Interpreting Dilthey: critical essays 1316459446, 9781316459447

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INTERPRETING DILTHEY Critical Essays       ERIC S. NELSON Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Nelson, Eric Sean, editor. : Interpreting Dilthey : critical essays / edited by Eric S. Nelson, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. :  [edition]. | New York : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   |   (hardback) |   (pbk.) : : Dilthey, Wilhelm, -. :  .   |  –dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Rudolf A. Makkreel

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

page ix x

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



Eric S. Nelson

  , ,   

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness: Its Kantian Basis and Hermeneutical Function

 

Rudolf A. Makkreel



Leben erfaßt hier Leben: Dilthey as a Philosopher of (the) Life (Sciences)



Jos de Mul



Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



Michael N. Forster



Hermeneutics and Historicity: Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason



Charles Bambach



Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



Frederick C. Beiser



More than One “Kind” of Science? Implications of Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies Robert C. Scharff

vii



Contents

viii

   , ,  







Dilthey and Empathy Shaun Gallagher



Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



Benjamin Crowe



Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



Nicolas de Warren

 A Task Most Pressing: Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel and His Rewriting of Modern Aesthetics



Kristin Gjesdal

 Experience and Metaphysics: The Anti-Hegelian Aesthetics of Dilthey and Santayana



Paul Guyer

 Dilthey and Wittgenstein: Understanding Understanding



Lee Braver

 Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophical Hermeneutics



Jean Grondin

Bibliography Index

 

Contributors

  University of Texas at Dallas  .  Syracuse University   University of South Florida   Boston University  .  Bonn University   University of Memphis   Temple University   University of Montreal   Brown University  .  Emory University    Erasmus University of Rotterdam  .  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology  .  University of New Hampshire    Pennsylvania State University

ix

Acknowledgments

My deepest and sincere gratitude goes to my teacher and friend Rudolf A. Makkreel for his dedication in bringing Dilthey’s works to the Englishspeaking world and promoting the study of Dilthey’s hermeneutics and philosophy. I am extremely thankful to Hilary Gaskin and the editorial staff at Cambridge University Press for their guidance, patience, and support in editing and publishing this volume. Mark Kevin Cabural and Lucy Sparrow were helpful in preparing aspects of the manuscript and their assistance is genuinely appreciated.

x

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context Eric S. Nelson

 Dilthey’s Biography and Philosophy Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in . He died in the Southern Alps in Seis am Schlern in . Born into an educated Calvinist family, he initially pursued a higher education in theology, history, and philosophy with the intention of following his father’s religious vocation as a Reformed minister. Dilthey studied at first at the University of Heidelberg, including under philosopher Kuno Fischer. We see in Dilthey’s correspondence from this period his antagonism toward Hegel and Hegelianism as well as his transition from theology to philosophy as he attempts to calm his father’s reservations concerning the effects of philosophy: philosophy might begin but does not conclude in problematizing doubt (Dilthey B I: ). Dilthey subsequently transferred to the University of Berlin, where he studied with two students of the philosopher, Reformed theologian, and political reformer Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich von Trendelenburg, and August Boeckh. Dilthey remarked in a letter of thanks to his father in  that he owed him a religious sensibility that avoided the extremes of unbelief and enthusiasm (Dilthey B I: –). A certain distance from religion and reverence for religious experience would remain characteristic of his approach to religion. His early academic training focused on the study of the history of the formation of Christianity, including the history of Christian mysticism and its Jewish and Greek sources, and he learnt from the methods of the German historical school and the prominent German historian Leopold von Ranke. Dilthey’s attention to ways and methods of historical perception led him to the hermeneutics (the theory and art of interpretation) of Schleiermacher who was a pivotal touchstone for his early thought. Dilthey completed in  a prize essay for the Schleiermacher Society on “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant 



 . 

Hermeneutics” (Dilthey B I: ; GS : – / SW IV: –). This essay was ranked first in the competition and he was commissioned to write a biography of Schleiermacher, volume  of which appeared in . Dilthey would emphasize the interconnections between philosophical reflection and personal experience, unfolding the philosophical character of biography and autobiography as well as the role of the individual factical person in interpreting the thought. Schleiermacher’s thought was not only an object of academic concern for Dilthey, as Dilthey identified with the liberal reformist tradition associated with Wilhelm von Humboldt and Schleiermacher. He became involved in liberal politics and the circle of Theodor Mommsen and debated with future liberal politicians such as Wilhelm Wehrenpfennig (Dilthey B I: –). The Hessian Dilthey often did not find the Prussian liberals sufficiently liberal (Dilthey B I: ). Dilthey defended his dissertation on Schleiermacher’s ethics and habilitation thesis on moral consciousness in , becoming an unsalaried Privatdozent at the University of Berlin in . Dilthey developed a unique approach to the question of historical consciousness that overcame the one-sidedness of both the historical school, absorbed in particularities, and the abstract ahistorical rationality typical of traditional philosophy. He also articulated the scope and experiential basis of the historical and systematic human sciences. Dilthey had a long career teaching philosophy, and what would now be classified as disciplines such as psychology and social theory, at the Universities of Basel (), Kiel (–), Breslau (Wrocław) (–), where he became close friends with the local aristocratic intellectual Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, and finally Berlin (–) as the successor of Rudolf Hermann Lotze. Academic philosophy still encompassed in the nineteenth-century areas that would become independent historical and social sciences. Dilthey worked as (what would now be described as) a philosopher, intellectual historian, and human scientist (including the study of psychology and society), prolifically publishing academic articles and treatises as well as popular works such as Lived Experience and Poetry, which was first published in  and went through ten editions by . Dilthey became a significant, and not uncontroversial, intellectual and cultural figure in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German intellectual history. This influence was extended through the work of his students, who began publishing the Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften), a critical edition of his works, at the outset of World War I. It was only recently completed with the publication of volume  in

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



 and volume  in . The topics of his writings gathered in these twenty-six volumes range across the human and natural sciences, including detailed philosophical, literary, and political histories as well as theoretical works addressing their systematic character and foundations. They address the methodology of scientific research, the differences between the human (Geisteswissenschaften) and natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), aesthetics, epistemology, psychology, modern Western intellectual and cultural history, and biography. Through circles of students such as Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Bernhard Groethuysen, Georg Misch, Herman Nohl, visitors from abroad such as W. E. B. Du Bois who attended his lectures in , and readers – to name only a few – such as Helmuth Plessner, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcuse, Karl-Otto Apel, and Ju¨rgen Habermas, Dilthey’s works continued to explicitly and implicitly inform and be contested in the study of philosophy, history, and the human sciences in movements such as Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and critical theory. A more neglected dimension of Dilthey’s endeavors is his liberal socialpolitical engagement, including his support for the education of women. He was an advocate of female higher education and supported the campaign, organized by Helene Lange, for the right of women to earn university degrees. He encouraged and tutored female students and researchers, most notably the political reformers and women’s rights advocates Gertrud Bäumer and Helene Stöcker (who was Dilthey’s research assistant from  to ). Dilthey is characteristically interpreted in contemporary philosophy as an inheritor of Johann Gottfried Herder’s expressivist approach to language and as part of the modern hermeneutical “lineage” that extends from Friedrich Ast and Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. But, like Schleiermacher before him, Dilthey was not only concerned with issues of expression, interpretation, and language and does not limit human scientific inquiry to the model of hermeneutics as textual or linguistic analysis. Such categories, which make his thought appear as a precursor that has been overcome in the further 



Dilthey and the development of the German women’s movement is a little explored topic. Helene Stöcker and Gertrud Bäumer note Dilthey’s significance in Schaser (, ) and Stöcker (, –, ). On the expressivist and historicist character of Dilthey’s thought, see Beiser (, ); Forster (, ). On Gadamer’s narrative sidelining Dilthey’s hermeneutics, compare the discussion in Nenon ().



 . 

hermeneutical turns of Heidegger and Gadamer, need to be situated in the larger context of his thought for it to be appropriately addressed in its own significance and situation. Dilthey’s interests in language and hermeneutics were part of a more extensive project to transform the foundations (epistemology) and practice (science) of knowing by describing and analyzing its experiential character in relation to the natural and social conditions of human existence. Dilthey’s project of a “critique of historical reason,” which appears to be both quasi-transcendental philosophy and quasi-philosophical anthropology, aimed at articulating an alternative critical philosophy that would concretely situate rationality and knowing, disclosing how they operate within the immanence of human life and experience. This critique of historical reason should be understood as a critique of experiential reason; philosophy transitions from its traditional role as metaphysics to an “experiential science” of spirit (Geist) – that is, socially historically mediated human life – that formulates “the laws governing social, intellectual and moral phenomena” (Dilthey GS : ).

 Dilthey in Historical Context As with other nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century thinkers, Dilthey had divergent research agendas, methodological strategies, and cultural-historical contexts from subsequent generations that have adopted and contested his interpretive strategies. It would be historically anachronistic and philosophically problematic to describe and assess Dilthey’s works according to the interests and standards of later philosophical perspectives. Heidegger and Gadamer applied an ontological understanding of hermeneutics upon a thinker who was deeply engaged with the empirical and ontic scientific inquiries of his time. Dilthey did not overcome and deny experiences of mind and consciousness for the sake of a discursive analysis of being. He linked the philosophical investigation of mental phenomena to their immanent worldly conditions and the findings of the contemporary sciences. Dilthey’s pursuits can be at important points opaque to readers because of his detailed and extensive engagement with the scientific research and cultural discourses of his time. Many of the scientists, philosophers, and artists with whom he interacted across the span of his life are forgotten or left in footnotes in 

On Dilthey’s “expansive naturalism,” which breaks through its reductive interpretations, see Nelson (a) as well as Jos de Mul’s contribution to this volume.

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



canonical accounts of the history of nineteenth-century philosophy that focus on a few isolated figures instead of considering its more comprehensive cultural and intellectual contexts. To read Dilthey’s writings in the present interpretive moment is to arrive at a configuration of thought that calls for being understood on its own terms, as an interpretive task, even as these texts are inevitably interpreted from our own hermeneutical situation in response to present needs and questions. Such reading across epochs and cultures can reach an unfamiliar place if it risks an actual encounter, a moment where the present has not yet been despite its being elusively “familiar” through its subsequent interpretive reception. The appreciation of “distance” (Abstand), the temporal pause that is the condition for the emancipatory effect of “historical consciousness” in relation to the present, is a guiding thread in Dilthey’s interpretation of history and his lifelong and unfinished project of a critique of historical reason. The distance and discontinuity that historical consciousness introduces in relation to the present is the possibility of engaging, confronting, and critiquing the present, and the prevailing traditions, prejudices, and customs that shape social and individual life. Dilthey’s debt to and appreciation of the “historical school,” i.e., the historians of nineteenth-century Germany whose stated task was to pursue the self-understanding of individuals and peoples for their own sake instead of for the purposes of the present, does not aim at either the relativistic or communitarian affirmation of the fixed essence or constant identity of a people (Volk), or the adulation of the collective spirit of one people over and against others. Dilthey resisted the increasingly excessive nationalist and biologistic organicism of his era and its ideological uses. Although he was committed to meaning-holism and allowed for impersonal structures and social institutions in the human sciences, he rejected the notion of the collective soul or spirit of a people due to his commitments to the priority of the individual and his proximity to methodological individualism. Buber, who helped the Dilthey family with the funeral arrangements after Dilthey’s death in Seis am Schlern in , pointed out in a discussion of Hebrew humanism how it was “my teacher” Dilthey who showed the necessity of affirming the human individual and community for there  

On this complex issue, see Bulhof (, ); Corngold (, –); Krell (, ); Makkreel (, ). Dilthey rejected the notion of a collective subject, see GS : ; GS : ; GS : .



 . 

to be genuine individual and national renewal. As Ilse Nina Bulhof noted, Dilthey was not a political radical of the left, right, or center; he was a late nineteenth-century bourgeois German liberal intellectual committed to both progressive Enlightenment ideas and to being a loyal servant to the Prussian crown and citizen of the German empire. In the vein of the left wing of the National Liberal Party with which he associated, Dilthey’s politics existed in the tension between the unredeemed demands of  for democracy and individual freedom and the impetus toward national unity, sovereignty, and realistic politics promoted by the Bismarkian state (Herrmann, in Dilthey GS : xiii). Due to Dilthey’s commitments to a multifaceted civil society – that encompassed the free self-formation and cultivation of individuality, the intimacy of family life, the solidarity of free associations, and a cosmopolitan historical and cultural pluralism – Dilthey was critical of radical forms of statism and ethnically based collectivism, as well as existing society’s socialist and Marxist critics. Dilthey critiqued Marx’s thought as abstracting from and doing violence to the real needs and interests of individuals, leveling the differentiated systems and spheres of social-political life, at the same time as he appreciated Marx’s analysis of the real problems of the concentration of capital in the economy and of power by the state. There have been multiple ways of looking at this more or less centrist political position. Dilthey has been interpreted as a Goethean liberal and humanist. Dilthey has been identified – beginning with his friend and correspondent Paul Yorck von Wartenburg – in Gadamer’s words as a “cultural liberal.” Dilthey represents from this perspective a liberal cosmopolitan relativism and the historicality that threatens to disintegrate the integrity of a life-form into a chaotic multiplicity of perspectives and possible truths. According to Yorck, in a pietistic criticism of his friend 

 

 

Buber (, ); Rickman (, ). Buber notes Dilthey’s philosophical importance for him and the new philosophical anthropology a number of times. But, he would also claim that while Dilthey and Simmel were his most important teachers, they were not important for the development of his dialogical philosophy of “I and thou.” Compare Buber (, ). Note Ulrich Herrmann’s discussion of Dilthey’s commitment to “national liberalism” in his introduction to GS : xiii. Bulhof (, –). This liberal individualist aspect of Dilthey’s argumentation, missed in readings that one-sidedly reduce his thought to holism or even to pantheism, is the one that the Austrian economic school used in their critique of Neurath’s socialism in the s, which failed to recognize Dilthey’s rejection of egocentric individualism for a more social-historically nuanced and contextual individualism (see Nelson a). On Dilthey’s criticism of Marx’s abstractness, see GS : –. Gadamer (, ). Christofer Zöckler argues that Gadamer neglects and opposes the dynamic elements and radical potential of Dilthey’s thought in Zöckler (, ).

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



adopted by Heidegger, Leo Strauss, and Gadamer, Dilthey appreciated faith as a cultural expression of life and could richly describe and analyze it in his historical writings. Christianity became a historical formation and cultural achievement mediating and infringing upon the lived experience of interiority. The early Heidegger claim that Yorck’s spirit must be made to serve Dilthey’s work, a claim in which the servant is the master, as Gadamer noted, should be interpreted in this context (Gadamer , ). The son and grandson of Calvinist ministers, Dilthey abandoned Calvinistic devotion and offered a secular cultural justification for the role of the religious in human life. Dilthey did not advocate the priority of the Christian faith and the German nation in the emotional ways that the pietistic aristocrat Yorck demanded: as a living, fundamental, disclosive truth that superseded all other possible truths. Dilthey’s principled contextualism is taken by his critics to be a relativistic abandonment of tradition that entails an arbitrary, anarchic, and nihilistic “anything goes” undermining faith and wisdom in a flood of incommensurable perspectives and worldviews.

 The Hermeneutics of Historical Life Dilthey has also been identified – by Isaiah Berlin – with an expressivist conservatism in the lineage of Giambattista Vico, Edmund Burke, and Herder that emphasizes preserving the integrity of collective and individual forms of life against their leveling integration into a totality or under an indifferent universal principle. This reading stresses the internal coherence and solidity of a life-nexus (Lebenszusammenhang) that persistently and adaptively reproduces itself through customs, habits, social structures, and traditions in response to changing conditions and circumstances. The adaptive development of individuals in their typically and relatively stable life contexts does not entail “anything goes” on the basis of feeling and imagination; its contextually rules it out. The problem with reading Dilthey as a radical relativist is that everything is permissible only in the imagination of artists, mystics, and the insane; that is, in the realm of inspiration and genius in contrast to the regularities of everyday life. 



On Dilthey’s conception of worldviews, its conflictual character, and relation to his account of historical formation, see Nelson (b; b). Heidegger’s preference for Yorck will lead his philosophy in a different direction than Dilthey’s, and is associated with his political sensibility (compare Nelson b). On Heidegger’s reception of Dilthey, see also Nelson (b; a; a). On the priority of the imagination, as the sense of the whole in Dilthey, see my analysis in Nelson (b).



 . 

Humans are shaped in interpretive interaction with their biological, environmental, psychological, social-historical, and intellectual-rational conditions in typical ways that indicate generalizable and – in conjunction with the study of human nature – universal characteristics. The difficulty with interpreting Dilthey as a conservative communitarian is that society does not consist of one essential identity or traditional way of life that retains its form through historical transformations. There is no primary origin or teleological goal to secure the course of historical change. Social life is a changing if often stable crossing, tension, and conflict between a multiplicity of forces, interpretations, and worldviews that from Dilthey’s perspective cannot be resolved but at most can only be temporarily balanced. Despite Dilthey’s affinities with Vico, David Hume, and Burke, this reading underestimates the extent to which Dilthey was committed to a historically oriented and contextualizing rethinking and modest conception of the Enlightenment, critical reason, and science. As Max Horkheimer noted, Dilthey “felt himself to be a disciple of the Enlightenment” (Horkheimer , ). The differences in interpretation can be traced to Dilthey’s attempts to rehabilitate earlier German liberal cultural ideals (particularly those associated with Kant, Goethe, and Schiller) under the altered conditions of advancing modernization and the politics of the new German state. Dilthey attempted to reformulate the ideals of free individuality and the formation and cultivation (Bildung) of the person articulated by the poets and philosophers of the past under the altered disenchanted conditions of an empirical and positivist regime of knowledge. Dilthey’s project responds to as much as it reflects a crisis of historical identity and historical understanding (compare Bambach , ). Historicism has been interpreted as the rejection of the emancipatory universalism of the Enlightenment based on the conservatism, nationalism, and statism of the right Hegelian philosophers and the anti-Hegelian Prussian historians. Dilthey inherited both the rich descriptive method and the philosophical critique of the anti-conceptualism of the historical school associated with the historians Leopold von Ranke (–), Johann Gustav Droysen (–), and Friedrich Meinecke (–). The philosophical lessons of historicism, adopting the pluralistic conception of history articulated by Humboldt and Herder and the source-based 

The roles of understanding and interpretation differentiate Dilthey’s account from forms of structural-functional and systems-theoretical social explanations. See my discussion of his interpretive psychology, as an example of an interpretive human science, in Nelson ().

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



methodology of Ranke, are for Dilthey the actual (“positive” in the nineteenth-century sense of the word) and irrevocable plurality and value of individuals, peoples, and worldviews. Despite the conservatism of the historical school, Dilthey maintained that the historical turn deepened rather than overturned the emancipatory tendencies of modernity: “The historical worldview liberates the human spirit from the last chains that natural science and philosophy have not yet broken” (GS : ; compare Makkreel , ). The historical sensibility for the unique and singular is not a rejection but a continuation and culmination of the modernist Enlightenment project of human emancipation and its concern for individual autonomy. History, which is a narrative of immeasurable terror and suffering, is not identical with a historical sensibility absorbed in present conditions; history can be more than an ideological and pedagogical justification of the present, its suffering, and the existing state of affairs. The critical and emancipatory moment of historical understanding was recognized by the early Heidegger where it frees the past in the present for the sake of the future: “Historical consciousness liberates the past for the future, and it is then that the past gains force and becomes productive” (Heidegger , ). The critical and potentially emancipatory moment, “destructuring” as Heidegger would later redescribe it, of historical distance in relation to the present has been a key element in Dilthey’s legacy recognized by diverse philosophers: Heidegger’s lecture courses and occasional writings of the s concerning the hermeneutics of factical life; José Ortega y Gasset’s dialectic of historical reason and Karl Jaspers’s philosophy and psychology of worldviews; Georg Misch and Helmuth Plessner’s extension and transformation of Dilthey’s project into philosophical anthropology in Göttingen in the s; Martin Buber and Leo Baeck’s adaptation of their Berlin teacher’s historical-anthropological and comparative interpretive strategies; and the explorations of the early Herbert Marcuse and Habermas concerning possibilities of a hermeneutical materialism and critical social theory in their respective early writings: Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity () and Knowledge and Human Interests ().

 Dilthey’s Conception of the Sciences The appreciation of Dilthey’s thought has not always been universal. Dilthey’s emphasis of the interruptive and relativizing power of historical 

On Dilthey’s pluralism and its intercultural significance, as developed in the work of his student and son-in-law Georg Misch, see Nelson (, –).



 . 

distance was also criticized for its relativistic implications by Edmund Husserl in his Logos article “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.” Dilthey’s thought has been judged as a source of modernistic nihilism by Leo Strauss, identified as a predecessor of fascism and life-philosophical irrationalism by Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács, accused of supporting the myth of the atomistic individual by Georg Simmel, and condemned for his continuation of modern epistemology by Heidegger and his Enlightenment-oriented “prejudice against prejudices” and positivistic destruction of the continuousness of tradition and its disclosive truth by Gadamer in Truth and Method. Historical consciousness is intrinsically “modernistic” due to its disturbing of continuity and identity by introducing intervals, distances, and differences that, it implies, reflection and conceptualization should respect rather than strive to overcome. Instead of establishing the neutral indifference feared by anti-modernists, however, historical thinking in Dilthey’s case relativizes and pluralizes for the sake of concrete individuals and the recognition of their own ethical life. Historical reflection allows the concrete individual person, who remains invisible to misappropriated natural scientific categories and speculative metaphysical thinking, to be recognized in her impersonal contexts and conditions and personal relations and dispositions. The “positive” actually existing factical individual emerges immanently as a singular ethical personality from a unique configuration of intersecting natural forces and social-historical processes. This conditional and transient being serves as the point of departure for Dilthey’s philosophy and differentiation of the sciences. Just as the facticity of individual life given in personal lived-experience (Erlebnis) is the source and task of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which are shaped by the affects, interests, norms, and values of practical life, the factuality of natural phenomena approached through theoretically formed experience (Erfahrung) serves as the basis for the cognitive construction of knowledge (Erkenntnis) in the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). Owing to the epistemological, interpretive, and practical primacy of lived-experience, which, given its structural, interpretive, and cognitive character should not be reduced to a noncognitive “empathetic insight” (Norris , ), Dilthey experientially and historically critiqued the rational status of traditional metaphysics and theology while also critiquing the doctrinal and one-dimensional empiricism and positivism 

On historicism and Enlightenment, see Gadamer (, ); Masson (, ).

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



that dominated European philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century. Dilthey advocated his own particular, more expansive and tolerant variety of empirical, positivist, and “scientistic” philosophy in confrontation with the narrowing and reification of what legitimately counted as experience and scientific inquiry, while rejecting any perspective “transcending of experience” (Horkheimer , ). Dilthey is frequently enlisted on behalf of the idea that the humanities and natural sciences have two distinct cultures. He is said to have helped solidify the divide between these two cultures or styles of thinking. This is achieved by distinguishing between understanding (verstehen) and explanation (erklären) as the leading sensibilities of the subjectively and intersubjectively oriented human sciences and the objectively oriented natural sciences. Dilthey is a problematic source for arguments for dualism given his rejection of “two world” theories. Dilthey argued for the structural differentiation of wholes given in experience rather than metaphysically or ontologically based dualities between nature and spirit. Dilthey’s philosophical practice, which integrated scientific research and philosophical reflection, in fact challenged the gulf between artistic-humanistic-interpretive and scientific-naturalistic-explanatory modes of thought. The oft-overlooked point is that this is an epistemological-methodologically based distinction immanently called for by the objects of study themselves. It is erroneous to identify Dilthey’s philosophy of the sciences with the human and historical sciences alone. All sciences as practical pursuits presuppose a natural and social-historical world. They differ in how they bring these dimensions of the structural nexus of human life – self, others, social structures, external objects, natural forces – into consideration. As an inheritor of the Enlightenment’s opposition to metaphysics and speculative philosophy, in ways that resonate with and that influenced Rudolf Carnap and the early Vienna Circle, Dilthey rejected an unconditional difference in substance or essence between mind and matter, spirit and nature, reason and the world (Nelson a). In contrast with both the philosophical tradition and many contemporaries, Dilthey stressed the need to cultivate both the interpretive-experiential and explanatoryexperimental aspects of scientific inquiry. The relation between hermeneutical interpretation and naturalistic explanation is one of degrees on an experiential continuum rather than an abstract opposition. The fluidity between explanatory and interpretative strategies, which equally emerge from lived-experience and the structural nexus of life, was fixed and fragmented into irreducible opposites in twentieth-century disputes over hermeneutics and positivism in the sciences.



 . 

 Biological and Interpersonal Life Dilthey’s relation with “life-philosophy” is ambiguous. Some so-called lifephilosophers promoted an irrational and noninterpretive direct intuition of the immediacy of life that opposes Dilthey’s account of interpretive mediation. Horkheimer accordingly notes that “it is not when we examine ourselves, it is not by introspection nor, as Dilthey once said, by brooding, that we arrive at what we are, but by an analysis of historical reality” (Horkheimer , ). “Vulgar” or “popular” life-philosophers such as Oswald Spengler, as noted by Otto Neurath (who is otherwise critical of Dilthey), uncritically adopted phrases from Dilthey, misusing them for their own purposes (Neurath , –). Unlike much of what is classified under lifephilosophy, a questionable and vague historical category that erases the differences between the thinkers it purportedly designates, Dilthey repeatedly explicitly rejected () the speculative philosophy of nature and organicist vitalistic Naturphilosophie, () the employment of spiritual and vital principles in biology and the human sciences, and () the thesis that immediate feeling and intuition should have priority over interpretation and conceptualization. In contrast with the German irrationalism that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century in vulgar life-philosophy and biological racial thinking, Dilthey was dedicated throughout his lifetime to the historically emergent yet ethically unconditional value of the individual person. Dilthey’s personalism could interpret individual life as ethical and meaningful while allowing for its natural and social constitution and scientific analysis. It was centered in historical life, in which “hunger, love, and war are the most powerful forces” (Dilthey GS : ) and not problematic supernatural or metaphysical claims about persons that cannot be justified through experience, Dilthey likewise retained the commitment to the project of achieving cognitively valid insight and knowledge through the integration of experience, personal reflection, and scientific inquiry. He insisted that reflection and inquiry, however, remain one-sided and abstract without understanding the diversity and richness of the human world, the depths of the life of the individual who lives and acts in this world, and the sciences that study it. This is the immanent movement 

Dilthey’s oft-cited statement from the Schleiermacher biography that the “individual is ineffable” (GS  / –: ; SW : ) indicates the complexity of this relational whole rather than an unknowable essence or substance.

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



from facticity to ideality in which practical and philosophical wisdom is to be found. The practically and communicatively mediated nexus of life (Lebenszusammenhang), as a dynamic “structural whole” (Strukturzusammenhang), of finite individuated organisms is the inescapable context for science and philosophy. This is the case even as individuals immanently strive to transcend their conditional context for the sake of ideal truth, beauty, and the good that have unconditional universal significance and validity, and which in turn can be brought back to their context in the functional reality of the practical life-nexus. As finite natural-cultural beings in a hermeneutical situation, situationally enacting self-reflexive awareness (Innewerden) and critical self-reflection (Selbst-Besinnung) and exposed to multiplicity and aporia, we cannot force or divine a conclusion to the oscillation between the practical and the theoretical, the factical and the ideal, the particular and the universal, nor the individual and the whole. These dynamic life-contexts have already been and will continue to be structured and mediated by language, conceptualization, and theory. Thus, appeals to unmediated emotion, intuition, and irrational vitality are as incomplete, socially mediated, and open to interpretation as abstract conceptualistic rationalism (compare Horkheimer , ). The philosophical alternative articulated by Dilthey encompasses the epistemic modesty and historical humility associated with: () a deflationary, embodied, and minimalistic transcendental philosophy – that Karl-Otto Apel described as Dilthey’s project of “transforming Kant’s transcendental philosophy of consciousness into a quasi-transcendental philosophy of life” – or, alternatively, () a critical, hermeneutical, socially historically mediated, and – hence – higher or expansive empiria (“unbefangene Empirie”) without the (doctrinal) empiricism (“Empirie, nicht Empirismus”) that reductively limits and distorts what counts as experience and its expression. Dilthey’s expansive experientialism is operative in his psychological writings. Whereas Wilhelm Windelband and the Neo-Kantian philosophers distinguished psychology, conceived as a natural science, from the “cultural sciences” (Kulturwissenschaften), Dilthey controversially located psychology in the realm of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Dilthey’s interpretive psychology was the  

Compare my discussions in Nelson (; ; a). Apel (, , ); Dilthey GS :  and GS : . For further discussion of Dilthey’s relation to empiricism and its German history, see Damböck (; ); Nelson (; Nelson a).



 . 

most contested part of his philosophy during his lifetime. These works not only separated him from Neo-Kantianism, they made him the target of Hermann Ebbinghaus and the newly emerging discourse of explanatory psychology. Dilthey’s descriptive and analytic psychology had, on the one hand, clear affinities with the British empiricist psychological tradition of Berkeley, Hume, and John Stuart Mill, while, on the other hand, rejecting its atomism and associationism through the description and analysis of experiences as relational structural wholes (prefiguring Gestalt-psychology and phenomenological psychology) and the individual as a developmental unity (compare Nelson ). In this psychology of “concrete life,” the individual’s sense of continuity and identity is not given; it is acquired in the formation of an “acquired psychic nexus” (erworbener seelischer Zusammenhang). Dilthey’s structuralism, evident in his analyses of the individual sciences and their objects, is perhaps the most underemphasized dimension of his methodology in his English-speaking reception.

 Dilthey’s Aesthetics Dilthey was best known to wider audiences for his popular aesthetic works such as Lived Experience and Poetry. It is this Dilthey who, according to Georg Lukács, opened up new ground for aesthetics (including his own early work) with his large-scale interdisciplinary syntheses that subsequently needed to be overcome by his generation for the sake of a more radical, objectively rooted, Marxist conception of aesthetics. Dilthey’s aesthetics is portrayed by Lukács as a continuation of Romanticism and a form of bourgeois aestheticism that – due to the emphasis on feeling, imagination, and the free responsiveness of the subject – is incompatible with the realism and naturalism of the second half of the nineteenth century and his own realist aesthetics. However, Dilthey’s aesthetic works present a more complicated picture. As Makkreel has analyzed, aesthetics is for Dilthey a model human science and involves critical in addition to descriptive tasks (Makkreel : , ). In a number of his aesthetic writings, particularly “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task” (), Dilthey was clearly a more sympathetic and complex aesthetic theorist who criticized the 

On Dilthey’s importance and limitations for Lukács’ early thought, see Lukács (, ). This suspicion of “bourgeois aestheticism” and individualism occurs in others such as Theodor W. Adorno’s remarks on Dilthey’s Lived Experience and Poetry in his  lectures on aesthetics (Adorno , –).

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



limitations while articulating the significance and possibilities of literary realism and naturalism against their Neo-Romantic critics and the emergence of symbolist spiritualism and its visionary enthusiasm. The power of realism for Dilthey lies in how it critically reveals the discrepancy between outer appearance and internal reality, even as its weakness is its inability to reflectively generalize and interpretively focus on what is essential to evoking and heightening the “feeling of life” (Lebensgefu¨hl). Rather than rejecting naturalism and defending Romantic aesthetics, naturalism is understood as achieving its truth when it not only copies and reproduces but elucidates, intensifies, and transforms the life that it portrays. The naturalism of social novels – such as those of Dickens, Balzac, and Zola – is the emergence of a new style and sensibility appropriate for the modern technological conditions of life that has not yet achieved a “new inner form” for the work of art in relation to the subjectivity of the artist and audience. Dilthey consequently reinterprets both romanticism and realism as revealing two sides of the tensions of reality and feeling, resistance and will, and the objectivities of social life in the context of individual livedexperience (Erlebnis). In Dilthey’s life-philosophical and hermeneutical analysis, realism and naturalism prove to be incomplete steps that are more aesthetically promising for the “present task of aesthetics” than what Dilthey diagnosed in late romantic tendencies: the abandonment of the tensions between reality and feeling in a literature that one-sidedly and unreflectively embraces vitality, intuition, and irrational feeling. Dilthey’s aesthetic writings echo his wider “hermeneutical empiricist” strategy of critiquing and contextualizing idealist epistemology by situating knowledge in relation to the life-nexus: the social-historical, psychological, and natural conditions of life.

 Description of the Contributions The contributions to this volume, written by a group of internationally recognized scholars, engage how Dilthey’s innovative philosophical strategies and arguments are to be understood in relation to their historical situation and how they remain relevant to current philosophical issues concerning art and literature, the biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, and the sciences, psychology and the embodied mind, and culture, history, and society. The contributions of this volume enact a critical interpretation of key facets of the development, content, and historical and philosophical implications of Dilthey’s thought, providing both an introduction and critical analysis.



 . 

In Chapter , Rudolf A. Makkreel examines the Kantian point of departure and the interpretive orienting significance of purposiveness in Dilthey’s works, tracing how Dilthey hermeneutically transformed the Kantian notion of immanent purposiveness. Dilthey critically differentiated his approach from traditional metaphysics and objective idealism, in particular Hegel’s systematizing developmental use of teleology, rejecting robust forms of teleological explanation that attribute intrinsic purposes to nature or that speculatively posit final purposes for human existence and history. Dilthey articulates in contrast a multiperspectival contextualizing sense of human history in which forms of purposiveness and counterpurposiveness operate within historical forms of life and social organizations. In Chapter , Jos de Mul reconsiders the neglected role of biology in Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences, focusing on how Dilthey’s conception of life as an “immanent purposiveness of organic life” is a transformation of Kant’s subjectivist approach to purposiveness. This interpretation of the mediating role of the biological perspective leads de Mul to consider the extent to which Dilthey prefigures contemporary “naturalized” phenomenological accounts of cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended, and offers lessons for how to interpret the nexus of social-historical reality in relation to and beyond biological life. While the first two chapters elucidate the key notion of purposiveness in Dilthey, the next set of chapters turn to his hermeneutics and the philosophy of history. Michael N. Forster tracks in Chapter  the development of Dilthey’s concern with hermeneutics as the practice and theory of interpretation. Forster clarifies how this concern is closely linked in his early works with his interests in issues of biographical and autobiographical understanding, evident in his Life of Schleiermacher, and the foundations and methodology of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in Introduction to the Human Sciences, and follows their import into his later hermeneutics of historical life as well as contemporary hermeneutics. In Chapter , Charles Bambach explores the question of hermeneutics in the context of Dilthey’s project of a “Critique of Historical Reason,” analyzing this critique as both part of the “hermeneutical turn” in modern Western philosophy and as a residue of Cartesian-Kantian metaphysical foundationalism. While the former indicates how the historicalhermeneutic interpretation of life is inexorably marked by contingency, finitude, and plurality, the latter aims at securing a stable epistemological foundation for all sciences. Dilthey appears to either paradoxically combine both tendencies or to suggest an alternative in epistemologically grounding the human sciences in a historically situated self-reflexive awareness.

Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context



Frederick C. Beiser turns our attention to Dilthey’s historicism in Chapter . Dilthey presented his project of a critique of historical reason as an extension of the historical spirit into philosophy and as a defense of the insights of the historical school – associated with his teachers Ranke, Mommsen, Boeckh, and Trendelenburg – that broke with its absorption in particularity and lack of abstraction and theory. Beiser depicts how Dilthey’s historical and systematic works intend to radically historicize philosophy and rationality. In Chapter , Robert C. Scharff revisits the question of the natural and human sciences and the problem of the unity of the sciences, exploring Dilthey’s contextualized and methodologically pluralistic alternative to the idea that scientific theory and practice requires one fundamental method in order to count as scientific. Dilthey prefigures postpositivist philosophy of science, which in a number of significant ways has yet to sufficiently take the hermeneutical turn indicated in Dilthey. Shaun Gallagher takes up Dilthey’s distinctive underappreciated conception of empathy in Chapter . He notes that Dilthey did not use the more typical German expression Einfu¨hlung but “mitfu¨hlen,” which literally means “feeling with” and which has significant hermeneutical implications in his interpretation of the method and practice of the human sciences. Relying on the developmental psychology of his time, Dilthey differentiated forms of elementary and full empathic understanding and described the social mediation of the mind. Gallagher considers how Dilthey’s insights can contribute to contemporary discussions of empathy. In Chapter , Benjamin Crowe turns to an investigation of Dilthey’s moral vision and ethical theory, which Dilthey himself thought played a pivotal role in his philosophical thought. Dilthey articulated an ethical discourse that analyzed the social-historical mediation and the priority of creativity and individuality in self-cultivation and self-formation (Bildung). Dilthey’s ethics addresses areas of practical philosophy such as moral development and psychology, moral education and self-cultivation, forms of practical logic and reasoning, as well as value theory. In Chapter , Nicolas de Warren considers Dilthey’s philosophy of worldviews and his conception of their struggle, beginning with an analysis of Dilthey’s “dream” that was presented in a lecture on the historical influences on his work given on his seventieth birthday. The author follows the tension between Dilthey’s call for a “historical worldview” (geschichtliche Weltanschauung) and the problem of an anarchy of opinions and perspectives. This tension informed Dilthey’s formulation of a philosophy of worldviews, encompassing their types and conflicts, that would allow Dilthey to appreciate the historicity of thought while not



 . 

abandoning rationality’s universalizing aspirations. The “philosophy of philosophy” is a late form of Dilthey’s project of a critique of historical reason. In Chapter , Kristin Gjesdal considers Dilthey as a philosopher of contemporary culture, examining his reception of new artistic movements represented by authors such as Dickens, Balzac, Zola, and Ibsen. Dilthey critically embraced the new realist novel and articulated the new poetics that they demanded. Gjesdal explores the role of realism in Dilthey’s poetics. She argues that in the late s, his aesthetics involves: () an effort to shed light on the new literary forms of realism and naturalism, () a systematic attempt at grounding aesthetics in a detranscendentalized psychology, and () a claim that work-oriented and systematic approaches are both needed in aesthetics. Paul Guyer contrasts in Chapter  the anti-Hegelian tendencies in the aesthetics of Dilthey and George Santayana, evaluating their respective endeavors to free aesthetic experience and practice from the demands of metaphysics and from a teleological conception of the development of art while retaining a sense of aesthetic holism. Lee Braver considers in Chapter  the hermeneutical dimension of the work of Wittgenstein, analyzing the affinities and differences between Dilthey and the later Wittgenstein on issues of understanding, interpretation, and meaning-holism. They suggest two ways of articulating the immanent holistic context of the life-nexus and form of life through which understanding occurs and which it cannot transcend to arrive at unconditional or external foundations. In the concluding chapter, Chapter , Jean Grondin returns to the question of hermeneutics in Dilthey in light of its reception in the philosophical hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, tracing how Dilthey’s work marks a crucial point in the transmission of the conception of hermeneutics to subsequent philosophers while not systematically prioritizing the concept or even using it for large stretches of his career. Grondin describes how Dilthey broadened and extended hermeneutics from an auxiliary discipline to a way of doing philosophy, analyzing its significance for the development of the hermeneutical thinking of Heidegger and Gadamer who both adopted from and polemicized against Dilthey’s interpretation of interpretation and his hermeneutical strategies. The chapters of this collection offer a variety of critical perspectives on Dilthey’s philosophy in its historical context and in view of its continuing relevance. The hope is that they will encourage further investigations and reconsiderations of the structures and implications of Dilthey’s philosophy.

 

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness Its Kantian Basis and Hermeneutical Function Rudolf A. Makkreel

The idea of purposiveness that plays an important role in Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy seems to fit well with the way that he conceives of the worldview of objective idealism that stresses the overall interrelatedness of things. But, instead of attributing this kind of orderly purposiveness to nature as a whole, in the way that objective idealists such as Leibniz and Hegel have done, Dilthey focuses on how purposiveness applies to certain sociohistorical spheres of human life. He especially sets himself apart from Hegel by avoiding speculative claims about final purposes of world history. Instead, we will see that Dilthey’s initial inspiration was Kant’s much more limited conception of immanent purposiveness. Discerning spheres of influence that are purposively centered on themselves produces a multicontextual understanding of human history that is also cognizant of counterpurposive tensions. Ultimately, Dilthey’s appeal to purposiveness in organizing aspects of historical experience serves a hermeneutical function.

