## 1. Biographical Sketch



Wilhelm Windelband was born in 1848 in Potsdam, Germany. His father,
Johann Friedrich Windelband was a state secretary for the Province of
Brandenburg. Windelband studied in Jena, Berlin, and Gottingen,
attending lectures by Kuno Fischer (1824-1907) in Jena and
studying with Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) in Gottingen.
Fischer and Lotze would deeply influence Windelband's
philosophical thinking, as well as his work as a historian of
philosophy.



In 1870, Windelband completed his dissertation on *Die Lehren vom
Zufall* [*Doctrines of chance*] under Lotze's
supervision. The following year he served as a soldier in the
German-French war. After his military service, he completed his
habilitation in Leipzig and took up a position as
"Privatdozent" there. His habilitation was published in
1873 under the title *Ueber die Gewissheit der Erkenntniss: eine
psychologisch-erkenntnisstheoretische Studie* [*On the
certainty of knowledge: a psychological-epistemological study*].
In 1874, Windelband married Martha Wichgraf with whom he would have
four children.



Two years later, Windelband became professor (ordinarius) of
"inductive philosophy" in Zurich. He lectured on
psychology before taking up a position as professor of philosophy in
Freiburg im Breisgau in 1877. In 1882 he accepted an offer from the
University of Strasbourg. While his inaugural lectures in Zurich
and Freiburg had centered on the relation between psychology and
philosophy, his works from the Strasbourg period develop his core
themes in the philosophy of values and the philosophy of history.
Windelband served as "Rektor" of the University of
Strasbourg in 1894/95 and 1897/98. He remained in Strasbourg until
1903, when he accepted a call from the University of Heidelberg.
Between 1905 and 1908 he served as representative of the University of
Heidelberg in the Baden "Landtag". He was a member of the
Berlin Academy of Sciences, and of the Academies of Sciences of
Gottingen, Bayern and Heidelberg. He remained in Heidelberg and
taught there until his death in 1915.


## 2. From Kant to the Philosophy of Values



Windelband's views on normativity are strongly influenced by his
teacher Lotze. In his *Logic* (1874), Lotze distinguishes
between psychological laws which determine how thinking proceeds as a
matter of fact, and logical laws, which are normative laws and
prescribe how thinking ought to proceed (Lotze 1874: SSx;
SS332, SS337). This distinction also corresponds to a
distinction between act and content. Lotze observes that
"ideas" do occur in us as acts or events of the mind. But
their content does not consist in such acts, is not reducible to
mental activity, and does not exist in the way empirical processes and
entities may be said to exist. It is not real, but "valid"
(Lotze 1874: SSSS314-318).



The distinction between the factual and the normative would become the
cornerstone of Windelband's "philosophy of values".
In his early writings, however, Windelband does not yet embrace this
distinction. In his habilitation thesis *Uber die
Gewissheit der Erkenntnis* (1873), he argues that logic is a
normative discipline, but that it needs to be put on a psychological
basis. This is because the justification of our knowledge claims is
always dependent on and relative to specific epistemic purposes which,
in turn, are given psychologically. Although he criticizes the
identification of the conditions of knowledge with psychophysical
processes, he does think of psychology and logic or epistemology as
continuous with one another. His 1875 "Die Erkenntnislehre unter
dem volkerpsychologischen Gesichtspunkte" ["The
theory of knowledge from the perspective of folk-psychology"]
which was published in Moritz Lazarus' and Heyman
Steinthal's *Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und
Sprachwissenschaft* [*Journal of folk psychology and
linguistics*], is more radical. It denies that logical norms are
independent of the conscious mind and claims that the origins of
logical norms are to be found in the social history of humankind: the
principle of contradiction emerges in situations of social conflict
together with the distinction between true and false beliefs; and the
law of sufficient reason comes into being when conflicts between rival
views are no longer settled by brute force. On this picture, logical
principles exist only when humans cognize them. There is no boundary
between psychological acts and objective logical laws, or between
actual historical acceptance and normative validity.



This is precisely the type of thinking that Windelband will later
reject as "psychologistic", "historicist", and
"relativist" (1883: 116-117, 132). It is not clear
what led Windelband to this change of view, but a deeper engagement
with the *Critique of Pure Reason* and with the Kant
scholarship of his time, in particular with works by Kuno Fischer
(1860), Herman Cohen (1871), and Friedrich Paulsen (1875), seem to
have factored in. The clear contours of Windelband's
anti-psychologistic interpretation of Kant emerge for the first time
in his 1877 paper "Uber die verschiedenen Phasen der
Kantischen Lehre vom Ding-an-sich" ["On the different
stages of the Kantian doctrine of the thing-in-itself"]. In this
essay, Windelband argues against the idea, held by prominent figures
of the "back-to-Kant" movement like Friedrich Albert Lange
(1828-1875) and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), that
knowledge emerges from an interaction between subject and object.
According to their view, the object affects the subject's mind,
while the subject provides the *a priori* cognitive structures
that organize representations. These *a priori* structures are
innate as they consist in the psychophysical constitution of the human
sensory apparatus and mind. Cohen's critique of this
(mis)interpretation focuses on the concept of the *a priori*
and the question of objectivity (Cohen 1871). Windelband, in contrast,
takes the problem of the thing-in-itself and the concept of truth as
his starting points. His critique of the subject-object-interaction
model leads him to an immanent conception of truth, according to which
truth consists in the normative rules according to which our judgments
*ought* to be formed. The immanent concept of truth thus shifts
the focus of philosophical analysis on the universal and necessary
"rules" that ground our judgments.



