Background
Rickert, Heinrich was born on May 25, 1863 in Danzig, Germany.
Rickert, Heinrich was born on May 25, 1863 in Danzig, Germany.
Literature and Philosophy at Berlin, Zürich and Strasbourg.
Professor at Freiburg and Heidelberg.
Rickert was the most important student of Windelband. He elaborated more fully the latter’s Suggestions concerning the priority of the practical in philosophy. Also like Windelband, he was Specially concerned with the problem of differentiating between the natural sciences on the one hand and the historical disciplines on the other, arguing that the fundamental distinction between them was not one of substance but one of method. However, he felt that Windelband’s discussion was inadequate. He argued that it was insufficient to differentiate between ‘nomothetic’ and ’ideographic’ method, to say that the one aimed at general laws whereas the other was concerned With the individual, and to make them mutually exclusive. The historian does not simply mean to describe historical events, but he wants to make them comprehensible. Furthermore, he argued, fhe historian intends to transform something that is by itself irrational into a rational account. Rickert was as much a follower of Plato as he Was a follower of Kant in his fundamentally dualistic thinking. In fact, he may have been more ‘•tdebted to Plato in this respect. Thus he differentiated at the most fundamental level between a world of ultimate being and a world of experience. The world of experience was divided again into a world of existence and a world of valuations, between that which is and that which ought to be, or between •tature and culture. The world of existence c°nsisted again of two worlds, namely a world of Physics and psychology whose objects are real, and a world of mathematics whose objects are ‘deal. And finally he divided the world of really listing things into a world of physical being and a world of mental being. Rickert’s distinction between the world of existence and the world of valuations formed one important part of the background of his conception of science. Thus he differentiated between sciences. The other important part of the background of his conception of science is his distinction between generalizing and individualizing thinking. The natural sciences were for him generalizing and not concerned with valuations. History was individualizing and concerned with valuations. While these two disciplines were at the extremes, and while there were for him many in the middle that were either ideographic and non-cultural or nomothetic and cultural, they were for that very reason the most interesting to Rickert. History interested him most, for he thought that value, or the ‘ought’, was the true object of knowledge, not being, or the ‘is’. What is recognized as existent is for a Kantian, at least in part, a result ofjudgement, and judgements for Rickert were ultimately impossible without a transcendent norm, namely that of truth. Our judgement that something ‘is’ the case must always be seen against the background of this transcendent ‘ought’. Furthermore, history was for him of the particular event, and he thought that ‘the single event is the only thing that really happens’. Science and its laws were for him the result of human judgement and thus superimposed on what really happens. Rickert did not believe that the concern with the individual and with value led to historicism and relativism. Rather, he hoped to show that there are a number of ‘transcendent cultural values' that can guide the historian in his interpretation of any event. Rickert’s discussion of the difference between the natural and cultural sciences was very influential, if only because it was very controversial. Some of his main critics include R. G. Collingwood and Hans-Georg Gadamer.