 Counterpurposive Stereotypes about Dilthey It is ironic that Wilhelm Dilthey, whose main intellectual purpose was to interpret other thinkers in particular and historical life in general, should be so widely misinterpreted. This is due in part to the fact that his writings are complex and his views matured over time. His corpus contains many important insights that influenced other thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer, Gadamer, and Ricoeur among others. But, many of the thinkers who were influenced by him did not always do him justice. This has generated misleading stereotypes about him that have gained sway. Thus, Dilthey’s claim that the human sciences aim primarily at understanding the meaning of sociohistorical life has often been misinterpreted to entail that they leave no room for causal explanations. He is thus misrepresented as a dualist who accepts nature as a nomothetic domain 



 . 

and thinks of historical reality as a spiritual sphere that can merely be described idiographically. Dilthey explicitly rejected this Neo-Kantian bifurcation, but the stereotype persists. Also, the fact that Dilthey thought that psychological description provides an initial orientation for understanding human behavior is not an endorsement of idiographic particularism, nor does it mean that he is guilty of psychologism. He uses psychological description to delineate some of the experiential structures that relate us to the world around us, without prejudging how knowledge of the world is justified. Dilthey’s views on knowledge are based on logical analysis and self-reflection and rely on normative standards that reject any form of reductionism, whether it be psychologism or naturalism. If we consider the parallel that can be established between Kant’s determinant-reflective judgment distinction and Dilthey’s explanationunderstanding distinction (Makkreel, , –, –), then it should become apparent that neither distinction carves out two separate domains. Determinant judgments classify relatively simple or familiar phenomena found in experience either by means of commonly observed rules to which they can be subsumed or by means of universal laws that can explain their behavior. However, reflective judgments are needed when our experience confronts us with a more complex or unusual particular, whether it be a rare beautiful flower, a resilient organism, or an unexpected human interaction for which we have no ready concepts, rules, and laws. As Kant indicates in his lectures on logic, reflective judgments can either be inductive or they can appeal to analogies that can provide a meaning context for framing what is to be understood. Contextual understanding of experience is also the project of Dilthey’s “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology” (GS : – / SW II: –), which sketches the general continuum of consciousness that provides the framework for understanding the meaning of particular experiences. Understanding the organizing reflective structures of mental life and explaining more determinate causal dependencies in psychic processes are not exclusive. They apply two modes of judgment to the same sphere of human experience. Another problem that has haunted Dilthey scholarship is that a first look at his typology of worldviews makes him seem to be a relativist. He distinguishes three types of metaphysical worldviews that are incommensurable and have recurred in the history of Western philosophy. The first of these is the naturalism of Protagoras, Democritus, Hobbes, and Hume among others. The other types are the idealism of freedom of Plato, Kant, and Fichte, and the objective idealism of Heraclitus, the Stoics, Leibniz,

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher (see GS , – / SW VI in press). Naturalism is pluralistic, the idealism of freedom is dualistic in opposing our finite nature to the infinite demands of reason. Finally, objective idealism aims at unity by discerning the infinite in the finite. Dilthey thinks that each of these three types will continue to reassert itself over time. This is due in part to the fact that the worldviews we adopt are influenced by various recurring attitudes to life and the world. But, this admission is not tantamount to the relativistic claim that each of them is equally valid. It is clear that naturalism is considered inadequate by Dilthey because it reduces what is real to what can be sensed and cognized. The idealism of freedom is regarded as superior to naturalism in that it can also assess what has been cognized as actual from the perspective of ideals projected by the will. Objective idealism, however, is most comprehensive in its attempt to make sense of things by also including our felt response to the world. It is prized by Dilthey in that it seems to allow all our capacities – cognitive, volitional, and affective – to reflectively know the world. It suggests the possibility of transforming our discursive or conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) of the world into a more holistic reflective knowing (Wissen). This ideal is laudable, but whether it can be fulfilled remains a question for Dilthey.

 From Objective Idealism to Objective Spirit The appeal of objective idealism derives from the fact that it conceives of the human subject, neither as a mere constituent of the physical world as naturalism does, nor as standing above or apart from that world as in the idealism of freedom. Objective idealism allows us to regard the individual knower as attuned to this world as a participant. This sense of being involved in the world provides an orientational access based on a sense of affinity and reciprocity. Admittedly, the volitional subject of the idealism of freedom is already capable of assessing what has been cognized and deciding what needs to be changed. But, the reflective knower of objective idealism seems to have a measure of wisdom in sensing what can and what cannot be changed. However, the fact that the objective idealist way of approaching the world can be endorsed as embodying a kind of wisdom and as relating us most fully to the world, does not assure Dilthey that its metaphysical conceptualization of life and the world is adequate or true. This is because any metaphysical formulation of a worldview amounts to an attempt to conceptually totalize things in a way that exceeds our human capacities.



 . 

Dilthey need not be seen as a relativist for failing to justify one type of worldview over the others, because he regards them all as inadequately founded. I will argue however that the perspective of objective idealism provides Dilthey an entry into a conception of purposiveness that can be extended to at least some spheres of reality. Naturalism denies the possibility of autonomous purposes and stands in opposition to the idealism of freedom. Dilthey finds neither of those two options sufficient because they conceive purposiveness merely in terms of personal needs and desires. If purposiveness is to have a meaning in historical life it should be able to encompass more than psychological and moral intentions. It will also be an idea of purposiveness that need not project a final purpose or overarching telos. Dilthey thought that the natural sciences were correct to not appeal to purposes in explaining the physical and organic world, and he rejected the metaphysical speculations of vitalism. Nevertheless, he argued that the human sciences may appeal to a purposiveness that is related to human intentions but not limited to them. He rejected Hegelian teleology as dogmatic for being geared to final purposes of history that depend on metaphysical hypotheses. But, the discovery at the beginning of the twentieth century of lost early writings by Hegel on the relation between life and spirit led Dilthey to soften his opposition to Hegel late in his career. He created a hermeneutical counterpart for objective idealism by adopting Hegel’s idea of objective spirit, not as a dialectical stage toward absolute spirit, but as a more limited medium of commonality that informs our elementary understanding of life. Indeed, he can be said to reconceive objective spirit as a regional sphere of order to which the Kantian idea of immanent purposiveness can be applied. As early as in his Basel lectures on logic from  to , Dilthey looked to Kant for the germs of an expositional idea of “immanent teleology” (GS : ) that can be methodically useful.

 Kant’s Immanent Purposiveness as Organizational As an idealist of freedom, Kant often speaks of the purposiveness of reason. Reason has both theoretical and practical interests. Its theoretical interests in the first Critique consist in finding an overall lawful order that gives systematic unity to all our cognition. The practical interests of the second Critique lie in submitting our actions to the categorical imperative that all maxims of action must be universalizable. Rational purposiveness is directed at the ideal assurance that the objective laws of nature do not

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



have the power to undermine the objective laws of morality. However, in the third Critique Kant is willing to move beyond the concerns of the idealism of freedom by exploring another sense of purposiveness, namely, what is purposive for judgment. The purposiveness of aesthetic judgment is without an objective purpose. It is not the earnest purposiveness of theory and practice, but a more playful purposiveness whereby the imagination can inspire judgment. Aesthetic purposiveness is initially subjective in suggesting many possibilities without committing to any. Its purposiveness is to produce pleasure, but for it to pass the test of human taste the pleasure must be disinterested in serving more than mere private enjoyment. A valid aesthetic pleasure involves a purposiveness that can be felt to be communicable and shared with others. Then, it becomes intersubjective and discerns the possibility of a reflective rather than determinant order. Kant opens the second teleological half of the Critique of the Power of Judgment by stating that “one has good reason to assume, in accordance with transcendental principles,” a general “subjective purposiveness of nature in its particular laws, for comprehensibility for the human power of judgment and the possibility of the connection of the particular experiences in one system of nature” (Kant, , : ). This is still a very general sense of systematic purposiveness, but it is now rooted in our power of judgment in order to test how far it can be specified and made objective. Kant thinks it is possible to speak of purposiveness of particular things in nature without overriding the mechanical principles of motion of physics. But, before further examining the status of purposive judgments that are teleological or content-directed, Kant introduces a formal purposiveness that is not material in any sense. It is a geometrical purposiveness as discussed in §: “All geometrical figures that are drawn in accordance with a principle display a manifold and often admired objective purposiveness, namely that of serviceability for the solution of many problems” (Kant, , : ). It concerns the suitability of a figure “for the generation of many shapes aimed at purposes and is cognized through reason” (Kant, , : ). The figure becomes a schema for solving as yet unspecified problems. It is a purposiveness that is “objective and intellectual” and “not merely subjective and aesthetic” (Kant, , : ). However, because it is only potentially purposive, it is not called “teleological.” In the rest of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” Kant moves from the formal objectivity of geometrical purposiveness to consider whether “an objective and material purposiveness” (Kant, , : ) can be attributed to organic life. Whereas geometrical purposiveness is formal in a



 . 

general schematic sense, teleological purposiveness will be formal in a specifying sense. Here, experience leads us to specify certain things as being end-directed. Kant distinguishes between a “relative purposiveness” (Kant, , : ) where something is thought to serve as a means to some external end and “an immanent purposiveness of a natural being” (Kant, , : ) as itself an end. While it is true that grass can be useful in providing food for cows, this external purposiveness of grass relative to cows does not explain its existence as an end of nature. We are only entitled to speak of a product of nature as also an end of nature to the extent that it exhibits an immanent form of purposiveness. This means that we must be able to regard it as “an organized and self-organizing being” (Kant, , : ). A thing can be organized if “each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others . . . and on account of the whole” (Kant, , : –). But, then it could still be a product of human art such as a clock. For something to be one of nature’s ends, we must judge it to also be a self-organizing product of nature that produces its own parts to form a reciprocally functioning whole. As a physical thing, a clock’s internal motion requires an initial impetus from without, but living organisms can be seen to move themselves and are defined as having a “self-propagating formative [bildende] power” (Kant, , : ). Ultimately, this formative power also includes the generative power to reproduce. Kant acknowledges, however, that any claim that organisms function teleologically must be thought of as being merely regulative. The physical laws of mechanism were validated as being constitutive for our understanding of all of nature in the Critique of Pure Reason. Although each part of an organism is in principle subject to the external mode of causality of the laws of motion and impact, the harmonious or immanent functioning of the parts among themselves can provide the whole a relative purposive independence. Even those parts of an animal “such as skin, hair and bones” that do not closely interact with each other and can readily be explained mechanically “must be judged teleologically” so that we can ask about any such part what “provides the appropriate material, modifies it, forms it, and deposits it in its appropriate place” (Kant, , : ). The supplementary idea of purposiveness provides a necessary framing function for human judgment in pursuing further inquiry. This means, however, that Kant’s regulative appeal to teleology applies only to the reflective rather than the determining power of judgment. Immanent purposiveness is imputed as a regulative claim about objective reality, but reflectively it is only intersubjectively valid “for us (human beings in general)”

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



(Kant, , : ). It allows us to organize our experience of certain aspects of nature “in analogy with causality according to ends . . . (like the kind we encounter in ourselves) . . . without presuming thereby to explain it” (Kant, , : ). Kant’s teleological claims are organizational and expositional rather than legislative and explanative. Another way to formulate this is to say that Kant’s claims about natural purposiveness are interpretive. This provides a link to Dilthey, who is interested in applying the idea of purposiveness to our interpretation of historical life. There, purposiveness can be more than a regulative idea, namely, it can be constitutive for understanding the order that humans discern in their own experience and bring about in the historical world. Thus, Dilthey speaks of the immanent purposiveness of psychic and spiritual life.



Immanent Purposiveness, Genesis, and Epigenesis

Whereas Kant saw immanent purposiveness as a regulative and reflective supplement to our determinant ways of causally explaining physical processes, Dilthey views our understanding of immanent purposiveness as more primordial than the causal order that governs our experience of nature. In his “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” of , Dilthey locates immanent purposiveness in many sequences of our ordinary lived experience. When one state is succeeded by another, this is often a purposive response to that initial state. Dilthey’s example is the case when “a feeling of aversion produces the inclination and striving to remove its object from my consciousness” (GS :  / SW II: ). But, even when a new state is aroused by an external change in our environment, previous states still provide a background for its reception. There is thus a nexus of consciousness that structures our lived experience and that can be described and analyzed without positing any hypothetical explanations. Dilthey summarizes this as follows: The structural nexus is available in lived experience. Because we experience these transitions and productive influences, and because we possess a reflexive awareness [Innewerden] of this structural nexus that embraces all the passions, sufferings, and destinies of human life, we understand human life, history, all the depths and abysses of the human condition. (GS :  / SW II: )

Reflexive awareness provides an immediate prereflective awareness of the interconnectedness of our experiences, and to the extent that this nexus of psychic life aims at the satisfaction of our needs it is felt to be purposive. In fact, Dilthey claims that “it is solely in psychic structure that the character of purposiveness is originally given, and when we attribute this to an



 . 

organism or to the world, this concept is only transferred from inner lived experience” (GS :  / SW II: ). We can couch this more carefully by stating that whatever is the source of immanent purposiveness, we first become conscious of it in psychic life and we can only attribute it to organic life by analogy. In the life of consciousness as well in organic life, immanent purposiveness has a self-organizing function. For Kant it was a formative power of organisms that functions independently of conscious intentions, for Dilthey it is continuous with human intentionality, but also taps preintentional processes of psychic life. We become immediately or reflexively aware of it as one state goes over into another, which can then be explicated reflectively as a developing structural nexus. It is the task of Dilthey’s descriptive and analytic psychology to articulate the genetic development of consciousness, which is more open-ended than Kant’s conception of organic epigenesis. Kant’s conception of the immanent purposiveness of organisms should be seen in conjunction with the way he tried to find a compromise between traditional preformationism and the theory of epigenesis proposed by his contemporary Johann Blumenbach. Epigenesis was a biological theory about how the embryo forms and differentiates itself after conception. It rejected the theory that the embryo is preformed in the germ cell of the mother and that the father’s semen only mechanically stimulates its growth. Specifically, Kant attempted to move beyond the traditional belief that the form of each individual creature is divinely preformed. He replaced the theory of individual preformation with a “system of generic preformation” that applies to a whole biological species. Organic form is now conceived “virtually (virtualiter)” as a “predisposition imparted to the stock” (Kant, , : ). This reduced mode of preformationism leaves room for the theory of epigenesis that Kant endorses scientifically “because it considers nature, at least as far as propagation is concerned, as itself producing rather than merely developing those things that can initially be represented as possible only in accordance with the causality of ends, and this with the least possible appeal to the supernatural” (Kant, , : ). The simplest way to conceive of the immanent purposiveness of organisms is in terms of growth and differentiation, self-preservation and resisting external harm. The first epigenetic manifestation of growth and differentiation occurs in the protected context of the mother’s womb. After birth the organism is usually nurtured in a relatively safe home environment and gradually learns to assert itself in order to gain a relative independence from the larger world, not only biologically, but also intellectually.

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



In the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant also speaks of epigenesis, namely, the “epigenesis of pure reason” (Kant, , B). By this he means that our cognition of the world is “not all borrowed from experience,” for there are elements of cognition that are “self-thought” (Kant, , B). Thus, the categories of the understanding are not mere “subjective predispositions for thinking implanted in us . . . in such a way that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along which experience runs” (Kant, , B). These laws of nature would be the ones that govern the processes of the human brain. The epigenesis of reason upholds the thesis that however our brain functions in providing us with the contents of experience after our release from the womb, our mind has the power to contribute a spontaneous form to them. We can thus formulate the following parallel: the immanent purposiveness of organisms points to nodes of spontaneity in a mechanistic world and the spontaneous epigenesis of reason involves a kind of “self-birth [Selbstgebärung] of our understanding” (Kant, , A / B) whose categories have the purpose of giving meaning to the givens of experience.

 Purposiveness as Nonfoundational and Orientational For methodological reasons, Dilthey’s immanent purposiveness of psychic life does not appeal to either Kant’s organic metaphors or any aspect of preformationism. It may be the case that we are born with certain predispositions, but for a descriptive psychology to posit them would be to allow unprovable hypotheses to influence it from the start. Moreover, Dilthey does not posit a transcendental self that grounds human consciousness or a pregiven whole that frames the processes of psychic life. Psychological description always begins midstream as it were. The first inklings of a unity of psychic life derive from a prereflective, reflexive self-awareness that precedes a distinct self. The reflective self of discursive cognition is only gradually acquired over time. There is no reason to posit a prior self that grounds our experience. The phenomenological way to make sense of the self is to articulate it as an evolving “acquired psychic nexus” that comes to provide the context for understanding the meaning of our impressions and evaluating our responses. This overall acquired psychic nexus or APN “conditions each act of consciousness in its appearance and character” (Dilthey, GS :  / SW II: ). It provides an orientational framework that uses what we have learned from experience to avoid reacting to the many stimuli that are not important for our life and to focus on those that are or could be. The APN is thus purposive in gradually making us capable



 . 

of becoming at least relatively independent from the external world. Although the APN is a developing framework that can influence future states of mind, its effect can be so indirect that it should not be thought of as having the governing function of holistic organisms. Indeed, Dilthey lays out a spectrum that delineates the extent to which the efficacy of the APN can be felt. In everyday experience we tend to be so preoccupied with immediate challenges that we lose that holistic perspective that moments of rest and reflection can offer. Thus, the full potential of the guidance that the APN can provide is often lost, if only temporarily. Dilthey was convinced that this loss of access to our overall APN is more permanent in cases of insanity. The tendency of those who suffer from psychosis to become obsessed with more confining contexts led Dilthey to question the Romantic link between artistic genius and madness. In his Poetics, he proposes that one of the marks of great poets is the ability to more actively draw on the richness and full scope of their APN and bring it to focus in their imagery. Their imagination not only synthesizes elements of experience that are not normally related, but also articulates the overall structures of human experience (Makkreel, , –, –). We all draw on our APN to a certain extent, but poets have the power to capture it more fully and give it a presence in their work. This constitutes the purposiveness of what is typical in art, namely, to allow something to become representative of a larger whole. Certain characters or situations are created to evoke more general themes of contextual significance. The acquired psychic nexus or APN that characterizes a human individual is a contextual system that has a general orientational purposiveness. In his descriptive and analytic psychology, Dilthey also distinguishes subsystems that are organized in accordance with the three aspects of consciousness that Kant had already differentiated as cognition, volition, and feeling. There is a logical structure that can be traced among perceptual and conceptual acts that are geared to the acquisition of cognition of the world. There is also an evaluative structure that is formed on the basis of our feelings. In fact, this affective structure is central in mediating between the information we have about the world around us and the way our will intends to respond to that information. This final intentional or volitional structure then determines the means we are prepared to use to attain the most important of our goals. These three structural systems function to articulate our mental life, but they cannot be fully separated. There is no state of consciousness or experience that does not consist of all three aspects of psychic life. Thus, as Dilthey points out, even an act that is primarily cognitive, will involve some feeling and willing. To arrive at a

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



reliable cognitive explanation of why something happened will require an interest in finding the most relevant conditions as well as attention in order to work out the solution. Interest is a function of feeling and attention is a volitional process.

 Purposiveness and Productive Cultural Systems On the model of the subjective immanent purposive contexts of human experience, Dilthey also projects purposive historical contexts that are objective. In the Introduction to the Human Sciences, he calls these purposive contexts “cultural systems” (GS : – / SW I: –). Cultural systems as Dilthey defines them encompass more than the kind of culture that we associate with the arts and humanities. They apply to a whole range of social and political interactions that human beings engage in. In principle, each of these sociocultural systems constitutes a voluntary association whereby individuals choose to cooperate in order to achieve a specific set of practical ends that they could not accomplish on their own. These systems aim at a certain functional reciprocity that serves to get things done. Members with distinct skills work together for a set of common purposes and therefore establish certain organizational structures to facilitate this. The immanent purposiveness of sociocultural systems is again to be understood as self-organizing in coordinating the activities of their members. However, over time as different people contribute to these organizations, their structures will change. There will be several reasons for this. One may be that the original purposes need to be adapted to new circumstances. Another factor is that those who govern the operations will change over time. Given the many challenges that life poses, members can commit only a part of themselves to the various systems to which they belong. This allows the purposiveness of a cultural system to take on a life of its own independent of its organizers. Gradually, cultural systems become institutionalized to form what Dilthey calls “the external organization of society” (GS : – / SW I: –). The dynamic immanent purposive system organized by a group of persons becomes increasingly impersonal and rigid. It is for this reason that late in his life Dilthey tends to replace the concept of purposive system (Zweckzusammenhang) with that of a dynamic or productive system (Wirkungszusammenhang) (Makkreel, , –). Wirkung denotes a productive efficacy that could be either causal or purposive. It can be productive in a way that exceeds any original intention. From now on I will also refer to purposive sociocultural systems as “productive systems.” We can summarize by



 . 

noting that organic immanent purposiveness is self-organizing in ways that are generative and that sociocultural purposiveness is self-organizing in a more open-ended productive manner. Early in his career, Dilthey used the organic metaphor “generation” to mark a time span in the development of historical life. It was used to measure, not the whole of a life, but the time span needed to imprint a “new ring on the tree” (GS : ) of human development. Whereas each actual tree ring represents one year of growth, Dilthey’s generational rings mark out roughly thirty years as the time span from birth to the full maturity of human beings. It is a designation for the contemporaneity of individuals who were nurtured by similar conditions. However, in his biography of Schleiermacher, Dilthey focuses on the generation that starts not with , the year of Schleiermacher’s birth, but with  when he arrives in Berlin. This is the point in time when he and contemporaries like the Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel began to purposively engage each other and define themselves over against the earlier generation of Lessing, Kant, Fichte, and Goethe. A generation represents a kind of immanent self-identification – “eine von innen abmessende Vorstellung” (GS : ) is Dilthey’s phrase – but it is somewhat contingent and primarily temporal. A generation is not a functional system like an organism or a sociocultural system, but it is purposive in providing a contextual schema for exploring mutual human influences within a limited time frame. Although each generation is nurtured by a preceding one, it tends also, as we saw from the Schleiermacher example, to eventually assert its own independent identity. Thus, when speaking of the development of the sciences, Dilthey notes that often a new generation will turn its back on earlier achievements. This is less a problem in the natural sciences than in the human sciences. Sometimes the ethos of a new generation will lead it to lose interest in insights that were in tune with an earlier ethos. This points to counterpurposive gaps in the history of the human sciences when intellectual achievements are lost sight of and go underground. The effect of such a counterpurposive turn can be a “complete break in continuity” (GS : ), but sometimes earlier accomplishments are recovered at least in part. The idea of a generation proved to be relatively useful for biography and autobiographical reflection, but for charting scientific and cultural development on a larger scale Dilthey replaced it with the concept of epoch (Epoche). This is a more technical term that is not to be confused with the more traditional notion of a historical age (Zeitalter). Whereas thinkers

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

such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx speculated about history as one universal purposive system that can be divided into ages, Dilthey’s epochs apply to the specialized purposive systems that we spoke of as being sociocultural. These systems can be more readily aligned with particular human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which can then analyze their own development in terms of epochs. The human sciences include the humanities that focus on activities associated with education and edification by means of the arts and literature, music and religion, as well as philosophical fields such as aesthetics and ethics. But the human sciences are not restricted to the humanities or liberal arts. As Dilthey conceives the human sciences, they also encompass social sciences such as political theory, sociology, and economics. Moreover, to connect these diverse disciplines, we need to understand the patterns and norms of human behavior that psychology, history, and philosophical anthropology can disclose. It is to these last three human sciences that Dilthey made his most important contributions. Many of the human sciences can be roughly correlated with one of the purposive systems that intersect in history at large. Thus, economics will be needed to make sense of the market systems that encompass the forces of production and distribution in different countries. But, these systems are complicated by the political institutions that regulate the processes. This is why there used to be a discipline called “political economy.” With the globalization of capitalism many extra-economic factors become relevant. History is needed to account for how the productive and distributive systems of an economy have developed over time, but most of all for providing an understanding of how other forces and institutions intersect and influence it. Productive systems like economies end up being so complex that they could be characterized as being like the ecosystems that we now speak of as integrating organic and inorganic forces. This could raise questions about the self-sufficiency of immanent purposive systems. But, just as the assimilation of external elements like air, water, and food was always understood to be part of the inherent functioning of organisms, Dilthey’s cultural systems were always conceived as intersecting with other systems and only relatively independent. This kind of intersection of purposive systems underscores the complexity of history as a human science. We saw that even a proper biography requires a sense of the period and the surroundings of the subject that can be schematized in terms of the generation that the subject belonged to. A biographer must also be aware of some of the productive systems relevant to the subject’s professional contributions. And, what may seem to be distinct histories of religion, the arts, literature, philosophy, politics,



 . 

economics, and society will often turn out to be less than autonomous. When it comes to large-scale histories of countries and civilizations, Rankean plot-like narratives no longer suffice according to Dilthey. An adequate understanding of history cannot be attained without a sense of how the various productive systems intersect in the course of history. This is why he questions those grand narratives of universal history that appeal to some overall purpose or final cause. The complexity of history cannot be explained in this way. Historical explanations worth striving for will have to be more local. Limited causal explanations may indeed be possible in history as long as they are framed by the understanding of the relevant productive contexts. Just as he rejected the metaphysical reading of world history by Hegel, Dilthey rejected August Comte’s system of positivism because it appeals to overarching laws of intellectual development that lead seamlessly from celestial to terrestrial physics and from there to organic and social physics. This last transition from organic physics or animal / human physiology to social physics or sociology deliberately bypasses psychology, which is dismissed as the last gasp of the theology of the soul. Comte regards his sociology as the culminating and unifying science that encompasses all the other sciences. By contrast, Dilthey advances his theory of the sciences as radically pluralistic. His human sciences make room for retrospective descriptions of psychic (seelische) processes without claiming to be able to introspect some underlying soul (Seele). No one science like sociology can adequately absorb the other human sciences into itself and do justice to the complexities of human life and history. The sociology developed by Dilthey’s student Georg Simmel was more acceptable in that, as Dilthey writes, it studies “the forms which psychic life assumes within the framework of the social relations of individuals” (SW I: ). Simmel’s sociology examines human relations such as dominance and subordination, the formation of hierarchies, and modes of political representation without ignoring the contributions of psychology as Comte did. Despite Dilthey’s criticism that the universal histories of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Comte are too abstract and unilateral, he holds on to the ideal of universal history. What this means for Dilthey is that the universal methods of the sciences should be applied when examining delimited periods of the past. To mark this difference we could say that Dilthey’s approach to history is “universalist” in nature without endorsing the overarching projections of traditional universal histories. It is unlikely that we will be able to determine universal laws that apply to history as such, 

This is what I argue for in Makkreel (, ).

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



but it is in within our power to arrive at laws that define aspects of the workings and development of specific sociopolitical and cultural systems. In a review of Marx’s Das Kapital, Dilthey is skeptical about its general theory of measuring economic value, but praises the chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” for explaining how “the present conditions of the accumulation of capital lead to the gradual concentration in ever fewer hands of the ownership of industry and commerce, and that accordingly this state of affairs prepares the way for the transfer to the state of this concentration of capital and of control over labor” (GS : – / SW I: ). Overall, Dilthey finds the work to be a mix of post-Hegelian conceptual speculation and brilliant causal analysis.



Life-Categories and Levels of Understanding

To better gauge the relation between Dilthey’s purposive systems and causal analysis in history, we can take a brief look at his essay “Life and Cognition,” from the early s. In his exposition of basic life-categories, he claims that both the concepts of causality and purposiveness derive their initial sense from a reciprocal nexus of efficacy (Wirkung) that pervades life. Dilthey conceives of life, not merely as the delimited spheres of organic and mental agency, but as the ultimate context of experience that we cannot go beyond or behind. This life-context (Lebenszusammenhang) would later be called the life-world (Lebenswelt) by Husserl. It is a worldly presence that manifests itself everywhere as “a reciprocal relation by which something exerting an influence experiences a reaction” (Dilthey, GS :  / SW II: ). The basic life-category that captures this relation is that of “doing and undergoing (Wirken und Leiden)” (GS :  / SW II: ). The reciprocal relation of doing and undergoing can already be experienced at the prescientific level and the view that this efficacy pervades every aspect of the world informs objective idealism as Dilthey defined it in his typology. The human sciences explicate this efficacy of life in terms of a secondary categorial relation of acting and suffering (Tun und Leiden) that can be applied to the sphere of human agency and interaction. It is at this second level that the acting–suffering relation defines the purposive functional structures of cultural systems and the external organization of society. The fact that psychological suffering is involved in human interaction is implied by Simmel’s focus on social 

For more on the acting–suffering relation versus the cause–effect relation see GS : – / SW I: –.



 . 

relations of dominance and subordination. Finally, it is also possible to explicate the efficacy of life in terms of more abstract cause and effect (Ursache und Wirkung) categorial relations. Although the natural sciences have been more successful in finding and testing causal uniformities in the physical world, as far as Dilthey is concerned the human sciences can in principle also develop causal explanations for certain aspects of human behavior. Some of these explanations may even be physiologically based as Comte insists, but Dilthey’s main thesis is that human science explanations are merely valid within the limited parameters of the purposive cultural systems that we understand through our participation in them. Thus, the purposiveness associated with human agency provides the framework for determining where causal conditions become relevant. Although Dilthey’s sequential ordering of the reciprocal efficacy of the life-nexus, human interactive purposiveness, and the unidirectional causality of nature diverges from Kant, he finds partial vindication from the acknowledgment in the Critique of Pure Reason that the third relational category of interaction (Wechselwirkung) is not reducible to the second relational category of cause and effect (Ursache und Wirkung) (Dilthey, GS :  / SW II: ). So far, purposiveness has been discussed mainly in terms of functional social organization with minimal reference to the intentional purposes ascribed to individual human actions. Indeed, in the just-concluded discussion of reciprocal efficacy, purposive interaction, and blind causality, intentional purposiveness was not mentioned at all. To make sense of intentional purposes, Dilthey adds another category that he calls “essentiality.” It is this life-category of essentiality that further refines the concept of purposiveness in evaluative and volitional terms. Dilthey writes: “Life itself forces us to distinguish between what matters, what is decisive and primordially powerful in life, and what can be dispensed with . . . We say that the meaning and sense of life inheres in what is essential” (GS :  / SW II: –). Each living being gradually delineates “a spectrum of interests from a central point to more peripheral interests on all sides” (GS :  / SW II: ). At the core are things that are both meaningful and of intrinsic value. This core is a sphere of “immanent teleology, as it is appropriately expressed in the categories of essence, meaning, and sense” (GS :  / SW II: ). This sphere provides the basis for assessing things in terms of being more or less important for our lives. And, when we begin to reflect about the relations of what is not essential to what is essential, “a relationship emerges that can be appropriately expressed only by means of the trope of means and ends” (GS :  / SW II: ).

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



Then, the concept of an explicit or intentional purpose comes to be valued as an end in itself in contrast to the means that serve to bring it about. There are many means such as tools that are purely instrumental, but Dilthey insists that there also preparatory stages of our life that are more than mere means. Such a stage may not count as an end in itself, but it can have “worth in itself” (GS :  / SW II: ). Thus, his philosophy of education is critical of those educators who regard youth as just a preparation for adulthood. Every stage of life and every epoch of history should be explored for its immanent teleology. “We view our thought and work as the means for the preservation and basis of life, and yet at the same time we know that real work possesses its own worth” (GS :  / SW II: ). Hermeneutically, Dilthey’s category of essentiality is linked to the idea of an intended purpose by means of the concepts of sense, meaning, and value. This underscores that immanently productive systems or contexts are centered in themselves without necessarily being ends in themselves as defined by a final purpose. That Dilthey assigns them a worth in themselves allows us to think of immanent purposiveness as a constellation in which the search for sense and meaning is geared to certain values without allowing any single purpose to become overriding. We can clarify this by turning to Dilthey’s late work, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences of . There, meaning becomes the central category for the interpretation of history. The historian’s initial task is to interpret the objectifications of the past and present. Whether they be institutions, customs, books, works of art, such phenomena always contain, like man himself, a reference back from an outer sensory aspect to one that is withdrawn from the senses and therefore inner . . . Here it is a common error to resort to the psychic course of life –psychology – to account for our knowledge of this inner aspect. (GS :  / SW III: )

The first step in understanding human actions and works is to place them in their local life-context. This kind of elementary understanding is still indeterminate and only makes an initial sense of what is at stake. Higher understanding that is aimed at finding the meaning of human products and institutions requires a more determinate context and this must be related to what we value about our cultural systems. Meaning is defined hermeneutically as a relation that parts have within a whole to which they contribute. The inner aspect that locates the historical meaning of an 

Section  of chapter  of “Life and Cognition” is entitled: “The Categories of Essentiality or Essence, Purpose, Value, Sense, Meaning.” See GS :  / SW II: .



 . 

institution such as a university derives primarily from the educational values that it fosters and passes on to future generations. Each of the founders of an institution may have had slightly different intentions, which end up partly canceling each other out. And, to the extent that something like a convergent purpose emerges, it will have to be adapted to changing circumstances and redirected. That is why we saw Dilthey redefine purposive cultural systems as productive systems. Only after the general sociocultural value-parameters have been established for understanding the meaning of institutions, may the relation to their creators and their ends come into play. Psychological appeals to their creators’ intent or purpose are not essential, but could eventually become relevant in order to explain why the lawyer who drafted the bylaws of an organization ignored certain conventions or why one of its administrators violated the ultimately agreed-on bylaws. Here, motivations or special interests may have intervened, but their potential explanative value is limited and often merely negative. Since works of art are individual expressions, Dilthey’s increasing reluctance to rely on psychological motivations and intentions to define their meaning may be harder to accept. But, from his final hermeneutical standpoint, Dilthey argues that art works are more than expressive, for they also articulate the context or sphere in which artists are creative. Thus, he claims that a poetic work does not give us a representation of “the inner processes in the poet . . . rather [it presents] a nexus created in them but separable from them. The nexus of a drama consists in a distinctive relation of material, poetic mood, motif, plot and means of presentation. Each of these moments serves a function in the structure of the work” (GS :  / SW III: ). Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a self-standing structural nexus objectified by the published text and its performances on stage. This objective structural nexus frames the meaning of the work and the primary task of understanding should be directed there. Nevertheless, critics have wondered why Hamlet, who can be decisive in certain situations, hesitates in fulfilling his vow to kill his uncle for his crime. One could ask whether there is some biographical information about Shakespeare that can shed some light on Hamlet’s character flaw. Or, one could share Freud’s suspicion that Hamlet unconsciously shared his uncle’s desire for his mother and was therefore held back by guilt. I think Dilthey would not rule out such explanations appealing to authorial intentions or unconscious causes. But, they remain hypothetical additions to an overall understanding and should not be made decisive in literary criticism. Speaking of understanding more generally – of texts, human affairs, and historical events – there are many who regard it as a mere preliminary for

Dilthey’s Conception of Purposiveness



explanation. While it is true that for Dilthey understanding provides the orientational context for framing explanative hypotheses, it is not a context that can then be set aside. A successful explanation can deepen our understanding without replacing it. Explanations are primarily cognitive proposals that are definite enough to be tested and rejected if the evidence does not support them. Proper understanding is a reflective knowing that exceeds theoretical cognition, for it is assented to on a practical level as well. Understanding is something we possess on many levels and may be altered by cognitive counterevidence without being simply replaced. In light of these considerations, we can give a final assessment of Dilthey’s appeal to the idea of purposiveness.



Orientational Purposiveness and Hermeneutical Contextualization

In his descriptive psychology, Dilthey claimed that our initial sense of purposiveness is rooted in a reflexive awareness of the continuum of our experience. It is a lived nexus in which many parts can be felt to cohere developmentally. We also saw that this conscious continuum is framed by a never fully conscious but more comprehensive nexus that structures what we have learned from the past. This acquired psychic nexus entails that new experiences are informed by past experiences without being constrained by them. Our lived experience is purposively enriched by this acquired psychic nexus and shapes our characteristic self. The acquired psychic nexus can guide us in becoming relatively independent from the hostile natural world around us, but it should also lead us to recognize that it is important to become integrated into a more supportive human world. The latter realization is underscored by The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, where Dilthey acknowledges that even before we can accumulate enough experience to be guided by an acquired self, we are already oriented by the medium of objective spirit. Indeed, objective spirit as Dilthey redefines it, is what our heritage passes on to us from the achievements of our ancestors and how they influence us together with our generational contemporaries. It is a local context of commonality that is embodied in the language, customs, and public practices that any generation assimilates. Objective spirit provides the medial means of communication and mutual understanding 

This is how I develop the explanation-understanding and cognition-knowing distinctions for hermeneutical purposes. See Makkreel (, –, –).



 . 

that make human exchange and cooperation possible. It is thus a more basic and overarching influence on us than our own acquired psychic nexus. Together, they provide us an evolving order of familiarity that frames the meaning of things. For Dilthey, objective spirit serves as a pregiven medial context that is purposive in providing a regional frame of reference for the elementary understanding of things. The task of the human sciences, however, is to reach for higher understanding and test the local assumptions and conventions of our region with those of other regions. Like the natural sciences, the human sciences aim at cognitive results that are universally valid. The commonalities we assimilate from our local habitat must be tested over against those of others so that we can assess them in terms of their value for knowing the world at large. Commonality (Gemeinsamkeit) must be placed in the context of what is universally valid (allgemeingu¨ltig). Once we begin as adults to participate in the sociocultural systems that are important for the maintenance and improvement of our life, these generalizing human-science concerns become increasingly relevant to each of us. This is because most of these cooperative systems that we participate in, whether by choice or because of need, lead beyond the local level. Obvious examples of this are the way educational institutions and economic systems need to accommodate what satisfies local conditions to global demands. Dilthey’s contribution to human understanding was to delineate some of the hermeneutical contexts that can bring the efficacy of historical life into focus, whether that be the medial context of the objective spirit of one’s region, the experiential context of one’s acquired psychic nexus, the temporal contexts of generations and epochs, or the functional contexts of sociocultural systems. All these contexts exhibit a kind of immanent purposiveness. But, they provide neither the open-ended formal problem-solving purposiveness that Kant assigned to geometrical figures nor the generically preformed purposiveness that he attributed to organisms. Dilthey’s contexts are orientational and serve to structure our understanding of historical life. The seemingly random convergence of multiple forces is reorganized in terms of a series of intersecting functional systems that set the stage for possible explanations and further reflective inquiry. These hermeneutical contexts are purposive, not for comprehending the rational arche or end of things, but in exposing “the reason of things that was active in their history” (GS :  / SW I: ).

 

Leben erfaßt hier Leben Dilthey as a Philosopher of (the) Life (Sciences) Jos de Mul

Ever since the publication of the Introduction to the Human Sciences (), the name of Dilthey has been strongly associated with the distinction, if not dichotomy, between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), and between their respective approach of their object: causal explanation (Erklären) versus hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen). Given the attention Dilthey pays in his demarcative project to the opposition between the natural and human sciences, this impression is understandable. However, when we study Dilthey’s writings more closely, the situation turns out to be more nuanced and more complicated. In the Introduction to the Human Sciences, for example, Dilthey argues that causal explanations are not restricted to the natural sciences, but play an important role in the human sciences as well. Moreover, Dilthey does not always restrict himself to the aforementioned binary distinction between natural and human sciences. In an appendix of The Rise of Hermeneutics (), he distinguishes a third class of sciences in-between the natural sciences and human sciences. This class of biological sciences (biologische Wissenschaften) focuses on phenomena that are characterized by an internal teleology of life (Lebenszweckmäßigkeit), and are in need of a functional explanation. Given the fact that “life” is one of the key concepts in Dilthey’s philosophy – not without reason Dilthey is often considered to be one of the main representatives of the so-called philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) – the question arises of how Dilthey’s concept of life relates to this third class of biological sciences. Although in Dilthey’s later, post- writings, such as The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (), life is primarily understood as a “psycho-historical” or “historicospiritual” (geistig-geschichtlichen) phenomenon, and as such object of the 

See GS : . The German word Geist can be translated both as “mind” and as “spirit” and in the case of Dilthey both meanings are often present. The two different English translations mentioned





  

human sciences, in the Introduction to the Human Sciences, and even stronger in his ontological works of the so-called middle period (–), in which he introduced the aforementioned tripartite division of the sciences, Dilthey often uses the word “life” in a biological sense, referring to the active interaction between the (human) organism and its environment. In the following, I will analyze the role Dilthey ascribes to biology in his foundation of the human sciences and discuss how the elaboration of this “biological standpoint” in the writings of the middle period is connected with an important change in the meaning of Dilthey’s concept of life. In the first section I will give a short overview of the changing position of biology vis-à-vis the human sciences from the Introduction to the Human Sciences to The Rise of Hermeneutics. In the second section, I will argue that Dilthey’s naturalistic revision of Kant’s subjectivist notion of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) in the works of the middle period, was one of the main reasons for this change, resulting in a notion of an “immanent purposiveness of organic life.” This naturalization of the concept of purposiveness, which was a fundamental part of his “Progression beyond Kant” (Fortgang u¨ber Kant) (GS : ), makes him a precursor of the so-called E movement in biology and the cognitive sciences, which is characterized by a “naturalization of phenomenology,” as we find it, for example, in Evan Thompson’s () Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. In the third section, I will underpin my claim that already in Dilthey’s philosophy of life, just like in the contemporary “E movement” (of which Thompson is one of the founders), cognition is comprehended as embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. Just as in the case of Thompson, Dilthey defends a nonreductionist naturalism in which the mind emerges from life. For both Dilthey and Thompson, the study of life and mind require a close cooperation between the natural sciences, the life sciences and the humanities, respectively resting on a third-person, a second-person and a first-person perspective. In conclusion I will argue that Dilthey’s philosophy of life and mind is not only interesting from a historical perspective, but contains many fruitful elements for the present discussion on human cognition, because the final focus in his work is a third realm of human life beyond biological life and the individual psyche: the historical world of meaningful cultural expressions. here are taken from Makkreel (, , ). In the rest of this chapter, the use of “mind” or “spirit” for Geist will depend on the context.

Leben erfaßt hier Leben



 In-Between the Natural and the Human Sciences: The Life Sciences In order to understand Dilthey’s early view on biology, the Introduction to the Human Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung fu¨r das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, Erster Band, ) provides an excellent starting point. In the first volume, Dilthey offers a survey of the human sciences and their relation to the other sciences, and prepares the foundation of the human sciences that have to take place in the never fully completed second volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences. In a first – provisional – definition of the term “human sciences” at the beginning of the first volume Dilthey states that this term refers to the class of sciences that have the sociohistorical reality (geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit) as their subject (GS :  / SW I: ). Examples of the human sciences Dilthey mentions within this context are, among others, history, politics, jurisprudence, political economy, theology, literature and the arts (GS :  / SW I: ). This broad definition, that includes both the humanities and the social sciences, gives the impression that Dilthey takes the object of investigation as the criterion for the demarcation of the natural and the human sciences. This is also reflected in Dilthey’s reference to Kant’s distinction between the “realm of history” characterized by freedom, and the “realm of nature” characterized by objective necessity. Dilthey makes it clear from the beginning, however, that the demarcation of the natural and the human sciences on the basis of their object presents serious problems. Dividing reality into a material substance (Materie) and a spiritual substance (geistigen Substanz) – a legacy of metaphysical tradition that, according to Dilthey, goes back at least as far as Thomas Aquinas – inevitably leads to insoluble problems. This especially becomes clear in the dualistic ontology of Descartes, which excludes a satisfactory explanation of the relation between body and mind (Dilthey, GS : – / SW I: –). Furthermore, a separation of the natural and the human sciences on the basis of a sharp division between a material and a mental substance would ignore the fact that the object of the human sciences is the psychophysical unity of human nature (psycho

The Introduction to the Human Sciences was intended to be the first volume of a two-volume Critique of Historical Reason (Kritik der historischen Vernunft). The first volume contains two of the planned five books. See de Mul () and H.-U. Lessing () for a detailed reconstruction of Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason.