The 1877 essay gives a genetic account of the development of
Kant's views about the thing-in-itself from the *Inaugural
Dissertation* (1770) to the second edition of the *Critique of
Pure Reason* (1787). This genetic reconstruction is supposed to
reveal the underlying philosophical problems and motivations that
drove Kant's thinking, as well as the inner tensions that,
according to Windelband, permeate critical philosophy. In particular,
Windelband identifies a "gulf" (1877: 225) between
Kant's critique of knowledge and the metaphysics of morals, as
well as a tension between the psychological account of the faculties,
and Kant's mature anti-psychologism. He distinguishes between
four phases in Kant's thinking about the thing-in-itself, and
argues that residues of the latter three stages are present in both
editions of the *Critique* (1781; 1787) and in the
*Prolegomena* (1783).



The first phase, Windelband argues, is that of the *Inaugural
Dissertation* (1770). Kant adopts Leibniz's distinction
between noumena and phenomena while formulating a genuinely novel
thought: he introduces the psychological distinction between receptive
sensibility and the spontaneous intellect. This distinction allows him
to maintain the claim that, unlike intuitions, concepts relate to
things-in-themselves (1877: 240-241).



In the second phase, Kant concerns himself more deeply with the
question how the concepts of the understanding can relate to objects.
He is driven to the insight that 



> 
> 
> [w]e can only have *a priori* knowledge of that which we
> produce by the lawlike forms of our rational activities
> [*Vernunfthandlungen*]. (1877: 246) 
> 
> 
> 



Here, Windelband follows Fischer's claim that the categories of
the understanding are *a priori* valid for experience because
they produce or "make" it (Fischer 1860). Because the
understanding cannot "make" the thing-in-itself, the
thing-in-itself cannot be known.



According to Windelband, Kant then proceeds to inquire why we are even
assuming the existence of things-in-themselves if we cannot know them.
Here he enters his third, most radical phase. Kant now thinks of the
thing-in-itself as a fiction, an illegitimate hypostasis in which 



> 
> 
> the universal form of the synthetic act of the understanding is seen
> as something that exists independently of experience. (1877: 254) 
> 
> 
> 



Windelband argues that it is only by dismissing the existence of the
thing-in-itself and by jettisoning the phenomena-noumena distinction
that Kant can undertake his anti-psychologistic turn. With the
rejection of the thing-in-itself, the characterization of sensibility
as "receptive" also needs to be abandoned. And that makes
a psychological construal of the faculties nonsensical. Kant is then
also able to abandon the concept of truth as correspondence between
representations and objects in favor of a strictly immanent
conception. The immanent conception defines truth in terms of the
universal and necessary rules that the relations between our
representations need to accord to (1877: 259-260).



And yet, Kant could not rest with this radical view given his
commitments in moral philosophy. Practical reason, and in particular
the idea that the moral law does not depend on the qualities of humans
as sensuous beings, but only on reason, demands a return to the
assumption that the thing-in-itself exists (1877: 262). In the fourth
phase, Kant thus reintroduces the thing-in-itself, while maintaining
his anti-psychologism.



This genetic reconstruction allows Windelband to think of the conflict
between the different views of the thing-in-itself that had emerged
within the neo-Kantian tradition as reflective of inherent tensions in
the *Critique*. He argues that Kant was especially unclear with
respect to psychologism: the distinction between judgment (as a
cognitive process) and justification (as logical and normative) is
inadequately articulated in the first *Critique*. Hence Kant is
at least partly responsible for the fact that in the first wave of
neo-Kantianism represented by Lange and Helmholtz "the new
concept of aprioricity was soon dragged down to the old idea of
psychological priority" (1883: 101).



But Windelband's approach to Kant is not merely historical. His
sympathies clearly lie with the Kant of the third phase. For
Windelband, the insight that natural psychological processes are
"utterly irrelevant" for the truth value of our
representations (1882b: 24), and the idea that the ultimate problem of
philosophy is that of normativity and justification--not a
*quaestio facti*, but a *quaestio juris* (1882b:
26)--need to be defended from Kant's own unclarities on
these matters. Windelband's "philosophy of values"
can thus be understood as an attempt to purify, explicate and develop
the radical insights of the anti-psychologistic move in Kant's
"third phase".



The cornerstone of this endeavor is the immanent conception of truth.
Windelband repeatedly returns to discussing the correspondence theory
of knowledge with its metaphor of a "mirror relation"
between mind and object. He criticizes the misconception that our
sensual perceptions are the things-in-themselves and that these things
could be compared with our representations. Any comparison must occur
between representations, since things and representations are
"incommensurable" (1881: 130). According to Windelband,
Kant's central innovation consists in the insight that the truth
of our judgments, and the relation of our representations to an object
are not to be found in correspondence at all. Rather, it consists in
the "rules" for combining representations (1881: 134).
This leads Windelband to define truth as the "normality of
thinking" (1881: 138)--with "normality" meaning
that thinking proceeds in accordance with rules or norms. Windelband
also conceptualizes the object of knowledge in terms of the rules of
judgment. The object of knowledge is nothing other than 



> 
> 
> a rule according to which representational elements ought to organize
> themselves, in order for them to be recognized as universally valid in
> this organization. (1881: 135).
> 
> 
> 



