Radicalizing the Copernican Turn. Chances and Challenges of Richard Hönigswald’s neo-Kantian Transcendentalism

By establishing a transcendental theory of concrete subjectivity, the new-Kantian philosopher Richard Hönigswald radicalized Kant’s Copernican turn and described the human body as principle and factum in a manifold cultural philosophy. For this purpose, he had to overcome his close relationship to the realistic-metaphysical neo-Kantianism of Riehl and Liebmann, who fell behind Kant’s Copernican turn and his rejection of epistemological relevant things in themselves. Thus, Hönigswald went through his own Copernican turn, before he refined the Kantian concept. Localizing the Kantian ‘I think’ in the concrete human-being offers the possibility to combine several parts and aspects of the Kantian philosophy and its components like ethics, aesthetics, and anthropology. Here Hönigswald concentrates on the capacities of human-beings who explore and form their living world, while Kant’s Copernican turn shows their ambivalences of freedom and determination, understanding and alienness. To regard these ambivalences, we can look ahead in philosophical body theory and refer to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and today’s postphenomenological approaches that stress alienation and contingency by highlighting human-beings’ entanglement with the world. In this process postphenomenology partly tries to go beyond the Copernican turn by establishing a praxeology that rejects the constitutive relevance of intentionality. If we go back to Hönigswald’s radicalization of the Kantian turn we can highlight, that each way of problematizing practices and theories needs a problematizing subject and thus intentionality in its bodily representation.