  

physische Lebenseinheit der Menschennatur) (GS :  / SW I: ). It was partly on these grounds that Dilthey considered the term Geisteswissenschaften to be an imperfect term, and he only conforms to it because by then it had become generally accepted. However, Dilthey neither based the distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences on their methodological differences, as the neo-Kantian philosopher Windelband did, distinguishing between nomothetic and ideographic sciences (cf. de Mul , –, – and de Mul ). In contrast, in the Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey takes the type of experience as his criterion of demarcation of the two halves of the globus intellectualis. Starting from what we might call a proto-phenomenological perspective, his basic distinction is between inner and outer experience: Whatever the metaphysical facts may be, man as a life-unit may be regarded from the two points of view that we have developed: seen from within he is a system of mental facts, but to the senses he is a physical whole. Inner and outer perception never occur in one and the same act, and consequently the reality of mental life is never given simultaneously with that of our body. On account of this, there are necessarily two different and irreducible standpoints for a scientific approach aimed at grasping the connection of the mental and the physical as expressed in the psychophysical life-unit. (GS :  / SW I: ; emphasis added)

Outer experience (äussere Erfahrung) is the process by which, by means of collaboration of the senses and discursive understanding, an image of reality outside ourselves, subject to natural laws, is created (GS : – / SW I: –). In the inner experience (innere Erfahrung or Erlebnis), on the other hand, we experience, “without the cooperation of the senses” (GS :  / SW I: ), an “independent world of mind” characterized by “a sovereignty of the will” and “a responsibility for actions.” Within this experience lies “every value and every purpose in life” (GS :  / SW I: ). This formulation expresses succinctly the transcendental-ontological nature of Dilthey’s demarcation. Natural and human sciences are not primarily concerned with different parts of reality, but are based on different ways of experiencing the same reality. Dilthey sees these two experiential circles as “different manifestations of one ground” (GS :  / SW I: –). Expressed in Kantian terminology: outer and inner 

In this sense the English “human sciences” is more adequate than the German Geisteswissenschaften. See de Mul (, , , , note ) about the emergence of the term “Geisteswissenschaften” in German academia around the s.

Leben erfaßt hier Leben



experience do share a common ground in the total number of objects of possible experience, but on this ground they constitute different domains of experience. In these domains of experience so formulated different facts of experience appear, facts of nature (Tatsachen der Natur) and facts of mind (Tatsachen des Geistes), respectively (GS :  / SW I: ). Using contemporary terminology, we could say that Dilthey’s basic demarcative criterion is the distinction between a first-person and a thirdperson perspective. However, this does not mean that human sciences would rest on a first-person perspective entirely. After all, an important part of socio-historical reality is only accessible from a third-person perspective. To give a few examples: the actions of other people, works of art and judicial systems are primarily given in outer experience (GS : – / SW I: –). What characterizes the human sciences is that they are based on a process that Dilthey, following Schleiermacher, designated as understanding (Verstehen), in which the objects of outer experience are linked to inner experience. “We only understand by transferring our inner experience to an external reality that is itself dead” (eine an sich tote äußere Tatsächlichkeit) (GS : ). The natural sciences, on the other hand, solely rest on outer experience. They try to explain inanimate nature with the help of testable hypotheses, which gives them an altogether different character: This leads us to the source of the difference in our relations to society and to nature. Social states are intelligible to us from within; we can, up to a certain point, reproduce them in ourselves on the basis of the perception of our own states; our representations of the historical world are enlivened by love and hatred, by passionate joy, by the entire gamut of our emotions. Nature, however, is dead [and] alien to us. It is a mere exterior for us without any inner life. Society is our world. (GS :  / SW I: )

In Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (/), we find the following clarification of this opposition between nature and inner life, leading to his often-quoted remark about erklären and verstehen: There exists a system of nature for the physical and natural sciences only through inferential conclusions that supplement the data of experience by means of combinations of hypotheses. In the human sciences by contrast, the continuum or nexus of psychic life is an original or basic given. Nature we explain, but psychic life we understand [Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir]. (GS : – / SW II: ) 

See GS :  / SW I: . Note that “understanding” here should not only be seen as a specific method of the human sciences but as an elementary characteristic of human life, on the basis of which a systematic understanding (interpretation) in the human sciences can be developed.



  

However, given the fact that as human beings, we experience our existence as a psychophysical unity, the opposition of the experience of nature on the one hand and psychic life on the other, and thus also of natural and human sciences, appears to be misleading. After all, in the context of his discussion of the implications of this unity for human experience, we read: The psychophysical life-unit which is filled with the immediate feeling of its undivided existence [unmittelbaren Gefu¨hl unseres ungeteilten Daseins] is analyzed into a system of empirically observable relations between facts of consciousness and observable relations of structure and the functions of the nervous system. For every psychic act shows itself to be connected with a change in our body only by means of the nervous system; and a change in our body, in turn, is accompanied by a change in our psychic state only through its effect on the nervous system. This analysis of psychophysical life-units provides a clearer notion of their dependence on the overall context of nature within which they appear and act and from which they withdraw again. It also clarifies how the study of sociohistorical reality depends on our knowledge of nature. (GS : – / SW I: ; emphasis added)

Given the subject of this chapter, this quote is interesting for more than one reason. In the first place, Dilthey correctly emphasizes in this passage the fact that in our life we immediately feel the unity of nature and psychic life. When I cut my finger while peeling a pear with a knife, I do not experience the resulting pain as a bodily and as a mental experience. From a first-person perspective, there is only one experience of pain, which is bodily and mental at the same time. After all, I feel the pain in my finger: in my lived experience the physical process and my awareness of it are one. Crucial here is that for me, as a human being, my body is no tote äußere Tatsächlichkeit at all, but an integral part of my lived experience. Of course, it is possible to watch the cut in my finger and the blood coming out of the wound from a third-person perspective as well. The doctor who inspects and bandages my finger does not and cannot feel my pain. Maybe, my bleeding finger reminds her of the pain she once had when she cut her finger herself or, if she never had such an experience, she might at least be able to imagine how it would feel to cut your finger. However, in both cases she must have had some experience of pain in her own life in order to understand the pain of the other. 

Obviously, there are many processes in our body of which we are not, or only vaguely or indirectly aware, such as digestion, blood pressure, etc.

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

In contrast, when we deal with inanimate nature our knowledge seems to rest entirely on the third-person perspective. After all, a stone has no inner life (at least as far as we know), and it seems to be absurd even to try to imagine “what it is like to be a stone.” In the case of an animal – for example a bat – it may be impossible to take “a first-bat perspective,” but it is at least not absurd to try to imagine such a perspective. And, as we will see, in an interaction with another species, we may even have another, second-person (or rather: second-species) perspective experience of the other. Here, I want to emphasize another remarkable part of the quote. Dilthey explicitly states that the human sciences rest on our (third-person) knowledge of nature. And, referring to the theories of Comte and Herbert Spencer, he clarifies this statement as follows: Mental facts comprise the uppermost limit of natural facts, and the latter the underlying conditions of human life. Because the realm of persons, including human society and history, is the highest phenomenon of the empirical world, knowledge of it must at countless points be based on the system of presuppositions which accounts for its development within the whole of nature. (GS :  / SW I: )

This already becomes clear when we think about the above example about cutting my finger. The understanding of this example presupposes not only that the reader has some basic knowledge of natural objects like pears, fingers and knives and about their specific properties (for example that a metal knife can easily make a cut in a fragile organ like the human skin), but the reader also must be able to understand my taking up the pear and the knife as part of a purposeful action. In other words: we have all kinds of presuppositions about the way nature acts upon us, and about the way we use nature in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Or, as Dilthey puts it: Man, because of his position in the causal system of nature, is conditioned by it in a twofold respect. The psychophysical life-unit . . . receives through its nervous system continuous stimuli from the general course of nature which it in turn affects. Where the psychophysical unit affects nature this is characteristically in the form of action guided by purposes. On the one hand, nature and its 

I’m referring here, of course, to Thomas Nagel’s () famous bat article: It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. ()



   constitution can govern this psychophysical unit in the shaping of purposes themselves; on the other hand, nature qua system of means for attaining these ends codetermines the psychophysical unit. Thus even in those cases where we exert our will, where we act on nature, we are dependent on the system of nature precisely because we are not blind forces but rather volitional creatures that reflectively establish their purposes. (GS :  / SW I: )

Interestingly, Dilthey connects these two ways in which nature conditions human life with a distinction between biology and natural sciences that study inorganic nature: The sciences of man, society, and history take the sciences of nature as their basis in two ways: first, insofar as psychophysical units themselves can be studied only with the help of biology; second, insofar as nature is the medium of their purposive activity, which is aimed mainly at the domination of nature. In the first respect, the life sciences provide the basis; in the second, it is chiefly those of inorganic nature. (GS :  / SW I: –; emphasis added)

Here, Dilthey explicitly distinguishes the life sciences (Wissenschaften des Organismus) from those natural sciences that have inorganic nature (anorganischen Natur) as their subject. In the Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey does not further explain this distinction within the natural sciences, nor does he explicate the implicit tripartite division of the sciences – human sciences, life sciences and the sciences of inorganic nature – that results from it. However, in the addenda to his essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics” that he wrote around , Dilthey returns to the question of the foundation of the human sciences and the problem of the demarcation of the different classes of sciences, and this time he makes this tripartite division of the sciences explicit: Self-evidently . . . the same elementary logical operations appear in the human and the natural sciences: induction, analysis, construction, and comparison. But what concerns us now is what special form they assume within the experiential domain of the human sciences. Induction, whose data are sensory processes, proceeds here as everywhere on the basis of a knowledge of a connection. In the physical-chemical sciences this basis is the mathematical knowledge of quantitative relations; in the biological sciences it is the [nexus] of purposiveness [Lebenszweckmaßigkeit]; in the human sciences it is the structure of psychic life. (GS : – / SW IV: )

Although the explicit tripartite demarcation of the sciences is new, Dilthey’s attribution of purposiveness to the biological sciences does not come as a surprise. In Chapter  of the Introduction to the Human

Leben erfaßt hier Leben



Sciences – entitled “The Sciences of the External Organization of Society” and starting with a section on the psychological foundation of these sciences – Dilthey also pays ample attention to purposiveness, and in that context he also refers to biology. However, in the Introduction to the Human Sciences he attributes the “purposive nexus” (Zweckzusamenhang) preeminently to the lived experiences of the human individual and the resulting human culture. He argues that the human sciences have a privileged access to life, because functional phenomena like purpose, function and structure (Zweck, Funktion und Struktur) are inherent to our lived experiences and our social world. In contrast, when we ascribe purposiveness to organisms, in Dilthey’s view this actually is no more than a projection of lived experience to an external object. In biology, the aforementioned functional terms can only be used heuristically: It is remarkable that the relation of purpose, function, and structure, which in the realm of organic beings guides research only heuristically – as a hypothetical model, so to speak – is here [the social world] a historically demonstrable reality, accessible to social experience. And thus it would turn things upside down if the concept of a living organism, which is obscure and hypothetical as it is found in organic nature, were used as a guide to those relations arising in society, which are experienced and clear! (GS :  / SW I: )

It is for that reason that in the Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey considers the psychophysical individual the basic element “from which society and history are formed” and anthropology and psychology, which study these life units, “the most fundamental group of the human sciences” (GS :  / SW I: ). However, in-between the publication of the Introduction to the Human Sciences in  and the writing of the addenda to The Rise of Hermeneutics in , the relationship between psychology seems to reverse completely. Whereas Dilthey in the Introduction to the Human Sciences rejects Comte’s idea that “the constancy of an external biological organization establishes the constancy of a certain basic psychic structure” because it is based on a “crude naturalistic metaphysics” (GS :  / SW I: ), in Life and Cognition (circa –), part of a draft for the second volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, he claims the opposite: A biological perspective is necessary in order to be convincing about the structure of life. Earlier I endeavored to show the validity of the psychological foundation [of the human sciences] over against a one-sided intellectualism. The approach has also gained more and more adherents. But



   ever since I recognized that the structure of life provides the basis for psychology, I have had to broaden and deepen the psychological standpoint by a biological one. (GS :  / SW II: )

In order to explain this remarkable reversal, which seems to replace anthropology and psychology with the life sciences as the most fundamental group within the human sciences, we have to situate it against the background of Dilthey’s overcoming of the subjectivist and static character of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

 Beyond Kant’s Subjectivist Notion of the Purposiveness of Life As the title Critique of Historical Reason, which Dilthey originally had in mind for his Introduction to the Human Sciences suggests, the influence of Kant’s transcendental philosophy on Dilthey is difficult to overestimate. Already in his inaugural address in Basel in , he expresses his intention “to follow Kant’s critical path and to lay, in close cooperation with researchers in other domains, the foundation for an experiential science of the human spirit” (GS : ). Dilthey considered Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason “to a large extent unassailable” (GS : ). However, as Kant restricts himself in his Critique to a foundation of the natural sciences, Dilthey intends to supplement the Critique of Pure Reason with a foundation of the human sciences. Dilthey’s use of the notion of teleology (Zweckmaßigkeit) in the Introduction to the Human Sciences clearly shows his indebtedness to Kant’s analysis of this concept in the Critique of Judgment. Natural sciences, as defined in the Critique of Pure Reason, can only explain nature in a mechanistic way. Concepts like “purposiveness” are neither categories nor constitutive principles of objective knowledge. Purpose, as Kant expressively puts it, is a “stranger in natural science” (Fremdling in der Naturwissenschaft) (Kant ,  / KU, B). In nature, however, we come across countless phenomena that are not amenable to a causal explanation, life being the most obvious example. With regard to these Kant considers a teleological perspective inevitable. The reason why a mechanistic explanation is insufficient is that, in contrast to inanimate nature, we can consider a living creature as nothing other than a purpose of nature, that is to say, as a phenomenon that “is both cause and effect of itself” (Kant , f. / B). This is the case for three reasons. First, the parts of a living organism are only possible with respect to the whole; second, there is a question of reciprocal causality

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

with regard to the relation between part and whole; and third, this reciprocal causality can only be understood as a purpose-means relation. As an organized purposive entity, a living organism looks like a work of art, though without an artist or designer. In other words, a living organism is a self-organizing creature (selbstorganisierendes Wesen) characterized by a formative force (bildende Kraft) (Kant ,  / KU, B–). According to Kant, it is exactly this interplay of forces and forms that evokes the impression of purposiveness in us. However, for Kant, the teleological view of nature, although inevitable, does not produce objective knowledge of nature, but, just as in the use of transcendental ideas by theoretical reason, it functions as a heuristic principle: “We do not actually observe purposes in nature as intentional ones, but merely add this concept in our thought” (Kant ,  / KU, B). In a formulation that is very close to Dilthey’s aforementioned reflections on the relationship between psychology and biology in the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Kant states: The concept of a thing as in itself a natural purpose is not a constitutive concept either of understanding or of reason. But it can still be a regulative concept for reflective judgment, allowing us to use a remote analogy with our own causality in terms of purposes generally, to guide our investigation of organized objects and to meditate regarding their supreme basis. (Kant ,  / KU, B)

Although mechanistic and teleological explanations are mutually exclusive principles of judgment (Prinzipien der Beurteilung), in Kant’s view it must be recognized that an exclusively mechanistic judgment of nature is just as illusionary (phantastisch) as an exclusively teleological judgment is fanatical (schwärmerisch) (Kant ,  / KU, B). His conclusion is that an investigation into nature must follow both methods, without confusing them or putting the one in place of the other. However far our causal knowledge of nature might extend, we cannot avoid ordering all causal relationships under a teleological principle. According to Kant, it is absurd to hope that one day a Newton will appear “who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced” (Kant , – / KU, B). Whereas Dilthey in the Introduction to the Human Sciences subscribes to Kant’s idea that the notion of purposiveness is no more than a regulative concept for reflective judgment, and for that reason cannot ascribe any foundational role to biology, his “biological turn” in the writings of the middle period indicate a change in his appreciation of Kant’s analysis of the concept of purposiveness. This change is connected with Dilthey’s



  

growing critique of Kant’s transcendental subjectivism. For example, in one of the drafts for the second volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, entitled “The Reality of the Temporal Flow: Critique of Kant’s Theory of Time as the Form of the Inner Sense,” Dilthey criticizes Kant for conceiving time as a pure form of intuition. Although he fully agrees with Kant that all experience is a priori characterized by temporality, he rejects Kant’s reduction of time to a pure intellectual form: “Kant’s first thesis about the flow of time as an a priori form is correctly demonstrated by him. . . . Kant’s second thesis is false. Time is not a pure form of intuition . . .” (GS :  / SW I: ). Dilthey gradually realizes that instead of being a formal, empty form, time is a real manifestation of life as a psychophysical whole (cf. de Mul , ff.; Makkreel , ). In Life and Cognition, criticizing the formal character of the Kantian categories, Dilthey expresses it as follows: “But the real categories are completely different from these. They are not founded in reason at all, but in the nexus of life itself. . . . The mark of real categories is that their content is unfathomable for thought. They are the nexus of life. This is certain and explicit for reflexive awareness, but unfathomable for the intellect” (GS :  / SW II: ). Moreover, the realization that time is a real category also leads Dilthey to the insight that the a priori forms of sensibility and understanding are not static, but develop in time. Already in an early draft for the Introduction to the Human Sciences Dilthey remarks: Kant’s a priori is fixed and dead; but the real conditions of consciousness and its presuppositions, as I grasp them, constitute a living historical process, a development; they have a history, and the course of this history involves their adaptation to the ever more exact, inductively known manifold of sense-contents. The life of history also encompasses the apparently fixed and dead conditions under which we think. They can never be abrogated, because we think by means of them, but they are the product of development. (GS :  / SW I: –)

For Dilthey, a priori structures are neither arbitrary axiomatic impositions, nor unchangeable laws of thought, but historically and culturally variable structures which rest on a foundation of various psychophysical and social conditions (GS : xxv). An important implication of the “historization of the a priori” is that Kant’s strict distinction and separation of transcendental analysis and empirical research is no longer tenable: 

See also the lapidary formulation of this point in the foreword to the Introduction to the Human Sciences (GS : xviii / SW I: ).

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

“philosophical foundation becomes linked to the nexus of the positive sciences” (GS : ). Because the real a priori structures of (human) life are subject to evolution (Evolution), unfolding (Entfaltung) and development (Entwicklung) (GS : ; cf. Damböck ), their transcendental reconstruction and analysis can only take place in close cooperation with the empirical sciences, such as biology, psychology and history. The overcoming of the subjectivist and static character of the a priori, which not only characterizes Kant’s transcendental philosophy, but also still – at least partly – marks Dilthey’s own early works, took Dilthey considerable time and did not proceed in the same pace all along the line. However, in the works of the s, Dilthey’s critique of Kant’s subjectivism also found its way in his reflections on the purposiveness of life. In the writings of the middle period reciprocal causality, purposemeans relationship between part and whole and the self-organization were no longer considered to be sheer regulative ideas, projections of the purposiveness experiences in psychic life onto “external objects,” but are now considered by Dilthey to be defining characteristics of organic life and as such the foundation of the higher forms of purposiveness. Here we find a remarkable similarity between Dilthey’s “naturalistic turn” and recent phenomenological approaches in biology and the life sciences. In Evan Thompson’s () Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, we find a similar attempt to connect empirical research in the life sciences and the cognitive sciences with phenomenology. Just as Dilthey, Thompson naturalizes Kant’s analysis of purposiveness: Kant’s statement, “the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us” (Kant , ), no longer seems compelling, thanks to our growing understanding of circular causality, nonlinear dynamics, and self-organizing systems. Many scientists now believe there are necessary principles of biological self-organization. The advance of science seems to have rolled back the limits of reason as Kant saw them, so that there is no longer any compelling reason to regard self-organization as simply a regulative principle of our judgments about nature rather than also a constitutive principle of nature itself (Juarrero-Roque ). (Thompson , )

Dilthey emphasizes the constitutive character of the self-organization of life, too. In the Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (), Dilthey points at the fact both the biological and the psychological purposiveness are immanent: “It must be emphasized once again that just 

On the different meanings of the phrase “naturalization of phenomenology” see Zahavi ().



  

as we reject the idea of a purpose underlying the nexus of subjective immanent purposiveness, so we must reject it for objective immanent purposiveness” (GS : – / SW II: –). Finally, although both Dilthey and Thompson naturalize phenomenology, they strongly reject reductionist naturalism. Although there is a strong continuation between organic and psychic purposiveness, the latter cannot be reduced to the former, but rather emerges from it and constitutes a higher form of articulation: “Without doubt, the higher phenomena of consciousness stem from lower ones. The lower ones constitute their foundation. However, they are not simply an assemble of connections, which could be completely derived from the elementary ones” (GS : ). In this sense the human sciences, including phenomenological descriptions of first-person perspective experience, have a relative independence vis-à-vis the natural sciences, as Dilthey already argued in The Introduction to the Human Sciences (GS :  / SW I: –). However, the cooperation of phenomenology and the natural sciences may help us to gain a better understanding of the nature of both life and mind (Thompson , ). Says Thompson: “Phenomenology provides a way of observing and describing natural phenomena that brings out or makes manifest their properly phenomenological features – selfhood, purposiveness, normativity, subjectivity, intentionality, temporality, and so on – which otherwise would remain invisible to science. Put another way, phenomenology offers a way of seeing the inner life of biological systems” (Thompson , ).



The Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended Character of Lived Experience

Evan Thompson – coauthor of the groundbreaking book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson and Ross ) – is one of the (co)founders of the embodied cognition paradigm. Although phenomenology, especially the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, is an important source of inspiration for Thompson, Dilthey is not discussed, either in The Embodied Mind or in Mind in Life. Given the rather one-sided emphasis in the secondary literature on Dilthey’s foundation of the human sciences and the almost total neglect of his reflections on the biological dimension of human life and the fact 

Cf. Damböck () and Jung (, ).



An important exception is Jung (, f.).

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

that most of these reflections have only recently been available in English translations, it is hardly surprising that Thompson does not even mention Dilthey’s name. However, looking at Dilthey’s work through the lens of the embodied cognition approach, does not only shed a new light on the importance of his thoughts, but may also contribute some valuable new elements to the embodied cognition approach. Although this tradition is not homogeneous – there are differences in emphasis, method and sources of inspiration (see Menary ) – it has become fashionable within this tradition to characterize human cognition in terms of the Es: embodied, embedded, enactive and extended. These four catchwords are surprisingly suitable to characterize the core of Dilthey’s work, not only of the middle period but also of his later – post  – work, in which he returns to the foundation of the human sciences. Embodiment As we have seen in the discussion of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey emphasizes the fact that the human being (like all animals) is characterized by its psychophysical unity. With this emphasis Dilthey opposes the one-sided intellectualism, not only of the rationalist tradition, but of the empirical tradition as well. In Dilthey’s often quoted words: No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought. A historical as well a psychological approach to whole human beings led me to explain even knowledge and its concepts (such as the external world, time, substance, and cause) in terms of the manifold powers of a being that wills, feels, and thinks. (GS : xviii / SW I: )

If there is one thing shared by all representatives of the embodied cognition movement, it is their criticism of this kind of intellectualism that can be found in cognitivism, the dominant approach within cognitive science, which equates cognition with the manipulation of mental representations. In The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification (), Dilthey explicitly rejects the idea that we know the external world through a mental “projection” (GS :  / SW II: ). Instead, knowledge of the external world presupposes that we are bodily present in the world, and it is only within the nexus of life that our self emerges: 

The translation of Leben und Erkennen [Life and Cognition], the most important “biological” texts of Dilthey, only appeared in , in SW II; that is, three years after Thompson’s Mind in Life.



   Our body is first of all the region of our movable limbs. . . . The region of the body sets itself apart from an environment within which motorimpulses only produce movement indirectly. Such external movements lack the accompaniment of inner sensations within the muscles and joints and on sensitive surfaces. . . . Tactile impressions in particular allow us to experience an actuality that is beyond our skin and hence external: something alien, located entirely outside of the area of our own lived bodily existence. (GS : – / SW II: )

Embeddedness The last quote already indicates that in Dilthey’s view, we cannot study the human being independent of its interaction with its physical environment. Moreover, psychic life finds its origins in this interaction. As Dilthey expresses it in Life and Cognition: The interaction between the self, which is enveloped, as it were, by a body, and objects finds its expression in the structure of all inner life. We experience this in ourselves, and we find it again in other living creatures. It is based on the fact that a living creature, in the midst of the stimuli that impinge on it from its milieu, seeks to satisfy its system of drives and feelings in reaction to these objects, either by adapting them to its needs or by adapting itself to what is unchangeable. We find this structure exemplified in every living creature. (GS :  / SW I: )

It is clear that for Dilthey, human life does not so much oppose animal life, but is an integral part of it. This observation enables me to return to an earlier remark on the distinction Dilthey makes about our alleged inability to understand nature, because it is completely alien to us. This might be true for inanimate nature, but in the case of living nature, in particular “the animal world,” we are at least able to understand it at a functional level. We share some of our basic drives – such as hunger and thirst and our sexual drive – with animals and although it is not possible to imagine “what it is like to be a bat” from a first-person perspective, interaction with animals discloses a “second-animal” perspective. When we play with our dog, for example, and join in the to and fro of throwing and retrieving a ball, there is definitely some form of mutual understanding. Likewise, our intercourse with other persons – from working or playing music together to making love – not only rests on third-person perspective observations and attempts to reexperience (nacherleben) their lived experiences from a first-person perspective, but also (and fortunately!) heavily depends on our ability to interact with them within a common context from a second-person perspective

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

(GS : – / SW III: –). Within this perspective in-between the “facts of [inanimate] nature” and the “facts of mind” the “facts of living nature” (Tatsachen der lebendigen Natur) appear. Enactment What the last quote also makes clear, is that the “objective immanent purposiveness” of our bodily interaction with the environment expresses itself in the “subjective immanent purposiveness” of psychic life. Thus, on the basic level of self-preservation and propagation, cognition is closely related to action, not only in the sense that it is a function of action, but also in the sense that it is enacted, has its foundation in action. In the writings of the middle period, one even often gets the impression that all cognition for that reason is solely functional. For example, when we read in the System of Ethics (): In the structural nexus of psychic life, thinking is interposed, as it were, between impression and reaction [Eindruck und Reaktion]; it must be transformed into action. The play of children depends on this, as does the whole of culture. For the animate creature, thought and cognition stand within a teleologically structured nexus that extends from perception of the external world to a mutual adaptation between the world and itself. Thus, the philosophical comprehension of the world also has its goal in action. (GS : )

It is important to note that Dilthey speaks of a mutual adaption of the organic self and the surrounding world. The animate creature is as much a product of the environment as this environment is produced by this creature. And, in a similar manner, the human being is as much a product of culture as culture is produced by humankind. It appears as if all cognition, including abstract philosophical thinking, is entirely pragmatic. In Life and Cognition, for example, Dilthey explains how the formal categories with which scientists and philosophers attempt to understand the world, such as substance, causality and essence, are not original categories, but abstractions from our enacted lived experience of respectively selfhood, acting and personal character and style. However, if we consider the later works of Dilthey, we see that this pragmatic dimension of life does not have the last word. Psychic life finds a 



Cf. de Mul (). Recently, in the cognitive sciences, there is also a growing interest in the crucial role the second-person perspective plays in all kinds of cognition. See, for example, Schilbach et al. (). Translation by R. A. Makkreel, to be published in SW VI (in press).



  

further articulation in what Dilthey, in the Introduction to the Human Sciences, called “the highest phenomenon of the empirical world” (GS :  / SW I: ): the historical world of meaningful cultural expressions, which has its own independent reality and which requires its own form of hermeneutic explanation beyond the causal and functional explanation of its underlying physical and biological conditions: higher forms of understanding (höheren Formen des Verstehen), exegesis (Auslegung) and interpretation (Interpretation). Extendedness The recent embodied cognition research shows a special interest in the topic of extended cognition, focusing on the outsourcing of aspects of cognition to the environment or external objects (see, for example, Clark ). We can think of the way an animal finds its way through the forest or a person her way to the city with the help of signs of recognition. In the case of human beings, especially the use of external symbols, from prehistorical cave paintings to writing, plays an crucial role in cognitive processes, and nowadays the human mind even is assisted by machines to process such symbols (computers) (cf. de Mul , ff.). Although Dilthey doesn’t uses the phrase “extended cognition,” from early on he was fascinated by the role external objects play in human cognition. Already in the Introduction to the Human Sciences, he repeatedly points at the fact that the human world for a large part consists of material objects (artifacts like houses, paintings, books, etc.), and that these are crucial to understand mental and spiritual phenomena. After all, without these expressions we do not have access to the lived experience of historical actors, painters, etc. In his post- writings, collected in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (GS  / SW III), he comes back to this role of expressions in his profound analysis of the structural nexus of lived experience, expression and understanding (Erlebnis, Ausdruck, Verstehen). However, this time, inspired by his bio-anthropological writings from the middle period, Dilthey arrives at a much deeper understanding of the cognitive dimension of this triad. According to Matthias Jung (/), the structural nexus of lived experience, expression and understanding results from the transposition of his biological model of mutual adaptation between organism and 

For a detailed analysis of the triad lived experience, expression and understanding, see de Mul (, –).

Leben erfaßt hier Leben



environment to the cultural sphere (Jung , –). Just as the organism and the environment mutually shape each other, human beings and their surrounding culture produce each other as well. Moreover, with the expression of lived experience into an external symbolic system, the already meaningful interaction with the physical environment emerges as a secondary, cultural semantization. As such, the structural nexus of lived experience, expression and understanding constitutes the basic structure of human – that is, culturally mediated – cognition. As articulations of lived experience, expressions are no longer conceived of as a simple copy, as they can contain more meaning than the lived experience. In this sense, expression is creative: “In lived experience we grasp the self neither in the form of its full course nor in the depths of what it encompasses. For the scope of conscious life rises like a small island from inaccessible depths. But an expression can tap these very depths. It is creative” (GS :  / SW III: ). Implicit relations, which often remain unconscious in lived experience, are articulated in expressions: “An expression of lived experience can contain more of the nexus of psychic life than any introspection can catch sight of. It draws from depths not illuminated by consciousness” (GS :  / SW III: ). Whereas first-person introspection gives us a certain access to our thoughts, volitions and feelings, and second-perspective action a pragmatic grasp of the life of other living beings, it is only via the third-person hermeneutic understanding, exegesis and interpretation of the articulated expressions that we disclose an entirely new independent realm of spiritual meaning for hermeneutic understanding, to which Dilthey refers with the Hegelian word “objective Spirit” (objectiver Geist). It encompasses the totality of human expressions in history that together constitute the “human-socio-historical reality” (GS :  / SW III: ), which “represents the highest evolutionary stage on earth,” and which is the subject of the human sciences. The inner dimension of this world of articulated expressions is no longer understood as psychic but as spiritual: “The understanding of this spirit is not psychological cognition. It is a regression to a spiritual formation that has its own structure and lawfulness” (GS :  / SW III: –). And, precisely for that reason, it transcends elementary understanding, and is in need of higher forms of understanding, exegesis and interpretation. 

“A discipline belongs to the human sciences only if its object becomes accessible to us through the attitude that is founded upon the nexus of life, expression, and understanding” (GS :  / SW III: ).



  

The task of comprehending this “life of the Spirit” (GS :  / SW III: ) is infinite, because as long as human history lasts, “all understanding will always remain partial and can never be completed” (GS :  / SW IV: ), but at the same time this form of self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) is the most rewarding task conceivable, as only in this realm is life really able to grasp itself most deeply: “Here life grasps life” (Leben erfaßt hier Leben) (GS :  / SW III: ).

 Conclusion A popular thesis in the early secondary literature on Dilthey is that between  and  Dilthey underwent a fundamental turn from a psychological to a hermeneutic foundation of the human sciences. This thesis has turned out to be untenable, as hermeneutics already played an important role in Dilthey’s work long before , he also continued to refer to his earlier psychological texts in his post- writings, even quoting large parts verbatim. Although I’ve tried to show in this chapter that in the middle period (–), Dilthey directs his attention to the biological dimension of human life, and even used the word “biological turn,” this turn should not be understood as a rejection of the psychological or hermeneutical dimension of his foundation of the human sciences. As the analysis of the publications of the middle period made clear, the evolutionary perspective inspires Dilthey to understand the biological, psychological and spiritual dimensions as three levels of human life, and that in order to grasp human life these levels should be studied in a close cooperation of the life sciences and the human sciences. In this sense Dilthey’s “naturalized phenomenology” can be regarded to be a forerunner of present approaches in the embodied cognition tradition. Moreover, within this context, the study of Dilthey’s work is not only interesting from the perspective of the history of philosophy or the history of science. As Dilthey’s post- work focuses on the hermeneutic interpretation of “the life of the Spirit,” a level of human life that does not get much attention in the embodied cognition tradition, it also remains an important source of inspiration toward a “Fortgang u¨ber Thompson” in order to also include this precious level of human life in the embodied cognition tradition.



It was already put forward by Spranger as early as  and was repeated by Groethuysen in his foreword to GS  / SW III.

 

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics Michael N. Forster

Wilhelm Dilthey was deeply interested in hermeneutics – the theory and methodology of interpretation – throughout his career. For example, his substantial work Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics dates from  and his seminal essay The Rise of Hermeneutics from . This interest was closely related to two other career-long interests of his: a broad interest in Schleiermacher, who among other things had been the most important recent theorist of hermeneutics (Dilthey’s Life of Schleiermacher, vol.  appeared in ); and an interest in the methodology of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften], in which interpretation plays a central role (Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol.  appeared in ). Making out Dilthey’s importance for hermeneutics is not, though, an altogether easy task. For one thing, the most familiar and influential assessments of his importance in this area – those of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas – are more likely to mislead than to help (see Forster a). For another thing, his main contributions turn out to lie, not in the areas where one might initially have expected to find them, but instead in others. They do not lie in his interpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, nor in his own hermeneutics. Instead, they lie in his broader history of the discipline, his definition of the discipline’s range of application, and especially his implicit conception of the epistemic status of its subject matter, interpretation, as potentially scientific, together with his two closely related conceptions of the central role of interpretation and hermeneutics in the human sciences and of the epistemic status of the human sciences as genuine sciences.



The Bad News

Let us begin with the bad news before going on to the good. Given the considerable extent of Dilthey’s concern with Schleiermacher’s version of 



 . 

hermeneutics and with hermeneutics itself, one might expect that he would have very illuminating positions on both of these subjects. However, surprisingly, that does not really turn out to be the case. Consider, first, his interpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. Dilthey does in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System and The Rise of Hermeneutics say many correct and insightful things about Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. For instance, he recognizes that it aims to provide a perfectly general methodology of interpretation (not, for example, one restricted just to the Bible or just to classical texts). He recognizes that it seeks to do so on the basis of a theory of the very nature of understanding (not just a collection of rules for achieving it). He recognizes that one of its central concerns is to address the problems for interpretation that arise out of the phenomenon of authors’ creative individuality (especially, conceptual originality). He recognizes that another of its central concerns is with the problem of hermeneutical circularity (the problem of how, for example, one can, as one should, interpret the parts of a text in light of the whole text when, conversely, interpreting the whole text requires interpreting its parts). He recognizes that it develops a very plausible solution to that problem (namely, to continue with the example just mentioned, that one should read through the parts sequentially in order to get a provisional understanding of them and of the whole, then use this provisional understanding of the whole in order to refine the interpretation of the parts, thereby producing a better understanding of the whole, which can then be reapplied to refine the interpretation of the parts still further, and so on ad indefinitum). And, he recognizes that it divides all interpretation into a linguistic and a psychological component, the former addressed mainly to what the author shares intellectually with his community but the latter to his intellectual individuality, and that it emphasizes the use of a “comparative” method on the former side and of a “divinatory” method on the latter. However, Dilthey’s interpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is also deeply unsatisfactory in many ways, and moreover tends to become increasingly so as he gets older – either misrepresenting Schleiermacher’s position outright or in cases where it is ambiguously torn between two sides emphasizing its least viable side. Let me describe some of the ways in which this is so. ()

One of Schleiermacher’s most important innovations in hermeneutics lay in founding the discipline on a new and superior philosophy of language, which in particular included versions of Herder’s principles that (a) thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



(Schleiermacher even went as far as to say: identical with) language and (b) meaning consists in word-usage (or as Schleiermacher put it more specifically, “the unity of the word-sphere”). Dilthey at one point in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System insightfully praises Schleiermacher’s project of founding hermeneutics on a new theory of language as “enormous progress” (GS :  / SW IV: ). Nonetheless, Dilthey tends to dismiss or overlook the two vitally important specific principles in question: Concerning (a), while he does recognize Schleiermacher’s commitment to a thought-language identity thesis, he quickly dismisses this as indefensible (GS : –,  / SW IV: , ), and therefore excludes it as much as possible from his reading of Schleiermacher’s position. Concerning (b), he not only hastily dismisses any equation of meaning with word-usage as untenable (GS :  / SW IV: ), but even at points denies that Schleiermacher holds such a position at all, instead attributing to him a thoroughly psychologistic theory of meaning (GS : – / SW IV: –). This early tendency in Dilthey to disregard Schleiermacher’s founding of hermeneutics on versions of principles (a) and (b) continues later in The Rise of Hermeneutics as well. () Relatedly, while Dilthey in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System properly emphasizes that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics pays at least as much attention to the linguistic as to the psychological side of interpretation, later in The Rise of Hermeneutics his characterization of it focuses almost exclusively on the psychological side, thereby severely misrepresenting it. () In Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System Dilthey properly recognizes that when Schleiermacher describes the predominant method on the psychological side of interpretation as one of “divination,” he mainly means by this that it is a method of guesswork or hypothesis (GS :  / SW IV: ; cf. GS : , :  / SW IV: , ). However, later in The Rise of Hermeneutics he instead characterizes Schleiermacher’s “divination” as an interpreter’s psychological selfprojection onto an author or his work, in the course of which the interpreter merely accentuates some of his own psychological traits  

But, contrast Dilthey GS : – / SW IV: –. Heinz Kimmerle has rightly emphasized this one-sidedness in Dilthey’s late account of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics (see, e.g., Kimmerle ). However, Kimmerle does not do justice to the younger Dilthey, who had been much more evenhanded and accurate.



 .  and de-emphasizes others (GS : – / SW IV: –). There are some small grains of truth in this characterization: Schleiermacher does sometimes (a) use metaphors to the effect that the interpreter should “put himself . . . in the position of the author” (Schleiermacher , ) or “put himself ‘inside’ the author” (), and (b) hold that the method of divination requires a measure of psychological common ground between the interpreter and the author (Schleiermacher , –). However, Dilthey’s characterization is far more misleading than illuminating. For one thing, it disregards Schleiermacher’s strong and important insistence that interpreters need to resist pervasive temptations to falsely assimilate the concepts, beliefs, etc. expressed by texts (e.g., texts from the remote past) to their own. Schleiermacher () writes, for example: Misunderstanding is either a consequence of hastiness or of prejudice. The former is an isolated moment. The latter is a mistake which lies deeper. It is the onesided preference for what is close to the individual’s circle of ideas and the rejection of what lies outside it. In this way one explains in or explains out what is not present in the author [sic]. ()

()

 

For another thing, Dilthey’s characterization disregards the fact that Schleiermacher’s metaphors of self-projection are counterbalanced by equally frequent metaphors of self-transformation and even self-effacement: the interpreter should “transform himself, so to speak, into the author” (Schleiermacher , ); he should “step out of [his] own frame of mind into that of the author” (). Dilthey already in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System characterizes Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as fundamentally ahistorical – in particular, as concerned with the challenges to interpretation posed by creative individuality rather than by historical (or cultural) distance (GS : , ,  / SW IV: , , ). This is again highly misleading. As Dilthey himself later observes in The Rise of Hermeneutics, the development of the discipline since the Renaissance has largely been due to a recognition that historical (and cultural) distance poses great problems for interpretation (GS : – / SW IV: ). Furthermore, the more immediate forerunners in the discipline whom Schleiermacher most admired

Gadamer in Truth and Method (Gadamer ) basically follows Dilthey in this (mis)reading of Schleiermacher. Again, Gadamer in Truth and Method (Gadamer ) basically follows Dilthey in this (mis)reading of Schleiermacher.

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



(in particular, Ernesti, Herder, and Friedrich Schlegel) had all exemplified that recognition in an emphatic form. So, it would be not only disappointing but also quite surprising if Schleiermacher were an exception to the rule. Here again, there turns out to be a grain of truth in Dilthey’s characterization, in that Schleiermacher does believe that an author’s psychological individuality poses problems for interpretation even where historical (or cultural) distance is not involved (see, for instance, Schleiermacher , –; , ). However, Schleiermacher also believes that historical (or cultural) distance is at least as important a source of such problems. This is especially clear in his essay On the Different Methods of Translation (), where he in effect argues that interpretation and translation typically need to cope with two problems: one arising from the discrepancy between the conceptual resources of our modern language and those of the historically (or culturally) distant language that the author was using; and the other arising from the author’s individual linguistic-conceptual deviations from his background language. () Relatedly, Dilthey implies that Schleiermacher excludes the consideration of historical context from interpretation (GS : – / SW IV: –). This is an extraordinary misunderstanding of Schleiermacher’s position. For example, in On the Different Methods of Translation Schleiermacher says that “the art of understanding” is realized through “precise knowledge of the whole historical life of a nation” (Schleiermacher , , cf. ; see also Schleiermacher , ). Here again there is a grain of truth in Dilthey’s reading (though this time only a tiny one), in that Schleiermacher does in the hermeneutics lectures tend to characterize the consideration of a work’s historical context as a prerequisite for its interpretation rather than as part of its interpretation. But, for Schleiermacher this is a way of saying that considering historical context is essential to sound interpretation, a conditio sine qua non of anything that really deserves the name of interpretation, not a way of saying that interpretation can do without it! () Dilthey consistently interprets Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as ultimately resting on an a priori metaphysical thesis developed by  

Kimmerle follows Dilthey in this (mis)reading of Schleiermacher. See, for example, Schleiermacher (, ): the task of “gathering historical data . . . should be done even before interpretation begins.”