Windelband uses the terms "axioms" and
"values" interchangeably to refer to the most fundamental
rules, and he uses the term "norms" often, but not fully
consistently to refer to values or axioms as they relate to
psychological experience and the cultural-historical world. Focusing
his interpretation on "values" and "norms",
Windelband captures the structural similarity of Kant's three
*Critiques* in terms of immanent truth: if truth is nothing
other than accordance with a rule, then there is moral and aesthetic
truth in just the same way as there is epistemic truth (1881: 140). In
a later text, Windelband describes the unified project of the three
*Critiques* in terms of the necessary and universal relation
between thought and object. He writes that the postulates of practical
reason relate to intelligible objects (ideas) just "as
necessarily" as the intuitions and categories relate to the
object of experience, and that teleological judgment constructs the
purposive whole of nature just "as universally" as the
principles of pure understanding apply the categories to experience
(1904a: 151). While this formulation glosses over some of the nuances
of the distinction between constitutive and regulative uses of reason,
Windelband's main intention is not that of giving a detailed and
fully accurate reconstruction of Kant's philosophy. In line with
his famous dictum that "understanding Kant means to go beyond
him" (1915: iv), he instead seeks to revive the critical project
in a manner that allows it to answer the needs of his own time. And
Windelband thinks that the critical philosophy required at the time of
his writing is a "philosophy of values" which reveals the
most fundamental values in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.


## 3. The Factual, the Normative, and the Method of Philosophy



As indicated above, Windelband bases his "philosophy of
values" on Lotze's distinction between the factual and the
normative. Throughout his career, he seeks to explicate and clarify
this distinction and to illuminate its consequences for philosophical
method. 



In "Was ist Philosophie?" ["What is
philosophy?"] (1882), Windelband approaches the factual-normative
distinction by identifying two basic and irreducible types of
cognitive operations: judgments and evaluations. While judgments
relate representations in a synthesis, and thus expand our knowledge
about an object, evaluations presuppose an object as given. They do
not expand our knowledge. Rather, they express a relation between the
"evaluating consciousness" and the represented object in a
"feeling" of approval or disapproval (1882b:
29-30).



Despite characterizing evaluations in terms of the feelings and
subjective attitudes of the evaluating consciousness, Windelband
argues that some evaluations are "absolutely valid". Even
if they are not embraced by everyone as a matter fact, they entail a
normative demand: they *ought* to be accepted universally
according to an absolute value (1882b: 37). The basic idea seems to be
that the normative force of any particular evaluation that is carried
out by an empirical consciousness is derived from its relation to a
non-empirical, absolute value. Windelband argues that even if there is
disagreement about which evaluations ought to be embraced as universal
and necessary, the demand for absolute validity itself can be
recognized by everyone: we all believe in the distinction between that
which is absolutely valid and that which is not (1882b: 43).



Accordingly, there must be a system of absolute values from which the
validity of judgments in epistemology, aesthetics, and ethic derives.
Critical philosophy, then, is nothing other than the "science of
necessary and universal values" (1882b: 26) that explicates this
system and thus reveals the grounds of normative appraisal and valid
judgment. Note that for Windelband, normativity and validity are
closely linked, if not identical. Absolute values endow our judgments
with a normative demand. Our judgments are valid if and only if they
raise a normative demand, that is if they *ought* to be
accepted universally and necessarily.



Having distinguished the factual and the normative by reference to
different cognitive operations, Windelband also seeks to identify the
points of contact between the two realms. Ultimately, he wants to
explain how empirical beings can recognize absolute values. His idea
that there is a system of absolute values is thus accompanied by the
conception of a "normal consciousness". In normal
consciousness the absolute system of values is, at least partially,
represented in the form of norms that are known by "empirical
consciousness" and that have an effect on it.



Starting from the immanent conception of truth as accordance with a
rule, Windelband distinguishes from among the infinite possible
combinations of representations that might or might not be formed by
empirical consciousness a subset of combinations: the subset that
accords with universal and necessary rules, and which hence ought to
be formed (1881: 135-139: 1882a: 72-73). This subset is
what he calls "normal consciousness" (1881: 139). Thought
is related to and valid for an object if of the infinite possible
combinations of our representations, our thinking forms exactly those
judgments that "ought to be thought" (1881: 135). One
might say that empirical consciousness contains (parts) of the system
of absolute values as its "normal consciousness". To the
extent that philosophy seeks not only to reveal the absolute system of
values, but also to inquire into how they can be norms for
empirical--embodied, psychological and historically
situated--human beings, critical philosophy is not only a
"science of values", but also a "science of normal
consciousness" (1882b: 46).



Although Windelband refers to the "philosophy of values"
as a science, he emphasizes that philosophy does not rely on the
methods of the empirical sciences. Philosophy is a second-order
science that reflects on the methods and results of the various
empirical disciplines in order to reveal the values "by virtue
of which we can evaluate the form and extent of their validity"
(1907: 9). Crucially, this reflective endeavor cannot be carried out
by means of empirical investigation. Here, the distinction between the
factual and the normative assumes a methodological dimension.



In "Kritische oder genetische Methode?" ["Critical or
genetic method?"] (1883) Windelband lays out in great detail the
differences between the "explanatory" and
"genetic" method of the empirical sciences, on the one
hand, and the "teleological" or "critical"
method of philosophy, on the other. And he warns of the devastating
consequences that result if the two are conflated. He singles out two
disciplines that might be thought to be relevant to philosophical
questions about values: individual psychology and cultural history. He
does not call into question the legitimacy of these disciplines or of
the "genetic method" in general. He even thinks that the
genetic method can be applied to values. That is, individual
psychology and cultural history can yield valid genetic theories that
explain the actual acceptance and development of values in an
individual's mental life and in cultural history. But actual
acceptance is not the same as normative validity, and validity proper
cannot be found by generalizing from the empirical. A firm boundary
separates the genetic method and its approach toward actually accepted
values from the critical method of philosophy which concerns values as
normative.



