[German] Rickert: “Cultural Science and Natural Science”

[German] Heinrich Rickert: “Culture and Natural Science,” translated by Tu Jiliang, proofread by Du Renzhi, Commercial Press, March 1986

http://rwxy.tsinghua.edu.cn/rwfg/ydsm/ydsm-qw/j06/000.htm

Page vi On the other hand, although the scope of any historical concept is limited by a certain object or phenomenon, it must itself necessarily contain something general. For example, although no one would doubt that Goethe was only a particular individual, that there was no second Goethe, does Goethe not have the same characteristics as others? Can one explain Goethe’s characteristics without using certain general concepts? Can historians give a scientific account of any historical figure without understanding the universal laws governing social and historical development? In fact, no science employs only the method of generalization, or only the so-called method of individuation.

Page 38
We must therefore understand the word “nature” in the Kantian sense, that is, in the formal or logical sense, rather than simply as the material world. In fact, under this assumption, knowing nature means forming general concepts from general factors and, if possible, forming absolutely universal judgments about reality. That is to say, it means discovering the concept of natural law.

Page 40
In its final formulation of the results of analysis, natural science does not take into account those things that can be found only in this or that particular object; therefore, even if natural science advances along the path of analyzing particular things, it can still arrive at general concepts.

Page 50
There are sciences whose aim is not to formulate natural laws, and indeed not merely to form general concepts in a broad sense. These are the historical sciences in the widest sense. These sciences do not want to tailor a set of standard clothes that fits both Paul and Peter alike. That is to say, they want to explain reality from the standpoint of its particularity; this reality is by no means general, but always particular. …………How the historical sciences express the specialness and particularity of the realities they study is not yet clear at present. For reality itself, because of its immeasurable diversity, cannot be subsumed under any concept; and since all conceptual elements are universal, the idea of forming concepts of individuation first appears problematic. Yet one cannot deny that history regards giving expression to what is unique, special, and individual as its own task, and that one must explain the formal essence of history starting from this task. For all concepts of science are concepts of tasks, and only by starting from the aims a science sets for itself and penetrating into the logical structure of its method is it possible to attain a logical understanding of science; this is the road to the goal. History does not wish to adopt the method of generalization as natural science does, and for logic this is of decisive significance.

////—— Rickert did not claim that one need not use certain general concepts to explain the characteristics of a particular individual! What Rickert wanted to emphasize precisely was this: when the object we face is a particular individual, the individualized method we adopt is to depict its distinctive character; even when using those universal features, the purpose is still to depict its distinctive character, and the final conclusion is always individual rather than universal. The generalizing method, by contrast, aims at depicting universal properties as far as possible detached from concrete individuals; even when we begin from the individual through “analysis,” what we ultimately hope to obtain is a universal conclusion, in which we will do our best to avoid seeing the shadow of the individual. Of course, there is no science that uses only the method of generalization or only the method of individuation; that is obvious, and Rickert had long made this explicit. But the mutual interpenetration of methods does not mean that these two methods cannot be used to distinguish between these two sciences. To distinguish two fields or categories, some measures that both possess, if their boundaries are vague and they merely show a tendency rather than a decisive distinction, are obviously hard to take as concepts defining their boundaries. But this difficulty cannot be absolutized. There are concepts that, even if they remain mutually interpenetrating and cannot be sharply demarcated, may still serve as measures defining the distinction between the two. To give an example that is not necessarily apt—there is no clear boundary between the concepts “tall person” and “short person,” but we cannot therefore say that any distinction between tall and short people is completely meaningless. In order to make the concepts of tall and short precise, we need to know which measure or measures, which feature or features, we are using to distinguish them. We see, for instance, that “weight” is a measure that shows a clear tendency between so-called tall people and short people—tall people are often heavier than short people; of course, “height” shows the same tendency (because tall people and short people interpenetrate one another, someone who counts as a “tall person” in a given setting is not necessarily taller by the measure of height than some “short person”). So, can we use “weight” as the measure for distinguishing tall from short? Obviously that is absurd; everyone knows that height is what measures tallness and shortness! The same issues must be noted in distinguishing science from non-science. First, although science and non-science interpenetrate one another, one cannot therefore say that there is no distinction between them, still less that because irrationality or some kind of social construction cannot be excluded from science, irrationality or social construction is simply a characteristic of science. Second, one must also note that not just any prominent tendency can serve as a measure distinguishing science—for example, concepts such as tolerance, skepticism, faith, and so on; if one classifies certain features as scientific simply on the basis that “science often is…,” one runs the risk of “classifying weight as a characteristic of tallness.” Rickert’s “generalizing method” and “individuating method” here do seem to provide a rather good way of distinguishing natural science from cultural science, but one must note that, first, distinguishing natural science from cultural science, and even distinguishing science from non-science, is of course far more complicated than distinguishing tall people from short people; it is not something that can be done by a single standard. Second, these distinctions likewise cannot yield a clear binary boundary; Rickert never forgot the mutual interpenetration between natural science and cultural science, nor their “intermediate realm.” The key purpose of Rickert’s attempt to distinguish natural science from cultural science in a “logical” sense is that he hopes both sides will have a clear awareness of their own characteristics and boundaries, even if those boundaries are fuzzy. This is entirely consistent with Kant’s spirit of setting limits for knowledge and for religion: if one does not know what one should and should not concern oneself with, one easily falls into confusion or error; only with clarity can one develop in a healthy way.