()

 .  Schleiermacher in his Ethics to the effect that all reason combines the identical with the distinctive (or the universal with the individual). This interpretation is not entirely wrong. However, it amounts to focusing on only one side of a position in Schleiermacher that is ambiguous, and moreover on the least plausible side of it. For another, and much more plausible, side of Schleiermacher’s position, prominent in On the Different Methods of Translation for example, rather presents the combination of the identical with the distinctive in texts as something that only certain texts exhibit (not all), and that is known on the basis of experience. Finally, in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System the young Dilthey is properly skeptical of Schleiermacher’s doctrine that the interpreter in every case needs to investigate, not only an author’s psychology in a general way, but also, given that an author’s “seminal decision [Keimentschluß]” always lies at the source of his text and unfolds itself as the text in a necessary fashion, this “seminal decision” and its necessary unfolding in particular. (The young Dilthey points out plausibly that this doctrine has its source in Fichte’s heady metaphysical theory that the self’s original act of self-positing necessarily unfolds itself as the whole world of appearances [GS : ff. / SW IV: ff.]. And, he rightly questions whether many texts really come into existence in such a way – rather than, say, having several points of origin – and whether therefore they really should be interpreted accordingly [GS :  / SW IV: ].) However, by contrast, the mature Dilthey of The Rise of Hermeneutics comes to emphasize and sympathize with this implausible doctrine of Schleiermacher’s (GS : – / SW IV: –; cf. GS : – / SW IV: –).

The upshot of this whole unsatisfactory interpretation of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is that by the time Dilthey writes The Rise of Hermeneutics in  he misleadingly attributes to Schleiermacher a simplistic and dubious methodology of interpretation, in which language and historical context play hardly any role, attention is instead mainly focused on the author’s psychology, the interpreter’s access to that psychology is conceived as a sort of (modestly adjusted) psychological self-projection, and the more specific aim of psychological interpretation is above all to recapture an 

See GS : –, –, ,  / SW IV: –, –, , . This interpretation contributes in Dilthey to a broader reading of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics as at bottom deeply anti-empirical in spirit (see, e.g., GS :  / SW IV: ).

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



author’s “seminal decision” and its necessary unfolding (GS : – / SW IV: –). Moreover, Dilthey’s own hermeneutics, insofar as he has one, basically takes over this whole model and its inadequacies. This can be seen from the drafts for a second volume of Introduction to the Human Sciences, for example, where he writes: Knowledge of psychic life is given to us immediately and directly only in [the] apprehension of our self . . . There is [only the] inference from the bodily behavior [of others], which we then endow with our own psychic states. Therefore we know and understand only as much of psychic states as we find in ourselves. We divide and combine these inner processes in ourselves, we intensify and diminish them, and in this way acquire those processes which we attribute to the expressions of life that surround or precede us . . . Therefore, the entire material for our knowledge, our understanding of the states of sensible, thinking organisms, is merely the transformation of that which we apprehend in ourselves. (GS : – / SW I: – [emphasis in the original]; cf. GS : – / SW I: –)

In fairness, Dilthey does qualify this crude position somewhat toward the end of his career in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (). There, he downplays the role of psychology in interpretation, mainly because he has now become impressed by the idea that meaning has a profoundly social character (depends on “objective spirit,” roughly à la Hegel), and consequently thinks that the interpreter needs to understand people, including even himself, in the light of their expressions in the social domain rather than more immediately (GS : – / SW III: –; cf. GS : –, – / SW III: –, –). And, in a section of the work titled “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life” he now distinguishes between elementary forms of understanding, forms of understanding that are socially mediated (through “objective spirit”), and “higher forms of understanding” that identify what is individual – allowing induction a role in the first, interpretation of the particular case in light of social norms in the second, and restricting psychological self-projection to the third (GS : – / SW III: –). However, as the last part of this tripartite model shows, even in this late work he continues to assign an important role to psychological selfprojection (GS :  / SW III: ; cf. GS : –, ,  / SW III: –, , ). Moreover, the rest of his account remains radically 

Concerning the Hegelian provenance of this concept in the later Dilthey, see Gadamer (, –) and Makkreel (, ff.).



 . 

underdeveloped. In particular, even this final version of his hermeneutics still lacks any foundation in a philosophy of language in the manner of Schleiermacher (or in a broader philosophy of “expressions” worthy of the name). And, despite his aspiration in Introduction to the Human Sciences to develop a methodology for the “Historical School,” which “considered spiritual life as historical through and through” (GS : xvi / SW I: ), and his observation in The Rise of Hermeneutics that the Renaissance’s discovery of the problem of historical distance marked an essential step in the development of hermeneutics (GS : – / SW IV: ), he still fails to incorporate any consideration of historical context into his hermeneutics. Nor can such shortcomings in Dilthey’s hermeneutics be seen as merely the result of a persistent tendency to postpone developing it until after the rest of his position has been presented, as one commentator has suggested (Rodi , –). For Dilthey rather regards its further development as impossible in principle. Thus, in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences he claims that the attempt to codify the rules of interpretation was something that only belonged to an early stage of the history of hermeneutics, a stage that he alleges has since been superseded by Friedrich Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Boeckh (GS :  / SW III: ). And, he adds that “there is something irrational in all understanding just as life itself is irrational; it cannot be represented in a logical formula . . . These are the limits placed on the logical treatment of understanding by its very nature” (GS :  / SW III: ). In short, not only is Dilthey’s grasp of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics inadequate but also, and largely in consequence, his own hermeneutics is so as well.



Some Good News: Dilthey’s Broader History of Hermeneutics

So much for the bad news about Dilthey on hermeneutics. But, there is also some very good news. A first achievement of Dilthey’s that deserves praise here is his broader history of hermeneutics (as contrasted with his detailed history of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in particular). Dilthey was arguably the first person to attempt to give a comprehensive history of hermeneutics as a discipline. Moreover, many of his specific observations on the subject still repay consideration today. The following are some of his most important points. ()

In The Rise of Hermeneutics he locates the origins of hermeneutics in ancient Greece. In particular, he observes that the central role that poetry played in Greek education led to spirited interpretation and

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



criticism of Homer and other poets during the Greek enlightenment of the fifth century BCE. He argues that the rise of the Sophists with their focus on rhetoric and its methods enabled hermeneutics to develop in a more refined way, eventually leading to Aristotle’s contributions to the subject. He notes that the interpretive and critical practice of Alexandrian philologists then led them to formulate even more sophisticated hermeneutical principles in the interest of achieving strict interpretation. He points out that this was opposed by an alternative, allegorical style of interpretation that emerged at Pergamon, which provoked its further refinement. And, he adds that this conflict later resurfaced in the Christian era between, respectively, Antioch, which championed a strict style of interpretation, and Alexandria, which now championed allegorical interpretation, a process that helped to spur still further development of hermeneutical selfconsciousness and sophistication (GS : – / SW IV: –.) () In the same work Dilthey identifies the Renaissance as an important new phase in the development of hermeneutics, especially thanks to its novel awareness of the historicity of mental phenomena (i.e., their subjection to profound changes over the course of history) and of the great difficulties that often arise for interpretation as a result of this (GS : – / SW IV: ). () Already in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System, and then again in The Rise of Hermeneutics, Dilthey identifies the Reformation as the source of the next major step in the development of hermeneutics. Indeed, in the former work he goes as far as to say that “the science of hermeneutics actually begins with Protestantism, although the art of exegesis and reflection on it are, of course, much older” (GS :  / SW IV: ). On Dilthey’s account, Protestantism’s defining doctrine that each Christian has the right and responsibility to interpret the Bible for himself gave a huge impetus to the search for reliable principles to guide the interpretation of this difficult text (GS : ff. / SW IV: ff.). Moreover (as in the ancient world), the conflict that then arose between Protestant and Catholic hermeneutical theorists served to increase the refinement of methodological self-reflection still further (GS : ff. / SW IV: ff.).



This was in effect the beginning of what Dilthey in Introduction to the Human Sciences calls the “Historical School,” which “considered spiritual life as historical through and through” (GS : xvi / SW I: ).



 . 

()

Finally, both in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System and in The Rise of Hermeneutics Dilthey identifies Schleiermacher as a sort of culmination in the development of the discipline. He in particular praises Schleiermacher for seeking a perfectly general theory and methodology of interpretation (GS :  / SW IV: ); aiming to ground it on an analysis of the nature of understanding itself (rather than merely providing a collection of rules for achieving understanding) (GS : , – / SW IV: , –); and recognizing that the phenomenon of authors’ creative individuality poses a major challenge to interpretation that it needs to address (GS :  / SW IV: ; GS : – / SW IV: –).

Dilthey’s broad history of hermeneutics, including the four central theses just mentioned, constitutes an important contribution. The history of hermeneutics has since been developed further by other authors (e.g., J. Wach and R. E. Palmer). But, Dilthey laid the foundations, and moreover in certain respects remains indispensable.

 Some More Good News: Broadening the Subject Matter of Hermeneutics Another important contribution of Dilthey’s lies in a certain broadening of the subject matter of hermeneutics. Schleiermacher had normally conceived interpretation and its theory / methodology as exclusively concerned with linguistic expression: written texts or discourse. In contrast, Dilthey, especially after , came to emphasize that there are also other types of “manifestation [Äußerung]” or “expression [Ausdruck]” that convey meanings, consequently require interpretation, and therefore ought to be covered by the theory / methodology of interpretation. Among these are instrumental music (GS : – / SW III: –), sculpture, and painting (GS : – / SW IV: –; GS :  / SW III: –); gestures and looks (GS : , – / SW III: , –); social customs and their products (for example, the way in which trees are arranged in a park or chairs in a room) (GS :  / SW III: ); a broader class of social practices and institutions that includes, in addition to all of the things just mentioned, also various sorts of social, political, economic, and legal institutions that convey meanings (GS : –, –, – / SW III: –, –, –); and finally (a class of cases that, unlike all of the preceding ones, do not normally involve any intention to convey the meanings that they reveal, and that

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



Dilthey therefore usually calls only “manifestations” rather than “expressions”), all actions (GS :  / SW III: ). This extension of the range of meanings – and consequently of interpretation, and therefore of hermeneutics as the theory and methodology of interpretation – to include much more than just language seems clearly correct and important. However, its novelty should not be exaggerated. For, while such a move certainly constitutes progress over Schleiermacher, it had already been strongly anticipated by several other theorists of interpretation before Dilthey, including Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Droysen (see, e.g., Droysen , : –, ff.). (Dilthey seems to have been especially influenced by Hegel here, in particular while working on his seminal book on the young Hegel, Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels [].) There is also a further important aspect of Dilthey’s position here that deserves mention, though. Among those of his predecessors who had already recognized the capacity of certain nonlinguistic arts such as instrumental music, painting, and sculpture to express meanings, and their consequent need to be interpreted, some had held that this capacity was only possible through a sort of parasitism on the artist’s language (e.g., Herder and Schlegel), whereas others had held that nonlinguistic art could in certain cases express meanings that transcended the expressive resources of the artist’s language (e.g., Hegel). In The Rise of Hermeneutics from  Dilthey still seems to be attracted to the former position (GS :  / SW IV: ). However, in works after  he comes to opt for the latter position instead. His decision during this period to begin exploring a class of “expressions” that are only in part linguistic is itself symptomatic of this. But, it can be seen even more clearly in a short piece titled Musical Understanding that he wrote around  (GS : – / SW III: –). In this piece he insists that instrumental music expresses deep aspects of the soul’s experience and has a meaning. But, he also distinguishes between, on the one hand, meanings in instrumental music that merely reflect a pre-articulation or pre-articulability of the same meanings in language and, on the other hand, meanings in instrumental music that are not clearly expressible in language but are more properly musical (in particular, ones concerned with “life”). Whether Hegel and Dilthey are right in claiming that certain forms of expression of meaning are independent from language or whether instead Herder and Schlegel are right in claiming that there is always an implicit  

Cf. for further discussion Rickman (, ch. ). Concerning the anticipations in Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Hegel, see Forster (; b).



 . 

dependence on language is a difficult question that I shall not try to settle here. But, the following two points at least tend to support the Hegel– Dilthey position: First, if one conceives language as restricted to speaking and writing, i.e., to uttered sounds and visible marks on paper or the like, then it seems extremely improbable that these two physical media of expression, among the many others that exist or are imaginable, could have the sort of monopoly on the power to express meanings in an independent way that the Herder–Schlegel position asserts. Would such a monopoly not be a sort of miracle? Second, Dilthey in Musical Understanding emphasizes that music is an evolving cultural artifact constituted by a rich body of rules that make its expressive power possible. This suggests a way in which instrumental music (or other nonlinguistic symbolic media) may sometimes be able to express meanings independently of spoken or written language, namely in virtue of possessing a sort of rulegovernedness that is similar to that which makes meaning possible in the case of such language. For example, the ancient Greeks’ various musical modes were evidently bound by explicit or implicit rules to certain specific sorts of occasions and moods.

 Some even Better News: Dilthey’s Most Important Contributions Let us now turn to what are arguably Dilthey’s most important contributions of all in connection with hermeneutics. These lie in his closely interrelated answers to three questions: () Can interpretation in principle be a science or instead only something else, say an art? () What is the central and proper method of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften], i.e., such disciplines as history, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, jurisprudence, psychology, classical scholarship, literary studies, and art history? () Are these disciplines properly speaking sciences [Wissenschaften]? The main lines of Dilthey’s approach to these questions had already been developed by Droysen in his lectures on Historik, or the methodology of the discipline of history (lectures first delivered in ). Droysen () had in particular insisted on the following principles: The appropriate method of a science depends on and varies with the science’s object (). Accordingly, history is a science but it is one whose central method lies  

For an attempt to settle it, see Forster (b, ch. ). Cf. Gadamer (, ff.) and especially Beiser (, ch. ).

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



not in causal explanation [erklären] as in the natural sciences, nor even in the criticism of sources, but instead in understanding [verstehen], or interpreting [interpretieren] (, , , ff., , ). The theoretical / methodological discipline that is of central importance to history is therefore hermeneutics (–). Dilthey’s answers to questions ()–() follow and develop these principles of Droysen’s. Dilthey’s answer to question () is implicit rather than explicit – implied by his explicit answers to questions () and () that the central and proper method of the human sciences is understanding, or interpretation, and that it is in virtue of their employment of this method that they are indeed genuine sciences. But, I would like to consider Dilthey’s answer to question () first here, not only because it is presupposed in his answers to the other questions but also because it addresses a question that is fundamental to hermeneutics in its own right. Friedrich Schlegel, in his Philosophy of Philology (), and then Schleiermacher, in his hermeneutics lectures, had already posed the question whether interpretation is a science [Wissenschaft] or instead an art. Schlegel had not given a consistent answer to the question, but Schleiermacher had done so, opting for characterizing interpretation as an art rather than a science, on the grounds that it centrally uses the method of “divination,” or hypothesis. Now, when Dilthey identifies interpretation as the distinctive method of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] and insists that in virtue of using this method they are genuine sciences [Wissenschaften], this implies a contrary answer to the Schlegel–Schleiermacher question: interpretation (at least in challenging cases and when properly practiced) is a science. What warrants Dilthey’s assessment that interpretation can be scientific? He has a number of important considerations that together strongly support it. First, he assumes (as indeed did virtually everyone else at this period) that interpretation is a matter of discovering facts that are no less objective than those discovered by the natural sciences – namely, the original meanings of texts, discourse, and other “expressions.” Gadamer has of course identified this assumption as the fundamental error in what he pejoratively calls “Romantic hermeneutics.” However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is probably Gadamer who is in error here, not Dilthey and the  

Here, Droysen develops just such a hermeneutics in four parts, flexibly modeled on Boeckh’s fourpart hermeneutics (that had in its turn been flexibly modeled on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics). Contra Beiser (, ), who implies that the idea of a “science vs. art” opposition only arose later, with positivism. It is true, though, that the exact meaning of the opposition had changed subtly by the time of Dilthey. For more on this, see Forster (a).



 . 

tradition to which he belongs (see Forster a). This, then, constitutes one important, albeit implicit, reason in Dilthey for classifying interpretation as a science. Second, in sharp contrast to many Enlightenment thinkers who had believed that human mental life is much the same at all times and places, Dilthey believes that it varies in profound ways between different historical periods (and cultures), and that it even does so to a significant extent between individuals at a single time and place. The former insight (concerning history and culture) was in his view the fundamental insight of what in Introduction to the Human Sciences he calls the “Historical School” (a school that it is his main purpose in that work to support by providing it with a sound methodological foundation). Moreover, as we have seen from his history of hermeneutics, for him the successive emergence of these two insights constituted two of the most important steps in the development of the discipline: the former insight (concerning history and culture) entering the discipline with the Renaissance, the latter (concerning individuality) with Schleiermacher. This whole phenomenon of mental variation between historical periods and cultures and even between individuals within a single period and culture – producing, as it often does, a deep mental gulf between an interpreter and the author he wishes to interpret – makes interpretation a far more difficult task than many Enlightenment thinkers had assumed it to be, indeed often a vertiginously difficult task. This entails that in order to have any real hope of success in many cases, interpretation needs to develop and follow rigorous methods. Actually, this whole line of thought already lay behind Schleiermacher’s famous statement in his hermeneutics lectures that contrary to a common assumption that “understanding occurs as a matter of course,” instead “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point” (Schleiermacher , –; cf. Schleiermacher , –). Now, to complete the point: interpretation is for these reasons often an extremely difficult task and needs to employ rigorous methods in order to achieve success – just like natural science! Third, Dilthey normally agrees with Schleiermacher that the methods of interpretation are strikingly different from those of the natural sciences. And, he normally supports this position by arguing that whereas interpretation aims at a sort of re-experiencing of a psychological state in its holistic and individual character, natural science aims at knowing objects in their discreteness and their qualitative identity to each other, in order to derive explanatory causal laws from that knowledge. However, he disagrees with Schleiermacher in rejecting Schleiermacher’s view that such a difference in

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



methods constitutes a good reason for denying that both sorts of activities are scientific. Dilthey’s position is instead that the umbrella of science is broad enough to cover a diversity of methods. This, then, is a further important part of his case for saying that interpretation (at least in challenging cases and when properly practiced) has a scientific character. Fourth, while the previous point is already powerful as it stands, it becomes even more so when one considers a further point that Dilthey occasionally (albeit rarely) makes: that the natural (and formal) sciences themselves exhibit a considerable diversity of methods. As Frithjof Rodi (, –) has noted, although Dilthey usually operates with a crude twofold distinction between, on the one hand, the human sciences with their method of interpretation, and on the other hand, the natural sciences with their method of causal explanation, in the addenda to The Rise of Hermeneutics he instead develops a threefold distinction between the human sciences, the physical-chemical sciences, and the biological sciences, characterizing the physical-chemical sciences as concerned with “the mathematic knowledge of quantitative relations” (i.e., covering laws, causal laws), but the biological sciences as concerned with “lifepurposiveness [Lebenszweckmäßigkeit]” (GS :  / SW IV: ; trans. modified). Subsequent work in biology and in the philosophy of biology has tended to bear out Dilthey’s intuition here that it is wrong to assimilate biology’s central methods to those of physics or chemistry. There is also another, and even more glaring, example of the same sort of situation, namely the formal sciences: logic and mathematics. Like many other philosophers, Dilthey in his discussions of the natural sciences tends to set these to one side by in effect stipulatively defining “natural science” in a way that excludes them. However, they surely are at least sciences, and just as surely they clearly do not employ the method of empirical generalization to covering laws or causal laws that characterizes physics and chemistry. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suspect that the picture that all of the nonhuman sciences employ some such single method is in the end little more than a naïve caricature (or a utopian fantasy), that they instead exhibit a rather rich variety of methods. Recognizing this situation significantly strengthens Dilthey’s basic intuition that interpretation’s failure to conform to the methods of natural sciences such as physics and chemistry is perfectly consistent with it nonetheless being scientific.

 

For a helpful discussion of the issues involved, see Rosenberg (). Such a position has recently been argued for by Jerry Fodor, among others.



 . 

Fifth, Dilthey moreover does in fact identify a considerable amount of overlap in methods between interpretation and the natural sciences. Schleiermacher had already done so to some extent, in particular by identifying a “comparative” method as predominant on the linguistic side of interpretation, by which he meant an inductive method of the sort that he thought was also used by the natural sciences (Schleiermacher’s broader position was just that a method of “divination,” or hypothesis, was equally essential to interpretation as well, and that unlike “comparison,” this was not shared by the natural sciences). Accordingly, but more ambitiously, Dilthey in the addenda to The Rise of Hermeneutics allows that several methods are common to interpretation and the natural sciences, again saliently including induction, but also including what he calls analysis, construction, and (in a somewhat different sense of the word from Schleiermacher) comparison (GS : – / SW IV: ; cf. GS : – / SW III: –). In short, according to Dilthey, though a sharing of methods between interpretation and the natural sciences is not essential for classifying interpretation along with the natural sciences as a science, there is in fact a considerable sharing of methods between them. Sixth, Dilthey sometimes also recognizes (in partial agreement with Schleiermacher and partial disagreement with him) that interpretation and natural science share the method of hypothesis – thereby strengthening the line of argument just discussed even more. Unlike Schleiermacher, Dilthey mainly associates the method of hypothesis with the natural sciences. Indeed, in his later works he does so exclusively. However, in earlier works, he instead sees it as a method that the natural sciences share with interpretation. For there, like Schleiermacher before him, he sees that it does actually play an important role in interpretation. For example, he writes in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System: “All interpretation starts with a very flexible hypothesis, which embodies a range of possibilities that will be narrowed down as the interpretation proceeds” (GS :  / SW IV: ; cf. GS :  / SW IV:  and GS :  / SW IV: ). As I have argued elsewhere, Schleiermacher and the early Dilthey are quite right to think that hypothesis plays a central role in interpretation (Forster b). This early strand of Dilthey’s position also implies an important correction of Schleiermacher, though. For Dilthey is also quite right to hold that hypothesis is a central method 

See GS : – / SW II: – and GS :  / SW III: ; and note also the omission of hypothesis from the account of the methods of interpretation in The Rise of Hermeneutics and its addenda.

Dilthey’s Importance for Hermeneutics



of the natural sciences, and Schleiermacher had been quite wrong to deny this (the intervening work of William Whewell concerning the important role that hypothesis plays in the natural sciences had probably helped to make this clear to Dilthey). In sum, Dilthey’s early position concerning hypothesis constitutes an important enrichment of his more general principle that interpretation and the natural sciences share certain methods in common, and thereby contributes to his case for saying that interpretation may properly be considered scientific. These, then, are six important reasons that can be found in Dilthey for his implicit classification of interpretation (at least in its more challenging cases and when properly practiced) as a science. Collectively, they amount to a very compelling case for so classifying it. Let us turn now to the two closely connected questions that still remain to be considered: () What is the central and proper method of the human sciences, i.e., such disciplines as history, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, jurisprudence, psychology, classical scholarship, literary studies, and art history? () Are these disciplines properly speaking sciences? Dilthey’s answer to question () is essentially that the central and proper method of the human sciences lies in description rather than explanation, and that it in particular lies in accurate understanding, or interpretation. Dilthey already adumbrates this position in Introduction to the Human Sciences () (GS : –, – / SW I: –, –). He subsequently elaborates it more fully in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences () and its addenda, where, for example, he says that the human sciences “will have a predominantly descriptive and analytical character,” and that “the method pervading the human sciences is that of understanding and interpretation. All the functions and truths of the human sciences are gathered in understanding. At every point it is understanding that opens up a world” (GS :  / SW III: ; GS :  / SW III: ). This conception of the character of the human sciences naturally makes hermeneutics their central methodological discipline. Accordingly, after having initially, in Introduction to the Human Sciences () and Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology () assigned that role to a descriptive psychology, in The Rise of Hermeneutics () and The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences () he assigns it to hermeneutics.  

Cf. GS : –, –,  / SW III: –, –, . See also GS :  / SW IV: . Cf. Makkreel (, –) for the history of Dilthey’s development on this issue.



 . 

Dilthey’s argument for this conception of the central and proper method of the human sciences has two sides, one negative, the other positive. (The general shape of the argument, and indeed many of its details as well, can already be found in Herder [Forster , –] – for Dilthey one of the founders of the “Historical School” whose methodology he himself aspired to supply.) The negative side of the argument consists of skeptically questioning pretensions to make these disciplines explanatory. Dilthey saw such pretensions as coming in two main forms. The first was the position argued for by positivists such as Comte, Mill, and Buckle (whom Dilthey already criticized in an early review article from ) that the ultimate aim of these disciplines is to arrive at explanations of human phenomena in terms of efficient causes and general laws. Dilthey usually allows that causality and general laws govern human just as much as nonhuman nature (see, e.g., GS :  / SW IV: ). He also usually allows that we may sometimes actually discover such causes and laws governing human affairs, for example laws concerning rates of suicide and crime (see, e.g., GS : – / SW IV: –). Indeed, he usually insists that a causal component is essential to the writing of history (see, e.g., GS :  / SW IV: ), and takes it for granted that parts of the human sciences are concerned with the discovery of general laws (see, e.g., GS : ,  / SW IV: , ). However, he is also usually very pessimistic about the prospects of advancing far in this direction. This pessimism dominates both of his most detailed and systematic treatments of the subject: Introduction to the Human Sciences (see, e.g., GS :  / SW I: –) and The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (see, e.g., GS : – / SW III: –). The following are some of his main reasons for it: () the epistemic inaccessibility of many of the most important causal factors involved in the causal determination of past history, especially the psychological factors (see, e.g., GS :  / SW IV: ); () the impossibility of exact measurement of such psychological factors (unlike physical ones), which precludes arriving at exact laws governing them (see, e.g., GS : – / SW III: –); () the holistic and individualistic nature of such psychological states and processes (in contrast to the discrete and homogeneous character of physical ones), which again precludes discovering general laws governing them (see, e.g., GS : – / SW III: ); () the impossibility of conducting experiments to test causal hypotheses concerning history (in contrast to nonhuman nature, where this is possible) (see, e.g., GS :  / SW IV: –); and () the important influence that the epistemically elusive decisions of single

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

individuals often have on the course of history (e.g., Alexander the Great or Napoleon) (see, e.g., GS : – / SW IV: –). So much for the first sort of pretension to make the human sciences explanatory. The second sort of pretension to do so consists in the various grand religious and metaphysical theories of an overall meaning in history that have been developed by such Christian theologians as Augustine and such philosophers of history as Hegel (whom Dilthey sees as seamlessly continuous with his theological predecessors in this area). Dilthey essentially considers such theories too fanciful to be taken seriously (in particular, see GS : – / SW IV: –; GS :  / SW IV: ; and GS : – / SW I: –). Now, this whole usual inability of the human sciences to provide explanations of human phenomena already in a way leaves the accurate description of such phenomena, in particular the accurate interpretation of such phenomena, as their main method by default. But, Dilthey also has several more positive arguments for conceiving the central and proper method of the human sciences as description and interpretation. First, in his early review of Buckle he argues that human beings have intellectual yearnings not only for explanation but also for narration – they want to know not only why things happened but also what happened. Indeed, he argues that the desire for narration is prior to and more fundamental than that for explanation (GS :  / SW IV: –). Consequently, even if the human sciences cannot in general provide explanations, the descriptive-interpretive function that they can serve is one of at least equal importance. Second, Dilthey argues that an interpretive narration of the past, other cultures, or other individuals takes us beyond the narrow confines of our own experiences to share the dramatically different experiences of other people, thereby enriching our lives and increasing our happiness (see, e.g., GS :  / SW III: –; and GS : ,  / SW IV: , ). Third, if the question is raised whether such an interpretive narration is a challenging enough task to constitute the central method of the human sciences, Dilthey would say that the insight that emerged in the Renaissance, developed further in the German “Historical School,” and was finally completed by Schleiermacher that human mental life varies deeply from period to period, culture to culture, and even individual to individual shows that it is. In short, for all of these reasons, both negative and positive, the central and proper method of the human sciences, according to Dilthey, is the descriptive-interpretive one, thus rendering hermeneutics their central methodological discipline.



 . 

This is a powerful case. It is also one that could be developed somewhat more fully than Dilthey develops it, though. This is especially true on its positive side, where there are several further good reasons that could be added. These would include, for example, the possibility that we may learn things from other periods, cultures, and individuals; the greater moral sensitivity that we are likely to achieve by coming to understand them; and the higher level of self-understanding that we can attain once we are able to compare our own outlook with others and to see how it developed out of past other outlooks (as in the method of genealogy). (In fact, Herder in his original version of the argument had already supplied several such additional positive arguments, including those just mentioned.) Finally, let us consider question (), the question of whether the human sciences are properly speaking sciences. Dilthey of course holds that they are. Since, as we have just seen, he identifies their central and proper method as one of interpretation, my previous account of his reasons for holding that interpretation (at least in difficult cases and when properly practiced) is a genuinely scientific accomplishment has already in effect supplied his reasons for believing that the human sciences are likewise genuine sciences. To recapitulate those reasons, now in direct application to the human sciences: their main subject matter when they employ that central method, namely meaning, is no less objective than the subject matters that are dealt with by the natural sciences; due to the phenomenon of deep historical, cultural, and even individual mental differences, in investigating that subject matter they face a very difficult task requiring very rigorous methods, just as the natural sciences do; the status of being a genuine science is compatible with a variety of methods, so that differences in this respect between the human sciences and the natural sciences do not entail that the former cannot be sciences, a point that is reinforced by the fact that there are also sharp differences of method among the natural sciences themselves; moreover, it in fact turns out that there is much overlap between the methods of the human sciences and those of the natural sciences, especially in that both employ the methods of induction and hypothesis. This is once again a sophisticated and cogent case.

 Conclusion To conclude, Dilthey was indeed important for hermeneutics. But, he was so in certain ways rather than others, and the distribution of his achievements and failures is somewhat surprising. Where one might initially have

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

expected his contributions to be especially impressive, namely in his account of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics and in his own hermeneutics, he actually disappoints. However, in his broader history of hermeneutics, his extension of hermeneutics beyond language to include other sorts of expression as well, his conception that interpretation (at least in challenging cases and when properly practiced) is scientific, his identification of the central method of the human sciences as consisting in interpretation, and his argument that because of that central method the human sciences deserve to be classified as genuine sciences – in all of these areas he makes contributions of considerable importance.

 

Hermeneutics and Historicity Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason Charles Bambach

 Dilthey’s Question-Frame: The Aporia of Life and Science The work of Wilhelm Dilthey comes to us in the form of a paradox and a puzzle. Dilthey is widely acknowledged as the thinker who helped initiate a “hermeneutic turn” within European philosophy that profoundly influenced the work of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in terms of an ontological focus on human experience. At the same time, Dilthey’s attempts to explore the logical-methodological-epistemological foundations of both the natural and human sciences appear to us as the last remnants of a metaphysical impulse toward an ultimate foundation for knowledge. Given these apparent tensions within Dilthey’s work, I would like to explore the question about paradox and contradiction within Dilthey’s fundamental posing of the question (Fragestellung or questionframe) about hermeneutic understanding and scientific knowledge within the human sciences. I intend to do this by looking at his attempts to provide a “Critique of Historical Reason” that would serve as “an epistemological foundation for the human sciences,” one that would take the form of “a critique of the capacity of the human being to know itself and the society and history which it has produced” (GS :  / SW I: ). Focusing on this self-reflexive awareness of the human being as the starting point for his critique, Dilthey would turn to history and historical life as the site for his epistemological project of understanding the nexus of lived experience, understanding, and expression that becomes the basis for his later hermeneutics of historical life. It is with this insight into the historicity of human life that, I believe, we can find the beginnings of an ontological interpretation of the human being that would prove so critical for twentieth-century hermeneutics. In what follows I will offer a reading of Dilthey’s work that attempts to situate it between two competing claims: the scientific imperative toward securing an epistemological foundation for work in the human sciences and the 

Hermeneutics and Historicity



historical-hermeneutic understanding of life as marked by ambiguity, finitude, and contingency. Between these poles, Dilthey struggles to articulate his own philosophical interpretation of “the totality of our being,” even as he still clings to a Kantian-Cartesian Fragestellung that hopes to “succeed in establishing a secure system of knowledge about society and history on the basis of this standpoint” (GS : xix / SW I: ). At the very outset of his career, Dilthey envisioned a “new critique of reason” that would provide a way of securing for the newly developed historical sciences the same rigor and validity that Kant’s original critique had achieved for the natural sciences (Dilthey , ). As a young academic, Dilthey had already expressed this ideal in his inaugural lecture at the University of Basel in . Here, Dilthey explained that his philosophical energy was devoted to the task of “following Kant’s critical path in order to establish an empirical science of the human mind in conjunction with researchers in other disciplines; what matters is to discern the laws that govern social, intellectual, and moral phenomena” (GS : ). In these early years Dilthey was still somewhat enamored of the positivist contributions to philosophy of Comte and Mill, even as he was also swayed by the romantic impulses of Herder and Schleiermacher. His very description of his project as “an empirical science of the mind” betrays these positivist leanings. And yet, as his work matured, he became deeply critical of the naturalist metaphysics of Comte and Mill that sought to apply regulative laws of nature to the heterogeneous-individual phenomena of the human mind in its historical facticity (GS :  / SW I: –). As he began his great work, Introduction to the Human Sciences (), Dilthey saw that the efforts of Comte and Mill to found a new “science” of history based on positivist-empirical principles only served “to truncate and mutilate historical reality in order to assimilate it to the concepts and methods of the natural sciences.” Instead, Dilthey found more fertile ground in the contributions of the German Historical School (Ranke, Niebuhr, Droysen), who “considered spiritual life as historical through and through.” And yet despite their “empirical mode of observation” and “sympathetic immersion” in the particularities of historical life, Dilthey believed that these historians embraced a speculative-metaphysical vision of history that was guided more by theological faith rather than by philosophical rigor. In the Introduction, therefore, he set out to offer a philosophical grounding of 

For a discussion of this speculative tradition, cf. Hinrichs ().



 

the human sciences that would steer clear of metaphysical speculation by attending to the practical activities of the human being’s “willing, feeling, and thinking” within the concrete historical experience that engaged its historico-temporal “interactions” with other human beings (GS : xviii / SW I: ). For Dilthey, this focus on the practical activity of the human being was what drove his theoretical program of “establishing a secure system of knowledge about society and history” that would yield “the epistemological foundation of the human sciences.” At the core of this epistemological program stood the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. As far back as his inaugural lecture of , Dilthey had claimed that “Kant had determined the fundamental problem of philosophy for all time” – namely, “through which means and within what limits is knowledge of the phenomenal world (given in inner and outer perception) possible?” (GS : ) (Dilthey ). Following Kant’s “question concerning the conditions of rigorous knowledge as the question concerning the condition for science,” Dilthey attempted to extend the range of Kant’s project by rethinking Kant’s definition of the empirical beyond natural scientific inquiry so that it would include the Historical School’s investigations in the realm of history, society, and culture (GS : ). As Dilthey contended, “the fundamental and one of the most important tasks in philosophy today is the establishment of a valid theory of scientific knowledge (GS : ) – a task that had been defined in exemplary fashion by Kant in his first critique. And yet, Kant’s analysis in the Critique defined reason in terms of a timeless, purely logical structure. Moreover, Dilthey insisted, “Kant’s a priori is rigid and dead,” based on an abstract and formalized conception of subjectivity (GS :  / SW I: ). As Dilthey so famously put it: “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but only the attenuated sap of reason as a mere activity of thought” (GS I: xviii / SW I: ). At the heart of Dilthey’s critique of Kant’s bloodless and formal concept of subjectivity lay his insight into the temporality and historicity of lived experience. Kant’s categorical rendering of time as transcendental ideality wound up affirming a mathematico-scientific model of time as constant presence. Any attempt at configuring time as an ideal form for intuiting phenomena was bound to miss its reality as lived experience. This led Dilthey to recognize that categories do not serve as a priori conditions that shape life; on the contrary, they “emerge from life itself” and constitute the “stream of life” that flows incessantly and whose “essence . . . we cannot grasp” (GS : – / SW III: –). With this insight into the

Hermeneutics and Historicity



limits of human reason and the finitude of human knowledge, Dilthey began to revision Kant’s critical legacy as a possible source for a new critique of reason rooted in historical life: “The question is whether an epistemology of history, which [Kant] himself did not provide, is possible within the framework of his concepts.” By posing the question of an historical epistemology within this Kantian scaffolding, Dilthey defined the essential ambition of his Critique of Historical Reason: to provide an epistemological foundation for the human sciences that would be as valid and rigorous as the one provided in Kant’s critique of the natural sciences. And yet, the very terms of Dilthey’s question-frame were marked by paradox, ambiguity, and contradiction. By historicizing reason and seeking to root it in “the full, total, and unmutilated experience of life,” Dilthey sought to overcome “the metaphysical armchair philosophy” of Neo-Kantian concept-formation that left it lifeless and calcified (GS : , ). As Dilthey put it in his “Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason”: “Today philosophical thought hungers and thirsts for life. It wants to return to a heightened joy of living, to art, etc.” (SW III:  / GS : ). Nonetheless, what motivated Dilthey’s own efforts to establish a science of historical knowledge was his commitment to the ideal of reason. Dilthey’s “critique” of historical reason needs to be understood, then, as both an attempt to secure scientific knowledge of history as well as to provide a historical corrective to Kant’s timeless, ahistorical model of reason. In this sense, Dilthey’s “Critique of Historical Reason” is not merely the attempt at applying Kant’s own critique of reason to history; it involves the realization that reason itself is historical (Rohbeck , –). “Reason now not only thematizes history, but reflects on itself as the product of historical development”; reason critiques itself as historical reason. Here, Dilthey’s project submits history to a rational critique and, moreover, puts forward the claim that reason be understood historically as that which emerges from its experiential sources in life. In his efforts to achieve a rigorous form of scientificity for history, however, Dilthey also comes to acknowledge the historicity of science, which serves to threaten the epistemological foundations of his critique. The rational critique of history is thereby exposed to the historical critique of reason, leaving open the very question of how to provide a secure foundation for Dilthey’s philosophical project. 

For Dilthey’s critique of Neo-Kantianism – especially the Baden Neo-Kantians Rickert and Windelband, cf. Bambach (, –).



 

 Psychology, Life, and the Principle of Phenomenality What, precisely, Dilthey meant by a “critique” of historical reason has presented a considerable problem within Dilthey scholarship. Even though Dilthey continued to employ this description of his lifelong philosophical project, its meaning changed in significant ways over the course of his writings from  to . If, at the outset of his career, Dilthey remained tied to an all-too-narrow epistemological framework for his proposal, by the s he had wholeheartedly embraced a psychological approach to the question of the proper method for investigating the human sciences. Within his Introduction to the Human Sciences (), Dilthey had already conceived of a science of psychology that would provide “the basis of all knowledge of historical life” (GS :  / SW I: ). This form of “descriptive” psychology was to serve as the basis of Dilthey’s whole project of finding an epistemological foundation for the human sciences: “the epistemological standpoint must be grasped within a truly descriptive psychology that encompasses a substantial psychic state of affairs” (GS : ). As he continued work on the second volume of his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey came to see that his Kantian formulation of the crisis within the sciences needed a grounding in the life nexus of the human being that was rooted in what he termed Innewerden, a “reflexive awareness” that is immediate and “not given relatively like an external object” (GS : / SW I: –; ; GS : ). As Dilthey puts it, “that which I experience in myself is present for me as a fact of consciousness because I am reflexively aware of it [weil ich desselben innewerde]: a fact of consciousness is precisely what I possess in reflexive awareness [dessen ich innewerde].” Contrary to the knowledge obtained in the natural sciences, which was based on perception of external facts, reflexive awareness provided immediate access to knowledge of that realm characteristic to the human sciences. Owing to psychology’s role as the archetypal discipline of reflexive awareness, Dilthey ascribed to it the task of providing a new, more phenomenologically attuned foundation for human–scientific inquiry. For Dilthey, the older form of the mechanical, law-driven psychology of the natural scientists aimed at subsuming discrete, individual mental acts under general psychological laws focused on the task of explanation. But, Dilthey’s newly formed “descriptive” or “analytic” psychology was rooted 

For more on Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason, see Schnädelbach (); Ermarth (); Owensby (); H.-U. Lessing (); Beiser ().

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

in the structural unity of inner experience as the nexus for understanding the larger socio-historical-cultural world within which the individual was situated. In his “Breslau Draft,” Dilthey wrote: The term “understanding” [Verstehen] as it is first applied to an individual inner state, designates the interpretation of that psychic state in the context of the whole of psychic life and conditioned by its milieu . . . Understanding is the domain of all who are actively involved in human affairs, and differs from explanation [Erklären] by participating in life, which is possible only on the basis of life. Life is the great object as well as the organon of those who are concerned with human affairs. (GS :  / SW I: )

This new focus on the philosophical approach to understanding was to win independence for the human sciences and provide a different model of scientific rigor. This Dilthey found in what he termed the “principle of phenomenality.” As Dilthey explained it in “Contributions to the Solution of the Question Concerning the Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World” (), “the highest principle of philosophy is the ‘principle of phenomenality’ according to which everything that is there for me stands under the most general condition of being a fact of my consciousness” (GS :  / SW II: ). In his “Berliner Logik,” he restates the significance of this principle by declaring that “the beginning of all serious philosophy forms the insight that what is there for me is there only as the content of my consciousness” (GS : ). This crucial principle serves two critical functions within Dilthey’s work. First, it stresses the rootedness of any form of knowledge in the Innewerden or reflexive awareness that precedes any form of self-consciousness. Here, there is no separation between subject and object, act and content, but an immediate and certain relation to what is there-for-me. Reflexive awareness is marked by an immediacy and certainty that is “pre-reflective” and “proto-intentional in that it is always oriented toward the world even if the world is not yet thematized as being objective” (SW I: –). Here, reflexive awareness precedes any kind of “representational awareness” of the transcendental subject and is a direct awareness that is there-for-me in lived experience: “this knowing is not only immediate, but unshakeable” (GS : – / SW I: –). What Dilthey strives to underscore here is that all knowledge of and by psychic acts is grounded in an immediate reality that precedes grammar, logic, method, and the principles of epistemological 

Cf. also Makkreel (, –) and de Mul (, –).