Windelband's argument against the application of the genetic
method to philosophical questions has three components. First, he
argues that the genetic method cannot solve philosophical questions
about normativity and validity, because there is too much variety
regarding the values that have been and are actually accepted. The
empirical method will not uncover values that are universally embraced
by all cultures (1883: 114-115).



Second, the genetic method can show and explain why some values have
been accepted by this or that individual, or in this or that culture.
But insofar as it is an empirical method, it cannot establish that the
values in question are universal and necessary. 



> 
> 
> The universally valid can be found neither by inductive comparison of
> all individuals and peoples nor by deductive inference from ...
> the 'essence' of man. (1883: 115) 
> 
> 
> 



Windelband points to the absurdity of trying to justify by empirical
means that which is the presupposition of any empirical theory: the
axioms upon which the validity of any theory is based (1883: 113).



Third, Windelband argues that the genetic method leads to relativism.
The argument rests on the two claims just outlined, and can be
reconstructed as follows. There is variation between individuals and
cultures regarding which beliefs are actually prevalent, and the
naturally necessary [*naturnotwendig*] laws of psychology lead
to the formation of both true and false beliefs. As an empirical
method with no access to the universal and necessary, the genetic
method of cultural history and individual psychology has no criterion
for distinguishing between valid and invalid beliefs. This means that
it has to treat all beliefs as "equally justified [*alle
gleich berechtigt*]" (1882b: 36).



> 
> 
> For [the genetic explanation], there is thus no absolute measure; it
> must treat all beliefs as equally justified because they are all
> equally necessary by nature... [R]elativism is the necessary
> consequence of the purely empiricist treatment of philosophy's
> cardinal question. (1883: 115-116)
> 
> 
> 



Note that Windelband does not differentiate between the idea that all
beliefs have only relative validity and the claim that they are all
equally justified or equally valid. In his view, the genetic method
does not merely render belief relative to individuals and cultures; it
also forces us to conclude that all beliefs are equally valid. An
empirical psychology or cultural history that oversteps its boundaries
and tries to address philosophical questions about normativity and
validity leads to "historicism",
"psychologism", and "relativism" and destroys
the basis of normative appraisal altogether.



Having rejected the genetic method in philosophy, Windelband explains
that philosophical method is purely "formal". The axioms,
or values, on which the validity of our judgments is based upon cannot
be proven. But it can be shown that the purposes of recognizing truth,
beauty, and can only be achieved if absolute values are presupposed.
Hence the critical method of philosophy has a teleological
structure:



> 
> 
> [F]or the critical method these axioms, regardless of the extent to
> which they are actually accepted, are norms which ought to be valid if
> thinking wants to fulfil the purpose of being true, volition the
> purpose of being good, and feeling the purpose of capturing beauty, in
> a manner that warrants universal validation. (1883: 109)
> 
> 
> 



And yet, while Windelband insists on the distinction between the
empirical-genetic method of science and the critical-teleological
method of philosophy, he takes his theory of "normal
consciousness" to imply that empirical facts do play a role in
philosophy. In particular, he wants to maintain that empirical facts
about individual psychology and culture can provide the starting
points for philosophical reflection. He therefore describes the
philosophical method as a method of reflection
[*Selbstbesinnung*], in which the empirical mind becomes aware
of its own "normal consciousness". Philosophy examines
existing claims to validity in light of teleological considerations,
and in this way reveals the "processual forms of psychic life
that are necessary conditions for the realization of universal
appraisal" (1883: 125). Put differently, teleological
considerations allow the empirical consciousness to distinguish within
itself between empirical and contingent contents, on the one hand, and
the "contents and forms" that "have the value of
normal consciousness", on the other (1882b: 45-46; 1881:
139).


## 4. The Problem of Freedom



The distinction between the normative and the factual and the question
how the two realms are related also structure Windelband's
reflections on human freedom. Throughout his intellectual career,
Windelband returns to this problem, presenting different strategies
for reconciling causal determinism and human freedom. His
dissertation, completed under Lotze in 1870, deals with the concepts
of chance, causal necessity, and freedom. At that time, Windelband
still embraces the Kantian concept of transcendental freedom,
according to which the noumenal self is the uncaused cause of all
intentional action (1870: 16-19). But after the 1877 essay,
which had uncovered the anti-metaphysical rejection of the
thing-in-itself in Kant's "third phase" as the
radical starting point for the "philosophy of values",
Kant's metaphysical solution to the problem of freedom ceased to
convince him.



Windelband's most fully developed effort to arrive at an
alternative solution to the problem of freedom can be found in his
1882 essay "Normen und Naturgesetze" ["Norms and
natural laws"] and in his 1904 lectures *Uber
Willenfreiheit* [*On freedom of the will*]. In these texts,
Windelband articulates the following core claims. First, the Kantian
dualism between phenomena and noumena needs to be overcome, and we
need to think of moral responsibility in a way that does not
presuppose a noumenal realm. Second, causal explanation and normative
evaluation are two irreducible, but ultimately compatible, ways of
viewing, or constructing, the world of appearances. Third, the object
of moral evaluation is neither a particular moral action, nor a
transcendentally free will, but a
"personality"--understood as a set of relatively
stable motivations and psychological dispositions--that is the
natural cause of our actions. Although articulating these same core
thoughts, the two texts differ in how they motivate these ideas, and
in the consequences that they draw from them.



"Normen und Naturgesetze" begins by postulating a conflict
between natural law and moral law: if the moral law demands an action
that would also result from natural causes alone, it is superfluous.
But if it demands an action that does not accord with natural causes,
it is useless, because natural necessity cannot be violated (1882a:
59).