Page viii
He believes that value is transcendent, beyond the reach of empirical cognition, and that “they often form a completely independent kingdom outside subject and object.” (Rickert, “On the Concept of Philosophy,” in Logos, vol. 1, 1910, p. 33) It is clear that what he calls “value” is in fact something that does not actually exist, something mysterious and unfathomable, a fictional construct of subjective idealism, utterly different from what we mean by value.

Page 21
Value (wert) is inherent in cultural objects; therefore, we call cultural objects wealth (Güter), so as to distinguish cultural objects as realities endowed with value from value itself, which has no reality at all and can be separated from reality. …………However, with regard to the value-characteristic that makes reality into cultural wealth and thereby distinguishes reality from nature, we must add the following. As for value, we cannot say that it actually exists or does not exist; we can only say that it is meaningful or meaningless.

Page 25
For value can be appraised only by people with a psyche. … But this cannot prove that the scientific classification made through the opposition of nature and spirit is correct. Since psychological life itself should be regarded as natural, the mere existence of the psychic still does not constitute a cultural object, and therefore cannot be applied to defining the concept of culture.

Page 78
Value is by no means reality, neither physical reality nor psychic reality. The essence of value lies in its validity, not in its actual factuality. But value is connected with reality, and we already know the two kinds of connection involved. First, value can attach itself to an object and thereby turn the object into wealth; second, value can connect itself with the activity of the subject and thereby turn the subject’s activity into evaluation.