 

investigation. In the immediacy of lived experience that comes to me via my reflexive awareness, “I experience not a relation, but a unity.” This is the nexus of life that is not merely cognitive, but also (and more powerfully) involves volition, emotion, and imagination. Dilthey expresses this experiential dimension of life in his well-known Althoff Letter of : All science, all philosophy is experiential . . . The quarrel between idealism and realism can be resolved by psychological analysis, which can demonstrate that the real world given in experience is not a phenomenon in my representation; it is rather given to me as something distinct from myself, because I am a being that does not merely represent, but also wills and feels . . . Both self and the real world are therefore given in the totality of psychic life. (GS :  / SW I: –)

This nexus of psychic life opens itself to us, however, only in the mediated context of lived experience that Dilthey articulates in a second major principle within his project: “the principle of the totality of experience.” As Dilthey understands it, lived experience extends beyond the sphere of an isolated consciousness into the nexus of social, linguistic, historical relations that constitute the world. In its totality, life is performative, interactive, and reflexive; this totality can never be grasped in a theoretical way, but must be engaged in terms of the concrete, factical co-givenness of self and world that emerges within reflexive awareness. Dilthey’s attempts to get at this dynamic nexus of lived experience (“the totality of psychic life”) would take the form of a “descriptive psychology” that would provide a rigorous approach to the question of knowledge within the human sciences. Such knowledge could never rest on a theoretical foundation since it was always to be rooted in life. Dilthey was adamant, however, that his embrace of life as the basis for his analysis of the psychic nexus was not to be misconstrued as part of the modish Lebensphilosophie of his day that often veered into irrationality. “We are not trying to promote mysticism,” Dilthey declared; “what we seek to show is life itself . . . to show life as it is – that is what we strive for. To describe life – that is our goal . . . We also want to make life visible in its unfathomable depths, and in its unfathomable nexus” (GS :  / SW I: –). For Dilthey, “life” is not merely a biological-organic designation; it encompasses the full phenomenological experience of a human being within the world, what Heidegger in the early s characterizes as 

Cf. GS : .

Hermeneutics and Historicity



“factical life” before settling on the term “Dasein.” As Dilthey himself explained it: “I confine the term ‘life’ to the human world”; it means simply “life as it is lived by the human being” (GS :  / SW III: ; GS : , ). Yet, despite this unassuming stance, Dilthey also acknowledged that life was “an insoluble enigma,” “something that cannot be analyzed . . . or expressed in any kind of formula or explanation.” On the contrary, “Life remains for thinking something unfathomable,” something that, like Augustine’s notion of time, is both immediately known even as it eludes our conceptual grasp. In Dilthey’s estimation, “Life is the fundamental fact that must form the starting point of philosophy. Life is that with which we are acquainted from within and behind which we cannot go. We cannot bring life before the tribunal of reason” (GS :  / SW III: ). Here, Dilthey clearly rejects the possibility of securing a metaphysical significance beyond life in the sphere of transcendent or timeless values. Life’s genuine meaning lies, rather, in the immanence of life itself in its factical contingencies. It arises from the nexus of sociallinguistic-historical relations that articulates the whole of which my life is but a part. And, it is in this part:whole relation, so crucial to hermeneutic understanding, that Dilthey will find an essential path into rethinking the meaning of life as that which “is at the same time intelligible and inscrutable” (GS :  / SW I: ). In this juxtaposition of life’s intelligibility and its concomitant inscrutability, we find traces of an underlying tension within Dilthey’s work between Leben and Wissenschaft that will come to shape his way of raising the very question of a hermeneutics of history that might grant legitimacy to the pursuits of the human sciences. At the same time, however, that we can find in Dilthey’s notions of reflexive awareness and lived experience the basis for a new “ontology of life,” we can also recognize traces of a latent Cartesianism in Dilthey’s language. We can see this especially in his programmatic “Preface” to the Introduction to the Human Sciences where “amidst such uncertainty about the foundations of the human sciences,” he writes about establishing a secure “system of knowledge,” one that “seeks a firm foundation,” “validity,” and a “certitude” that “provides the sciences with certainty” (GS I: xvi–xix / SW I: –). But, let us be clear. Life and lived experience provide “the starting point for   

Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (hereafter: GA) (Heidegger  ff.): :  / GA : –; Heidegger writes: “life = Dasein, ‘being’ [Sein] in and through life,” . This sentence, missing in the German text of GS , was added by the editors from the Nachlass. On Dilthey’s “ontology of life” cf. de Mul (, –).



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philosophy” precisely insofar as that which is immediately present to us as both indubitable and self-evident provides us with unshakeable certainty. In Dilthey’s words: Lived experience is always certain of itself. And since lived experience constitutes the justifying ground for the entire system of my knowledge about psychic objects, I must analyze lived experience with regard to the certainty contained in it . . . No matter how this is accounted for psychologically, the certainty of lived experience requires no further mediation. It can accordingly be called immediate. (GS :  / SW III: –)

Such observations reveal a pervasive longing within Dilthey’s work for a certitude aimed at securing the same kind of legitimacy for historical inquiry as that obtained in the natural sciences. Hence, in writing about the principle of phenomenality, Dilthey asserts that it provides a certainty that “is not only immediate but unshakable” and indeed exceeds the certainty of mathematical axioms that need to be “mediated by the development of our intellectual capacities” (GS :  / SW I: ). It is this emphasis on the question of scientificity and universal validity that will prove difficult for Dilthey to reconcile with his claim that it is “the historicity of psychic life as it is manifested in every system of culture produced by human beings” that constitutes “the most fundamental fact of the human sciences” (GS :  / SW V: ).

 Historicity and Hermeneutics: The Problem of Understanding In the years after , Dilthey would more self-consciously turn to hermeneutics as the way of properly addressing the question of knowledge in the human sciences. This hermeneutic “turn” in Dilthey’s work needs to be understood, however, within the context of its overall development. That means that we acknowledge both the continuity of this hermeneutic approach with the earlier Schleiermacher biography as well as the beginning of a more radical change toward hermeneutics in the late work, beginning with the essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics” (). If, in the Schleiermacher biography hermeneutics is conceived theoretically in terms of method, by the late work it becomes a way of philosophically rethinking the central role of understanding (Verstehen) within the human sciences, a 

De Mul (, –). Here, I agree with de Mul’s claim that “‘the hermeneutic turn’ in the Formation was largely prepared in the work before ” and that “although descriptive psychology continues to play an important role in the Critique . . . in the later work it is forced to surrender its status as the most fundamental human science to hermeneutics” ().

Hermeneutics and Historicity



problem that opens up the ontological question about the meaning of human historicity. Dilthey’s approach to hermeneutics, however, is marked by the same ambiguity and tension as we saw in his Introduction to the Human Sciences and his work in descriptive psychology. On the one hand, Dilthey explains in “The Rise of Hermeneutics” that “disciplines, like history itself, depend for their methodological certainty upon whether the understanding of what is singular may be raised to the level of universal validity.” He goes on to claim that the “main purpose [of hermeneutics] is to preserve the universal validity of historical interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification for such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded” (GS : – / SW IV: –). On the other hand, however, Dilthey acknowledges that all understanding remains tied to both the historicity of the work being interpreted as well as to the historicity of the interpreter. In other words, within Dilthey’s hermeneutics, the historicity of the object confronts the historicity of the subject as a way into the enduring problem of interpretation. All interpretation is limited and finite. Moreover, the part:whole relationship that situates all interpretive efforts within a hermeneutic circle provides no objective standpoint outside the circle that could serve as a fixed standard of adjudication. As Dilthey expresses it: “Theoretically, we have reached the limits of all interpretation, which is able to fulfill its task only up to a certain point. For all understanding always remains partial and can never be completed. Individuum est ineffabile.” In the “Addenda” to his hermeneutics essay, Dilthey concedes that there are “difficulties contained in the nature of understanding with reference to the practice of a universally valid science.” What Dilthey proposes in the “Addenda” is “a new historical grounding” for hermeneutical reflection whereby “historical consciousness must raise itself above the procedure of a particular temporal epoch” (GS V:  / SW IV: ). In this way, historical consciousness, in reflecting on its historical condition, can overcome the limits of its own historicity as it “finally comprehends all these historical tendencies within a purposive system as a series of possibilities contained within it.” In this “inner dialectic” between individual historical consciousness (part) and the larger claims of universal validity that apply across historical epochs (whole), Dilthey hopes to attain “a universality that is always and everywhere bound to historical thought. Here, as everywhere, historical thought itself becomes creative in that it raises human activity in society above the limits of the moment and the situation.” Throughout his project of a “Critique



 

of Historical Reason” – whether in the form of an epistemological, psychological, or hermeneutical grounding of the human sciences – Dilthey seeks to derive “universally valid knowledge from experience.” His very “problematic” or Fragestellung is defined by this tension between Leben and Wissenschaft: between a life marked by the historicity of lived experience and the desire for a scholarly-scientific knowledge of life that would attain to universal validity. Dilthey himself acknowledged these aporiae within his work and was constantly tossed back and forth between these two demands. In the wake of Dilthey’s contributions, both Heidegger and Gadamer have found them to be both incompatible and contradictory. On the one hand, Heidegger writes that Dilthey’s “forward movement into an authentic sphere against the traditional way of posing questions proved decisive” and that “Dilthey was the first to understand the aims of phenomenology.” And yet, on the other, Heidegger argues that “what Dilthey set out to do in concrete research . . . needs to be grasped in a wholly different way.” In most of Heidegger’s early lectures before Being and Time we can detect a certain ambivalence regarding Dilthey: “Dilthey possessed a sure instinct, but he had to work with insufficient methodological and conceptual means, and these precisely blocked his path to a radical formulation of the problems.” Beyond this, Heidegger alludes to “what is positive in Dilthey” concerning his insight into the historicity of human being and claims that “it was Dilthey who . . . had a truly radical awareness of this problem.” Heidegger remarks further that “Dilthey’s genuine philosophical tendencies were aimed at an ontology of ‘life’”; yet because of his recursive turn toward life as an object of epistemological investigation, Dilthey was unable to grasp the full sense of what it meant to be “historical.” This ambivalent stance toward Dilthey’s contributions finds its fullest expression in Heidegger’s Kassel lectures: What is important is to work out the being of the historical, i.e., historicity rather than the historical, being rather than beings, reality rather than the real . . . Dilthey penetrated into that reality, namely, human Dasein – which, in its authentic sense is the meaning of historical being. He succeeded in bringing this reality to givenness, defining it as living, free, and historical. But he did not pose the question of historicity itself, the question of the meaning of being, i.e., the question of the being of beings.   

 Heidegger (, : ) / GA : , . Heidegger, GA : . Heidegger (),  / GA : . Heidegger (),  / GA :  and (, ) / (/: , ); (, n).

Hermeneutics and Historicity



As part of this critique of Dilthey’s work on history as being still too dependent on the methodological and epistemological problematic of the human sciences, Heidegger also offered a corrective to Dilthey’s hermeneutics. As he saw it, both Dilthey’s hermeneutic method and his grasp of “understanding” remained too dependent on the grammaticalpsychological hermeneutics of Schleiermacher. This proved to be a “disastrous limitation,” Heidegger claimed, since the ontological significance of hermeneutics was suppressed and occluded in such a conception. Heidegger’s hermeneutics no longer focused on questions of method or validity, but understood itself as a hermeneutics of facticity attuned to Dasein’s self-understanding in the factical “‘how’ of its ownmost being.” In Dasein’s “radical wakefulness for itself,” Heidegger’s early hermeneutics pointed not to the past, but to futural possibilities that emerge out of Dasein’s encounter with its own historicity. In its being wakeful for an authentic form of self-understanding, Dasein generates its own historical meaning as that which lies ahead of it. In this experience of kairotic wakefulness, Heidegger breaks with Dilthey’s hermeneutics of the written word to pursue a radical hermeneutics of factical existence. Here, understanding is grasped not as a way of approaching history or the texts of a past tradition, but as a way of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, a way in which it both covers over and dis-covers its “there” in temporal-factical existence. Heidegger’s criticism of Dilthey’s hermeneutics will find an echo in the work of Gadamer that, in like manner, takes Dilthey to task for his entanglement within the question-frame of historicism. In Truth and Method Gadamer engages Dilthey as an active dialogue partner, acknowledging his important contributions to understanding the meaning of historicity for hermeneutics. He likewise credits Dilthey with helping us to profile the significance of historical life for engaging our factical self-understanding, even suggesting that it is due to “the rise of historical consciousness that hermeneutics owes its centrality within the human sciences.” And yet, as important as Dilthey was for Gadamer’s own rethinking of hermeneutics, ultimately he believed that “the full scope of the hermeneutic experience is not found in Dilthey” because he still conceived of hermeneutics as a way to guarantee “objective” truth from out of the immediate, pre-theoretical reflexive awareness of the “subject.”   

 Heidegger (: , ) / GA : , . Ibid. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [hereafter: TM], nd revised edn. (NY: Continuum, ),  / Gesammelte Werke I [hereafter: GW](Tu¨bingen: Mohr-Siebeck, ), . Gadamer Reader, ed. Richard Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ), ,  / GW II: ; GW X: –.



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Because Dilthey persisted in raising the question about historical knowledge in terms of subject-object metaphysics, he defined “the task of historical consciousness [as] a victory gained over its own relativity, thus establishing the objectivity of its knowledge in the realm of the human sciences.” By casting the problem of historical consciousness as an epistemological-methodological one, Gadamer claims, Dilthey betrayed “his latent Cartesianism” that remained tied to an ideal of scientific certitude profoundly at odds with his insight into human historicity. Here, Gadamer finds that Dilthey remained caught in an inner contradiction between the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and the Enlightenment ideals of certainty that he inherited from Descartes and Kant. As Dilthey came to ponder the authentic sense of historicity for grasping the meaning of lived experience, he understood it as resulting in a form of historical relativity at odds with his ideal of objective knowledge. As Gadamer puts it, Dilthey’s effort to understand the human sciences through life, beginning with lived experience, is never really reconciled with the Cartesian concept of science which he did not know how to throw off. Emphasize as he might the contemplative tendencies of life itself, the attractions of something “solid” that life involves, his concept of “objectivity,” as he reduced it to the objectivity of “results,” remains attached to an origin very different from lived experience. This is why he was unable to resolve the question that he himself had posed: how to justify the human sciences with the expressed aim of putting them on the same level as the natural sciences.

Gadamer continued to speak of the “ambiguity” and “inner disunity of [Dilthey’s] thought” that emerged from its oscillation between the scientific ideals of positivism and the immediacy of lived experience found in both romantic hermeneutics and the Historical School. Given Dilthey’s manner of posing the question of historicity in terms of scientific knowledge and of asking “how objectivity is possible in relativity,” it was hardly surprising that he became “entangle[d] in the aporiae of historicism.” For Gadamer, this demand that the singular, unrepeatable experience of historical life be subject to the demands of “scientific” history was fundamentally incompatible with Dilthey’s pioneering insights into historicity. Gadamer’s final judgment was that “Dilthey did not fully achieve the task 



Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,”[hereafter: PHC] Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. , no.  (): ; ,  / Das Problem des historischen Bewusstseins, [hereafter: PHB] (Tu¨bingen: Mohr-Siebeck, ), , , –. TM:  / GW I: .

Hermeneutics and Historicity



he struggled so hard to accomplish – namely, to reconcile the conflict between ‘historical consciousness’ and the scientific claim to truth.” As a result, Dilthey’s work foundered on the philosophical problem of relativism that it sought to evade and overcome. In remaining ever too preoccupied by “the charge of ‘relativism’” that might undermine the scientific ambitions of his “Critique of Historical Reason,” Dilthey wound up forgetting the very “immanence of knowledge in life.” Ultimately, Gadamer finds that Dilthey’s “epistemological reflections on the basis of the human sciences are not really compatible with his starting from lifephilosophy.” It is this inner contradiction at the heart of Dilthey’s work that makes his whole hermeneutical vision questionable in Gadamer’s eyes. Not only did his unrepentant Cartesianism prevent Dilthey from grasping the ontological significance of historicity, but it also led him to define Verstehen as a “method of historical science” rather than as “a fundamental determination of human being.” This kind of methodological objectivism led Dilthey to understand history philologically so that he wound up “conceiving the historical world as a text to be deciphered . . . and not as historical experience.” What follows from this whole philological approach to history as text is that Dilthey remains tied to two of Schleiermacher’s interpretive ideals: Besserverstehen (understanding an author better than she understands herself ) and Rekonstruktion (a reconstruction rooted in reexperiencing the life-nexus of an author, Nacherleben). In this philologically driven attempt at reconstructing and understanding a past lived experience, the past becomes an “object” for theoretical contemplation and not a practical, engaged event of meaning in the present, and for the future. Against this model of Schleiermacher’s romantic hermeneutics, Gadamer understands the hermeneutic ethos as one defined by “the interpreter’s belonging to the tradition he is interpreting . . . [where] understanding itself is a historical event.” What matters about the historicity of understanding, Gadamer claims, is less the correctness of our historical interpretation of the past than the way we are appropriated and transformed by our experience of interpreting it. Against the crypto-psychologism of Besserverstehen, Gadamer seeks to make hermeneutics focused on the event of understanding and not on the subject who we attempt to understand: “that is why understanding is not merely a reproductive, but always a    

 Gadamer Reader, ,  / GW II: , . Gadamer, TM:  / GW I: . Gadamer, “Das Problem der Geschichte in der neueren deutschen Philosophie,” GW II: . Gadamer, TM: – / GW I: . Gadamer, TM: , – / GW I: , –.



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productive activity as well. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better . . . It is fair to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all.” This expressed challenge to Dilthey’s notion of understanding lay at the very heart of Gadamer’s project in Truth and Method. In fact, Gadamer explains that philosophy’s “contemporary task might just be to free ourselves from the dominant influence of Dilthey’s manner of questioning.” Understanding changes us; that means that our historicity shapes our own sense of being human and is not primarily a condition of our knowledge about past epochs, texts, or happenings. “Understanding must be conceived as a part of the event in which meaning occurs” inasmuch as “the essential nature of the historical spirit consists not in the restoration of the past, but in thoughtful mediation with contemporary life.” This Gadamerian emphasis on the persistent, ongoing process involved in the interpreter’s reshaping the meaning of a text, a work of art, or an historical event, offers a serious challenge to Dilthey’s notion of historical interpretation. Gadamer’s main criticism here is that Dilthey sees the past as a fixed, unchanging form whose original meaning needs to be restored, reconstituted, and reexperienced. But, Gadamer responds by offering a notion of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (“the consciousness of being affected by history”) that understands “the authentic experience of history” as consisting of a genuine encounter with the past that changes us in ways we cannot anticipate. Here, we cannot speak of objectivity or neutrality; rather, interpretation opens us to our own factical life situation bounded by a historicity that can never overthrow its limits and prejudices to attain a universal knowledge of the past. In this sense, the role of historical interpretation is aimed less at a Rankean reconstruction of “what actually happened,” than at opening up our own historically effected prejudices to the alterity of a past whose presuppositions and meaning continually elude us. In this encounter with the past, “understanding” is conceived of less as a method or technique than as an experience of truth where “our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by letting this prejudice be given full play, are we able to experience the other’s claim to truth and enable him to have full play himself.” By conceiving of understanding as “an event of truth” that has little to do with epistemological certitude or universal validity, Gadamer rethinks Dilthey’s whole reliance on theory as the proper model for historical inquiry. Going back to the originary Greek notion of theoria as “true participation,” Gadamer  

 Gadamer, TM: – / GW I: –. Gadamer, GW II: . Gadamer, TM: , , – / GW I: , , –.

Hermeneutics and Historicity



understands it not as something merely contemplative, but as “being seized, captured, and carried away by the spectacle of what appears.” Here, Gadamer adds that it is helpful to remember that the original Greek sense of the theoros signified a delegate sent to participate in a religious festival, someone who was present for the event taking place. And yet, the theoros was no mere observer of something happening before his eyes, but rather a participant who became part of the event itself, who literally “took part” (teilgenommen) in it. In this notion of the theoros Gadamer finds a strong contrast to Dilthey’s notion of theoretical contemplation as involving distantiation and the neutral gaze of the spectator. Here, Dilthey’s interpreter appeared as something like Henrik Ibsen’s detached spectator hidden anonymously behind the fourth wall of a theater, rather than as an engaged participant whose very activity became part of a Brechtian performance. It is this criticism of Dilthey that lies behind Gadamer’s privileging of Hegelian integration over what he sees as Dilthey’s adherence to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics of reconstruction. But, does Gadamer’s critique effectively portray the limitations and/or failure of what Dilthey attempts to present in his Critique of Historical Reason?

 Dilthey and the Problem of Historical Relativism Dilthey was hardly unmindful of the charge of historical relativism made by his critics, and in some sense it helps to explain precisely why he was so determined to maintain a stance of theoretical caution that embraced objectivity as its goal. In a late sketch he writes: “I can only live in the complete objectivity of thinking. In many difficult hours I have envied the power of personality in Rousseau or Carlyle. In me the thirst for objective truth was always the strongest urge” (GS : ). Dilthey’s deeply historical sensibility made him skeptical about any historicist philosophy of history that understood it teleogically as a unified process along Hegelian lines. On the contrary, Dilthey was always skeptical about any philosophy of history that organized the manifold diversity of cultural forms into a single narrative or subsumed them under a transcendental ideal. All attempts to conceive history in this fashion simply betrayed the essential historicity of human experience and wound up perpetuating the same metaphysics of history that guided both German Idealism and the Historical School. Dilthey’s fundamental hermeneutical insights into human 

Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Aktualität des Schönen” in: GW VIII: .



 

historicity, however, proved difficult to reconcile with his philosophical ambition to provide a secure and unshakeable foundation for the human sciences. This problem, which preoccupied Dilthey throughout the various shifts and altered emphases of his Critique of Historical Reason, came to define the ambiguities and contradictions within his work. Even as Dilthey recognized that “everything historical is relative – (. . . which appears to lead to dissolution, skepticism, and exhausted subjectivity),” he also emphasized that “what is relative must be brought into a more profound connection with what is universally valid” (GS : ). As Dilthey argued: “Every worldview is historically conditioned and thus limited and relative. A terrible anarchy of thought appears to emerge from it. And yet the very historical consciousness that has brought forth this absolute doubt, is also capable of determining limits for it” (GS : ). If Dilthey’s insights into historical relativism do open the path to “the anarchy of thought,” then we must also acknowledge that they give rise to a powerful sense of freedom for modern humanity, since they liberate us from any kind of metaphysical dogmatism in and through their affirmation of the limits and boundaries of human reason. It is this sense of finitude and tragic limitation that underlies Dilthey’s attempts to navigate the tensions between the temporality-historicity of human life and the urge to find something enduring and eternal that exceeds the measure of our comprehension. Near the end of his life, Dilthey attempted to offer a way to reconcile the contradictions and ambiguities in his Critique of Historical Reason by putting forward a theory of worldviews. Although Dilthey identified three different types of worldview that shaped Western thought – naturalism, subjective idealism, objective idealism – he did not offer a way to judge the universal validity of their historically conditioned claims. What remained for him was an “eternal contradiction” between the creative spirit (that seeks to lift its creations out of the temporal flux so that it might prove enduring) and historical consciousness (that understands everything as relative and temporally conditioned) (GS V: ). As he surveyed the great “struggle of worldviews [der Kampf der Weltanschauungen] with one another” over the course of human history, Dilthey realized that there had been none that had provided any universal validity (GS : ). “It is useless to want to search for laws in the universal process of history,” Dilthey recognized; “but what should be just as clear, however, is that every purposive nexus bears within itself moments of lawlike order” (GS : ). This affirmation of the law-like order within history – and within the diversity of historical worldviews – offers help to those who wish to understand Dilthey’s complex relationship to the

Hermeneutics and Historicity



problem of historical relativity. For, despite his attestations to the “anarchy of thought” and to the multiplicity and irreconcilability of historical worldviews, Dilthey did not embrace a philosophy whose final world was historical relativism. In his letters to Husserl, Dilthey refers several times to the meaning of his life’s work as “formulating a universally valid science . . . [and] a universally valid theory of knowledge,” one within which “the objectivity of historical knowledge so clearly stands out” (Dilthey , , –, ). And, he makes it very clear to Husserl that he is “neither a philosopher of intuition, nor a historicist, nor a skeptic,” but a philosopher who remains committed to a “human-scientific analysis” of historical consciousness. And yet, again, Dilthey would also affirm that “historical comparison reveals the relativity of all historical convictions” (GS : ) (Dilthey , ). The insight into historical relativity, when viewed against the corresponding demand for universal validity, brought forward a “dissonance between the sovereignty of scientific thought and the perplexity of spirit conceiving itself and its meaning within the universe.” For Dilthey, this crisis of historical relativism yielded a “consciousness of anarchy” in all one’s most profoundly held beliefs and with this “an uncertainty about the values and aims of life.” In this existential dissonance, Dilthey found “something tragic in humanity’s striving for knowledge, a contradiction between volition and capacity.” At once aware of “the tragedy of finitude,” Dilthey sought at the same time to overleap it by achieving a kind of knowledge that, though rooted in the facticity of life, could secure a kind of truth that would not be undermined by its cultural-historical limitations (GS :  / SW III: ). Given this vision of Dilthey as a philosopher of ambivalence, uncertainty, anarchy, finitude, dissonance, and contradiction, we need to ask whether the critique levied by Heidegger and Gadamer is fair to Dilthey?

 Dilthey’s Aporiae Within the last decade or so scholars such as Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Jos de Mul, and Eric S. Nelson have attempted to place Dilthey’s work in a more favorable light (Lessing ; de Mul ; Nelson , a). The effect of their collective efforts is a positive rethinking of “Dilthey’s full hermeneutical legacy [that]only partially resonates in the ontologically oriented hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer” (Nelson a, 

See also de Mul (, –).



 

). Concretely, their insightful scholarship helps to balance the scales in the recent Dilthey-reception by exploring the meaning of the latest publications from Dilthey’s Nachlass. What emerges here is a recalibration of Dilthey’s hermeneutical ventures, one that challenges Gadamer’s claim that, Dilthey’s approach, by understanding itself as a methodology, misses the ontological implications of hermeneutics. As de Mul puts it, Dilthey’s “philosophical foundation was not primarily a (neo-Kantian) methodology of the sciences . . . [but] should also be conceived as ontological” (De Mul , ). Moreover, as Nelson claims, we need to rethink Gadamer’s charge that Dilthey’s “historical objectivism” constitutes an overly theoretical approach that misses the practical dimension of human facticity. In Nelson’s view, Dilthey’s deeply hermeneutic approach to “knowing [as] an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by reflexive awareness . . . is never merely epistemic but fundamentally practical” (Nelson , –). Here, Dilthey set out to rethink facticity in terms of the practical sense of epistemological and scientific concerns that were directed toward a “bodily awareness rooted in the relational lifenexus.” Against “Heidegger’s monolithic depreciation of the sciences,” de Mul hails Dilthey for opening up an interdisciplinary understanding of the human sciences that shapes the historicity and facticity of our approach to knowledge (De Mul , , –). Beyond this, the full effect of this new Dilthey scholarship is to challenge two other critical claims made by Gadamer: first, that Dilthey understands history as a “text” and thereby reduces it to mere “deciphering and not as historical experience” and second, that his approach to historical life is fundamentally a reconstruction based on the ideal of reexperiencing (Nacherleben). Against Gadamer’s claim that this approach is all too caught up in “historical objectivism,” de Mul counters that Dilthey was no mere antiquarian out to objectively reproduce the past on its own terms, but sought, rather, a “broadening of the horizon” of historical life beyond reconstruction to include both construction and deconstruction. In the wake of these revisions of Gadamer’s sometimes tendentious criticisms, I think we need to reengage Dilthey in terms of his own hermeneutical contributions. First and foremost, we need to recognize the practical, corporeal, and factical dimensions of Dilthey’s work that do not focus solely on our cognitive relation to history, but continually stress  

Gadamer, TM:  / GW I: ; on temporal distance: TM:  / GW I: ; on historical objectivism: TM:  / GW I: . Gadamer, TM:  / GW I: ; PHC:  / PHB: .

Hermeneutics and Historicity



the vital, experiential, and phenomenological dimensions of our historical situation. Dilthey’s repeated emphasis on the dynamic, interactive, and relational meaning of human historicity pointed toward a new approach to a hermeneutics of historical life – one that did not focus primarily on method, but on the question of human existence. As Dilthey continually emphasized, “the principles of historical science cannot be formulated in abstract propositions . . . they must be based on relationships grounded in lived experience” (GS :  / SW III: ). Here, I read Dilthey’s essential concern as an ontology of historical life grounded in Erlebnis and not epistemology. Furthermore, I believe that his work opens up in a powerful way the radically hermeneutic character of historical existence as an intersubjective web of shared lived expressions. In doing so he is able to show the co-givenness of self and world as a historically understood nexus of relations marked not only by our own historicity, but also by the historicity of the worlds we share with others through understanding and interpretation. Consequently, we need to grasp Dilthey’s approach to history not primarily as “aesthetic contemplation” (as Gadamer contends), but as lived participation in the making of historical meaning. This involves not merely reconstructing or reexperiencing (Nacherleben) the past, but in integrating it into the new historical situation within which we find ourselves as we rethink the horizon of our future. In Part I of Truth and Method, Gadamer offers an interpretation of the work of art as play and situates it in terms of the idea of “festival.” As Gadamer understands it, the festal time of celebration “appears as historical temporality.” On this reading, the festival embodies art’s ontological meaning as temporal enactment that “is temporal in a more radical sense than everything that belongs to history. It has its being only in becoming [Werden] and return [Wiederkehr].” Yet, I would argue that there are strains within Dilthey’s work that might also be read in terms of Gadamer’s understanding of art and festal time. Here, we might consider Dilthey’s notion of human historicity as opening up a dimension of time that enables us to experience history itself as a festival – as a way of instantiating community through engaged (hermeneutic) participation. That Dilthey himself did not pursue this path of thinking may be read as part of his own inability to throw off the mantle of epistemological questioning that covered over a more profound understanding of the meaning of historicity. And, while I do think that the new Dilthey scholarship has helped to challenge some of the traditional criticisms levied 

Gadamer, TM: – / GW I: –; GW VIII: –.



 

by Heidegger and Gadamer, nonetheless I do share their sense that Dilthey’s whole Fragestellung remains entangled within an essential aporia. In the end, despite his commitment to an ontology of historical life, Dilthey’s continued efforts to approach this life in terms of an ideal of scientificity proved incompatible with his hermeneutic impulses. This aporia between scientism and historicism in Dilthey’s manner of questioning ultimately prevented him from eluding the threat of relativism that he so determinedly worked to avoid. In raising the question of historical being in terms that were still tied to a philosophical program of proof, surety, security, validity, and certitude, Dilthey ultimately proved himself unable to “pose the question of historicity itself, the question of the meaning of [historical] being” (Heidegger /, ). And, while there are still crucial elements in Dilthey’s work that remain vital to any new attempts at rethinking the question of historicity, we still need to approach them against the detritus of scientistic metaphysics that helped shape Dilthey’s project of a Critique of Historical Reason.

 

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism Frederick C. Beiser

 The Challenge of Anti-Historicism In a speech he gave on his seventieth birthday, the aging Wilhelm Dilthey took the occasion to look back on his career and to summarize his life’s work (GS : –). He explained that it was his great fortune to have lived and studied in Berlin when and where the new science of history was born. He had been the student of some of the founders of this new science – Ranke, Mommsen, Boeckh and Trendelenburg – who had been the inspiration for much of his own work. It was his special mission to bring the new historical spirit into philosophy itself. To that end, he not only wrote history of philosophy but he also undertook his project for a critique of historical reason. The aim of this project was to historicize philosophy itself; it would not only criticize history according to reason, but it would historicize reason itself, showing how philosophy too is the product of history. But, when he gave his speech in , Dilthey knew that the attitude toward history was changing. A reaction was underway against “the historical consciousness” that had been the heart and soul of his age. There were powerful voices who protested against it, who called into question not only the value of historicization but even the status of history as a science. One of these voices was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, in the second volume of his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (second expanded edition, Schopenhauer ), had attacked the scientific status of history. Another such voice was the young Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the second of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (), had criticized the whole historical age because it shifted attention to the past when the great problem was how to live in the present. Shaped by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the new spirit of the age seemed directed against history. There was a demand for relevance to life, for thought and action in the here and now; history, however, 



 . 

seemed a grand irrelevance, sheer nostalgia about the past, which is dead and gone. While everything can be done about the present, nothing can be done about the past. And, we only live once. All this raises the question: What was Dilthey’s attitude toward this new anti-historicism? Surely, one would think, Dilthey must have formulated a position on it, given that it had called into question his main achievement and his lifetime devotion to history. Yet, despite the challenge it posed for him, Dilthey never wrote a sustained and systematic response to anti-historicism. He made many criticisms of it, to be sure, but they are occasional and fragmentary. So, to understand Dilthey’s reaction to anti-historicism, one must reconstruct it from many scattered writings. The chief aim of the present chapter is to reconstruct Dilthey’s reaction to anti-historicism from these fragmentary writings. This is a worthwhile task because getting clear about that reaction should reveal Dilthey’s rationale for his own historicism, i.e., why he believed it to be necessary and valuable. It is fair to say that Dilthey only knew the full rationale for his historicism after his confrontation with the anti-historicism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Another aim of this chapter will be to assess the merits of the critique of historicism and Dilthey’s defense of it. We shall see that this critique is not as compelling or cogent as it has often been thought to be, and that, in the case of its most famous spokesman, it rests upon a reactionary political agenda. We shall also see, however, that Dilthey’s countercritique does not hit its target because it fails to take into the agenda of his main critic. Nevertheless, that countercritique, we shall see, reveals some of the more important presuppositions of Dilthey’s historicism. In reconstructing Dilthey’s views about anti-historicism I will focus especially upon Nietzsche’s anti-historicism and Dilthey’s reaction to it. There are two reasons for such an approach: first, Dilthey regarded Nietzsche as the chief spokesman for anti-historicism; and, second, Nietzsche developed the most extensive and extreme critique of historicism. 



See especially (but not exclusively) the following fragments: “Die Kultur der Gegenwart und die Philosophie” (GS : –); “Traum” (GS : –); “Begriff der Philosophie: Nietzsche” (GS : –); “Die drei Grundformen der Systeme in der ersten Hälfte des . Jahrhunderts” (GS : –); “Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften” (GS : , ). Also important are Dilthey’s three early articles on Schopenhauer: “Arthur Schopenhauer” (GS : –); “Zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers” (GS : –); and “Schopenhauers Lehre und Leben” (GS : –). See Dilthey to Paul Yorck, May  (, ).

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



It was indeed his critique that was the guiding spirit behind Gadamer’s later criticism of Dilthey, which has been so influential in shaping the later reception of Dilthey’s thought. Understanding Nietzsche’s critique of historicism means first and foremost that we take a close look at the arguments of his famous essay “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie fu¨r das Leben,” which was the second of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. To that task we now turn.

 Nietzsche’s Critique of Historicism Nietzsche’s main objection against historicism is that it reverses the proper order of values we should have in life. We should give priority to life, to our needs and interests in the present; and we should make knowledge of the past serve these needs and interests. But, historicism reverses this order of priorities: it makes knowledge of the past into an end in itself; and it sees in the cultivation of such knowledge the highest vocation of a human being. For Nietzsche, the chief question is this: “Should life rule knowledge . . . or should knowledge rule life?” (Nietzsche , –). And, the answer should be obvious: “life is the higher, governing power, for a knowing that destroys life would have destroyed itself.” Nietzsche’s attack on historicism in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen was not simply a critique of an intellectual movement; it was a critique of a whole culture, an entire system of education and way of life. The critique of historicism was part and parcel of Nietzsche’s general campaign against “Socratic culture,” which he had begun a few years earlier in his Die Geburt der Tragӧdie. Socratic culture was for Nietzsche the very antithesis of the “tragic culture” of the ancient Greeks, which he wanted to revive for the modern world. Socratic culture gives primacy to knowledge over life, making reason dominate the will, so that it determines the ends of human action. It is profoundly optimistic in the very great powers it 

 

On Gadamer’s critique of Dilthey, see the four articles reproduced in volume IV of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke (–): “Das Problem Diltheys. Zwischen Romantik und Positivismus” (: –); “Wilhelm Dilthey zu seinem . Geburtstag” (: –); “Der Unvollendete und das Unvollendbare. Zum . Geburtstag von Wilhelm Dilthey” (: –); and “Wilhelm Dilthey und Ortega, Philosophie des Lebens” (: –). See also Gadamer’s discussions of Dilthey in Gadamer (a, –, –). We will follow here the text in Nietzsche (, : –). All references in parentheses will be to this edition unless stated otherwise. On Nietzsche’s account of Socratic culture, see Die Geburt der Tragӧdie, §§– / Nietzsche (, –).



 . 

attributes to human reason: it assumes that reason knows the good; that if we know the good, we will act on the good; and that if we act on the good we will become happy. Hence, the cultivation of reason, the growth of wisdom and science, is the leading element of the good life. Tragic culture, however, gives primacy to life over knowledge, allowing the will to dominate reason, so that reason is only its instrument, determining nothing more than the means for its ends. It is profoundly pessimistic in the very limited powers it attributes to human reason. It assumes that there is indeed a conflict between reason and life, insofar as reason, if pushed to its limits, leads to a complete skepticism. The more we ask for reasons, the less it seems we know, so that in the end we are like Socrates: the wisest man in Athens because he admits that he knows nothing. This skepticism is completely debilitating because it undermines all motivation for action. Hamlet therefore became for Nietzsche the symbol of tragic culture: the man who thought so much about what to do that he did nothing (Die Geburt der Tragӧdie, section  / Nietzsche , –). Although Nietzsche never mentions Socratic culture in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, it provides the necessary backdrop for his critique of historicism. Historicism was for Nietzsche the modern manifestation of Socratic culture. Historicism assumes, like all Socratic culture, that knowledge is an end in itself, and it proceeds as if that knowledge were a virtue and an integral part of the good life (and not only a means to it). Just as Nietzsche was troubled by the skepticism of Socratic culture, so he fears that historicism too leads to skepticism. Historical criticism, he warns us often in the Betrachtungen, undermines the illusions necessary for action and happiness. The contrast between knowing serving life or life serving knowing, so crucial to the argument of the Betrachtungen, is indeed an instance of the general antithesis between the rationalism of Socratic culture and the voluntarism of tragic culture. The critique of historicism in the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen was by no means a rejection of history in general or as such. Nietzsche fully recognized that history could be useful for life, and he stressed that he objected against only the excess of history, which happens when knowledge of the past is made an end in itself (Nietzsche , ). He recognized three forms of history useful for life: monumental history, which finds heroes to serve as models for action; antiquarian history, which is the study of our origins, and which gives us pride in our roots and culture; and critical history, which dissolves the power of the past over us (Nietzsche , –). It is striking, however, that Nietzsche never makes

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



historical accuracy a desideratum for any of these forms. It does not matter if the monumental historian overlooks the vices and follies of his heroes; it does not matter if the antiquarian historian ignores shameful episodes in his country’s past; and it does not matter if the critical historian has only negative things to say about the past if it liberates us from it. Each kind of history should serve only our present needs. Hence, Nietzsche lays down as the general rule for historical study: “Only from the highest power of the present may one interpret the past” (Nietzsche , –). In other words, we should select from and interpret the past strictly according to our contemporary interests and needs. This was an explicit and emphatic rejection of the historicist’s chief goal and ideal: understanding the past from within, according to its beliefs, values and needs. Nietzsche prescribes understanding the past according to our beliefs, values and needs; if that means distorting the past to serve our ends, so be it. What, more exactly, is wrong with interpreting the past in its own terms? Other than not serving our present interests and needs, Nietzsche has another objection against this historicist ideal. If we make understanding the past for its own sake the ideal of history, and if we make history into the central part of our system of education, then we are forfeiting our autonomy. We see from this kind of history how others have thought and acted in the past; but we learn nothing about how we should think and act in the present (Nietzsche , –). Hence, we are alienating ourselves, forfeiting our power to govern our lives according to our own ideals. Given that historicism undermines life and encourages heteronomy, what should be done against it? In the final section of the Betrachtung (§) Nietzsche outlines “the antidotes” against historicism. These are “the unhistorical” and “the suprahistorical” (Nietzsche , ). The unhistorical consists in the art of learning how to forget and to live in an enclosed horizon; the suprahistorical consists in cultivating art and religion, which turn our attention away from history and toward what gives existence “the character of the eternal and the permanent” (Nietzsche , ). Orienting our lives around the suprahistorical requires going back to the Delphic oracle and knowing ourselves; it means reflecting on our “genuine needs” and acting on them (Nietzsche , ).

 Dilthey’s Anti-Critique For all his profound differences with Nietzsche, Dilthey made some remarkable concessions to him. It was the great strength of



 . 

