Neo-Kantianism, Russian

2. Epistemological Neo-Kantianism

Some scholars trace the beginnings of Russian Neo-Kantianism as far back as the early writings of Pëtr Lavrov in the 1860s and Vladimir Lesevich in the 1870s. Nevertheless the first explicit stirrings date from the following decade. Although, unlike the Germans, the Russian Neo-Kantians in general paid little attention to the natural sciences, the initiator, leader and philosophically most influential member of the movement Aleksandr Vvedenskii (1856–1925) started his career with a lengthy master’s thesis – he never attained a doctorate – on the concept of matter. In it he upheld the basic thrust of Kant’s dynamic model of elementary physical processes against the backdrop of contemporary theories. In his mature years he came to call his own stance ’logicism’, which he conceived as a logical proof of the impossibility of metaphysical knowledge and, not immodestly, as the distinctive Russian contribution to philosophy on a par with British empiricism, French positivism and German Kantianism in their opposition to such knowledge. Logicism, in Vvedenskii’s eyes, presupposed no theory of a priori judgment or conclusions about the nature of space and time. Yet he believed it possible to demonstrate, without the elaborate reasoning and considerations found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (see Kant, I. §§4–8), that the objects studied by the natural sciences are mere representations of ’true being’, the thing-in-itself, which as such remains totally transcendent.

As all metaphysical hypotheses are irrefutable some can be incorporated into a worldview, though purely on the basis of faith. There is, however, another group of ’views’ that consists neither of metaphysical hypotheses, since the views make no reference to transcendent objects, nor of knowledge claims, since they concern activity in the immanent world. This group is that of our moral tenets. We must integrate into our worldview only those metaphysical hypotheses that are demanded by our moral tenets, only those that we must hold to be true if we are to believe in the ’absolute obligatory nature of moral duty’. Among these hypotheses, or postulates of practical reason, are those discussed by Kant (see Kant, I. §§9–11), but in addition there is one he largely failed to elaborate, namely the existence of mental activity similar to my own in the other.

The Cartesian thesis of the privacy of the mental, that there are no objective criteria by which I know that the other has thoughts and feelings like mine, is one Vvedenskii continued to defend throughout his long professional career at St Petersburg University. The argument from analogy can be of use only in explaining how I extend my conviction in the existence of the other’s mental activity to a number of others but not how I come to my initial recognition (see Other minds). Just as we speak of a moral sense in referring to the recognition of moral obligation, so too can we speak of a metaphysical sense in referring to my acknowledgement of the other’s mental processes. Furthermore, since moral obligation is contingent on the existence of at least one other animate being, I am as certain of the existence of mental activity in the other as I am of the obligatory nature of my duties. In fact, the metaphysical and the moral sense are the same; the former is merely what Vvedenskii called ’the cognitive aspect’ of the latter. In his later years Vvedenskii spoke less of a metaphysical sense and more of accepting the other’s mental activity as a ’working hypothesis’ that proved ’convenient’ in the construction of a scientific psychology.

Not surprisingly, then, Vvedenskii held that psychology as a science yielding knowledge relies necessarily and fundamentally on personal self-observation. Nevertheless he allotted a role, albeit on a secondary level, in a properly conceived psychology to experiment and what he termed ’collective or comparative self-observation’, the accumulation and comparison of introspective observational data by a number of individuals.

Despite Vvedenskii’s wish to found a distinct school of thought his only disciple was Ivan Lapshin (1870–1952), who also taught at St Petersburg University prior to his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1922. Extending Kant’s original transcendentalism, Lapshin held that even formal logic is grounded in an a priori categorical synthesis. Consequently, anyone who rejects Kantian (or, rather, Neo-Kantian) epistemology has no basis for using the laws of logic. As those laws cannot justifiably be applied in contexts beyond possible experience metaphysics lies beyond the pale of science. Such is the purest expression of ’critical idealism’. Disagreeing with Kant, Lapshin maintained that space and time were essentially not pure intuitions but categories of cognition along with causality, substantiality and so on. Intuited parts of space are merely conceptual ’illustrations’ of space. As a category space is intimately involved in all judgments including analytical ones such as the law of non-contradiction.

Like Vvedenskii, Lapshin devoted considerable attention to the problem of ’the other’. He too claimed that my experience of an immediate givenness of another’s intimate self is illusory. For the most part we analogically infer the other’s mental states from observed bodily movements or positions. Even whether all other rational beings think in accordance with the same laws of logic must be answered agnostically. We are forced to turn to faith. Yet faith can be either immanent or transcendent. A transcendent faith in the other’s self, in other words, that the other has mental states exactly as I do and that they are the ’essence’ of the empirical being before me, is both unnecessary and philosophically unjustified, since it treats the other’s self as a thing-in-itself. On the other hand, immanent faith means we have supreme confidence in the empirical reality, the ’objective significance’, of positing mental states within the other’s empirically observed body.