////—— The translator says that Rickert’s “value” “is utterly different from what we mean by value”; so what exactly is this “value” that “we” mean? We know that before Li Deshun wrote Value Theory in the late 1980s, the issue of “value” had long been neglected by Chinese Marxist philosophy. Of course, Marx himself did not directly discuss value theory all that much either. So what, then, is this “value” that the translator speaks of so confidently as “what we mean”? That is rather intriguing. Let us keep our heads cool and see what Rickert’s value is all about. It should be said that Rickert’s definition of “value” here is indeed rather vague, but some of its features are quite clear. First, value is not “reality” (p. 78), yet it also cannot be separated from reality (p. 21); value is neither physical reality nor psychic reality, neither object nor subject. But Rickert’s value is not mysterious, much less fictional; he is simply using the word “value” in the sense of everyday language!—Clearly, we all know that the event of “Friedrich Wilhelm IV refusing to accept the German throne” has a certain historical value for culture (whether that value is good or bad is not a question for history), whereas “the tailor who made him an overcoat, though equally real, is in fact historically insignificant”; what his tailor did in these events has no value. Although judgments about whether value is good or bad are debatable, what has value and what does not is relatively likely to win general recognition. To say that something has value is in fact not to ask whether value exists, but to ask whether that value has meaning, and this issue is usually so straightforward that there is no need to take it too seriously. One should know that the main concern of this work is the classification of science and philosophy of history, not value theory. It is like how, in discussions of epistemology, we can get tangled up over what exactly “cognition” is; yet that does not prevent me, in another context, from saying “I know Xu Zhihong,” with precision in my wording. If, because one is too absorbed in epistemology, one becomes unable to understand what the sentence “I know Xu Zhihong” means, then that would be ridiculous in a somewhat ironic way. Of course, how one is to understand the word “value” is something that requires further discussion. Here Rickert has already pointed out that “value” exists between subject and object, manifesting itself in the subject’s activity of evaluation; in fact, this is consistent with Marx’s view of value as practice. Yet no matter how much further one may discuss it, that does not hinder our understanding of the value Rickert means here. Moreover, as to whether one can distinguish natural science from cultural science by whether or not they possess value, I remain skeptical; but this idea is obviously very interesting.

Page viii–ix
It should also be pointed out that when historians narrate historical events, they do not, as Rickert says, fail to make any judgments about historical events. The history of class society is the history of class struggle, and any historical work inevitably, openly or covertly, expresses the author’s class standpoint; no historian selects materials from Rickert’s so-called standpoint of “value” without also making judgments about historical events.

Pages 79–80
Thus it becomes plainly apparent that historically important and meaningful events include not only those that promote the realization of cultural wealth, but also those that obstruct the realization of cultural wealth. Only those events that are purely heterogeneous, with no relation to value, are excluded as nonessential events. This is enough to show that saying an object has significance for value, for the realization of cultural wealth, does not at all mean passing judgment on that object, because evaluation must always be either affirmative or negative. Although the reality-based significance of value relations is beyond doubt, whether reality has positive value or negative value is a matter of debate. For example, as a historian, the historian need not decide whether the French Revolution was beneficial or harmful to France or Europe; that is a matter of evaluation. …………When history puts forward praise or blame, it goes beyond its scope as a science concerning real existence. For praise or blame can only stand if supported by a value standard whose validity has already been established, and that cannot be the task of history. Undoubtedly, no one for that reason wants to prohibit historians from taking an evaluative attitude toward the events they study, and perhaps there is not a single meaningful historical work that is entirely free of affirmative or negative evaluation. What must be stressed is only this: evaluation does not belong to the concept of the formation of historical concepts; conversely, it is only through connection with the guiding cultural values that the historical importance or significance of events can manifest itself. This importance or significance is not the same thing as an event’s affirmative appraisal or negative value; therefore, the logical possibility of individuating concept formation does not mean that one can do without theoretical connection to value, but rather that one can do without practical evaluation.

Page 81 I once stressed that Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s refusal to accept the German throne is an essential element in history; conversely, the tailor who made him an overcoat, though equally real, is in fact historically insignificant.

Page 85
Finally, in order to avoid misunderstanding, one must clearly distinguish historical development from the concept of progress, and this in turn can be done only by means of the distinction between evaluation and value relations. Compared with historical development, a mere series of changes contains too little, while a series of progress contains too much. …………But since history does not inquire into the validity of value, and merely considers the fact that certain values are in fact evaluated, the historical science cannot decide the question whether a series of changes is progress or regress. For this reason, the concept of progress belongs to philosophy of history; from the standpoint of the values embodied in historical events, it explains the “meaning” of historical events and judges whether history is conducive to or detrimental to value. To what extent such a philosophical-historical narrative can become scientific, we need not discuss here for the moment. Empirical historical narration refuses to make such judgments. In the specialized scientific sense of the word history, any kind of judgment is “unhistorical.”