Lebensphilosophie, he wrote in a late fragment, using his generic term for Nietzsche’s kind of philosophizing, that it directly raised and attempted to answer the fundamental questions about the value of life and the meaning of existence (Nietzsche , ). All the scientific knowledge of the modern age, Dilthey admitted, had brought it no closer to answering these questions (Nietzsche , ). There is a gulf between facts and norms, “is” and “ought,” he noted, so that all the knowledge of the facts given to us by science will still not allow us to determine how we should live. Nietzsche’s argument against historicism assumed that there is such a dualism, which seemed to make all the knowledge of history irrelevant for life. Dilthey’s greatest concession to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche was his later conception of philosophy itself, which had been greatly influenced by them. The goal of philosophy, he maintained with these Lebensphilosophen, should be reflection on the value and meaning of life. It is significant that Dilthey did not champion the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy as epistemology, as the science of the logic of the sciences. His concept of the goal of philosophy, as he formulates it in his Das Wesen der Philosophie, accepts Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy should attempt to solve “the puzzle of life and the world” (GS : , ). To this extent, then, Dilthey would agree with Nietzsche that philosophy should serve life. Philosophy, he held, should provide us with a “worldview,” which is a general attitude toward the world and a stance on the highest values of life. A worldview or Weltanschauung is not science or Wissenschaft, because it attempts to guide our life and action, to enter the realm of norms, whereas science or Wissenschaft remains confined to the realm of facts. Although Dilthey agreed with Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophen that philosophy should have a moral vocation, he disagreed with them deeply about how to realize that ideal. They wanted to lay down unconditional or absolute values, he said (GS : ), but they had no means of achieving that goal. Their starting point was their personal experience; and their methods consisted in introspection and reflection on that experience; and then, from such a slender and flimsy basis, they drew grand conclusions about how all human beings, in all times and places, should live. But, in  

See “Die Kultur der Gegenwart und die Philosophie” (GS : –). The manuscript is dated circa . To understand Dilthey’s account of the methods of the Lebensphilosophie, it is important to keep in mind his early essay and reviews of Schopenhauer. He criticizes Schopenhauer for making grand generalizations from his personal experience without checking whether his own experience is typical. See “Zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers” (GS : –) and “Arthur Schopenhauer” (GS : ).

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



arriving at such conclusions they failed to see how much their own personal experience is really conditioned and limited by the present. The Lebensphilosophen had therefore failed to learn the first lesson of historicism: that what appears to be eternal and permanent from our own contemporary perspective is really the product of a particular time and place. They thought that their little corner of the world was the entire world. Hence, Dilthey declared with some self-vindication: “History is their refutation.” In claiming that history is their refutation, Dilthey did not mean to charge Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophen with naivité. He realized that they were attempting to respond to the results of historical criticism, which had posed the fundamental predicament of all modern culture: a complete anarchy, a total skepticism about all worldviews. Lebensphilosophie, Dilthey explained, grew out of the “despair of the spirit” (Ratlosigkeit des Geistes) that came from the realization of “the relativity of each metaphysical or religious doctrine.” Its source lay in the “emptiness of consciousness” (Leere des Bewusstseins) that saw the results of historical criticism: “all criteria are nullified, everything stable has become shaken.” Dilthey’s point is not that the Lebensphilosophen are unaware of this predicament but that they have no plausible solution to it. Rather than having some reliable method to justify their values, they could do nothing more than rely on their personal experience, their intuitions and feelings. What, then, was the solution to this predicament? Dilthey’s antidote to the failures of Lebensphilosophie is precisely what Nietzsche saw as the source of all the trouble: namely, more history. If history inflicts the wound, Dilthey taught, it should also cure it. Just how Dilthey conceived history in this role becomes clear from an early article, “Ueber das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und den Staat” (Dilthey , – / GS : –), which was published in , shortly after the publication of the second of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. In this article, Dilthey explains why moral philosophy should become more historical. Moral philosophy, he writes, has to deal with the skepticism arising from the great variation of morals in history (GS : ). Unless moral philosophy does a comparative study from history, showing how there are universal and permanent values within and despite all the changes of history, this skepticism will seem fully justified. The strategy Dilthey indicates here he would later attempt to follow in his theory of worldviews: attempting to find the invariant forms of worldviews through their comparative study in history. Dilthey disapproved of Nietzsche’s anti-historicism for more reasons than its inadequate methodology. Another fundamental objection was its



 . 

false conception of human nature. In an article about philosophical systems in the first half of the nineteenth century, Dilthey singled out Nietzsche as the prime example of the latest trend to dispense with “the baggage of history” (Dilthey , – / GS : –). He disapproved of this tendency because it assumed, falsely, that human nature is ahistorical. Nietzsche shared Rousseau’s belief that there is a natural self independent of society and history. He assumed that to know ourselves, we have to peel off the artificial layers acquired through history; and that if we only dig far enough, we will eventually find our inmost core and truer self. But, Dilthey questions whether there really is such an inner soul or true self. What makes us who we are is our particular place in time and history; each of us is the product of what our culture and epoch has made of us. There are no “genuine needs” that exist behind and before the needs we acquire through society and culture. One person’s interests and needs will differ from another’s according to their place in society and history. So, to know ourselves, Dilthey contends, we should not abstract from history; rather, we should go back to history, tracing the process by which we came into being. As Dilthey sums up his argument: “What man is only history tells us. The scientific mind leaves behind its means of living and working when it attempts to dispense with its historical baggage; this surrender of historical investigation is the renunciation of the knowledge of man; it is a retreat into genial and fragmentary subjectivity” (GS : ). For similar reasons, Dilthey could not accept Nietzsche’s assumption that the study of the past in its own terms involves a forfeiture of our autonomy. In making this assumption Nietzsche again betrayed his atomistic conception of human nature and freedom; it was as if true freedom came from acting in accord with our “genuine needs,” in listening to our true inner self, which somehow existed independent of society and history. In another late fragment, “Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften” (GS : ), Dilthey seems to have precisely Nietzsche’s criticism in mind when he argues that understanding the past in its own terms does not weaken but strengthens our autonomy. If we attempt to understand something from the past in all its differences from ourselves, Dilthey argues, we only enrich and broaden ourselves. We are indeed “liberated” (in Freiheit gesetzt), he assures us, because we get beyond the limits of our own time and place by seeing what it would be like to live in another time and place. This is not alienating ourselves but extending ourselves, becoming something more than a creature of our own time and place. Behind Dilthey’s argument here there lay a Hegelian conception of freedom: that the self becomes free not by

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



abstracting from the other but by incorporating it into itself. What Nietzsche was advocating instead was, in Hegelian terms, “negative freedom,” i.e., false abstraction from the other. The net effect of Dilthey’s argument against Nietzsche’s conception of human nature and freedom is that there is no suprahistorical standpoint to serve as an antidote to historicism. The belief that there is such a standpoint is an illusion, Dilthey believes, because who we are is determined by our place in society and history. Nietzsche’s suprahistorical standpoint, in Dilthey’s view, was a question-begging relapse into the old atomistic, ahistorical conceptions of human nature and society. It was a throwback to the old natural law tradition of Hobbes and Rousseau, according to which we have essential human needs independent of society and history. But, that conception of human nature had been completely discredited by the new historical sciences, Dilthey believed. Nietzsche’s animus against history was for Dilthey an essentially reactionary attitude, a relapse into older prescientific ways of thinking.

 The Politics of Anti-Historicism These were all powerful criticisms of Nietzsche’s anti-historicism. They are powerful in the sense that, if they are accurate, they reveal and demolish the basic assumptions behind Nietzsche’s campaign against history. But, are these criticisms really accurate? Did Nietzsche really have the ahistorical conception of human nature that Dilthey attributed to him? There are strong reasons for thinking that Nietzsche held no such assumption, and that he accepted one of the basic conclusions of historicist criticism: that who we are is the product of our history. For all his diatribes against historicism, Nietzsche is much more of a historicist than he appears. In one revealing passage from his second Betrachtung Nietzsche tells us explicitly and emphatically that he regards the doctrines about “the fluidity of all concepts, types and species” as “doctrines that I hold to be true but dangerous” (Nietzsche , ). These doctrines are indeed dangerous for him because they are true. The great danger behind them is that they destroy “the illusions” that are necessary for life and action. Remarkably, Nietzsche admits that the ahistorical belief in eternal and universal values is false, and that we can expose its falsity through historical criticism. But, the problem is that we need this belief if we are to motivate ourselves to live and act in the world. Everything that lives, Nietzsche explains, requires belief in and commitment to fundamental values; and that belief consists in faith in their unconditional value and worth (Nietzsche , ). We



 . 

must live in a “pious atmosphere of illusion” that we construct out of love, love in the world we create for ourselves and the belief that it is the perfect and the right way to live (Nietzsche , ). In stressing the importance of illusion in life, Nietzsche reinvoked another old theme from his Die Geburt der Tragӧdie and his campaign on behalf of tragic culture. It was a central characteristic of Apollonian art, Nietzsche explained in that work, that it conceals the horror of existence; it creates an illusion of beauty, of serenity, harmony and order, as if existence itself shares these very traits. Although we are the creators of beauty, we still objectify it, seeing it as an objective property of things, and so we live in a pleasant illusory world of our own making. Life was justifiable only as “an aesthetic phenomenon,” Nietzsche believed, because only beauty could reconcile us to life, which is otherwise futile, meaningless and filled with sorrow and suffering. Socratic culture, of course, is to be condemned because it would deprive us of these comforting illusions. It tolerates only what is true, and so it shows us that there is no real beauty in the world. But Socratic culture has illusions all its own: that reason ultimately gives us knowledge of the truth, and that knowledge will make us good and happy. Against this illusion, there stood the hard fact of Socratic skepticism: that all we can really know is that we know nothing. Nietzsche thinks that modern historical criticism has the same dissolving power as Socrates’ examined life. It will destroy all our illusions, just as Socrates found that nobody in Athens really knew what they were talking about. As a warning against the power of historical criticism, Nietzsche refers to what has happened to Christianity earlier in the century (Nietzsche , ). The historical criticism of Strauss, Bauer and the Tϋbingen school, he points out, made Christianity virtually unbelievable for any thinking person. Now that historical criticism has dissolved Christianity, it is only a matter of time when it will turn against all morals and values. Everything will be historicized, so that all morals and values lose their authority, their apparent universality, necessity and eternity. So, Nietzsche’s advocacy of illusion allows him to escape some of the force of Dilthey’s criticism. He is no believer in eternal and universal values, as Dilthey portrays him. Neither is he an advocate of an atomistic conception of human nature, as Dilthey also regards him. On the contrary, Nietzsche, as he frankly admits, is fully ready to accept the power and results of historical criticism: that belief in such values is false; and that human nature is plastic, the product of its particular place in society and history. Such a belief, and such a conception, are entirely illusory, Nietzsche concedes. It’s just that he advocates preserving and promoting

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



these illusions, because they provide the cloud of love that nurtures and sustains life. But there is still something deeply paradoxical about Nietzsche’s advocacy of illusion. Namely, how do we believe in an illusion once we know that it is one? Is it possible for me to hold a belief, logically and psychologically, if I know that it is false? Once historical criticism has done its work and revealed these beliefs to be illusory, they have ipso facto lost their efficacy for life and action. Take Nietzsche’s own example of Christianity. Will anyone believe anymore in the saving power of Christ once they recognize how this belief arose from the messianic myths of the ancient Jews? Will anyone believe in the existence of God once they see how it came from the hypostasis of human needs and fears? The growing rise of disbelief among the educated public is very much the result of this kind of historical criticism. This raises grave doubts about Nietzsche’s antidotes of the nonhistorical and suprahistorical. They can hardly be effective, because they will be seen to have their efficacy only because they are illusory. Nietzsche’s advocacy of illusion seems much more plausible, and much less paradoxical, if we keep in mind the political program behind it. Already in the early s, Nietzsche’s political ideals were clear to him: the state should be divided into masters and slaves. Slavery was a hard and brutal institution, perhaps, but the ancient world was wise to recognize that it is a sheer necessity for the existence of culture. Now, illusion is perfectly possible, indeed necessary, for those who work, for those who labor for their subsistence, because they do not have the energy, time or talent to know about historical criticism, and they need to have the illusion that their work is the only way of life for them. For the masters, however, illusion is not possible, because they do know about historical criticism; but then again they do not need illusion. They are strong souls, who have the power to sustain truth. It is only when we see the political agenda behind Nietzsche’s advocacy of illusion that we can explain some of the apparent inconsistencies of his argument in the second Betrachtung. Nietzsche tells us that the stronger someone’s inner nature, the more history they can assimilate (Nietzsche , , ). On its own, this statement is remarkable because it seems to undermine Nietzsche’s entire argument. For, if we are committed to developing everyone to their ultimate strength, there should be no problem with historical culture at all. Everyone will be able to stomach the results 

See especially the early  essay “Der griechische Staat” (Nietzsche , –).



 . 

of historical criticism. Once we see, however, that Nietzsche is not committed to developing the strength of everyone, that he does not think that the great mass of people are capable of such spiritual power, then his advocacy of illusion makes perfect sense. Although Nietzsche’s political agenda is largely implicit in the second Betrachtung, now and then it emerges clearly enough. We are told in explicit terms that the goal of humanity lies in its “highest exemplars” (Nietzsche , ), and that the masses are of value only insofar as they are of service to these exemplars (Nietzsche , ). Nietzsche admires Plato for teaching the lie that his three classes were made of various metals in the underworld (Nietzsche , ). This lie not only discourages the classes from mixing with one another, but it also prevents the lower classes from rebelling against their masters. Nietzsche wants a similar lie for his ideal state: it will keep the workers in their place and content with their condition; their masters will be able to devote themselves in peace to the cultivation of their genius. So, in the end, Nietzsche’s admission of the power of historical criticism, and his advocacy of illusion, avoid the force of Dilthey’s critique of his philosophy. Although Dilthey was perhaps perfectly correct in rejecting an atomistic concept of human nature, this was not really a doctrine that Nietzsche held. Dilthey was charging against open doors, attacking an opponent who did not exist. Yet, Nietzsche’s advocacy of illusion only works within the context of his political ideals and agenda. They hold only for an aristocratic political ideal that would divide society into masters and slaves, rulers and subjects. But, then, the question remains: Who today accepts Nietzsche’s political agenda? It is a doctrine flatly contrary to modern democratic and egalitarian ideals. Still less does it work for a modern enlightened age, where the general public is educated, and where the results of rational enquiry are made public. Nietzsche’s ideal is utterly reactionary, because it opposes not only democracy and equality but also the enlightenment of the common man. Though no political radical himself, Dilthey saw that the fundamental problem of modern culture arose because the average educated man knew the results of historical criticism: the anarchy of worldviews, the loss of faith in seeing the historical limitations of all morals, religion and philosophy. In admitting this problem and in asking the next generations to face it, Dilthey is much closer to our moral convictions than Nietzsche. We are all today not Nietzsche’s but Dilthey’s heirs. 

On Dilthey’s political views, see Ermarth (, –).

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism





The Possibility of Historical Objectivity

Another crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s attack on historicism is his critique of the concept of historical objectivity. Section  of the second Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen is devoted entirely to this critique. Though brilliant in style and argument, Nietzsche’s critique was by no means innovative. Johann Droysen, in his  lectures on historics, had already criticized the concept of historical objectivity (Droysen , –). Indeed, the tradition of skepticism about this concept goes back to Johann Chladenius in the mid-eighteenth century (Chladenius , –). The classical statement of the concept of historical objectivity appears in the preface to Leopold von Ranke’s  Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Vӧlker, where Ranke famously declares that the task of the historian is “to show how things actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) (Ranke , : vii). To know what really happened, Ranke advised the historian to distinguish sharply between fantasy and fact, hypothesis and reality; he must always go back to the original sources, weigh the evidence for any hypothesis and determine the degree of probability. It was Ranke who had been the foil of Droysen’s critique of objectivity. Since Nietzsche quotes Ranke, it is likely that he was also the target of his attack. It was surely significant for Dilthey that Nietzsche would focus on Ranke, who had been his teacher and model of “the historical school.” Dilthey was not only a great admirer of Ranke’s efforts to achieve historical objectivity (GS : ), but he was also a firm believer in the gospel of objectivity. He famously confessed: “I can live only in complete objectivity of thought” (GS : ). So, whatever Nietzsche said against Ranke’s concept of objectivity should also apply to Dilthey. Nietzsche’s discussion of historical objectivity first focuses on its apparent connection with the concept of justice. There is an apparent similarity between the two concepts because objectivity involves the values of detachment and impartiality, which we also attribute to justice. It then seems as if the rationale for, and value of, objectivity lies in justice itself. Just as we can and should be just, so, it seems, we can and should be objective. In focusing on the apparent connection between objectivity and justice Nietzsche again would have been thinking of Ranke, who tended  

Since these lectures were published only in , it is unlikely that Nietzsche would have known about them. On Droysen’s critique of the concept of objectivity, see Beiser (, –). See Nietzsche (, ). Nietzsche does not identify the author of this quotation; but Colli and Montinari, the editors of the Kritische Studienausgabe (Nietzsche ), identify Ranke as the author. They do not identify, however, the source.



 . 

to associate objectivity with justice. Objectivity did not mean for Ranke withholding all moral judgment but cultivating a special kind of moral judgment, namely, that which attempts to be impartial and nonpartisan. Ranke’s famous statement that “all epochs are equally near to God” meant precisely that all deserve fair treatment. Nietzsche maintains that the apparent connection between justice and objectivity is really only an illusion, resting upon a confusion of the moral with the aesthetic (Nietzsche , –). When a historian examines an event and intuits all its motives and consequences without letting it have an effect upon him, he is acting like an artist or artistic spectator, who invests all his attention in his object and who contemplates it with disinterest. But, such aesthetic contemplation, Nietzsche implies, is not the same as moral judgment according to a norm of justice. Nietzsche does not fully explain, however, why the disinterest of aesthetic contemplation is different from that of moral judgment. The argument is left on an intuitive level, and seems to rely on Kant’s distinction between aesthetic and moral judgment. Whatever the confusion of moral with aesthetic judgment, Nietzsche maintains that the concept of historical objectivity is guilty of an even worse mistake: it assumes that the standpoint of the historian is a pure replication of empirical reality (Nietzsche , ). When a historian creates a narrative, when he brings together a mass of facts into a unified whole, Nietzsche argues, he is functioning more like the artist than the scientist. It would be absurd to think that this narrative, the whole, directly resembles something in reality itself. We must not confuse historical objectivity with empirical reality, as if the standpoint of the historian mirrors something in the perceptible world. In disputing that the historian’s narrative corresponds to anything directly in reality, Nietzsche follows a line of thought he first sketched in an earlier essay, his  “Ueber Wahrheit und Lϋge im aussermoralische Sinne” (Nietzsche , –), where he argued that the abstractions of language designate no particular in reality itself, and that the proper relation between representation and reality is more aesthetic than cognitive. Nietzsche’s final point against the concept of objectivity is that it has to be historicized itself (Nietzsche , ). If all beliefs, values and  

See Ranke’s statement in the introduction to his lectures on modern history, –, in Ranke (, IV: ). Ranke made this statement in his  Berechtsgaden lecture (Ranke , II: ).

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



practices are the product of their time and place, then that should be the case for the standpoint of the historian itself, which cannot stand above and beyond the flow of history. Nietzsche hypothesizes that the historicist’s striving for a universal history has its roots in the medieval beliefs in the end of history and the last judgment (Nietzsche , –). Since we still subconsciously think that the world is coming to an end and that we have to make account of ourselves, we turn backwards to the past and recount what we have done. Nietzsche admits that this is only a hypothesis or theory; but he insists that his main point is that historicism has to be historicized itself (Nietzsche , ). What would Dilthey have made of all these criticisms? That all standpoints are relative, depending on their historical origins and context, was a point basic to all his thinking. Such relativity, Dilthey realized, applied no less to the historian himself. The point of his critique of historical reason was to criticize not only the standpoint of the philosopher according to history, but also the standpoint of the historian according to reason. Such a critique meant inter alia that the historian had to realize that his own interests and concerns were the starting point of his enquiry, and that these interests and concerns were conditioned by the values of the culture from which he came. Because the historian’s interests and concerns were themselves a product of history, each generation would have to write history anew. It would see new things in history because its interests and concerns were new. But the question remains what implications this point has for historical objectivity itself. If a historian knows that his standpoint is limited by the interests and concerns of his own age this does not necessarily mean that there are no historical facts and that there is no limit to creativity in constructing narratives and theories about them. In assessing the question of historical objectivity, it is important to keep in mind the original context in which Ranke made his famous declaration. Ranke’s point is that the historian has to be careful in distinguishing fact from embellishment, hypothesis, imagination and sheer forgery. He made his declaration after a careful critical examination of Guicciardini’s Storia d’ Italia, which had been the chief source of Renaissance Italy, but which he found to be full of fabrication and at odds with well-attested facts. The sense of objectivity that Ranke was advocating is that we demand of newspaper reporters and courtroom judges: we need to know the facts and just the facts; who did it, and 

See Ranke (); republished as volume XXXIV of Ranke (), Sämtliche Werke.



 . 

how, when, where and why they did it. If this sense of objectivity is impossible, then we have to accept a radical relativism about history, one so radical that there really cannot be any historical facts at all. This would make ordinary life, where we have to determine basic facts, virtually impossible. It is a common shortcoming of critiques of historical objectivity – Nietzsche’s is no exception – that they are undertaken on such a general level that they fail to distinguish the various kinds of discourse about the historical world and their various degrees of probability. At the most basic level, it is necessary to distinguish basic facts from more general theories about these facts, hypotheses or generalizations that bring them into some coherent whole. There is an obvious difference between determining basic facts – the who, how, when and where of events – and then constructing an explanation of them by placing them in a broader narrative or by subsuming them under a generalization. One might admit that there can be objectivity in determining basic facts but then go on to insist that theorizing about them cannot be objective. This is indeed the most plausible way to put Nietzsche’s polemic. He is writing about narratives or theories about facts, which bring them into a coherent whole, rather than determining these facts themselves. But, even here, on the higher level of theorizing about facts, we should ask whether this implies there is no room for objectivity at all. To be sure, when the historian constructs his narrative he has to rely on his imagination because the hard facts do not construct a narrative themselves. But the problem remains that the historian’s imagination and intuition are limited by the facts; it is not that any narrative at all will do. Nietzsche too readily conflates the historian with the artist. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt noted long ago, the historian is not as free as the artist, because his imagination and creativity are limited by historical reality (Humboldt , IV: –, especially , ). Nietzsche descries historical objectivity as a “mythology” because the historian’s narrative is constructed by his imagination and does not directly resemble any event in empirical reality itself (Nietzsche , ). No one expects, however, the theory to copy or mirror exactly what we perceive, as if it were a picture or photograph. The question is which theory, among the few possible, is consistent with the facts and best explains them, i.e., brings them under a generalization about human action and motivation. Nietzsche’s critique derives all its plausibility from a common nominalist trope – that universals do not exist in a reality consisting of particular things – which does not begin to deal with the more complicated logic of historical theories.

Dilthey’s Defense of Historicism



Although Dilthey never explicitly replied to Nietzsche’s critique of historical objectivity, he points out a problem with his philosophical method that bears directly on this issue. He complained that both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer began with observations about personal experience and then rushed to broad generalizations for which they did not have sufficient evidence (GS : ; GS : ; GS : ). What he missed in their methods was what he called, referring to a concept of Francis Bacon, “axiomata media.” These axiomata media would be those maxims telling us to find other phenomena resembling our original observations, so that we could verify that our original observation is not an isolated case, and so that we could be sure to have a broad base of phenomena as evidence for our generalization. It was only by following these axioms, and by comparing phenomena with one another, that we could determine exactly what it is about them that is relevant for our generalization. When Schopenhauer and Nietzsche formulated their own metaphysical theories, Dilthey charges, they did so without applying the axiomata media. The implications of this point for Nietzsche’s views on historical method are clear. Dilthey would say that Nietzsche’s critique of historical methodology is faulty because it gives no place to the axiomata media, leaving nothing between personal observation and broad generalization. It was only because of this oversight that Nietzsche saw all historical theorizing as a free-for-all governed by the imagination alone. So, in the end, Nietzsche’s critique of historical objectivity does not have the powerful and dangerous implications that it appears to have at first sight, implications that would make the concept into nothing more than “mythology.” There is still room for objectivity in the sense of determining basic facts, and in constructing theories from a broad array of facts according to axiomata media. Where his critique begins to take hold is only in the upper range of theorizing, where the historian attempts to construct a more general narrative or theory from a broad array of facts. But, even here his imagination will be limited by the need to be consistent with the facts and to explain them. Of course, it is still possible for there to be several narratives or theories about the same array of facts, where there is little or no hope for verification or falsification of one narrative or theory against another. But, at this high a level, one might well ask, is history any less objective than theories in the natural sciences?  

See Dilthey, “Arthur Schopenhauer” (GS : ); “Zur Philosophie Arthur Schopenhauers” (GS : ); “Begriff der Philosophie: Nietzsche” (GS : ). Although he gives no direct citation, Dilthey is probably referring to Bacon, Novum Organum §.

 

More than One “Kind” of Science? Implications of Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies Robert C. Scharff

As is well-known, the defense of distinctively “human” sciences by philosophers like Dilthey proved intolerable to many mid-twentiethcentury philosophers of science. The very idea that natural and human science might require fundamentally different research methods for fundamentally different subject matters, each with a fundamentally different yet equally “scientific” purpose, appeared to directly challenge a primary article of orthodox philosophical faith: Scientific practices, to be scientific, must all share a single method. As with most orthodoxies, however, eventually the real world became too much for it. The era has passed when Dilthey’s ideas can be discredited with ominous warnings about his “irrationality” and the threat of “metaphysics” that looms ahead for civilization if we fail to defend the “essential” and “reconstructable” methodological unity of the sciences. A whole army of historians, social scientists, and postpositivist philosophers has shown that we have nothing to fear from taking a fresh, contextualized, more pluralistic, and less ideological look at the question of what is scientific about scientific practice. Yet in my view, the question of where to go after the demise of positivist philosophy of science is often answered too quickly, still typically leaving it framed with too much dependence on traditional epistemological, ontological, and empirical assumptions. To begin by asking whether there are multiple sciences, multiple methods, and multiple variants of “interpretation” (now that all science is presumed to be interpretive) is still basically to react to positivist dogma, retaining the same mind-set that produced the dogmas. So-called postpositivist responses to positivism, precisely in their oppositional stance, are often just positivism lite, perfectly suited to privileging the traditional understanding of what an epistemology of science does – e.g., focus on individual minds over collaborative practice, theorizing rather than experimentation, verification rather than discovery – instead of starting with a genuinely descriptive and phenomenological approach to scientific practice. Hence, to this day, most 

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textbook accounts of the Erklären–Verstehen debate silently assume a positivist outlook, review the standard epistemological arguments and counterarguments, and ultimately trace the whole debate to a long-settled Methodenstreit between positivists and mainstream empiricists on one side and the progeny of the German historical school, Dilthey, and Southwest German neo-Kantians on the other. In what follows, I therefore start with Charles Taylor’s essays on the Verstehen controversy – to give an example of the sort of price one pays for perpetuating the orthodox framework, even if one is explicitly sympathetic to Dilthey’s unorthodox aims, as Taylor clearly is. In the remaining sections, I argue that the real question Dilthey can help us raise is ultimately not an epistemic one concerning Verstehen and its scientific status; nor is it an ontological one concerning people vs. material objects. Rather, it is a question about how we should understand the very idea of expressing or articulating human experience at all, scientifically or otherwise, and how to analyze this idea. I take up Dilthey’s claim that “explaining” and “understanding” are best conceived as different expressions of our “manifold powers” for relating to our sociohistorical engagements. I argue that for a philosophy of science that takes this claim seriously, the first order of business is to determine, not what method to follow or what regional ontologies to embrace, but what it is to be an interpreter of science – the question, that is, of who we take ourselves to be as philosophers when we address such issues. Seen in this light, Dilthey appears more like a pioneering forerunner of science studies and phenomenological philosophy than the famous opponent of a positivism now everywhere disavowed.

 Taylor and “Interpretive” Science According to Taylor’s influential analysis of the Verstehen debate, Dilthey’s argument for a separate set of interpretive human sciences is now unnecessary. With the passing of mid-twentieth-century logical empiricism, he argues, virtually everyone agrees that all sciences, not just the human sciences, are hermeneutical – in the sense that they all “interpret” the way the world appears to us in our sociohistorically contextualized, prescientific lives. In an imagery that has become famous, Taylor () asks us to picture “old-guard Diltheyans, their shoulders hunched from years-long 

I ignore here differences in detail among logical empiricists regarding their “argumentative strategies” against methodologically separable Geisteswissenschaften. I only wish to stress the ideological uniformity that lies behind these strategies. For a more detailed history, see Uebel ().

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resistance against the encroaching pressure of positivist natural science, suddenly pitch[ing] forward on their faces as all opposition ceases to the reign of universal hermeneutics” (). This characterization of what it is like to philosophize after Dilthey may well please some postpositivists, but it is unlikely to satisfy any Continental philosophers. For one thing, as Joseph Rouse () points out, Taylor’s so-called “reign of universal hermeneutics” actually has two fundamentally different branches, and only one of them – namely, the sort of “hermeneutics of practice” that many readers have found in the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein – points in the direction of a genuinely phenomenological study of scientific experience and scientific practice (–; also Rouse ). The other notion of interpretation – a Quinean-Davidsonian hermeneutics of linguistic translation concerned primarily with concept formulation and empirical warrant – is a much more tradition-bound activity. For Quine, “it is [still] a question of my deciding which sentences to accept. For Heidegger, it is how can I be freed to encounter what is at stake, what is truly questionable, in living now” (Rouse , –). In other words, a Quinean universal hermeneutics continues the traditional empiricist-positivist philosophy that “interprets what is the case”; the Heideggerian sort of universal hermeneutics follows the phenomenological alternative and “interprets what[ever] is the matter.” Moreover, although Taylor does not explicitly identify these “two branches” of hermeneutics, his vision of the future of postpositivist philosophy of science actually depends on it. For after conceding that even natural science is an interpretive response to what is “practically preunderstood” in everyday life, he insists that we continue to recognize the importance of defining human scientific interpretation as concerned with what things mean to people and natural scientific interpretation as concerned with what there is, no matter what it might mean. Otherwise, he argues, we run the risk of carrying forward precisely the old idea that all science reads the Book of Nature as it is, not as one might like it to be. What we must do now, he explains, is incorporate Dilthey’s real point (which Taylor thinks is less about science being interpretive and more about types of interpretation) by restricting the old idea to natural science.  

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Most of Taylor’s essays on this issue are in his Philosophical Papers (a, b). Rouse (), , my emphasis; also –. Rouse emphasizes that for science studies, the treatment of everyday practical life must acknowledge that it is already organized as a whole set of “self-adjudicating communities” (), plausibly interpreted as including the seeds of scientific research communities. Taylor does this by rethinking it in light of Bernard Williams’ idea that natural science pursues an “absolute conception of the world” as it is. For criticism of Williams’ claims about this conception

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Only then, by contrast, can we drive home the point that the human sciences explicate our pre-understanding of specifically “human” rather than “natural” relations. In Taylor’s phrase, when we “self-interpreting animals” try to understand other self-interpreting animals, the result is not an “absolute . . . [i.e., causally explanatory, natural scientific] account of the world as it is independently of the meanings it might have for human subjects,” but precisely an articulation of those meanings. Of course, Taylor’s modified version of the two-sciences doctrine satisfied almost no one. Perhaps most obviously, he gives no justification for continuing to embrace – indeed, to absolutize – the traditional explanatory ideal for natural science. As Rouse argues, once all scientific activity is deemed interpretive, all science is in this fundamental respect ontologically the same whether we engage with material nature or other people. Implicitly, then, Taylor is still seeking “natural” scientific “kinds” – for the positivists, there is just one, for him, more than one – and thus misses the deeper implications of insisting upon the truly heterogeneous character of our pursuit of truth. Above all, then, what makes Taylor’s postpositivism unsatisfactory is that he comes at the issues backwards, from a traditional preconception of what must be the case about scientific practice, to conclusions that dictate how to characterize that practice once it is directly considered. To see that the articulation of life potentially involves genuinely multiple lines of “scientific research,” not just one or two, one must take into account from the very beginning all the conditions that shape them – including cultural, social, political, ethnic, and instrumental conditions, not just the orthodox questions of how one “reasons” or “what” one studies – where the very language of these questions carries with it a cognitive and epistemic orientation that makes all these other conditions appear at best as merely supplementary and at worst philosophically irrelevant. By contrast, Rouse argues on phenomenological grounds that we must be more pluralistic about what sorts of science there might be than Taylor (he says also Dilthey). Once one takes a good look at scientific practice, Taylor’s way of distinguishing human from natural sciences once and for all by determining whether they study material objects or people, becomes too obviously saddled with traditional bias and abstract bluntness to sustain.

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and of the quasi-emotivist ethics that must in principle be paired with it, see Putnam (, –). Taylor (, ). For his more famous defense of this two-science scheme, see “Self-Interpreting Animals” in Taylor (a, –). Rouse (, –). See also Rouse (, –). For Rouse’s own systematic development of this idea, which I received too late to integrate into the present discussion, see Rouse ().

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But what about Dilthey? Isn’t he also wedded to the same ontological dualism as Taylor? I believe the answer is no. Indeed, I think that to understand why the answer is no is to see how Dilthey actually prepares the way for the phenomenological line of reasoning that Rouse projects and Taylor cannot. The key problem here is not just the orthodox and still hegemonic fixation on the issue of one science or many; nor is the solution just a matter of embracing a science studies counternotion of scientific practices as simply undefinable by any definite number of epistemically reconstructable methods. The real question is how to get from the former notion to the latter in the philosophically most effective way. Taylor’s approach in terms of setting philosophical limits to the use of orthodox imagery may be unsatisfactory, but the reason he gives for being concerned with such limits in the first place is still a good one. Immediately after bidding farewell to the old Diltheyans, he warns us that the somewhat selfcongratulatory claim that we now live in an age of universal hermeneutics is only a “pleasing fantasy” that obscures the whole point of the original Verstehen controversy (Taylor , ). What he means is that when postpositivists embrace the idea that all science is interpretive, they do so largely because they are complacently happy with how much progress they seem to make by simply opposing the explicit claims and theories of logical empiricism, without having to question their own still basically traditional understanding of science, in which natural scientific theorizing remains interpretation in the most fundamental sense, even if this leaves room for lesser alternatives. But one cannot simply “walk away” from the old positivist commitments by rejecting old positivist theories, Taylor argues. They will not just disappear once we realize “that the deductive-nomological model is bankrupt, or that we can’t sharply distinguish between observation and theory, or that some (other kind of ) understanding is essential to natural science.” Postpositivists, strong or lite, purchase their notion of the universality of hermeneutics too cheaply – by naively overvaluing the philosophical power of their explicit opposition to visible doctrines. The irony, however, is that this criticism ensnares Taylor himself, insofar as he makes room for human science without disturbing the usual (and thus still hegemonic) conception of natural science. As he sees it, the fact that we are self-interpreting animals is relevant only for the human sciences; the natural sciences remain the domain for selfless, knowing minds, studying the causes of real things, not just their meanings to us. 

Taylor (, ). Quine is identified as one whose postpositivism is a surface phenomenon only (–).

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For this reason (along with others, such as the fact that neither “self” nor “interpreting” are explicated, nor identified as marking out as something especially “human”), Rouse argues that really doing better than positivism lite means producing a comprehensive alternative model for science studies as a whole – not just, like Taylor, a purportedly better analysis of one sort of science that leaves intact the established view of another. Such a comprehensive alternative would start by emphasizing that all sciences are sociocultural practices, and hence that no science is rightly construed as fundamentally “subject-centered.” Instead of thinking of scientific practices as something conducted by individual minds externally linked by a mutually agreed-upon explanatory or interpretive method, these practices must be rethought in terms of the whole “configuration of the world within which [research] activities are significant.” Readers of Dilthey will undoubtedly recognize the Diltheyan ring to Rouse’s argument. Above all, his projected new model for science studies does not grow out of opposition to logical empiricism, but is inspired by a phenomenological sense of actual scientific practice. I want to show that Dilthey not only foreshadows Rouse’s move here but does so in a way that clarifies especially well what sort of move it must be, precisely because he struggled so hard to make it himself and was only partially successful. Today, it is easy to find Rouse’s proposed new model appealing, but it is much harder to take his proposal to heart and carry it forward in the teeth of a still powerful philosophical resistance and an inherited tradition that leaves us with all the wrong philosophical instincts. There are very good arguments, as Rouse explains, why we should to back off from the traditional Cartesian framework and recognize that “theorizing is as much a practice as any other aspect of scientific work,” and thus to ready ourselves to develop the new sort of model he calls for. My question, however, is what sort of philosopher can listen to these arguments and then philosophize accordingly? Following out Dilthey’s unsystematic suggestions about life’s own “standpoint” will help.

 Dilthey’s “Standpoint of Life” As I discuss elsewhere, Dilthey’s efforts to distinguish interpretive humanhistorical from explanatory natural sciences repeatedly drive him back,  

Rouse (, –, –). For Rouse’s explanation of why this rethinking is best conducted as part of a general “historical project of naturalism,” see Rouse (, –). Readers of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses will know that I am proposing a “destructive retrieval” of Dilthey, but it is not necessary for my discussion here that one follow it with this in mind. See Scharff ().

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especially in his late work, toward the idea of a “standpoint of (historical) life” – by which he means the orientation to which we are entitled simply by virtue of our being fully and meaningfully embedded in the midst of things, engaged in a living-through of the sociohistorical life out of which all our articulations of that life develop (Scharff , –, –). Yet how to determine the significance of this idea is not obvious. Depending on the context, Dilthey gives this standpoint either an epistemically narrow, human-scientific interpretation or a significantly wider and philosophically more suggestive one. Thus more frequently, he describes it as, at once, the standpoint of what the human sciences study – namely, the “(psychic-) historical life” of human beings as they live through and articulate it – and thus also the necessary standpoint for human scientists who wish to understand this life “in its own terms.” In this narrower sense, the standpoint of life is for human science what the standpoint of observation is for natural science. Yet, especially in his late writings, Dilthey expands this human-scientific conception in the direction of what he calls more “general epistemological” issues involving the direct comparison of human and natural sciences regarding what kinds of “certainty” we can expect from their research. At least by implication, the wider sense of life’s standpoint is present in Dilthey’s writings long before it has a name. In his “Preface” to the  Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey explains that his analysis of traditional philosophy’s futile attempts to account for knowledge entirely in terms of conceptual representation, together with his historicalpsychological studies of the “whole human being,” finally led him to conclude that even natural knowledge must be understood in terms of the “manifold powers” of this whole being. Hence, the Introduction will relate every component of today’s abstract scientific thought to the whole of human nature as it is revealed in experience, the study of language, and the study of history . . . . The result is that the most important features of our image and knowledge of reality, our own living personal identity, the external world, other individuals, their temporal life and their interactions – all of these can be explained in terms of this whole human nature, in which willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects of a single, real life process. The questions we must all put to philosophy cannot be answered by the positing of a rigid epistemological a priori, but rather only in terms of a developmental history proceeding from the totality of our being.  

GS :  / SW : . Sometimes, Dilthey even uses the phrase informally, as a label for our comprehensive attunement to an everyday sense of “the whole of historical life.” GS : xviii / SW : – [trans. slightly modified, as elsewhere in this chapter]. “Experience” here is “Erfahrung,” but only in the general sense Dilthey often employs, not in the technical sense it takes on in epistemological debates. (He often talks of “consciousness” with the same philosophical informality.)

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Out of this “Totalität unseres Wesens” arise all expressions of our many capacities for articulation – including, of course, our capacities for acquiring natural- and human-scientific knowledge. In this sense, our constantly “developing” experiential standpoint is life’s ur-phenomenon, that is, our basic engagement in and with a world of meaningful encounters; and even when Dilthey has not yet given this standpoint its later name, he recognizes that any philosophizing about the sciences – or any questions we “put to life” – must get its bearings from within this totality. As Dilthey famously says, this originary, “uncircumventable,” lived-though, multiply articulated experiential sense of things is historical life itself, “back behind which thought cannot go” (e.g., GS :  / SW : ; GS : ; GS :  / SW : ; GS : ). It follows that reflection on the human sciences – like reflection on any aspect of historical life and its articulations – must see itself as a hermeneutics, that is, a conscious project of responsively reliving and critically conceptualizing something about historical life itself. We can see, then, why it would be misleading to call both Quinean and Heideggerian philosophizing interpretive. Like Dilthey, Heidegger envisages a philosophy that would operate from within the standpoint of historical life (Scharff , –), whereas Quine speaks from what he understands to be the standpoint of (natural) science that observes this life from outside of it. Philosophy of science, he famously quips, is philosophy enough. To be fair, explicit displays of Quine’s sort of philosophical self-possession are less common today, and many analytic philosophers regard themselves as not only postpositivist but post-Quinean (see, e.g., Rouse , –; Soames ; Murphey , –). Nevertheless, his philosophical orientation itself has not disappeared as completely as his noisy embrace of it, for his self-confidence expresses the attitude of someone accustomed to speaking for an orthodoxy that still dominates the English-speaking world – that is, a tradition for which “object,” “representation,” “conceptual scheme,” “translation,” etc., all have largely settled meanings and together constitute the standard conceptual tools for analyzing all “talking and thinking” about anyone’s surroundings, anywhere, even on Mars. How modest, then, could we expect even a post-Quinean to be, were someone to argue that all these traditional conceptual tools are manifestations of just that one sort of articulation of life in which abstract and methodologically regularized thought plays an outsize role? 

Quine (, –, ). Cf. the  manifesto of logical empiricism: “[T]his much is certain: There is no such thing as philosophy as a basic or universal science alongside or above the various fields of the one empirical science” (Neurath , –, ).