Windelband holds that causal determinism extends to mental life and
that for this reason the conception of freedom as a fundamental
capacity that violates "the naturally necessary functions of
psychic life" (1882a: 60) is implausible from the get-go.
However, he grants that there are two different and irreducible ways
of viewing the same objects: on the one hand, there is psychological
science which explains what the facts of mental life are. On the other
hand, there are ideal norms, which do not explain what the facts are,
but express how they ought to be (1882a: 66-67). The solution to
the antagonism between natural law and moral law is to be found in the
relation between these two points of view.



Here, Windelband introduces the claim that although ideal norms differ
from causal laws, they are not incommensurable with them and, in fact,
act on us causally. His argument builds on his conception of
"normal consciousness" as the representation of the system
of absolute values within empirical consciousness. Windelband argues
that a mind that becomes aware of its own "normal
consciousness" is capable of acting on the basis of and in
agreement with the norms that it has discovered within itself: 



> 
> 
> [E]ach norm carries with it a sense that the real process of thinking
> or willing ought to form itself in accordance with it. With immediate
> evidence a form of psychological coercion attaches itself to the
> awareness of the norm. (1882a: 85) 
> 
> 
> 



The norm becomes a determining factor in and for empirical
consciousness. It acts as "part of the causal law" and
determines psychological life with natural necessity (1882a: 87; see
also 1883: 122).



The result is what Windelband calls a "deterministic concept of
freedom" (1882a: 88), according to which freedom consists in
nothing other than the becoming-aware of the norms that command how we
ought to act: our becoming-aware of them determines our actions with
natural necessity. Freedom is the "determination of empirical
consciousness by normal consciousness" (1882a: 88).



But Windelband still needs to explain how it is possible that we can
be aware of a moral norm and not act on it. Long passages in the 1904
lectures are devoted to developing the thought that what determines
our moral decisions and actions, and hence decisions if and when we
act in accordance with the moral law is our "personality".
Windelband approaches this as a theoretical, not as a normative,
question and concludes that we may well call those decisions and
actions "free" that are predominantly determined by our
constant personality, as opposed to being determined by external
circumstances or contingent affects. Freedom is "the unhindered
causality of a pre-existing willing" (1904b: 106).



However, Windelband concedes that this analysis does not exhaust our
concept of freedom since there is not merely a theoretical, but also a
normative use of the concept. In this context, Windelband acknowledges
the attraction of the Kantian argument that moral responsibility is
possible only if we have transcendental free will and with it the
capacity for genuine alternatives: we could act differently given the
same circumstances. But Windelband rejects the project of grounding
human freedom in a noumenal world. He thinks that Kant's
distinction between an intelligible noumenal self that is the uncaused
cause of our actions, and a deterministic empirical world as
constructed by our understanding reproduces the same problems that
earlier metaphysical accounts of freedom had encountered. He discusses
two problems in particular.



First, on the one hand, the personality that a particular individual
has developed is part of the empirical world and therefore, on the
metaphysical picture, does not feature into the free decisions of the
individual. But, on the other hand, the noumenal self is empty. It is
an abstract, general self, uniform in all of us; and thus it cannot
account for the differences in the moral life of individuals (1904b:
161-163).



Second, transcendental freedom is fundamentally incompatible with the
"all- encompassing reality and causality of the deity"
(1904b: 187). God is the ultimate uncaused cause, and the only way to
understand this thought is by assuming a "timeless
causality" between God and the intelligible characters (noumenal
selves)--a view which ends up undermining the freedom of the
latter (1904b: 186-9)



Having concluded that Kantian dualism fails to avoid the pitfalls of
earlier metaphysical approaches to freedom, Windelband abandons the
concept of transcendental freedom altogether. But while in 1882 his
alternative had been the "deterministic concept of
freedom", in 1904 Windelband proceeds to articulate the view
that the concept of free will is a mere placeholder in our normative
discourse. We are not free in the metaphysical sense, but we are
perfectly entitled to pass moral judgment. And we use the language of
freedom to express the fact that when passing moral judgment we
disregard questions of causal determination.



To spell out this idea, Windelband takes up the 1882 distinction
between the "points of view" of explanatory science and
ideal norms. He now argues that there are two ways of constructing the
world of appearances: we construct the world of appearances according
to causal laws, and we construct it according to our normative
evaluations. Evaluation 



> 
> 
> reflects within the manifoldness of the given on those moments only
> which can be put in relation to the norm... [O]ne could call the
> manner in which the objects of experience, the given manifoldness of
> the factual, appear uniformly in light of such an evaluation another
> form of "appearance".... (1904b: 195-6) 
> 
> 
> 



Freedom then means not that the will is an uncaused cause. When
speaking of freedom, we appeal to the uncaused merely in the sense
that we evaluate matters independently of causal deterministic
processes (1904b: 197-198).



Windelband believes that his view preserves moral responsibility. As
described above, his theoretical investigation had yielded the result
that that which determines the extent to which we act in agreement
with a moral norm is our personality or character. Personality is the
constant cause of voluntary action, it determines our actions
necessarily according to general psychological laws. From a practical
standpoint, personality then is also the ultimate object of moral
appraisal. We hold personality responsible, and we are justified in
doing so, even if the formation of personality is itself a causal
process over which the individual has no control. Ultimately, the
upshot of Windelband's discussion is that moral responsibility
does not presuppose a noumenal world and transcendental freedom,
because it does not presuppose that we could act otherwise. It merely
presupposes that another person in the same circumstances could act
otherwise. The idea that one could have acted differently refers 



> 
> 
> not to the concrete human being in these concrete circumstances, but
> to the generic concept of the human being. (1904b: 212)
> 
> 
> 


## 5. The Natural and the Historical Sciences



In Windelband's view, a reconsideration of the Kantian project
is not only necessary because of its inherent tensions; broader
developments in nineteenth-century culture and science also
necessitate an adaptation of the critical method to changed historical
circumstances. One important factor is the professionalization of the
historical disciplines that had been underway since the early
nineteenth century (1907: 12). One of Windelband's central and
best known philosophical contributions concerns the question what
distinguishes the "historical sciences", that is, those
disciplines that study the human-historical and cultural world, from
the natural sciences. Windelband's answer to this question is in
line with his formal-teleological conception of philosophy: by
explicating the autonomous presuppositions of historical method,
critical philosophy safeguards the historical sciences against
methodological holism, namely the view that there is only one
scientific method, and that this is the method of physics and natural
science.