////—— Rickert has already made this clear: “Undoubtedly, no one for that reason wants to prohibit historians from taking an evaluative attitude toward the events they study, and perhaps there is not a single meaningful historical work that is entirely free of affirmative or negative evaluation” (p. 80). Rickert’s intention is not to forbid evaluation of history, but to make this point clear: “evaluation” in any case does not belong to historical science! Rickert set clear boundaries for history as a science, but historians are not merely scientists. Just as physicists can publish their metaphysical views, and those metaphysical views and beliefs are of great significance for their scientific inquiries, we still need to be clear about what is not science. Evaluation of history is obviously important, but it should not become the duty of science! As for the so-called “class consciousness” that historians inevitably carry when they study history scientifically, this is similar to what I discussed a few days ago—“vacuum” can never be absolute vacuum; there are always impurities of one sort or another, and even the very process of extracting impurities may simultaneously introduce new impurities, but we cannot therefore deny that the direction of efforts to create a vacuum is wrong. Historical study as science is certainly bound to bear class consciousness, but one can by no means conclude from this that deliberately adding more class consciousness is somehow correct. Of course, whether Rickert’s “cultural value” is itself class-laden can be discussed, but in any case one cannot blow air into it in order to create a vacuum, nor smear black paint on a white wall in order to paint it white. Conducting historical research while carrying biases that include “evaluation” has already brought far too much confusion to historical scholarship in New China.

Page x
While flatly denying the laws of social and historical development, Rickert also denied the scientific character of historical materialism, regarding historical materialism not as a science but as a “metaphysical standpoint,” and as “the product of party politics.” He said that the materialist conception of history “is by no means an empirical, value-related historical science, but rather a philosophy of history fabricated in a crude and uncritical manner,” …………Rickert’s distortions of historical materialism are quite representative among bourgeois philosophers. Many bourgeois philosophers, just like him, use the class standpoint of historical materialism as a pretext to slander historical materialism as the product of politics; they use its standpoint of the masses as a pretext to slander historical materialism as something lowly; they use its emphasis on the role of economic factors in social development as a pretext to slander historical materialism as the so-called “economic conception of history.” Yet it is precisely because historical materialism possesses these views that it has become a genuine science far higher than all bourgeois philosophies of history.

Page 100–102
In those cultural sciences that take economic life as their object of study, universal concepts will occupy an important position, because as long as one isolates these movements and looks at them in themselves, what is in fact being considered here is often only masses (Massen). Hence the essential components for this kind of cultural science are usually in agreement with the content of the relevant universal concepts. For example, in a certain people, in a certain period, the historical substance of peasants or factory workers fairly exactly coincides with what all individual cases have in common, and thus can form their natural-scientific concept. Here the purely individual component may recede into the background, while the determination of universal conceptual connections takes on the greatest importance. Moreover, from this one can also understand why the attempt to turn historical science into a universalizing natural science is often closely linked to the view that history is fundamentally economic history.
But here it also becomes clear at the same time how groundless this attempt to treat history only as economic history, and thus as natural science, really is. It can be easily demonstrated that this approach rests on a principle of distinguishing essential from non-essential components chosen in a completely arbitrary manner, and that, in terms of its origin, the reason this principle was favored must be attributed to a wholly unscientific political partisan bias. One can already find this principle in the works of Condorcet, and so-called historical materialism (which merely constitutes the apex of this whole line of development) is a typical example in this regard. This historical materialism depends to a large extent on a particular social-democratic wish. Since the cultural ideal serving as its guiding principle is democratic, there arises a tendency to regard great figures as “non-essential” in history, and to regard only what comes from the masses as meaningful. Thus historical writing is “collectivist.” From the standpoint of the proletariat, or from the standpoint theorists regard as belonging to the masses, what is chiefly taken into account is a largely animal value, and as a result only those things directly related to the masses—namely economic life—are “essential.” Hence history is also “materialist.” This is by no means an empirical, value-related science of history, but rather a philosophy of history fabricated in a crude and uncritical manner. Moreover, the absolute value assumed here plays such a decisive role that whatever has significance for absolute value becomes the only true existent, and thus everything outside economic culture becomes a mere “reflection” (“Reflex”). In this way, there emerges a standpoint that is completely metaphysical; in formal terms it exhibits the structure of Platonic idealism or conceptual realism, with value represented as something real and as the only reality. The only difference is that the ideal of the stomach replaces the ideal of brain and heart. The “theorist” Lassalle even advised workers to regard suffrage as a matter of the stomach, and to let the warmth of the stomach circulate through all parts of the state organism, because there was no force capable of long resisting it. It is no wonder that from this standpoint the whole development of humankind is ultimately seen as “the struggle for a place beside the feeding trough.”
Once one has understood the value standpoint on which “historical materialism” rests, one can see what sort of objectivity such historical writing claims. Rather than being a science, it is more a product of party politics. There is no need to argue that historians in the past perhaps paid little attention to economic life, and that economic history, as a supplementary investigation, certainly has its value. But any attempt to connect all phenomena with that economic history taken as the sole essential component must be counted among the most arbitrary historical interpretations ever carried out thus far.