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Of course, this is precisely what Dilthey does argue. For him, the positivistic idealization of the standpoint of natural science is not just ontologically constricted; it gets things backwards, by assuming that its conceptual tools should be imposed on “the whole of life” while forgetting that they actually originate in that life. We must therefore stop listening to underlaboring positivists who tell us that the method and image of reality in natural science are also definitive of a properly philosophical outlook. Instead, we must begin to treat natural science “in its own terms”; and when we do so, we discover that its cognitive productions are the primary example of only one of the three classes of life’s manifestations (Lebensäußerungen). Specifically, they epitomize that class of expressions “consisting of [representative] concepts, judgments, and larger thoughtformations,” whose fundamental characteristic is their abstractness from life. They are, says Dilthey, “detached from the lived experience in which they arose, and . . . adapted to logical norms,” in order to insure that they “assert the validity of what is thought” in a form that “remains the same in every context,” so that its meaning “is the same for the one who formulates it and the one who understands it” (GS : – / SW : ). In other words, for observation reports and predictive theories to be observation reports and predictive theories, they must be considered solely in the direction of their use and never in the direction of their genesis. It is as if the explanations of natural science were, collectively speaking, like the Great Oz. They do their best work when one ignores what is behind the curtain – that is, when one refrains from “disclos[ing] how the[ir] logical content . . . is related to the dark background and the fullness of the psychic life” out of which such theories develop (GS :  / SW : ; see also Scharff , especially –, –). Yet Dilthey’s account of the life-manifestations of cognition is not a criticism of natural science, nor the product of strong-program social constructivism, nor a mere reminder that philosophers of science should not ignore the context of discovery. His aim is to make explicit and underscore the necessity of the relation between the self-imposed restrictions of natural scientific thinking and the effectiveness of its theories. For it is a very powerful set of restrictions indeed, representing a deliberate epistemic commitment of disinterest toward any disclosure of natural science itself as a human practice. Natural science thus exists as the practice it is, precisely in and through a suppressed utilization of the standpoint of experienced life out of which it develops. Yet if this is what Dilthey’s account actually asserts, it also silently suggests something that has much greater philosophical importance. Stated

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quickly, the implication is that the very characteristics that make the outlook of natural science possible also make it unsuitable as philosophy. As Dilthey says, natural scientists (and the traditional epistemologists who speak for them) conduct their affairs as explanation-seeking, disembodied minds that have been resolutely stripped of their real vitality and reduced to ahistorical subject-knowers operating entirely with “the diluted extract of reason [Vernunft] as the mere operation of thought” (GS : xviii / SW : ). In natural science, success may indeed come by this studied suppression of its lifeworld origins; but as history shows, when philosophy tries to think the same way, it simply becomes arrogant. By contrast, Dilthey’s projected thinker who philosophizes from life’s own standpoint would be open to addressing the totality of ways in which practical involvements can be systematically articulated – whether by a process of decontextualization and recontextualization as in mathematicizing explanations, or by imaginatively reconstructive narrations of how past events were lived-through, or by analyses of the way past circumstances now shape but does not determine current practices, or in art or music or architecture, or wherever. In a sense, then, Dilthey, Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein all appear to start where thinkers like Quine leave off. For they understand that in order to become the kind of philosopher that can investigate all of life’s articulations, one needs to “go back behind” Quine’s subject-mind and undo its prior commitment to all the traditional epistemic and ontological machinery that narrowly predetermines what “really” counts as knowledge and what “really” counts as philosophizing about it. If one starts instead as they do, by trying to understand historical life and its varieties of expressivity in their own terms, everything changes. Thought gains the possibility of being responsive to whatever is disclosed from life’s own standpoint, and of recognizing that “explanation” is just one very highly stylized kind of meaningful “understanding” – obviously, one with enormous practical implications, but not the suitable philosophical measure of all “real” meaning that it often takes itself to be. In many scattered passages, Dilthey suggests instead that a reflectively enhanced self-awareness of lived experience/expression itself – the “Besinnung” or “Selbstbesinnung” required of human scientists who want to understand life in its own terms – is the proper starting point for philosophy generally. At the very least, it would have to be on the basis of such reflectiveness that one might discern how both “understanding life” and “explaining nature” are, at bottom, manifestations of lived-through and differently articulated

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possibilities. It is this larger truth – about making the standpoint of life the originating ground for philosophizing generally – that I wish to stress here. As Ricoeur puts it, in Dilthey’s work if not always in his accounts of what he is doing in his work, historical understanding is not exactly the counterpart of the theory of nature; the relationship between life and its expressions was rather the common root of the double relationship of man to nature and of man to history. If we follow this suggestion, the problem is not to strengthen historical knowledge in the face of physical knowledge but to burrow under scientific knowledge, taken in all its generality, in order to reach a relation between historical being and the whole of being that is more primordial than the subject-object relation in epistemology.

In my view, Ricoeur has the matter precisely right. Here is the most important part of Dilthey’s legacy, and the feature of his work from which contemporary philosophy still has the most to learn.

 Taking Up, Not Conceiving, Dilthey’s Standpoint Again, I think Ricoeur captures ultimate promise of Dilthey’s ostensibly epistemological investigations is precisely. Yet, for this very reason, I also think that those wishing to follow out the line of reasoning Ricoeur finds prefigured in Dilthey are likely to find Dilthey himself, who never saw the matter so clearly, more helpful. There is only an apparent, not a real paradox here. The trick is to recognize that the issue is existential, not conceptual. If it were merely a question of gaining cognitive clarity about Dilthey’s legacy, then Ricoeur is the better source. Put briefly, philosophizing about science looks one way before Dilthey, another way after him. Before him, there is “the” epistemology of science, and its problem is how to oppose epistemologically uncooperative “human” scientists. After him, a whole 



Dilthey’s idea of a Selbstbesinnung that seeks “the foundation for action as well as for thought” by cultivating an explicit concern for “differentiating among the facts of consciousness as well as the articulations based on this differentiation” can be found very early in his writings – e.g., in the “Breslau Draft” (circa ), intended as Book Four, Section One, of Volume II of the Introduction (GS : – / SW : ). For background – and a strong reminder that Dilthey never thought of himself as primarily just an epistemologist of a second kind of science – see Makkreel (, –). Ricoeur (, –). Like Ricoeur, Heidegger focuses on Dilthey’s work, even if this is too generous to Dilthey’s own self-conception. See, e.g., Heidegger (/, especially –); English in Heidegger (, –, especially –); also Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, vol. : –, –; English in Heidegger (, –, –). Hereafter, Gesamtausgabe volumes are cited as GA, volume, page, followed by “/” and the English translation.

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies



cluster of new issues becomes unavoidable – issues concerning plural methods, ontologically diverse subject matters, and the vital fact of our “double [and ultimately multifaceted] relationship” with nature and history. Yet, Dilthey promises something more. In his struggle to explain why human scientists must learn to approach their subject matter with their whole being and not just with subject-minds, he shifts the conversation from strictly epistemological issues – including the new ones later associated with his name – to the possibility of transforming philosophical thinking in all of its inquiries. In Ricoeur’s words, Dilthey’s work (if not always Dilthey himself ) suggests an actual “burrowing under” the epistemic standpoint of the sciences in general, and then a displacement of its dominant Cartesian (i.e., now typically positivist) outlook in favor of an orientation fashioned from within “a relationship between historical being and the whole of being that is more primordial than the subject-object relation in epistemology.” This displacement, as Ricoeur rightly says, would involve actively “following out” Dilthey’s line of reasoning – that is, experiencing the effects of it on one’s thinking and reflectively monitoring precisely how one’s orientation is changed thereby, not just contemplating this change from the outside by comparing the initial set of concepts/theories that define the traditional subject-object relation and some new set that allegedly defines the standpoint of life. In other words, Ricoeur implies that it would be a question of actually getting from the former outlook to the latter; and spectator minds cannot do this, because they only observe, contemplate, and cognitively move from one conceptual pole to the other. Like Descartes in Meditation Four, such minds know only how to entertain ideas until they are clear and then, thanks to prior arrangements made about clarity, affirm them – which works fine in mathematical and logical thinking, where the transition from having an idea to taking a stand on its worth is regulated entirely by explicit conceptual standards, but not so well when one is trying to transition from one way of thinking (i.e., logical, discursive) to another (i.e., hermeneutical). And, here, Dilthey’s unsteady path can be more helpful than Ricoeur’s clear idea. For, by analyzing how Dilthey continually subverts his own discoveries – for example, by describing the experiential “possession” of life in the traditional Cartesian/positivist terms that make it an “inner” experience, not an outer perception – we can learn something both about how inheritance of this tradition still predisposes current thinking to embrace the same dualism and also about what it might take to overcome this predisposition more thoroughly than Dilthey.



 . 

Consider in this light his analysis of “epistemology” in the  Introduction. One cannot make room for the human sciences, he argues, by sacrific[ing] the legitimate independence of the particular sciences, the fruitful power of their empirical methods, and the certainty of their foundation to a subjective and sentimental mood which seeks nostalgically to recall by means of [pseudo-]science a [kind of] psychic satisfaction that has been lost forever. (GS : xvii / SW : –)

The problem is not the third-person point of view as such. Spectators, qua spectators, simply operate under the legitimate and obviously often fruitful resolve to “have” reality only in cognitively representable external confrontations. Moreover, it is indisputable that “everything” is open to this objectification. The real question is whether every lived-through phenomenon comes into its own as objectified. Hence, we need not ask whether one can make some particular methodological beginning (e.g., an “explanatory” rather than a “hermeneutical” one); but we should address the prior and neglected question of how we make this beginning, and ask what thus comes to be silently regarded as settled regarding alternative beginnings. For Dilthey, then, the problem is not natural scientific objectification; it is the philosophical privileging of the spectator viewpoint, when instead it is “only in inner experience, in the facts of consciousness” that philosophizing – even philosophizing about the sciences – must be grounded. For [a]ll science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, that is, the totality of our nature. We designate as “epistemological” [the] standpoint which consistently recognizes the impossibility of going behind these conditions [and context] . . . Modern science can acknowledge no other epistemological standpoint.

But, of course Dilthey’s “we” is wildly premature. His is precisely the kind of “epistemological standpoint” that traditional epistemologists do not recognize. They have resolved to know “reality” only as something thinkable along the lines of observable material nature; hence, “human beings” are deemed accessible only as either part of that reality or conscious bearers of the criteria for adjudicating claims made about it. All around Dilthey, this spectatorism silently continued to rule, often invisible even to itself; 

GS : xvii–xviii / SW I: , emphasis added. I cite early passages in order to stress the fact that the promising elements of his thought that are prominent only later do not constitute a break with some mythical and less promising “epistemological” Dilthey.

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies



and his efforts to reflectively attend to it “directly” and as the articulation of a specific lived-through concern or interest – for him the expression, ultimately, of the Enlightenment ideal – were greeted with suspicion, and even regarded as irrational guesswork about something unobservable and merely subjective. His opponents, to use Heidegger’s phrase, treated their “founded mode” of being-in-the-world as if it were identical to being-in-the-world as such; hence, they could not hear Dilthey’s suggestion – all the more so when he put it in “psychological” terms in the Ideas – that we reflect on the fact that lived experience expresses itself in every thought, practice, and production because it constitutes the way we originally “possess reality” construed in every possible sense. But isn’t Dilthey himself also partly to blame for his opponents misreading him? After all, he does refer to the facts of consciousness (Bewußtsein), says all science is based on experience (Erfahrung), calls his project an epistemology, and admits that only a natural science can be based on observation. In other words, he employs all the standard philosophical phrases from the dominant natural-scientistic outlook of his time, with very little accounting for his unorthodox use of them. Certainly, this at least makes it understandable that he should have been read as saying strange things about familiar topics. For example, given his characterization of Erlebnis, historical life, self-awareness, and expressivity as “psychic” phenomena, together with his claim that an “unbiased and unmutilated view” of them requires “description rather than [theoretical] construction,” it is no surprise that his new “psychology” was almost immediately attacked for abandoning the only truly objective (i.e., naturalistic) way of dealing with mental events. And, in favor of what? “Intuitions” about what takes place, unobserved, “inside” human bodies? As Rickert () puts it, people like Dilthey, who give priority to historical contingency, personal experience, and concrete circumstance and reject the quest for the universal, the necessary, and the theoretically unifying, are under the illusion that the intellectual poverty of their unprincipled enterprise is really a virtue (–). 



GS : – / SW : –. “Everything in a historical period derives its meaning through the energy drawn from its overall direction . . . [and] all manifestations of this energy are akin to each other” (GS :  / SW : ). See Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (GS : –). Trashing Dilthey’s Ideas (GS : –) began almost immediately with a review by Hermann Ebbinghaus (“Über erklärende und beschreibende Psychologie”) – a tract that Husserl later admitted had influenced him excessively when he drew up his criticisms of Dilthey in the famous Logos article (Husserl , –). See also de Mul (, –).



 . 

We are, I think, at a philosophical crossroad here. Let me put the matter first in exaggerated form: Interpreting a work to see what theories it contains and positions it takes is always possible, but it is also sometimes block-headed. Thus, one can of course stand back from Dilthey’s work, assume that all of its key terms must mean roughly what one usually understands them to mean, and then analyze what he says to find his theories, arguments, basic assumptions, warranted claims, and so on. And of course, Dilthey does propose some theories, make arguments, and assert claims, and he does express all of this in familiar philosophical language. Yet the results of such an interpretation are only illuminating if a work is designed to be analyzed in this logical and discursive (i.e., dianoetic) fashion. In Dilthey’s case, this expectation seems out of place. Is Rickert right that Dilthey is simply making a virtue out of not being properly philosophical? Are his writings simply sloppy and undisciplined, driven by the wrong sort of intention, often settling for the merely “intuitive,” or even the “irrational”? Such charges tell us more about the unquestioned commitments of the interpreter than about Dilthey. Of course, sometimes seeming irrationality is actual irrationality; but not here. Instead of reading Dilthey to see how he fails to do what one expects of a philosopher of science, the better plan is to ask what is new in Dilthey that prevents him from letting his (admittedly still fairly traditional, albeit somewhat modified) philosophical self-conception subvert his unorthodox intuitions about scientific research. One thing that seems clear from Dilthey’s writings is his marked willingness to privilege what goes on in his actual studies, often in the face of traditional epistemic demands. Some, like the young Heidegger, have tackled this point all at once and head on: Toward what, he asks, is Dilthey unknowingly, “restively,” and sometimes in spite of himself, “on the way” in all his work (Heidegger , –)? I shall close much less ambitiously by analyzing a couple of features of Dilthey’s works that might contribute to such larger questions.



Dilthey’s Legacy in Light of Current “Experience”

Perhaps the most obviously promising feature of Dilthey’s larger legacy lies behind the somewhat frustrating way he keeps expanding his conception 

For discussion, as well as a defense of Heidegger’s claim (contra Husserl and Gadamer, and recent commentators like Makkreel) that Dilthey’s “ultimate philosophical motive” (GA : /), as “confirmed and strengthened by the theses of Count Yorck” (Heidegger , ), leads directly to the “question” of life, as answered in Being and Time, see Scharff (, –, –, –; ).

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies



of epistemology without making this expansion itself a philosophical topic. In , looking back over his efforts to defend the possibility of human science, he concludes that today, hermeneutics (in the older sense of the science of the art of interpreting written records) enters a context that directs the human sciences to an important new task. It has always defended the certainty of understanding against historical skepticism and subjective arbitrariness . . . [but] now it must define its task relative to the general epistemological task of demonstrating the possibility of a knowledge [not just of individuals and their expressions, but] of the whole connected context of the historical world and the means to its realization.

Typical of his later work, Dilthey’s concern here is less the defense of Verstehen, whose “fundamental meaning” he assumes he has clarified (GS :  / SW : ), and more on how much “certainty” we might expect from Verstehen-based sciences. But this leaves him in the strange position of assigning both of these tasks – defending Verstehen as well as determining the epistemic promise of all the human sciences taken collectively – to a much expanded and redefined “hermeneutics” that has never been an epistemology of science. As with many of his remarks about epistemology, the orthodox language he uses here clearly does not satisfactorily cover what he is actually considering. Read in light of the neo-Kantian conception of epistemology with which he starts, this remark appears to stray carelessly from its proper topic. What is this expanded hermeneutics that “assigns tasks” to the human sciences? What sort of “universal validity” can we expect from sciences that use “procedures that have no analogy to the methods of the natural sciences” because they seek to understand the relation between life expressions and “something inner expressed in them” instead of simply objectifying the latter (GS :  / SW : )? Moreover, by what right does an epistemologist of the human sciences dare to compare the methods of Verstehen and Erklären? Whatever sort of philosopher is fit to address this issue, it cannot be someone like the author of the  Introduction who begins by simply doubling the epistemological standpoint of the neo-Kantians to make room for a second scientific project. Matters become much clearer, however, if we can try to “understand in its own terms” what Dilthey is actually trying to do and why he thinks he 

GS : – / SW : . Skepticism and relativism are, of course, what Husserl accuses Dilthey of promoting, and Heidegger criticizes Husserl for accusing him of. See, e.g., Scharff (, –) and (for Husserl) de Mul (, –).



 . 

can do it. Notice, first, that he appears to regard the “general” epistemological task he now faces precisely as an expansion of his earlier epistemology, not as its replacement. His Introduction makes the epistemology of the human sciences responsible for defending Verstehen, its differences from Erklären, and its function especially in studying individuals and their life-expressions. In , something “new” is added to what has “always” been a part of such an epistemology, namely, the “many additional reference points” for understanding that become clear once we have considered (as Dilthey has in the meantime) “the whole connected context of the historical world within which individuals come to self-awareness” (Makkreel, SW : ). The obvious question, then, is how must Dilthey understand his philosophizing about the human sciences, such that he envisages a continuity, not a break, between what he says about it in  and in ? Here we get to the unorthodox heart of Dilthey’s position: This continuity is not connected with any desire for theoretical consistency; it indicates a broadening and deepening of his initial confidence that all of life’s articulations – whether arising out of the natural or human sciences, or from everyday practices, state planning, architecture, religion, poetry, philosophy, or whatever – originate in, express, and continue to be related to historical life experience. In other words, although it is perfectly possible that on some issues Dilthey simply changes his mind, fails to be systematic, or falls prey to inconsistency or contradiction, the best interpretive practice is to assume that his epistemic claims concerning historical life, our living through it, and our articulations of it are as “connected” and “unified” as is life-experience itself – even if, as he says, no “logical formula” will ever capture this. Again, traditional epistemology has the matter backwards. From the standpoint of life, we understand that how we “live through a sense of connectedness and totality in ourselves” can never be made “completely clear to our theoretical understanding.” It is only once a theoretical standpoint is already adopted that we encounter observable



I agree with Makkreel that such passages should be read as a “revived and expanded” return to earlier epistemological discussions, rather than as calling for the latter’s (excessively psychological) replacement (SW : ). However, the SW translation makes it easy to miss this nuance by rendering “allgemeinen erkenntnisstheoretische Aufgabe” simply as “the epistemological task.” Contra Makkreel, what is “expanded” here is the conception of philosophy’s job vis-à-vis the sciences, not just the epistemic outlook of the human sciences, as is clear once one reads the numerous exchanges on the “general” epistemological significance of hermeneutics in the Dilthey– Yorck correspondence in Dilthey (, e.g., –) – even if one is not persuaded that this leads straightaway to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein!

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies



configurations of events that “stand out” in a way that “leads thought from causes to effects.” The point is to remember that this way of thinking “has its origin in us and is given in lived experience as a reality. Thus we formulate the concepts of the unity of a diversity, of parts of a whole, of causal relations, and we subsequently understand nature by applying these conceptions to it under certain [observable] conditions of coexistence or of uniform succession.”

Here, then, we see the full philosophical import of Dilthey’s calling the experience of historical life his “starting point” (Anfang). It is not just human scientists but philosophers who need to remember that “the historical world is always there, [such that] the individual does not merely contemplate it from without but is intertwined with it” (GS : – / SW : ). After all, “[w]e are historical beings before being observers of history, and only because we are the former do we become the latter.” So, for example, to get past metaphysics or traditional philosophy of science, a turn toward (respectively) pretheoretical coping or science practice is not quite enough. It is through a self-awareness of the experiencing of such coping or science practice that philosophy establishes its proper Anfang. Thus, Dilthey’s late remarks about the need to “expand” epistemology foreshadow a general philosophical reform in which the traditional standpoint modeled after natural scientific Erkenntnis would be displaced by a “selbstbesinnlich” orientation, emergent from the standpoint of life itself, that reflectively enhances the prescientific, “immediate knowledge [Wissen]” associated with our “operative noticing [Innewerden]” of living through something that is always “implicit in everyday consciousness and verbal usage.” As with all articulations of life, both natural and human scientific theorizing take off from this experiential source, but only natural science tries to conceptually fix, systematize, and universalize this or that feature, function, or configuration of the whole of life. The point to remember is that their efforts always retain a certain fundamental unsatisfactoriness – not for logical reasons, nor empirical insufficiency, nor lack of rigor, nor because of the “finitude of human reason,” but because “life is irrational” – in the metaphorical sense that that the wholly connected  

GS : –; emphasis added (to highlight the experiential support for each subsequently theorized unity); translation altered. GS :  / SW : . Dilthey’s problematization of the human sciences, says Heidegger, expresses an “ultimately philosophical motive: to interpret life from out of itself primordially” (GA : /). Hence, Verstehen in the deepest sense is not just what we sometimes do; it is how we always are – and only sometimes do we try to formalize this in scientific research (Scharff , -, -; Scharff , –).



 . 

meaningfulness of life in its total historical nexus remains beyond any theoretical explication or complete understanding. For many neo-Kantians of his day (and ours?) as well as the early Husserl, however, all of Dilthey’s appeals to historical life and its foundational relevance for epistemology undermine well-established philosophical principles. Rickert and Husserl, for example, simply reject the idea of a “historical philosophy” (de Mul , –). And in a study that prompted the young Heidegger to side with Dilthey, Natorp argues that Dilthey’s references to an “immediate” and “inward” awareness of experience show his basic failure to appreciate that the human sciences could not understand historical life’s meaning at all without life’s observable manifestations to study. To think, asserts Natorp, is to objectify something sensually given; nothing to objectify, no knowledge. Natorp is still is worth recalling here, however, because the way he argues against any “knowledge” of experiential immediacy highlights some lingering (and ultimately occlusive) traditional assumptions about “experience” and “reflection.” The fact is, asserts Natorp, we have no direct access to the subjective immediacy of life (and thus, in Kantian language, no real “experience” of it), and “in order to grasp it scientifically, one is forced to strip it of its subjective character.” Indeed, “one kills subjectivity in order to dissect it,” even though one then “believes that the life of the soul is on display in the result of the dissection!” (Natorp , ). Yet Natorp nevertheless argues that philosophy should attend as much to the sheer having of experience as to its conceptualization, for it is the precise character of their correlation that necessitates the movement from the former’s subjectivity to the latter’s objectivity and makes knowledge possible. He criticizes Kant for having “gone forward” too quickly with the





GS :  / SW : . One can see this in Dilthey’s formulation of the “categories of life.” Rather than being derived from, say, a table of logical judgments and then transcendentally “justified” as “formally” necessary for natural knowledge, these “real” categories issue directly and remain inseparable from the immediate awareness of experience life, to designate features of life as it is lived through pretheoretically in the “primordial world” of everyday affairs (GS :  / SW : ). For this reason, they remain responsive to life’s ever-changing visage without any expectation of completeness or finality (GS : – / SW : –). Natorp (, –; cf., , –); quoted from and discussed in Zahavi (, –), who makes it plain that for Natorp, as for all the neo-Kantians of his day, philosophical thinking just is the activity of a “subject,” so that by definition it can have only possible “objects” and never “subjects” (i.e., one’s own or another’s) to think about. Here is what makes Dilthey’s discussion of the difference between traditional Reflexion and the more intimate Selbstbesinnung so important (Scharff , –).

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies



analysis of the conditions for objectification, without first “turning back” to reflect on the character of the subjective givenness of experience. Natorp describes his account of experiential immediacy as a kind of “inversion” of the normal process by which experience objectifies itself. In philosophy, as in science, if anyone asks how this process itself is experienced, the standard reply is in objectivistic terms. Either one explains the process (e.g., in terms of brain physiology, cognitive structures, or laws of association) or else, more directly and negatively, one simply admits that because we have no “reflective” access to this experience, we cannot have knowledge of it. Natorp offers a third option, something he calls “subjectification” (to be paired with objectification), which involves recasting Kant’s claim that there can be no self-knowledge. Natorp argues that even without “knowledge” of the subjective, we can perform a kind of regressive analysis that moves back from our objectifications toward the lived unity of experiencing as it was prior to its being theoretically dissected. At least this way, Natorp concludes, the subjective process can be “reconstructed.” There is, however, an obvious difficulty with Natorp’s project. If he were right that we never directly grasp life in its experiential immediacy, then his supposedly backward-logical reconstruction would have nothing to reconstruct. He would be, paradoxically, conceptualizing something without prior knowledge of what he is conceptualizing; and since all conceptualization is objectification and only what is objectified can be known, his reconstruction would amount to the objectification of something that by definition cannot be known. Yet, there is a more productive way of interpreting Natorp’s efforts. What he inadvertently shows is how the modern tradition actually treats unmediated experience paradoxically. On the one hand, it is acknowledged to be the source and motivating ground for objective knowledge. On the other hand, once the project of objectification is underway, the philosophically reflective consciousness that is defined in terms of this process, turns back upon experience and declares it to be merely subjective, meaning-poor, and thus utterly dependent for its intelligibility on the very conceptualization process to which it gave rise. In Dilthey’s writings, however, precisely because he continues to understand objectification as a specific kind of manifestation of historical life, the traditional (and paradoxical) epistemological ordering of experienced life and its conceptualization is reversed (or better, restored). 

Natorp (, –). Heidegger also recommends Natorp’s () “Bruno Bauchs Immanuel Kant und die Fortbildung des Systems des Kritischen Idealismus,” which is in some ways clearer concerning his motives regarding “reconstruction.”



 . 

Moreover, when Natorp is then read through Dilthey’s eyes, he becomes instructive precisely because he tries, but cannot fully make Dilthey’s reversal. The main point is not the unintended irony of Natorp’s reconstruction project. It is his stubborn conviction that such a reconstruction is possible. For this shows that his vision of “historical life as it is immediately lived through” is distorted by tradition but not blocked. In the end, Natorp remains more burdened by his inheritance than Dilthey. By struggling against the ever-more-obviously inadequate traditional language associated with the objectivist ideal, Dilthey shows us how to recapture the experience of historical life through its denigration. In Natorp, traditional commitments continue to rule what he does but not what he sees; but in Dilthey, his conception of what he does is frequently emended by what he sees. Yet we should resist the temptation to simply enjoy this conclusion and turn toward Dilthey. To “understand” Natorp is to recognize that there does remain a danger here that his overcommitment to tradition allows him to see with special clarity. Some of Dilthey’s sympathizers have imagined themselves becoming phenomenologists, or at least getting philosophically closer to historical life experience, by entering a “subjective” or “first-person” realm that objectivists like Natorp have missed. Indeed, this move can even seem justified if one interprets Dilthey’s idea of understanding life in its own terms entirely in terms of the human-scientific context where he initially conceived it. From within this context, it can indeed appear that understanding life involves taking up a radically different, epistemically more “fundamental,” anti-“theoretical” standpoint. But this way of trying to think past modern orthodoxy is not ambitious enough, and it leads to making the wrong comparison between Natorp and Dilthey. The issue is not what Natorp misses but what his traditional philosophical commitments prompt him to cover badly, by overextending a line of thinking that, when properly “understood” as one especially powerful way of articulating the experiences of historical life, can otherwise be well-employed. Here as elsewhere, the objectification of life experience is not a mistake; it is just a poor model for philosophy. Dilthey’s writings, if not always his self-conceptions, project a better one. 

I mean “phenomenology” in a sloppy and generic sense that has many variations, e.g., imagining a “first-person” perspective as accessing what “third person” thinkers ignore, embracing “subjective” over “objective” truth, replacing objectivism with an instrumentalism or pragmatism that is assumed to be closer to life, cultivating the humanities instead of thinking like a scientist, becoming postmodern – the list is endless . . . and the options, all equally futile as efforts to be phenomenological about these matters.

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics for Science Studies

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One final remark, then, to connect all of this up with my opening discussion. In my view, the work of Rouse, Taylor, Ricoeur, Heidegger, and others shows that Dilthey is not merely of historical interest, precisely because in all of them, something like Dilthey’s movement toward reconsideration of philosophy’s proper starting point reemerges – and it appears to do so in connection with the same sort of discomforting Dilthey-like sense that some directly experienced concern or practice is being subjected to a tradition-bound mishandling that deems it less than properly “scientific” in the wide cultural sense of knowable that still dominates contemporary life. “Of course,” the bad theories, narrow concepts, and pinched visions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century positivism have all been rejected. Today, everyone realizes that not all science is natural science, that not all knowledge is like natural scientific knowledge, and that not all philosophical thinking about knowledge should be conducted in terms of the old objectivist paradigm. Yet saying all of this is still much easier than taking it to heart. For in our “developed” world, it is instrumental reasoning and its technoscientific Äußerungen that shape our dominant outlook regarding what is real and what is knowable, and everyone starts by living their lives as inheritors of precisely this vision. It is Dilthey’s challenge to this vision that I think is, quite justifiably, his real “threat” to philosophical business as usual.

 

Dilthey and Empathy Shaun Gallagher

Dilthey’s conception of empathy is complicated by a number of issues. One minor issue concerns terminology. Although many commentators speak about Dilthey’s notion of empathy, Dilthey himself did not use the standard German term Einfu¨hlung, which was translated by the novel English term “empathy” in Titchener (). We’ll see that this has some negative consequences. A second, more major issue concerns the particular use that Dilthey intends for this concept. His analysis of empathy (he uses the term “mitfu¨hlen,” literally “feeling with”) plays an important role in his hermeneutical conceptions about methodology in the Geisteswissenschaften and its differentiation from the methods of the natural sciences. This also helps to distinguish his conception of empathy from some of the more mainstream discussions of empathy in early twentieth-century philosophy and psychology. As I’ll suggest, this may be more to the detriment of those discussions since in several respects Dilthey was ahead of his time. More specifically, his distinction between elementary understanding and full empathic understanding fits well with recent distinctions between basic empathy and high-level empathy. In addition, in working out his account of elementary understanding he appeals to developmental studies, and he suggests that before a child learns to talk it is already immersed in socially organized contexts and the expressions that constitute the objective manifestations of the mind, all of which form a background context for understanding another person. To explicate Dilthey’s account of empathy in the context of his own time, I’ll review an early twentieth-century debate about Einfu¨hlung from which Dilthey was seemingly excluded, in order to show what he shared with other theorists of empathy, and how he differed. I also want to ask what Dilthey can contribute to contemporary discussions and to an ongoing twenty-first-century debate about empathy. 

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 

 Dilthey in Context A good historical, albeit negative starting point for understanding Dilthey’s work on empathy can be found in a review essay by Moritz Geiger from , a year before Dilthey’s death (Geiger /; , I: –, II: –). Geiger provides an overview of the field at that time, and he focuses on the discussion of empathy taking place in philosophy and psychology. He identifies the origins of the concept of Einfu¨hlung, as a cultivated aesthetic feeling, in the Romanticist notion of an emotional contemplation of nature. He points to Rudolf Hermann Lotze () and Robert Vischer () as theorists who carried the concept over into psychology, emphasizing the notion of mental content and not just aesthetic feeling. Theodor Lipps is identified as a major figure in the early twentieth-century debate about Einfu¨hlung, employing the term to refer to our sense of other minds (Lipps ). Lipps () distinguishes between external perception, which allows us to know objects or things in the environment; internal perception (introspection), which allows us to know ourselves; and Einfu¨hlung, which is neither internal nor external perception, but rather a different kind of mental process, which allows us to know other minds (). Geiger goes on to consider three questions about the phenomenon of Einfu¨hlung: the question of phenomenology (what we experience when we experience empathy), the question of psychological mechanism (how empathy is caused in us), and the developmental question (how we come to have this capacity). He reviews the work of Lipps, Stern, Volkelt, Fechner, Prandtl, and makes references to Darwin and Wundt. Geiger, however, does not mention hermeneutical thinkers (Schleiermacher or Dilthey, for example) or phenomenological thinkers (e.g., Husserl, Scheler, Stein). The latter group was just starting to engage in the empathy debates around that time, and they go on to develop an alternative conception via a critique of Lipps. Dilthey, however, building on Schleiermacher’s work in hermeneutics, had already developed an analysis that is simply not considered in this context. On the one hand, we might think that Dilthey is not mentioned in this review because it focuses on the notion of Einfu¨hlung and this is not a term that is used by Dilthey (Makkreel ). On the other hand, Geiger mentions the notion that empathy frequently is said to involve a “transposing” (Hineinversetzen) process, where one puts oneself into the position of the other person, and this is a concept that had been used by

Dilthey and Empathy

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Dilthey (GS ). To be sure, for Geiger it was not clear whether the notion of transposing was an answer to the phenomenological or the psychological question. One other possible reason for Dilthey’s exclusion is that a focus on Einfu¨hlung meant that the issue was primarily about the psychology of everyday social encounters, whereas Dilthey develops his notion of empathy in the context of working out a hermeneutical approach to history and in his discussions of scientific methodology in the human and social sciences. If these are different frames of reference than the one Geiger was concerned with, it is nonetheless unfortunate not to have included Dilthey in the review since Dilthey’s work also has something to contribute to the more everyday psychological question. If this exclusion is a negative result of the fact that Dilthey did not use the term Einfu¨hlung, it goes even further, since an additional result of this exclusion of Dilthey from the debate on Einfu¨hlung is that his influence has not been felt in the more recent and ongoing discussions about empathy. If we fast-forward a hundred years we find a renewed debate on the concept of empathy underway at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This debate repeats many of the terms of the earlier one, and indeed cites that earlier debate, especially the contrasting views of Lipps and the phenomenologists, although now with the additional references to recent advances in the neurosciences. In the following sections I want to look closely at the terms of these debates and suggest how Dilthey’s notion of empathy, usually overlooked in this context, could have made, and can still make a significant contribution to an understanding of our everyday social encounters.

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Stueber (, –) explains: In contrast to Lipps, philosophers in the hermeneutic tradition were not interested primarily in the question of how one can find out whether or not there are other minds, or whether some other person is a minded creature. Their primary interpretive problems were not of how one recognizes the emotional state of another based on his facial expressions, which is precisely the sort of question that was central for Lipps. Thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition were more interested in determining the epistemic means for justifying the interpretation of utterances, written texts, and actions of others . . . in the contexts of larger historical narratives. With the exception of Stueber (), there is little discussion of Dilthey in this contemporary debate. In this context, however, Stueber sets Dilthey aside, so to speak, classifying him as someone more interested in hermeneutical understanding than in social cognition. Likewise, Goldman () mentions Dilthey only in passing. Dan Zahavi discusses Lipps and the phenomenologists in detail, as well as contemporary theories in many of his papers on empathy, but mentions Dilthey only as someone that Goldman mentions in passing (e.g., in Zahavi , ).



 

 Dilthey in the Initial Debate In the initial debate about Einfu¨hlung, as summarized by Geiger, the main distinction is between theories that equate empathy with a form of imagination, and those that think of it as a real (rather than imaginary) instantiation of the other’s emotion. According to the first view, the simple perception of outward expressions (gestures, facial expressions, etc.) of emotions is not sufficient to grasp their meaning; in addition I have to use my imagination to gain a sense of the emotion itself. In contrast, on the real instantiation view, embraced by Lipps, we come to experience (not just imagine) the same thing that the other person experiences. If we experience the anger of the other person, “this anger is not something that is simply objectively there facing us, but we are in it. We live in this anger, it fully gives itself [Selbstgegebenheit], although for other reasons it does not have the same effectiveness [Wirkungsfähigkeit] as anger in daily life” (Geiger /, , trans. revised). With regard to the psychological mechanism that explains how empathy is possible, Geiger notes that both theories agree on one basic idea, namely, that it involves a projection of one’s own experience into the other. Although we know of the other’s experience only through external signs, “we add something mental from our own inwardness – here we have a special act of the spontaneity of a mental nature, and not a simple intake of the data transmitted to us from the outside” (Geiger /, , trans. revised; see, e.g., Lipps , ; , ). Projection involves a kind of filling in (Einfu¨llung) where we use our own experience to fill in what we cannot access of the other’s experience. This may be a matter of psychological association that leads to a kind of empathic fusion (Verschmelzung) (Stern ; Volkelt ). Lipps () rejects the idea that the process is one of inference by analogy since that would already assume that there is another experiencing ego behind the expressions of experience (–). Moreover, such an inferential process would be a projection of my own ego into the other’s body, which Geiger (/) calls “empathy by self-objectification” (; see Lipps , ). If we now ask how Dilthey might fit into this initial debate, we find that certain elements already mentioned are also elements in his account, including the processes of transposition, imagination, and projection. 

Polanyi () associates Lipps and Dilthey’s conception of empathy: “I think that Dilthey and Lipps described here a striking form of tacit knowledge as applied to the understanding of man and works of art, and that they were right in saying that this could be achieved only by indwelling [or

Dilthey and Empathy

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Importantly, however, Dilthey adds something that is missing in the other theorists, namely, a distinction between “elementary understanding” and higher forms of understanding, both of which involve empathy. This is a distinction that parallels a distinction between low-level or basic empathy and high-level or reenactive empathy that is clearly distinguished in the contemporary debate, but not in the early twentieth-century debate. Dilthey’s distinction goes beyond any of the issues that Geiger summarizes. Dilthey specifies that elementary understanding arises in the context of practical life, “where persons rely on interchange and communication. They must make themselves understandable to each other. The one must know what the other wants. This is how the elementary forms of understanding originate” (GS :  / SW III: ). By elementary understanding he means the interpretation of a single expression, correlating to what is often called a basic action. Just as the integration of a set of basic actions (“such as picking up an object, letting a hammer drop, cutting wood with a saw”) add up to a complex activity, a set of elementary understandings (“which are like letters of the alphabet”) spells out a higher form of understanding. For Dilthey (), understanding another person involves “the presence of one’s own mental experience” and the “projection of the self into some given expression” (). This is facilitated by elementary empathy. The reliving of the other’s experience is facilitated by the fact that experience itself is the common element between empathizer and empathized – the empathizer is, after all, someone who is trying to experience the other’s experience. “With respect to lived experience, there is no difference between the perceived object and the perceiving eye” (GS : lxxx). To the extent that I am attempting to gain access to the unity of the other’s experience, this is a unity that I myself live. More formally, he suggests that

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re-living]” (). Lipps and Dilthey, however, are not in total agreement, as we’ll see (also see Makkreel ). Like Polanyi, however, for the sake of a short exposition, I’ll ignore the distinction between the early Dilthey, who focused on the psychological question of empathic access to the other’s mental experience, and the later Dilthey who considers empathy and Verstehen in the larger context of social and historical structures. I read Dilthey as consistent and more continuous than does Makkreel. As Stueber () notes, even in the later writings, “Dilthey retains categories that are reminiscent of his earlier ideas and still speaks of ‘re-experiencing’ (Nacherleben), ‘reconstructing’ (nachbilden), or ‘putting oneself into’ (hineinversetzen)” (). At the same time, “The re-experiencing (Nacherleben) of Dilthey’s later phase is certainly not a simple resonance phenomenon due to the observation of the gesture or facial expression of another person, as Lipps described it” (). The terminology of “low-level” vs. “high-level” empathy is Goldman’s (); the basic vs. reenactive terminology is Stueber’s ().



 

the logic of elementary understanding may be expressed as an inductive argument from analogy, although we may not be conscious of any such inference (GS :  / SW III: ; see Dilthey , ). The inference is not one from effect to cause (something more appropriate for natural scientific explanation); rather there is a fundamental link between expression and the mental experience, which is the target of our understanding. The projection involved in elementary empathy is a transposition, and on this basis “there arises the highest form of understanding in which the totality of mental life is active – recreating or reliving” (GS :  / SW III: ). Dilthey here talks about the context or connectedness of experience. One understands the other if “the connectedness that exists in one’s own lived experience and [which] has been experienced in innumerable cases is always available to accompany the possibilities inherent in the object. This disposition involved in the task of understanding we call ‘transposition’” (GS :  / SW III: ). This is a fuller sense of empathy that builds on the transposition involving context and potentialities. Full empathy “requires that the understanding go forward with the line of the events themselves. It must advance continually with the course of life itself. The process of transposing oneself or transposition expands to make reexperiencing a creation along the line of the events” (GS :  / SW III: ). This fuller or higher sense of empathy, he contends, is facilitated by artistic expression in poetry or theater, or by fictional or historical narrative. Dilthey focuses on the outcome of empathy – understanding – and although he indicates he is not concerned with a psychological explanation of how it works, he nonetheless points to a process of imaginatively re-presenting (Vergegenwärtigung) of a particular situation that “stimulates a re-experiencing in us” (GS :  / SW III: ). Transposing oneself into the other’s circumstances allows us to relive the other’s feelings. “Thus human beings who are determined from within can experience many other kinds of existence through their imagination. Confined by circumstances, they can nevertheless glimpse exotic beauties of the world and regions of life beyond their reach” (GS :  / SW III: ). Depending on circumstances, however, full understanding involves not only imagination, but also, as in elementary understanding, inference from analogy, although, perhaps, in this case, a more conscious form of inference. There are instances in which expression (in the form of gesture, facial expression, or speech) does not seem to match up with inner states, or where we discern an intention to deceive. “We constantly rely on the interpretations of specific gestures, facial expressions, actions, or combinations of them; they occur in inferences from analogy, but our understanding pushes us

Dilthey and Empathy

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further” (GS :  / SW III: ). We make judgments about the character and capacities of others, and to what extent we can depend on them in practical matters. Context and changing circumstances matter and the task is to gain insight from the whole context of a life. If we can infer how a person we have understood would act in new circumstances, “the deductive inference from an inductively arrived at insight into a psychic nexus can only produce expectations and possibilities” (GS :  / SW III: ) – that is, it can never be perfect. The emphasis on context and the connectedness of life also introduces an important feature into Dilthey’s account, a second feature that remained untouched in Geiger’s summary of the initial debate: the idea of objective spirit, one of the few things that Dilthey borrows from Hegel. The context of action, for example, includes the “manifold forms in which a commonality existing among individuals has objectified itself in the world of the senses” (GS :  / SW III: ). People act and think and experience within contexts that are defined by normative structures, practices, and institutions. These reflect certain styles of life, and forms of social interaction – customs, laws, religious practices, as well as the institution of science. From earliest childhood, the self is nurtured by this world of objective spirit. It is also the medium in which the understanding of other persons and their life-manifestations takes place. For everything in which spirit has objectified itself contains something that is common to the I and the Thou. Every square planted with trees, every room in which chairs are arranged, is understandable to us from childhood because human tendencies to set goals, produce order, and define values in common have assigned a place to every square and every object in the room. The child grows up within the order and ethos of the family that it shares with the other members, and in this context it accepts the way the mother regulates things. Before the child learns to speak, it is already wholly immersed in the medium of commonalities. The child only learns to understand the gestures and facial expressions, movements and exclamations, words and sentences, because it constantly encounters them as the same and in the same relation to what they mean and express. Thus the individual becomes oriented in the world of objective spirit. (GS : – / SW III: –)

It’s within this medium that elementary empathy develops, and this may explain the fundamental link between expression and mental experience, where, for example, “the gesture and fright are not juxtaposed, but a unity” (GS :  / SW III: ). One might conceive of this unity as a unity of association formed in early and ongoing experiences. This is one view expressed in the initial debate in regard to the developmental question, although there no conception of objective spirit is mentioned.