Windelband shares the goal of securing the autonomy of the historical
disciplines with his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey. In his 1883
*Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften* [*Introduction to
the human sciences*] Dilthey had founded the distinction between
the natural sciences and the human sciences or "sciences of
spirit" on a distinction between outer and inner experience.
While outer experience forms the basis of hypothetical knowledge in
natural science, inner experience discloses "from within"
how the individual is an intersection of social and cultural relations
(Dilthey 1883: 30-32, 60-61, 88-89). Inner
experience is at the same time psychological and socio-historical, and
a descriptive psychology capable of grasping the integrated nexus of
inner experience can provide the "sciences of spirit" with
a solid foundation (Dilthey 1894).



Windelband profoundly disagrees with Dilthey's strategy for
demarcating the historical disciplines. In his Strasbourg
rector's address "Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft"
["History and natural science"] from 1894, he takes issue
with the suggestion that the facts of the "sciences of
spirit" derive from a particular type of experience. He takes
Dilthey to endorse an introspective view of psychological method. To
this he objects that the facts of the historical disciplines do not
derive from inner experience alone, and that inner perception is a
dubious method in the first place. He also classifies psychology with
the natural sciences, rejecting Dilthey's idea that the
human-historical disciplines could be founded on a non-explanatory and
non-hypothetical descriptive psychology. Perhaps most fundamentally,
Windelband rejects the term "sciences of spirit" on the
ground that it suggests that the distinction between different
sciences rests on a material distinction between different objects:
spirit and nature (Windelband 1894: 141-143).



Windelband seeks an alternative method for science-classification that
is purely formal. His reflections take scientific justification in its
most abstract form as their starting point: justification in science
is either inductive or deductive, Windelband argues, and the basic
relation on which all knowledge is based is between the general and
the particular (1883: 102-103).



The distinction between different empirical sciences is then also to
be sought at this level. In particular, Windelband argues that science
might pursue one of two different "knowledge goals" (1894:
143): it "either seeks the general in the form of natural law or
the particular in the historically determined form" (1894: 145).
The former approach is that of the "nomothetic sciences"
which seek to arrive at universal apodictic judgments, treating the
particular and unique as a mere exemplar or special case of the type
or of the generic concept. The "idiographic sciences", in
contrast, aim to arrive at singular assertoric judgments that
represent a unique object in its individual formation (1894: 150).



Windelband emphasizes that the distinction between nomothetic and
idiographic sciences is a purely formal and teleological one. One and
the same object can be approached from both points of view, and which
method is appropriate depends entirely on the goal or purpose of the
investigation. Moreover, most sciences will involve both general and
particular knowledge. The idiographic sciences in particular depend on
general and causal knowledge which has been derived from the
nomothetic sciences (1894: 156-157).



Note, however, that Windelband is not consistently restricting his
analysis to the formal level. He tends to use the terms
"nomothetic" and "natural" sciences, and the
terms "idiographic" and "historical" sciences
interchangeably, which at least suggests a correspondence between
scientific goals, methods, and objects.



Although Windelband does not spell this out in great detail, he also
suggests that values are of integral importance to the idiographic
method. First, he argues that the selection of relevant historical
facts depends on an assessment of what is valuable to us (1894:
153-154). Second, he suggests that the integration of particular
facts into larger wholes is only possible if meaningful, value-laden
relations can be established such that "the particular feature
is a meaningful part of a living intuition of the whole
[*Gesamtanschauung*]" (1894: 154). And third, he claims
that we value the particular, unique, and individual in a way in which
we do not value the general and recurrent, and that the experience of
the individual is indeed at the root of our "feelings of
value" (1894: 155-156).



It is Windelband's student Heinrich Rickert who takes up these
suggestions and develops them into a systematic account of the
"individuating" and "value-relating"
"concept-formation" of the "historical sciences of
culture" (Rickert 1902). Rickert argues that "scientific
concept formation", by which science overcomes the
"extensive and intensive manifold" of reality, depends on
a principle of selection. The principle of selection at work in the
natural sciences is that of "generalization". For this
reason, the natural sciences cannot account for the unique and
unrepeatable character of reality. The historical sciences, in
contrast, form their concepts in a manner that allows them to capture
individual realities (Rickert 1902: 225, 236, 250-251). They do
so on the basis of values: values guide the selection of which
particular historical facts belong to and can be integrated into a
specific historical "individuality" (examples being
"the Renaissance", "the Reformation" or
"the German nation state"). According to Rickert, one can
clearly distinguish the theoretical value-relation that is the basis
of historical science and practical evaluation. The historian relies
on values but does not evaluate his material (Rickert 1902:
364-365). Building on Windelband's core ideas about
historical method, Rickert arrives at a more refined and systematized
account of how historical science forms its concepts, that ultimately
leads to an account of what culture as an object of scientific study
amounts to.



