The article aims to offer an interpretation of transcendental philosophy that emancipates it from the exclusive field of the theory of knowledge in order to bring out the importance of its relationship with practices. This relationship allows us to consider practices as indispensable ways of giving meaning to experience and at the same time to recognize in the transcendental a ‘thought of the real’ whose vocation is itself practical. To support our thesis, we will consider the first two works of Emil Lask (1875-1915), a fundamental figure of neo-Kantianism and of early 20th century philosophy in general: Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (1902) and Rechtsphilosophie (1905). If in the first work the theoretical and gnoseological perspective leads to a ‘negative’ definition of the real, as valueless, contingent and irrational, in the second the relationship with law and the practice of jurisprudence allows us to arrive at a concept of reality as a dimension endowed with value, whose significance derives from the indispensable role of practices.