RICKERT, HEINRICH. – Philosopher, born in Danzig on 25 May 1863 and died on 28 July 1936 in Heidelberg, where he had been a professor (after Freiburg). WINDELBAND, WILHELM (v.), from whom he derives his fundamental philosophical themes, he is the most original and acute representative of the so-called “Philosophy of Values” (v.).
The principal writings that develop and deepen his doctrine are: Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (Freiburg 1892); Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaft. Begriffsbildung (ibid. 1896–1902); System der Philos. (I, Tübingen 1921); Grundprobleme der Philos. (ibid. 1934).
To know is to judge, that is, to recognize a value; and the recognized value must hold for everyone at all times. Therefore, in the act of judging, a universally and eternally valid value is presupposed, judgment (v.) is made concerning particular and transitory representations. Judgment has an “obligatory character,” a necessity (different from causal necessity); it is imperative: in this “ought to be” (which transcends every individual empirical consciousness and belongs to a universal and impersonal consciousness) lies the truth of judgment. Philosophy must distinguish the world of reality (“judgments of reality,” descriptive and classificatory of phenomena, proper to science) from the realm of values, whose judgments are precisely proper to philosophy. The reciprocal relationship between the two worlds is given by the “act of evaluation,” which expresses the meaning of value and constitutes a third realm, that of “significance.”
R., at times also polemically (Die Philos. des Lebens, Tübingen 1920), a defender of the eternity of values against the philosophies of life and the various forms of historicism (v.), rightly claims their suprahistorical character: value is presupposed to history, which does not create II. Therefore the historian recognizes “the value of events,” and human spiritual activity does not “posit,” but “discovers” values.