////——Rickert by no means denies the study of history from the economic base and from the standpoint of the masses, and he also considers what takes economic life as its object to be “cultural science”; however, if one absolutizes one perspective as the only perspective, or reads history through tinted glasses colored by some preconceived evaluative bias (the typical result of which, in today’s Chinese history textbooks, is the simplification that historical figures and events are “either enemies or friends”). Of course, Rickert may well have had many misunderstandings of Marx, but those misunderstandings are no more serious than the misunderstandings Marxists have of Marx. No number of enemies can sully or wreck a theory; on the contrary, the greater the enemy, the more it reveals its vitality. An idea will continually renew its vitality in the process of confronting criticism and self-reflection. What can sully, wreck, or even kill off a line of thought can only be its successors. Marx’s view of history should be quite profound, but his successors’ “historical materialism” is in urgent need of reflection.

Page 9–10
Indeed, through his “within the limits thus determined,” Kant, if not in the special sciences then at least in philosophy, put an end to the monopoly of the concept of nature; that is to say, he also theoretically lowered the “worldview” of the natural sciences—which, when applied to the cultural life of history in the age of the Enlightenment, had in practice to suffer a complete failure—from a position of supposed absolute legitimacy to one of relative legitimacy, thereby restricting the methods of the natural sciences to specialized inquiry. Yet by means of this restriction the concept of nature could only become more precisely delimited and more clearly understandable; and this was accomplished to such a great extent that even if some backward philosophy were to try to restore this concept to a monopolistic position, the special sciences of nature would not thereby be greatly harmed. For the special sciences, the concept of nature remained essentially unchanged. The drawbacks of shrinking one’s field of vision in this way—which makes one once again replace the epistemological standpoint with an outdated metaphysical naturalism—consist, at most, in rendering many natural sciences helpless when dealing with certain difficulties arising in the most general theories (for example, atomism or energeticism). It is indeed unpleasant that there are still some natural scientists today who seem to feel wronged when they hear it said that it is not only they who propel science. Yet in other respects, even a belief that is not altogether well-founded, namely that natural-scientific thought is the only correct one, also helps special research in the natural sciences to become conscious of its lofty significance and thus to gain interest and vitality in its work. ………… (……then the natural sciences may be comforted by having a solid tradition. ……Page 11
For the empirical cultural sciences, in any case, until now there has been no philosophical foundation broadly comparable to that of the natural sciences.)

Page 14 Since the sciences can be distinguished from one another both by the standpoint of the objects they investigate and by the standpoint of the methods they employ, they can be classified both from the material point of view and from the formal point of view.

Page 30
Empirical reality proves itself to be an endlessly busy manifold; the more deeply we penetrate into this manifold and begin to break it down into its various individual parts, the more immense it appears, because the content contained in the “smallest” part of reality is far more than any finite human being can describe, and what he is able to bring into his concepts, and thus into his knowledge, from it is utterly insignificant compared with what he must discard. If we are required to reflect reality in concepts, then as knowers we are faced with a task that is in principle insoluble. Therefore, if whatever has ever been done up to now can be claimed as knowledge, then for the concept of inner truth it must also be true here that knowledge is not reflection, but transformation; not only that, we may add: compared with reality itself, knowledge is always a simplification.

