“A turn to ontology” in neo-kantianism (P. Natorp and E. Lask)

Abstract

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the intellectual situation within neo-Kantianism began to change: there were philosophical projects attempting to overcome the total domination of epistemology in Neo-Kantian doctrines and making place for ontology. Ontological tendencies are typical mainly for P. Natorps’s projects of general logic and E. Lask’s logic of philosophy. I analyze the continuity of Natorp’s early epistemological ideas, developed in the spirit of the Marburg interpretation of Kant’s transcendentalism, and his later ideas, focused on speculative ontological constructions. In particular, I investigate the methodo­logical relationship between the characteristics of knowledge in his early and late philo­sophy: dynamism, creativity, categoriality, unity of the starting point and the goal. The ba­sic structure of Natorps’s project of general logic is reconstructed. Lask’s main texts re­veal the provisions that open the way to an ontological turn. These factors include a cri­tique of the identification of the realm of value and that of the extrasensory in the meta­physics of the past, the postulation of a prereflexive stage of knowledge, interpreting the doctrine of judgment as a doctrine of immanent sense, and treating truth as a con­stitutive-aleteological phenomenon. Both Neo-Kantian philosophers build their systems on an on­tological foundation, making subjectivity dependent on objectivity in cognition, which can be interpreted as a kind of retreat from Kantian criticism. The ontological basis is ex­pressed in the postulation of a universal character of the logical expressed in Natorp’s idea of “poiesis” and Lask’s idea of “panarchy of the Logos”. The analysis of Natorp’s and Lask’s onto-epistemological projects allows us to clarify and reveal the role of Neo-Kantianism in the formation of the new ontologies of the 20th century a.k.a. the “ontologi­cal turn”.