historicism is said to have ushered in.

Bambach wishes to see Heidegger as a key figure in the transition from a modernist to a post-modernist understanding (this thought should give us pause, however, considering Heidegger's own criticisms of another thinker often linked with post-modernism, namely Nietzsche) but also admits that the distinction between the two categories is 'slippery', and admits that both are essentially reactive in character. But these interesting thoughts from the introduction are not developed in the rest of the book; if these terms are vague, it would seem unwise to continue to rely on them to shape one's analysis.

Rickert, Heidegger's NeoKantian teacher, comes in for a lot of criticism (following Heidegger). Although concerned with the problem of historical relativism as much as Heidegger, Bambach places Rickert's thought firmly in the 'Cartesian-Kantian' tradition, which is supposed to suffer from internal tensions that ultimately led to these philosophical crises. According to Bambach in this tradition the object of cognition is presented as already 'there' in the world, already given, and hence separate from the subject. However, in NeoKantianism the object is most certainly not 'there' for us, at least the way it is in the usual kinds of realism. Were it to be, it would violate Rickert's 'principle of continuity', that states that reality (and so subject and object) is continuous with every other part. As well, Bambach quotes Rickert as arguing that no-one could seriously maintain that an absolute or value-free observation of reality is at all possible. As values determine the concepts by which we parcel up the 'heterogeneous continuum' of reality, the objects of experience for Rickert cannot be completely free of conceptual determination.

Likewise Bambach often claims that the Neo-Kantian approach is grounded in the timelessness of the a priori, and contrasts this with the contextual approaches of Dilthey and Heidegger, which are grounded in time - but this seems to me to be a misunderstanding of the a priori. The a priori may be timeless in a sense, in that it is a category of judgments made prior to experience and thus seemingly oblivious to change in experience (and so timeless), but the a priori is not a thing or a ground as such, but a class of judgements, which may apply to time or temporal categories, though not in need of experience to be formulated. For example, Kant included judgments about causality in the a priori. Hence the a priori need not exclude time in this sense. At any rate, it is not obvious to this reader that there are no transcendental elements in Heidegger's thought. In fact rather late in the book Bambach admits that 'right up through Being and Time, Heidegger's thought was marked by a concern for a transcendental solution to the crisis of the sciences and to the problem of historical relativism', which leaves one puzzled as to the criticisms of Rickert's 'transcendental formalism' earlier in the book.

Bambach claims that 'Heidegger shared with Dilthey, Rickert, and Windelband the aim of combating the relativistic implications of historicism. But Being and Time, understood within its own problematic, is hardly a considered response to the historicist debate.' By this Bambach means to see the thought of Heidegger as s transformative response to the 'crisis' of the title, of which the historicist debate forms a central part, in which the other thinkers in this volume remained entrapped to some extent or another (due to their inability to free themselves from 'Cartesian-Kantian' presuppositions). Yet the lesson that this reader takes from the book is that Heidegger, despite everything, is as much a part of the general ambit of the problematic which he criticizes. Is Rickert's insistence that history must study individuals all that different from Heidegger's attempt to deconstruct the 'metaphysics of presence'? Dasein and umwelt (Heidegger), heterogeneous individuality and continuity (Rickert), Satz von Phänomenalität and Satz von der Totalität des Erlebens (Dilthey), seem rather like parallel explorations of varying perspicuity and varying philosophical persuasions. Rather then sharply separated from his predecessors due to his ability to throw off 'Cartesian-Kantian' presuppositions, Heidegger seems as much a fellow traveller on the road of nineteenth century historicism and crisis (which, it should be said, never troubled the historical Descartes or Kant).

Charles R. Bambach has done us a kindness by providing us with this detailed, ambitious, and thoroughly readable treasure of scholarship. He demonstrates, above all, the kind of scholarly precision and erudition that is sorely lacking in most books on Heidegger. This book is a must read for anyone interested in 19th and 20th century philosophy of history. It is far superior to its only comparable predecessor, Jeffrey A. Barash's "Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning."

The only negative thing I have to say about this book is that the thread of the argument is inscrutable at times. The overall point, of course, is quite clear, but one tends to become lost in the details. The last chapter on Heidegger is particularly flawed in this respect.

All the same, this book is a new departure in Heidegger scholarship, and ought to be well-received by all.