////——Knowledge is not reflection, but transformation; that does make some sense, though I reserve judgment.

Page 32
We transform every heterogeneous continuity in reality either into a homogeneous continuity or into a heterogeneous discontinuity. As long as this can be done, reality can also be called rational. Only for knowledge that wants to reflect reality without transforming reality does reality always remain irrational.

////——The cognition of the natural sciences can indeed be said to be a process of transforming the phenomenon of heterogeneous continuity into homogeneous continuity or heterogeneous discontinuity; however, whether this attempt at transformation is an attempt to approach and reveal the essence of nature, I cannot say. I reserve judgment.

February 11, 2006

Latest Comments

• wellyu
  September 18, 2006 16:04:11
  [reply]
  That’s right, Rickert takes the method of universalization and the method of individualization as the distinction between natural science and the social sciences, but it is not, as stated in the translator’s preface by Tu Jiliang, the Marxist dialectical relationship between universality and particularity. For example: 
    
  “On page vi, on the other hand, although the scope of any historical concept is limited by a certain object or phenomenon, it must itself contain something general. For example, although no one would doubt that Goethe was only an individual person, that there was no second Goethe, does Goethe not possess characteristics common to others? Can Goethe’s characteristics be explained without using certain general concepts? Can a historian scientifically evaluate any historical figure without understanding the universal laws of social and historical development? In fact, no science employs only the method of universalization, or only the so-called method of individualization.” 
    
  Rickert proceeds from the reality of an “endlessly busy manifold,” and the “heterogeneous continuity” of reality. To give reality a homogeneous and continuous generalization, as mathematics does, is in fact a construction of ideas and not at all cognition of reality. Another rationalization of reality is to transform “heterogeneous continuity” into “heterogeneous discontinuity,” that is, into the cognition of the differences among individual things, as in historical knowledge. 
    
  For historical science, universal knowledge has only a very secondary auxiliary significance. The reason is that universal knowledge can never exhaust the “heterogeneous” and “manifold” character of reality; there is always content that cannot be universalized. So, although there are many intermediate fields between the two extremes, this extreme opposition still cannot be mutually transformed, and the intermediate field is merely an intermediate field in the disciplinary sense, involving the more or less simultaneous use of these two ways of forming concepts. Therefore, the metaphor of “tall people” and “short people” is not appropriate. 
    
  Tu Jiliang formally recognized that Rickert made a sharp opposition between universality and particularity, and therefore criticized him from the standpoint of their dialectical unity. Since the two of them have different basic views of reality and of people’s cognition of reality, Tu Jiliang’s criticism did not damage Rickert’s theory.
• Gu
  September 18, 2006
  19:17:09
  [reply]
  Brother Yu’s remarks are quite good. However, regarding the so-called “intermediate field,” I think it is not that simple. One must know that natural science is by no means only mathematics and physics; between mathematics and history there are many genuine natural-science disciplines, such as biology, medicine, meteorology, astronomy, geology, and so on. Are these disciplines not natural science? Are they cultural science? Yet in such “natural sciences,” one cannot achieve the kind of “universality” reached by physics. How are these disciplines to be understood? Even more so, psychology, anthropology, and the like are more ambiguous disciplines that in fact clearly lie between the method of universalization and the method of individualization; for these disciplines, it is inappropriate to lean only toward universalization or only toward individualization. The so-called issue of “disciplinary boundaries” is by no means first and foremost physics, nor is it literature, history, or philosophy; rather, it is the status of “intermediate” disciplines such as psychology and anthropology that is the primary issue. The metaphor of tall people and short people here suggests this: mathematics and physics are unquestionably tall people, history is clearly short people, but disciplines like psychology are hard to classify; yet one cannot simply ignore the difference between the two ends just because the status of the middle remains unsettled.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.