The Very Possibility of a Science of Religion: Ernst Troeltsch and Neo-Kantianism

Abstract

Troeltsch’s objection to Rickert in this essay can be characterized as a renewed version of the formalism objection that Hegel and others leveled against Kant’s practical philosophy and its supreme moral principle. The mere idea of necessarily valid values, or indeed also of a Kantian categorical imperative, alone is empty unless it can be shown to have been actualized, and to be capable of being acted upon, in the rich configurations of value and the concrete ideals of collective life in history. Of course, Rickert never intended his transcendental epistemology to yield such concrete content and he strictly distinguished, for this reason, between the transcendental task of philosophy, the task of positive science, and the task of nonintellectual life more generally. Philosophy could not yield concrete norms for how the sciences investigate nature, nor for how individuals ought to pursue self-cultivation in their ethical lives, but merely to redeem the sense in which these formal aims were genuinely valid despite the deliverances of the natural and historical sciences that appear to indicate the contrary. Troeltsch’s dissatisfaction with this abstract and purely theoretical character of philosophy led him to abandon one of Rickert’s most important principles, namely, his a priori transcendental method.