In some of his later writings, Windelband will pick up the more
developed thoughts of his student Rickert. For example, he claims that
each science creates its objects according to the manner in which it
forms its concepts (1907: 18), and that the historical sciences rely
on a system of universal values when making selections about what
enters into their concepts (1907: 20).


## 6. The History of Philosophical Problems



A large part of Windelband's *oeuvre* consists of
writings in the history of philosophy. Windelband primarily covers
modern philosophy from the Renaissance to his own time, but he also
published on ancient philosophy. As a historian, Windelband is heavily
indebted to Fischer. And yet, he goes significantly beyond his
teacher, developing a new method and mode of historical presentation.
Windelband conceives of the history of philosophy as a "history
of problems". Rather than presenting a chronological sequence of
great minds, he organizes the presentation of philosophical ideas
according to the fundamental problems around which the philosophical
debates and arguments of an age were structured. Windelband also takes
a reflective attitude towards his own historiographical practice and
seeks to clarify the goals and systematic relevance of the history of
philosophy.



In these reflections, Windelband seeks to integrate two main thoughts:
First, the idea that philosophy is a reflection of its time and age
and, second, the conviction that the history of philosophy has
systematic significance. Windelband finds both thoughts in
Hegel's approach to the history of philosophy. Mirroring
Hegel's famous dictum that "philosophy is its own time
apprehended in thought", he speaks of philosophy the
"self-consciousness of developing cultural life" (1909:
4). He also applauds Hegel's "deep insight" that the
history of philosophy realizes reason and thus has intrinsic relevance
for systematic philosophy (1883: 133). Windelband thinks of history as
the "organon of philosophy" (1905: 184), as a guide to the
absolute values that the critical method seeks to reveal.



But despite the Hegelian gloss of these two claims, Windelband is
critical of Hegelianism. This is primarily because he has a different
understanding of the idea that philosophy is "its own time
apprehended in thought". For Windelband, this means that
philosophical thinking is shaped by historically contingent
factors.



Accordingly, Windelband formulates two criticisms of the Hegelian
conception of the history of philosophy. First, he finds fault with
the idea that the order in which successive philosophical ideas emerge
is necessary and that--in virtue of being necessary--it has
systematic significance: 



> 
> 
> [I]n its essentially empirical determination which is accidental with
> respect to the "idea" the historical process of
> development cannot have this systematic significance. (1883: 133, see
> also 1905: 176-177) 
> 
> 
> 



The history of philosophy is not only shaped by the necessary
self-expression of reason, but also by the causal necessity of
cultural history. The cultural determinants of philosophical thinking
lead to "problem-convolutions" (1891: 11), in which
various, conceptually unrelated philosophical questions merge with one
another. Windelband also emphasizes that the "individual
factor" of the philosopher's character and personality is
relevant for how philosophical problems and concepts are articulated
in a given historical moment (1891: 12)



Second, although Windelband agrees that the historical development of
philosophical ideas is partly driven by critique and self-improvement,
he does not think of this process in terms of progress. Windelband
probes the often unacknowledged presuppositions of our talk about
progress. In "Pessimismus und Wissenschaft" (1876)
Windelband argues that science cannot decide between historical
optimism and historical pessimism (1876: 243). In "Kritische und
genetische Methode" (1883) he gives a more detailed analysis of
why this is the case. Historical change itself is not progress, he
observes. In order to determine whether a given historical development
is progressive, we need to be in possession of "a standard, the
idea of a purpose, which determines the value of the change"
(1883: 119). Windelband is wary of triumphalist narratives that
identify the historical development of present-day values with
progress. History is determined by contingent cultural factors and
could have produced "delusions and follies ... which we
only take to be truths now because we are inescapably trapped in
them" (1883: 121). Of progress we can only speak legitimately,
if we are in possession of an absolute value that allows us to assess
the historical development. At minimum, this means that the appeal to
a progressive history of philosophy is of no help when it comes to the
systematic task of uncovering the system of absolute values: progress
cannot aid in revealing absolute values as it presupposes them.



But while the fact that philosophy is at least partly determined by
contingent cultural factors undercuts necessity and progress, it also
opens the door for a reconceptualization of the "essence"
of philosophy. In his *Einleitung in die Philosophie*
[*Introduction to philosophy*] (1914) Windelband reflects on
the fact that everyday life, culture, and science do already contain
general concepts of the world. These concepts form the initial content
of philosophical reflection (1914: 6). But the business of philosophy
only takes off when these initial concepts, and the assumptions that
are baked into them, become unstable and collapse. An experience of
shock and unsettling prompts philosophy to question, rethink, and
critically assess the concepts and ideas of everyday life and science.
In this process of critical assessment, philosophy strives to purify
these concepts and ideas, and to connect them into a coherent, unified
system. According to Windelband, in this process of conceptual
reorganization, a rational necessity exerts itself. The
"vigorous and uncompromising rethinking of the preconditions of
our spiritual life" creates certain philosophical problems
"with objective necessity" (1914: 8).



Windelband provides neither a very detailed account of what
"philosophical problems" exactly are, nor of how precisely
they spring from the unsettling of everyday concepts. But he makes
three claims that, taken together, establish that philosophy, even
when reflecting its particular age, is not solely determined by
contingent cultural factors. First, philosophical puzzles stem from
the "inadequacy and contradictory imbalance" of the
contents that philosophy receives from life and science (1891: 10).
That is, true philosophical problems emerge whenever the systematizing
drive of philosophy is confronted with the deep incoherence of life.
Second, philosophical problems are necessary because the conceptual
"material" found in life already contains "the
objective presuppositions and logical coercions for all rational
deliberation about it" (1891: 10). The necessity of
philosophical problems is logical necessity. Third, despite historical
change 



> 
> 
> [c]ertain differences of world- and life-attitudes reoccur over and
> over again, combat each other and destroy each other in mutual
> dialectics. (1914: 10) 
> 
> 
> 



Because philosophical problems emerge "necessarily" and
"objectively", they also reoccur throughout history.
Philosophical problems are thus timeless and eternal (1891:
9-10; 1914: 11)).



Windelband also believes that the history of philosophy, pursued
empirically and scientifically, can disentangle from one another the
"temporal causes and timeless reasons" (1905: 189) that
together give rise to the emergence of philosophical problems. 



> 
> 
> Only through knowledge of the empirical trajectory that is free of
> constructions can come to light .... what is the share of
> ... the needs of the age on the one hand...but on the other
> hand that of the objective necessities of conceptual progress. (1905:
> 189) 
> 
> 
> 



At this point, Windelband reaches a clear verdict on the goal and
systematic significance of the history of philosophy: it lies in
disentangling that which is contingently actually accepted from that
which is "valid in itself" (1905: 199). History is the
"organon of critical philosophy" precisely to the extent
that it allows us to distinguish the actually accepted norms of
cultural life from that which is absolutely valid (1883: 132).


## 7. Critical Philosophy and World-Views



Windelband's "philosophy of values" is also an
intervention into debates that had preoccupied the neo-Kantian
movement and German academic philosophy more broadly since the
materialism controversy [*Materialismusstreit*]: what the
relation between science and world-views is, and whether philosophy is
capable of providing a "world-view".



Given that he takes the core of the critical project to consist in a
*quaestio juris*--a concern with normativity--it
seems surprising that throughout the 1880s Windelband insists that
critical philosophy does not provide a "world-view": the
project of revealing the highest values of human life has nothing to
do with "world-views", he argues, because it does not
provide a metaphysical account of the world and our place in it (1881:
140-141, 145). Questions about optimism or pessimism cannot be
answered by means of "scientific" philosophy, since they
depend on the idea that the world as a whole has a purpose. And claims
about the ultimate purpose of the world arise only from an
unscientific, subjective, and arbitrary projection of particular
purposes onto the universe as such (1876: 231). Philosophy is a
science, albeit a second-order formal science, and is thus barred from
formulating a world-view that would be metaphysical in character.



After 1900, however, Windelband's position on the question of
world-views changes. He now claims that it is the aim of philosophy to
provide a "world-view" with scientific justification
(1907: 1). Given that Windelband holds that philosophy in general and
the Kantian project in particular need to be adapted to the developing
circumstances of time and culture, this change of position is not
inconsequential: the cultural landscape of the early 1900s demands a
revision of the neo-Kantian project that highlights not only its
"negative" and critical aspects, but also develops its
positive implications for cultural life (1907, 8). The shift to a more
positive attitude towards philosophy as a world-view corresponds to a
re-evaluation of Kant's oeuvre, in which Windelband at least
partly suspends the anti-metaphysical rigor of the "third
phase" of the genesis of the *Critique of Pure Reason*,
and attributes more relevance to the *Critique of the Power of
Judgment*. This view is taken up by Rickert, who later argues in
more detail that the third *Critique* forms
the core of critical philosophy, and that Kant's metaphysical
project can provide the basis for an encompassing theory of
world-views (Rickert 1924: 153-168).



In his 1904 "Nach hundert Jahren" ["After one
hundred years"] Windelband provides yet another take on the
relation between the natural and the normative. Declaring the question
how the realm of natural laws is related to the realm of values to be
the "highest" philosophical endeavor (1904a: 162), he now
sees in the *Critique of the Power of Judgment* the possibility
of solving this problem: here one finds the idea that the purposive
system of nature gives rise to the value-determined process of human
history. The central concept that allows for connecting nature and
history in this way is that of "realization" (1904a:
162-3).



The turn to the concept of "realization" also leads to a
shift in how Windelband approaches the problem of science
classification. In 1894, Windelband had thought of the nomothetic and
idiographic sciences as two fundamental yet disjointed and even
incommensurable approaches to seeking knowledge of the word:
"Law and event persist next to each other as the last,
incommensurable factors of our representation of the world"
(1894: 160). But in 1904, he claims that the concept of realization
provides a common, unified basis for the natural and the historical
sciences (1904a: 163).



Windelband's language assumes a Hegelian tone. Critical
philosophy equipped with the concept of realization is able to grasp
and express the "spiritual value content" of reality
(1904a: 165). History is capable of revealing the universal value
content in the contingent maze of human interests and desires, and in
so doing captures "the progressive realization of rational
values" (1907: 20-21). The human as a rational being is
not determined psychologically or naturally, but humanity is a
historical task: "only as a historical being, as the developing
species, do we have a share in world-reason" (1910a: 283: see
also 1905: 185). Windelband even suggests that history itself has a
goal, namely the realization of a common humanity (1908: 257).



These remarks remain cursory however, and there is room for debate
over how much of Hegel's ontology of history Windelband takes on
board, as well as whether his talk about the progressive realization
of reason in history is incompatible with the formal-teleological
method that he had endorsed in the 1880s and 1890s. His
"Kulturphilosophie und transzendentaler Idealismus"
["Philosophy of culture and transcendental idealism"] of
1910 presents us with a puzzling fusion of Kantian and Hegelian
language. The goal of critical philosophy is that of revealing the
unity of culture, Windelband now claims, and this unity can only be
found 



> 
> 
> by grasping the essence of the function ... which is common for
> all the particular ...cultural activities: and this can be
> nothing else than the self-consciousness of reason which produces its
> objects and in them the realm of validity itself. (1910b: 293).
> 
> 
>