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Assuming that one rejects the nativist view, or the idea of empathy as an “inherited disposition” (Geiger /, ; Darwin ; Fechner ) then elementary empathy would depend on learning how gestures and expressions correlate with inner feelings. As Geiger explains, by learned association I link a feeling (e.g., anger) that I have experienced with a proprioceptive-kinesthetic image of my expressive movement. There is then a cross-modal connection between proprioception and vision, so that I learn to associate the visible kinematic movements of others with my own kinesthetic experience, and thence to the feeling of anger that I have previously experienced. This explanation remains tied to purely bodily and perceptual processes and does not consider the medial contribution of normative structures, practices, and institutions. If Dilthey comes to this conception of objective spirit (or what today has been called the socially extended mind – see Gallagher b) because of his concern with historical interpretation or the methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften, it is also clear that such socially extended factors play an important role in social and intersubjective interactions. Indeed, this is quite clear from Dilthey’s own discussion of infant development mentioned above. As the debate over empathy developed in the early twentieth century, however, the focus remained on the more immediate factors of elementary empathy. The classic phenomenologists – Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Max Scheler, for example – respond to the initial debate by taking issue with Lipps and offering a perceptual account of empathy. As we saw, according to Lipps, we project our own experience (an inner imitation) onto the other and come to experience (not just imagine) the same thing that the other experiences. For the phenomenologists, this doesn’t ring true: when we grasp that another person is angry, we do not necessarily feel anger ourselves; if we notice that someone else is fearful, we do not experience fear ourselves. We find this objection in Husserl (, ), and more recently and succinctly expressed by Zahavi (b): “How plausible is it to claim that I have to be scared myself in order to understand that my child is scared, or that I need to become furious myself if I am to recognize the fury in the face of my assailant” (). Moreover, Lipps’ position doesn’t explain why we should (or why we are warranted to) project our own experience onto the other. At best, according to Stein (), we get an explanation of automatic mimicry / contagion, but not empathy, since contagion falls short of empathy. Stein () remarks on a related view in Dilthey: “In Dilthey and others we find the view that the intelligibility of foreign individuality is

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bound to our own individuality, that our experiential structure limits the range of what is for us intelligible” (). She rejects the idea that the intelligibility of the other is bound to our own individuality, but she does not reject the idea that an experiential structure limits the range of empathy. Here, she agrees with Dilthey that different personality types, or “the whole person” may play a role in defining the range, but rejects the focus on specific individual self-experiences. In this respect, according to Stein, the living body is the most general aspect of experiential structure that can guide our understanding of others (). According to the phenomenologists, empathy involves making the other’s affective state the intentional object of our own awareness (Stein ). For both Husserl and Stein empathy is a unique form of intentionality directed at the experience of others. It is not a case of attributing, imagining, projecting, inferring, or cognizing the experiences of others; it is rather a complex case of perceiving the other’s experiences “in” her gestures and bodily expressions (Stein , ). This empathic perception involves the apprehension of physical gestures and expressions, plus an apperception of the experience expressed in those bodily expressions (Husserl , ). Stein contrasts the situation in which I learn about someone’s experiences by means of a letter that describes a sad event in that person’s life (this would involve a more imaginative or inferential understanding) and the situation of being with that person as they live through the experience. The latter is more directly a case of perception than imagination or inference. Husserl also considers that in cases where we encounter the other in person, her intentions and feelings are perceptually present in her gestures and expressions. Stein’s focus (and the primary focus of other phenomenologists) continues to be for the most part on elementary empathy and on bodily expression and perceptual processes. Yet, Stein’s example of the contrast between a face-to-face encounter and an understanding based on a letter could certainly reflect some of Dilthey’s concerns about a methodological interpretation of texts and historical events, and the notion of a more sophisticated or full understanding that would go beyond elementary empathy and the immediacy of perception on which the phenomenologists focused.

 Dilthey in the Twenty-First Century The more recent debate about empathy, motivated in part by the neuroscience of mirror neurons (MNs), and by the development of simulation

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 

theory (ST) in philosophical and psychological accounts of social cognition, bears a striking resemblance to the initial, early-twentieth-century debate. ST defines one of the main positions within this ongoing debate. It explains social cognition as a process based on simulation, that is, the idea of () imagining myself in the other person’s situation, () asking what I would believe or feel or do in that situation, and () projecting my answer into the other’s mind. ST is closely associated with the notion of empathy. For example, Alvin Goldman () often equates simulation and empathy, calling ST “empathy theory” (; see , ). Goldman (, ) holds that “the term ‘empathize’ [is] roughly equivalent to ‘simulate’ (in an inter-subjective fashion)” and that “empathy is a key to mindreading . . . the most common form of mindreading.” Karsten Stueber () also equates empathy with simulation and claims that empathy is central and “epistemically essential” to our understanding of other agents (; see also Stueber ). Very much in line with Dilthey’s distinction between elementary empathy and full understanding, as well as Goldman’s distinction between low-level and high-level simulation, Stueber distinguishes between basic and reenactive empathy. Basic empathy is a perceptual phenomenon that “allows us to directly recognize what another person is doing or feeling” when observing her facial expressions or behavior (Stueber , ). Vittorio Gallese (), along with Goldman and Stueber, argues that basic empathy is linked to the activity of the MN system. MNs are activated when an agent engages in intentional action, and also when the agent observes another agent engaging in intentional action. In the observational mode, MNs are said to simulate the other’s actions, intentions, and/or feelings. Basic empathy, however, is not sufficient to “explain and predict a person’s behavior in complex social situations” or to provide “a full grasp of all mental concepts that we attribute to the typical adult” (Stueber , ). Accordingly, simulation theorists contend that we require something more; namely, reenactive empathy. This more sophisticated form of understanding requires a higher-order simulation of thoughts or mental states taken as reasons for action. ST draws on Lipp’s account of basic empathy, as an automatic imitation that allows us to experience (not just imagine) the same thing that the other person experiences (see Gallese ). Research on MNs provides an updated, neuroscientific explanation of the underlying mechanisms for this sort of empathy. ST could easily draw from Dilthey’s account as well, both in terms of his distinction between elementary empathy (now associated with the MN system) and full understanding, conceived as a reenactive

Dilthey and Empathy



imagination, and in terms of his conception of Hineinversetzen. Indeed, Dilthey’s views on empathy have been cited as a forerunner of ST (Heal ; Goldman , in passing; Chenari ; see Makkreel  for a different interpretation). Dilthey’s term “Hineinversetzen,” often translated as empathy, literally means putting oneself in the other’s place, the first step in the process of simulation, leading to a transposition or a reliving (Nacherleben) that may depend on inference, but certainly goes beyond inference. The understanding of someone else’s state can be conceived as an analogical inference, proceeding from . . . certain inner states, to an inner state like these . . . [T]his account gives only a rough and schematic description of what is contained in the result of the reconstructive process, for an inference severs the inner states from the complexity of mental life, whereas it is only by its relation to this that the reconstruction obtains its certainty. To reconstruct is to relive. (Dilthey, in Hodges , ; trans. revised)

Although within ST itself there are debates about how best to understand empathy – either as a basic process (as in Gallese) or as a higher-level process that involves explicit imagination (as in de Vignemont and Singer ), ST is not the only player in the ongoing debate about empathy. Its traditional rival is “theory theory” (TT) that argues for a conception of cognitive empathy based on an inferential process that draws on knowledge of folk psychology (see, e.g., Dvash and Shamay-Tsoory ). A more recent rival is “interaction theory” (IT) that, on the one hand, draws not only from developmental studies of interaction, but also from phenomenological conceptions of enactive direct perception as the basis for elementary empathy, and, on the other hand, appeals to the concept of narrative practice and the socially extended mind (what Dilthey calls “objective spirit”) as a way to account for a higher-order empathy (Gallagher and Hutto ; Gallagher a, b). In both respects, the work of Dilthey is highly relevant to IT, and can be summarized in three points. First, with respect to elementary empathy, IT shares with Dilthey a concern for understanding the developmental details. Dilthey, however, looks primarily at the pragmatic setting of interaction for the origin of elementary understanding. That is, he looks to the practical dealings and communications that subtend our everyday interests, and to basic actions (“such as picking up an object, letting a hammer drop, cutting wood with a saw”) that reflect our larger practical intentions. Such actions and interactions fall under the contemporary notion of “secondary intersubjectivity” that signifies our everyday interactions in highly contextualized practical



 

situations (Trevarthen and Hubley ). In contrast, IT argues that elementary empathy is even more basic and is essentially connected with primary intersubjectivity – the very basic and more immediate perceptual and emotional interactions that characterize face-to-face relations (Trevarthen ). This difference of emphasis reflects Dilthey’s criticism of phenomenology. As Arthos () points out, for Dilthey, phenomenology focuses too much on direct, immediate perceptual factors rather than on the more complex view that takes expression as indirect evidence: “If we consider mankind only in terms of perception and knowledge it would be merely a physical fact for us and, as such could only be explained in terms of the natural sciences” (Dilthey , ). Dilthey suggests that the human being “comes to know himself only by the circuitous route,” (ibid.) in a more hermeneutical way where all of the effects of secondary intersubjectivity loop back into primary intersubjectivity. This is clearly reflected in the next two points about his considerations of narrative and objective mind. The second point concerns narrative practice. In this regard, Dilthey’s work on biography and history places narrative at the center of our higherorder empathic understanding of others. Narrative reflects the connectedness of life, a concept richly developed by Dilthey. The person who seeks the connecting threads in the history of his life has already, from different points of view, created a coherence in that life which he is now putting into words. He has created it by experiencing values and realizing purposes in his life, making plans for it, seeing his past in terms of development and his future as the shaping of his life and of whatever he values most. (Dilthey , )

IT’s view of narrative practice in both our everyday social and pragmatic understanding of others (Gallagher and Hutto ), and in more specialized empathic understanding (Gallagher a; also Gallagher ) is consistent with Dilthey’s perspective in this regard. Whether one should emphasize the connectedness of life through a coherent narrative, as Dilthey does, or a greater diversity that is only partially represented in narrative, as one finds in Ricoeur, for example, there is a clear affinity between Dilthey and Ricoeur’s narrative theory (Arthos ), and that 

Makkreel () summarizes Dilthey’s view: there is a basic coherence to human experiences, interactions, and relations. “This coherence, which we now tend to call the narrative that gives our life its initial intelligibility, manifests a minimal sense of structure, that is, the loose connectedness or continuity of a nexus” ().

Dilthey and Empathy



affinity extends, through Ricoeur, to IT’s conception of narrative practice as well. An appeal to narrative practice has been offered as an alternative to simulationist views on empathy (Gallagher a), although for Dilthey simulation and narrative can be closely aligned and can both inform a theory of empathy that takes imagination to be an important means for empathic transposition. Finally, Dilthey’s appeal to the Hegelian notion of objective spirit is part of a trajectory that informs IT’s conception of the socially extended mind (Gallagher b). As Dilthey (, ) suggests, I am involved in the interactions of society because its various systems intersect in my life . . . Every individual is, also, a point where systems intersect; systems which go through individuals, exist within them, but reach beyond their life and possess an independent existence and development of their own through the content, the values, the purpose, which is realized in them.

The idea of objective spirit is that “states, churches, institutions, customs, books and works of art” (), which are socially constituted extensions of our own cognitive practices, can shape the way that we interact with and understand one another, and in this sense, such institutions and practices operate as a medium through which elementary empathy develops. If, however, Dilthey, influenced by his Romanticist roots, assumes that there is “an unproblematic continuum between individual and institution” and ignores “the aporias of subjectivity, intention, consciousness, fault and rupture” (Arthos ), the concept of the socially extended mind as developed in IT can correct that assumption by invoking a more critical hermeneutics (Gallagher b). Indeed, a notion of critical empathy may be required to address the concerns raised by recent critics of empathy (e.g., Prinz ; Bloom ). If, for example, the fact that my empathy for a victim may inspire a hasty overreaction, irrational condemnation, or hatred toward the presumed victimizer, then one may need to craft a more careful and reflective empathic understanding. But, this may also be something we can learn from Dilthey, insofar as his notion of a full empathic understanding is in fact something that provides a more methodical and studied approach to social expressions and historical existence. 

Stueber (), for example, suggests that narrative can inform or educate the enactive imaginative process of simulation, providing “hints and clues” to enhance simulation.



 

 Conclusion Although Dilthey didn’t use the term Einfu¨hlung, he developed a complex analysis of empathic understanding that has relevance to the analysis of intersubjective interactions among individuals. His distinction between elementary and higher-level understanding anticipated a distinction that remained implicit in the initial debates about empathy in the early twentieth century, and is more fully expressed in more recent discussions. His appeals to the concept of objective spirit, as well as his considerations about biographical and historical narratives line up well with contemporary discussions of these issues in the field of social cognition. Moreover, his considerations about empathy, imagination, narrative, and objective spirit relate directly to Dilthey’s writings on textual hermeneutics and the methodology of the human and cultural sciences. This chapter has not addressed questions about the relation between empathy and Verstehen methodology, although, as Stueber points out the concepts of empathy and understanding were used almost interchangeably in order to delineate a supposed methodological distinction between the natural and the human sciences (Stueber ; Stueber ). At the same time, however, Verstehen is not reducible to empathy since Dilthey also insisted on a more systematic historical and philological research, something that could lead to a non-empathic interpretation as easily as to an empathic understanding. 

For more on this point, see Weiss (); Bakker (); Harrington (); Throop ().

 

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory Benjamin Crowe

Dilthey’s contributions to aesthetics (and allied fields like poetics), hermeneutics, theory of history, and historiography of philosophy tend to receive the most attention, while his far-reaching and foundational inquiries into moral psychology, value theory, pedagogy, and practical rationality are less frequently examined. This neglect comes despite the fact that, by his own lights, much of Dilthey’s work serves a moral vision combining emphasis on the value of individual personality and creativity with a conception of self-formation (Bildung) shaped by earlier moral and religious traditions. Dilthey wrote and lectured on these issues throughout his career. Thus, while never producing a systematic treatise in moral philosophy, Dilthey articulates an attractive range of positions in his many notes, essays, parts of longer works, and fragments. The two brief pieces Special thanks to Kristin Gjesdal, James Reid, Iain Thomson, Elijah Millgram, and participants in the  Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy at Texas A & M University for comments, questions, and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.  This neglect is particularly noteworthy in Anglophone scholarship on Dilthey. A handful of Ph.D. theses in Germany have been devoted to Dilthey’s ethical theory over the decades since his death. Thomas Herfurth’s Tu¨bingen thesis remains the only book-length treatment that encompasses all of the thenavailable discussions in Dilthey’s corpus (GS  has appeared in the meantime). As Herfurth () observes, most general studies of Dilthey’s philosophy do not discuss the topic, or do so to a limited extent. Two articles on the topic appeared in the s: Kross () and Amaral (). The scholarly silence regarding ethical theory that Herfurth pointed out in  has endured through the present (Herfurth ). Writing in , Rudolf Makkreel remarks on this ongoing dearth (Makkreel ).  Many passages from Dilthey’s writings attest to this moral vision, as well as to its significance for the entire trajectory of his own life and thought. Two important remarks come from some later texts. In one essay called “The Dream,” Dilthey observes that “I have not offered a solution to the riddle of life, but rather an attitude of life [Lebensstimmung] that has arisen for me in reflecting on the consequences of historical consciousness” (GS : –). In another late fragment called “Overview of My System,” Dilthey describes philosophy in more specific terms as “the means toward an autonomous, world-affirming existence and activity in the power of thought [das Mittel eines weltfreudigen, in der Kraft des Gedankens selbständigen Daseins und Wirkens]” (GS : ). For a discussion of Dilthey’s philosophy of religion, see Crowe ().  Dilthey’s Ph.D. dissertation, accepted in , is on Schleiermacher’s ethics. Accepted the same year but only published much later, his Habilitationsschrift is titled “Attempt at an Analysis of Moral Consciousness.” In arguably his most influential work, the Introduction to the Human Sciences





 

completely dedicated to moral philosophy are both open-ended and suggestive of later developments. I have elected here to emphasize the systematic, methodological, and axiological dimensions of Dilthey’s thought in view of the present nature of the discussion, in the interest of opening up a new avenue of investigation into the work of this fascinating figure who defies many of the standard categories in the history of philosophy. After demonstrating the foundational place of moral inquiry in the “critique of historical reason,” I argue that Dilthey’s method of “selfreflection” (Selbstbesinnung) holds the key to understanding the sources and argumentative strategies behind his distinctive views. Along the way, I explain how Dilthey’s approach diverges from the more orthodox Kantianism of the era in important ways. I then zero in on Dilthey’s pathbreaking and incomplete account of the categories that structure practical life, as well as the pluralist conception of value that he develops out of this larger material logic of the practical.

 Ethical Theory and the Critique of Historical Reason Without rehearsing the details of Dilthey’s education, nor of the philosophical problems that he inherited, it is still important that I furnish some sense of the broader philosophical context for Dilthey’s moral investigations. Dilthey himself provides several useful formulations







(), Dilthey devotes two substantial chapters to ethical theory, and drafts for subsequent volumes of the work take up related topics in some detail. After his return to Berlin, Dilthey lectured on ethics in , producing the only volume of his Gesammelte Schriften entirely dedicated to the topic (GS ). Finally, issues in ethical theory are treated quite extensively in a work sometimes regarded as the crowning achievement of his intellectual endeavors, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (), as well as in drafts, sketches, and outlines related to this text (particularly those found in GS ). Herfurth () remarks on the argumentative and stylistic imperfections of GS  in particular (). Makkreel () observes that “the lectures are somewhat schematic. Many different themes are considered without being adequately developed” (). I do not concur, however, with Makkreel’s further observation that “there is one theme that seems over-developed and that is the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and its many shortcomings” (ibid.). To my mind, Dilthey’s sympathetic but ultimately critical engagement with Mill brings out some important features of his own position, including his pluralism. The general nature of Dilthey’s relationship to the Kantian tradition is perhaps best captured by Beiser’s () comment that “All his life Dilthey had a very ambivalent attitude toward Kant’s philosophy. He would be not only its advocate but also its critic” (). Dilthey’s pluralism in ethical theory comports well with his brand of historicism. For two excellent examinations of Dilthey and historicism, see Bambach () and Beiser (, –). In this regard, Dilthey’s approach to ethical theory might be fruitfully compared with that of Isaiah Berlin, who, like Dilthey, was profoundly influenced by the humanist and historicist tradition that emerged in the eighteenth century. For Berlin’s defense of pluralism, see his Four Essays on Liberty (Berlin ).

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



of the overarching project within which moral inquiries comprise a foundational layer. For example, in Introduction to the Human Sciences: From these premises we derive the tasks of developing an epistemological foundation for the human sciences and of using the resources created by such a foundation to determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another. The accomplishment of these tasks could be designated the Critique of Historical Reason, i.e., a critique of the capacity of man to know himself and the society and history which he has produced. (GS :  / SW I: )

Dilthey’s most influential and perspicuous writings make it apparent that ethical theory is foundational to this project. The object domain of the human sciences is human history, inclusive of human actions and actors, institutions, moral attitudes, and value judgments. This domain is in turn organized by concepts such as value and purpose. History, for Dilthey, is the realm in which human agency, and all of its effects, are manifested, the realm in which we confront the “the uniqueness of the life of human spirit” in “freedom and the corresponding facts of moral life” (GS :  / SW I: ). The human sciences themselves reflect this reality. Their methods and goals, and the conceptual schemata they develop in pursuing the latter, are continuous with the reality they examine. This means that the human sciences are themselves informed by horizons of value. Indeed, Dilthey rejects the sharp distinction between theoretical and practical, or between factual and evaluative. As he puts it at one point, “theoretical propositions must not be severed from practical ones. Truths must not be separated from ideals and norms” (GS : ). This is simply a reflection of the fact that the human sciences are practical disciplines that developed from the need for organizing and guiding human life. The enterprise of philosophically grounding these disciplines contributes to social development, as Dilthey makes clear in the opening section of Introduction to the Human Sciences, “This [book] is intended to aid all those whose lifework is devoted to society – politicians and lawyers, theologians and educators – in coming to know how their guiding principles and rules relate to the encompassing reality of human society” (GS :  / SW I: ). Hence, “science of inner experience,” the task of which is to articulate precisely this connection between the human sciences and the reality they investigate, must come to 

For an excellent discussion of this distinctive feature of Dilthey’s approach, see Reid ().



 

terms with “the principles of our action that explain the presence of purposes, highest goods, and values . . .” (GS :  / SW I: ). In an essay composed in , Dilthey points out that “[the human sciences] refer what happens and what has happened – the unique, the contingent, the momentary – to a system of value and meaning” (GS :  / SW III: ). For Dilthey, this implies that a critical, or “epistemological,” inquiry be broadened beyond the narrowly theoretical or intellectualist perspective found in Kant. Beyond simply “the conceptual cognition of reality,” the human sciences encompass the “positing of values,” the “determination of purposes,” and the “establishment of rules” (GS :  / SW III: ). As in Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey stresses how this likewise makes apparent their continuity with human historical life: “I see a continuum that constantly leads from life, from conceptions of fate, character, passion, value, and the purpose of existence, to history as a science” (GS : ,  / SW III: ). He goes on to observe that “it lies in the very structure of the human spirit to establish a productive system that generates values and realizes purposes on the basis of objective apprehension” (GS :  / SW III: ). In view of these characterizations of his domain of investigation, one must take Dilthey’s moral inquiries very seriously as essential components of his broader philosophical project. This conclusion is further reinforced when one observes how Dilthey’s moral investigations serve as conceptual laboratories in which some of his most characteristic and influential ideas are developed and, as it were, given a trial run. His  Habilitationsschrift, his debut in the professional world, is entitled “Attempt at an Analysis of Moral Consciousness.” Readers will find here much that is familiar from his other works. To pick out just a few examples, here one finds Dilthey arguing for bracketing metaphysical questions in the interest of a psychological analysis of “moral consciousness” (GS : ) in a way that clearly points ahead to both his criticism of metaphysics in Book Two of the Introduction to the Human Sciences and to his proposal for a “descriptive and analytic psychology” in a series of essays from the s. He motivates this proposal by first highlighting various aporiai in the ethical theorizing of the period, much as, in the final period of his career, Dilthey took the conflict of worldviews as the starting point for an analysis of “psychic structure.” Key concepts familiar from Dilthey’s later published work, such as “life-experience” (Lebenserfahrung) and the conception of psychic life as a “purposive system” (Zweckzusammenhang) make their earliest appearance in this essay. Finally, the claim that Kant’s account of categories as a priori forms of synthesis should be extended and deepened to provide an account of

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



“moral consciousness,” and that this extension requires the abandonment of an intellectualistic framework, is, as will be examined in more detail below, one of the key proposals of the work (GS : ). Similarly, parts of the discussion in the  System of Ethics present, albeit in a condensed form, many of the ideas Dilthey develops in his essays on descriptive and analytic psychology over the next decade. These all too brief overviews of these two works ground the assertion that Dilthey’s ethical investigations are not only philosophically fundamental for him but also furnish vital materials for understanding the development of his thought. It is also worth making the observation that Important aspects of the intellectual context of Dilthey’s early career are apparent in his early writings on ethics and value theory. For instance, the opening of the  Habilitationsschrift plainly situates the investigations not only within thencurrent debates about moral psychology, but also refers to the Pessimismusstreit that roiled the German philosophical scene in the wake of Schopenhauer, a figure with whom Dilthey engaged early and often.

 Ethical Theory and Self-Reflection The distinctive methodology that Dilthey adopts for his larger “critique of historical reason” also lies at the basis of his moral investigations; in what follows, I articulate both the basics of the methodology itself and what it reveals about the distinctive nature of Dilthey’s philosophical outlook. Here, I follow Dilthey’s discussion in the so-called “Breslau Draft” of the later volumes of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, in which the key term “self-reflection” (Selbstbesinnung)” is used to characterize his method. To quote Dilthey: I call the laying of the foundation which philosophy must carry out “selfreflection” and not “theory of knowledge.” Self-reflection provides the foundation not only for thinking and knowing but also for action. This 



See especially § , which concludes with a call for a “descriptive psychology” that avoids both the postulation of mental substances and the development of a materialist metaphysics rooted in evolutionary biology (GS : –); or §§ – of Part Two, in which Dilthey develops an analysis of the system of drives and affects as the foundation of ethics (GS : –). One risk with adopting this label is that it makes Dilthey’s approach seem wholly introspective, when in fact it comprehends much more than inspecting the contents of one’s own mind. In my view, Dilthey’s later emphasis on hermeneutics (especially after  or so) does not represent any profound shift in his basic approach to the foundational discipline of philosophical reflection, but rather serves to highlight the breadth that this approach possessed from the beginning. This is, however, not the place to engage with the fraught issues regarding how Dilthey’s thinking evolved over his career.



  must not be understood to mean that an action could be an object of knowledge the same way a fact is, especially the facts of nature. . . . The reason for the fact that it contains more than so far has been taken into account is that statements concerning feeling and will, which involve the consciousness of what is peculiar to feeling and will, have not been adequately distinguished from knowledge in the sense of thought contained in experience and directed to its correlate, reality. (GS :  / SW I: )

Dilthey here reiterates a key point, i.e., that a foundational investigation of the human sciences requires an investigation of the basic organization of practical life. Two further points stand out. First, Dilthey’s approach is broadly empirical; Dilthey is concerned to avoid a priori construction as well as metaphysical speculation and the hypostatization of conceptual schemes. His reasoning here has multiple strata. For the sake of brevity as well as of locating Dilthey’s project historically, it is useful to note how he frequently argues that self-reflection fulfills the promise of Kant’s critical revolution. Instead of a priori construction and metaphysical speculation, philosophy must revert to what Dilthey calls at one point the “real nexus of the facts of consciousness” (GS :  / SW I: –). Importantly, this “real nexus” is not identical to the content of an individual’s first-person experience; instead, Dilthey has in mind the “structure” (Struktur) of human psychic life shared not only with other human beings but also, to a certain extent, with other living creatures. This antimetaphysical approach is captured nicely in remarks found in a  draft work: “thought cannot go behind life. To view life as appearance is a contradiction in terms. Within the course of life itself . . . lie the realities that constitute the productive nexus and the value of our life” – any timeless “antecedent” of life is a mere “realm of shadows” (GS :  / SW II: ). Second, Dilthey’s basic orientation is anti-intellectualistic. While Dilthey shares with Kant the core critical insight that the structure of the human mind, rather than reality “in itself,” is the ground of the intelligibility of experience, he finds Kant’s conception of this structure 





A comment from a still later draft of the continuation of the Introduction to the Human Sciences makes clear both the scope and the foundational status of self-reflection in Dilthey’s entire philosophical project: “Self-reflection, as the foundation of knowledge, provides the most fundamental perspective on the status humanitatis and its effects on the way human beings regard knowledge and themselves” (GS : – / SW I: –). Among other places, this claim is made explicitly in Book Two, Ch.  of Introduction to the Human Sciences (GS :  / SW I: ), and in a discussion of the value theory and logic from the final years of his life (GS : –). Comments to this effect can be found, for instance, in the  essay “The Origin of Our Belief in the External World and Its Justification” (GS :  / SW II: ).

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



to be far too narrow. As he famously puts it in the Preface to the Introduction to the Human Sciences: “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought” (GS : xviii / SW I: ). Instead, “In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects. The questions that we all must address to philosophy cannot be answered by the assumption of a rigid epistemological a priori, but rather only by a developmental history proceeding from the totality of our being” (GS : xviii / SW I: ). In either detaching affect and volition from cognition or attempting to reconstruct the former as analogues of the latter, philosophers have blocked their own access to the most fundamental layer of human experience. In the published portion of the Introduction to the Human Sciences (), Dilthey sketches how self-reflection, meant to counter metaphysical and intellectualistic approaches, plays out in moral investigations. In Book One, Ch. , Dilthey first describes how the practical domain is comprised solely of “facts of consciousness” (GS :  / SW I: –), for “values and rules exist only in relation to our system of vital energies and . . . they have no further conceivable sense without reference to such a system. An arrangement of the real world can never have value in and of itself, but always has value only in its relation to a system of vital energies” (GS :  / SW I: ). Self-reflection thus investigates the origin of values and rules in human “emotional life” (GS :  / SW I: ). Dilthey’s Habilitationsschrift already announces his commitment to pursuing moral investigations through self-reflection, albeit without using the precise term. By taking “moral consciousness” specifically as his subject matter, Dilthey signals that his approach is empirical and psychological, or, as it puts it in the text, that it proceeds through “inner experience and observation” (GS : ). Since “moral consciousness” includes judgments as well as motivations (GS : –), it cannot be adequately accounted for if rational or cognitive processes are regarded completely independently of affective and volitional processes (GS : –). Likewise, in the  System of Ethics, Dilthey undertakes an “epistemological and critical 

Dilthey shares this broadly “subjectivist” approach to value with Alexius Meinong, who likewise developed a psychological approach to various topics in ethical theory. Dilthey seems to have been familiar with Meinong’s writings on value theory and judgment from the s. For example, in notes from the last several years of his life he refers to Meinong’s Psychologische-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werth-Theorie and to the  article “Über Werthaltung und Wert,” both in Vol. III of Alexius Meinongs Gesamtausgabe, ed., Rudolf Haller et al.,  vols. (Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, –). See GS : –.



 

grounding [Begru¨ndung] of ethics” (GS : ). The impasses and apioriai of moral philosophy can only be overcome, Dilthey maintains, by adopting the method of self-reflection, which eschews metaphysical hypotheses. “Ethics,” he maintains, “is only possible on the basis of self-reflection” (GS : ). But, what does it mean to undertake moral investigations by selfreflection? Do the results resemble those classical moral theorizing? Giving a full answer would require finishing the work that Dilthey himself left only partially completed. By way of providing some part of an answer, I examine in what follows one of the more distinctive contributions to emerge from Dilthey’s inquiries, namely, his theory of the categories of life.

 Ethical Theory and Practical Categories While they are crucial sources for understanding Dilthey’s thought, both of his primary writings on ethical matters are fragmentary. Thus there is thus no defining treatise on the subject, there is a clear direction of argument that Dilthey articulates and develops over the course of his long career and that, by the by, yields some distinctive contributions. In both texts, Dilthey begins by outlining what he sees as unfruitful lines of inquiry within the moral philosophy of the era, pointing especially to ensuing impasses or antinomies. No doubt partly inspired by Kant’s critical turn, Dilthey’s response to this perceived logjam is to shift the investigation to a more fundamental level, and to explore how ethical life develops and organizes itself into an intelligible domain determined by synthetic forms or structures that play a role here similar to that played by the categories in Kant’s critical reconstruction of experience. In his  Habilitationsschrift, Dilthey proposes to undertake an inquiry into the “elements of morality” (GS : ) that brackets metaphysical theorizing and also seeks to avoid any arbitrary way of setting the boundaries of the moral domain. While he is sensitive to the limitations of an orthodox Kantian approach to these “elements,” he nevertheless adopts the Kantian distinction between “form” and “matter” as a clue or guideline for pursuing the investigation (GS : –). In the first large section of the essay itself, Dilthey takes up the debate over whether practical reason or a species of moral feeling furnishes the principle of morality (GS : –). Moving past this debate requires that we come to see that reason is not imposed from without on the raw or intrinsically unintelligible “matter” of feeling, and that there is no simple or univocal form that grounds moral judgment. Instead, there is an irreducible plurality of different forms of moral judgment, which Dilthey thinks of as rooted in different kinds of

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



synthetic acts (GS : –). In the second main section, Dilthey develops the idea that moral theories are all grounded in a pretheoretical totality, and that the antinomial relationship between moral theories arises from their claim to capture the “whole of ethics” (GS : –). One conclusion of the essay, which reappears largely unaltered in the  System of Ethics, is that there is a plurality of “practical categories” that must be investigated in order to understand ethical life, or to grasp how the mind (Geist) structures the “principal forms of its existence on the basis of a priori syntheses” (GS : ), which can be shown to play a role at multiple levels of ethical life – individual, social, political, economic. The primary task of ethical theory thus becomes the investigation of these “practical syntheses a priori that form [bilden] the natural, universal, and inalterable organization of moral consciousness” (GS : ). As will be seen in more detail below, Dilthey comes to significantly modify the Kantian conception of a priori forms of synthesis, dislodging them from the intellect and locating them instead in a holistic “psychic structural nexus” that is cognitive, volitional, and affective, and which can only be brought to light in and through the historical development of ethical life. However Kantian his initial inspiration might be, Dilthey winds up taking things in a direction that Kant would have been very unlikely to countenance. The System of Ethics marks this divergence from Kant. The centerpiece of the investigation is an analysis of the “system of drives and feelings” and the historical-developmental process of functional diversification and articulation that it undergoes (GS : ). This system is the basic level of lived reality for us as organic beings (GS : ). We have a direct experience of the “vitality of our own selves as a reality,” and it is first of all with reference to this sense of ourselves that we organize what is given into significant objects and persons and begin to render the world of feelings into an intelligible totality (GS : ). This process of unification has a teleological structure, a tendency toward a kind of equilibrium or stability. At the most basic level, this shows up as the drives of the organism gradually form a kind of system, and feelings express the relationship that this system has to its environment. A process of gradual functional diversification or specialization within the system arises; what begins as an elementary biologically based system gradually undergoes a “higher formation” into something recognizable as human ethical life 

This picture of the teleological structure of the system of drives and feelings remains an enduring part of Dilthey’s understanding of the “psychic nexus,” and becomes particularly salient in some late texts on logic and value theory (GS : –).



 

(GS : –). In §§ – of Part Two, Dilthey traces out a process of development from mechanical satisfaction of drives to the exertion of will that is accompanied by an elevated feeling, and from there to a growth in the energy of the will, and a dawning consciousness of autonomy or of one’s own individual moral worth. Running parallel with this development, and in a way that is in fact inseparably bound up with it, social feelings rooted in the underlying commonality or “solidarity” of human nature ramify themselves in increasingly complex ways (GS : –). A key part of this latter process is the operation of what Dilthey calls “reimagining” (Nachbilden) or “understanding” (Verstehen) (GS : ). There is an important cognitive component in the development of moral phenomena like sympathy, love, friendship, and even patriotism. These values are not transcendent ideals, but forces that shape social reality. Yet, ethical life does evince a tendency toward a type of transcendence, namely of individual or subjective interest, of a sort that is also at work in the “domain of knowledge,” i.e., in the formation of the sciences and the specific theoretical or intellectual values that structure scientific activity. He puts the point this way: “[j]ust as there are fundamental predispositions [Grundantriebe] towards constancy, coherence, and universal validity in thought, so too in active life towards consistency [Konsequenz], organization [Planmäßigkeit], and solidarity” (GS : ). The process of ethical life is a gradual synthesis or unification of what is initially experienced as distinct and as resisting one’s own drives, alongside a growing recognition of commonality. Dilthey goes on to examine how ethical life entails the gradual overcoming of opacity and alienation between individuals, and the gradual curtailment of irrational self-interest (GS : ). Further on in the text, Dilthey describes this process as the “formation” (Aufbau) of a specifically moral “system” or “nexus” (ibid.). At its furthest point of development, this brings about the recognition that others have a kind of volitional center and that they, like oneself, are ends in themselves (GS : –). But, rather than endorsing the Kantian idea that this recognition expresses a universal, a priori law of reason, Dilthey argues that it reflects a structure of will and of feeling (GS : ), a set of “ethical predispositions” (sittlichen Anlagen)” or “ethical forces” (sittliche Kräfte) that, like  

Again, as will be made apparent below, this account of moral development is an enduring feature of Dilthey’s ethical theory. Dilthey provides another account of sympathy and its role in the formation of objectivity in the  essay, “On the Origin and Justification of Our Belief in an External World” (GS : – / SW II: –).

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



the “categories of thought” can neither be exhaustively enumerated nor sharply distinguished from one another (GS : ). In their most basic forms, these “predispositions” cannot be derived or deduced from anything, but are “original phenomena” (Urphänomen) (GS : ). The irreducible plurality of these formative forces leads Dilthey to reject any monistic account of this process of the formation of ethical life that collapses the “predispositions” that give rise to it into a single motivating value (such as utility) (GS : –; cf. GS : –). Finally, Dilthey denies there is any simple or univocal sense of ought (GS : –). Instead, moral life reflects a plurality of “synthetic elements,” and the apparent impasses and aprioriai of moral philosophy rest on the attempt to render one of these the ultimate ground of all the rest (GS : ). These synthetic elements are “practical categories,” forms that structure our “attitudes” or “modes of comportment” (Verhaltungsweisen) to the various items of concern in the “world of value” (GS : ). Rather than deducing them a priori from a single principle, Dilthey argues that these categories of the “moral world” can only be uncovered by examining the way they shape historical life. Dilthey takes up the task of uncovering and articulating these “practical categories” in a series of essays composed over the course of the following decade (s). As will be pointed out below, Dilthey’s pluralistic impulse pushes him ultimately to reject the idea that the category of value should be conceived of in exclusively moral terms. In a draft text entitled “Life and Cognition,” likely composed in – as part of a continuation of Book Five of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey asserts that all categories ultimately resolve into “life-categories,” that is, ways in which life itself becomes organized into productive and intelligible wholes (GS : – / SW II: ). The “reception and shaping of stimuli into representations of things” is conditioned by “real concerns that govern life” that cannot simply be reduced to affective markers of the state of an 





In a later text, Dilthey argues that Kant’s categorical imperative is “only the logical condition under which a moral law is possible,” and that there is in fact an irreducible plurality of moral duties that differ from one another in “dignity” and binding force (GS :  / SW III: –). He identifies and briefly discusses three: ought of “obligation” (Verbindlichkeit) in the strict sense (grounded in a recognition of some reciprocal connection), ought of benevolence (Wohlwollen), and ought of an ideal or perfection (Vollkommenheit). Dilthey revisits this tripartite schema in the  essay “The Structural Nexus of Knowledge” (GS :  / SW III: –). Dilthey had introduced the language of “life-categories” earlier, in draft material for what would have been Book Six of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, composed in the early s (GS :  / SW I: ). But, as noted above, the  Habilitationsschrift already contains the idea of forms of synthesis at work in the practical domain.



 

organism such as pleasure and pain (GS :  / SW II: ). As already described in the  System of Ethics, life involves a dynamic and purposive structure that tends toward the realization of stability or equilibrium (GS :  / SW II: ) and that employs a group of “lifecategories” in bringing this about. But, this stability or equilibrium is also balanced by what he calls in the  Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology the “fullness of life,” or “the richness of the actuality of life as felt by us” (GS :  / SW II: ). This dynamic process unfolds through experience (Erfahrung), an inductive learning process that involves responding to momentary experiences (Erlebnissen) with the formation and revision of “a unified ideal of life” (GS :  / SW II: ). In “Life and Cognition,” Dilthey singles out the categories of “essence, essentiality, meaning and sense,” “value,” and “ends and means” (GS :  / SW II: ). The role of “essentiality” is captured by the observation that “[l]ife itself forces us to distinguish between what matters, what is decisive and primordially powerful in life, and what can be dispensed with without loss to our present fullness of life” (GS :  / SW II: –). Dilthey stresses how this generic form of essentiality can be articulated in various ways by different individuals, or even by the same individual at different stages of her life. Examples include the satisfaction of powerful sensual drives, “the constant intensification of the whole of psychic life, which is evoked through honor, pride, and great mental achievements,” the “still, calm, but quite lasting satisfaction, utterly shaken by nothing, that comes with fulfilled duty.” The point is not that there is a universally valid notion of what is essential. Rather, Dilthey is pointing out that for everyone, whether she knows it or not, something or other is essential to her (GS :  / SW II: ). Essentiality is a category that serves to organize and unify experience and that emerges over the course of psychological development; articulating its function and basic contours is not a matter of providing a transcendental deduction, but rather of





In the  Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, Dilthey explicitly links categories like “value” and “purpose” to this teleological structure. Psychic life undergoes development, simply because there is “a sense of purposiveness and value providing a certain tendency to drive it forward” (GS :  / SW II: ) – the goal of this striving is stability or equilibrium. He goes on to specify the idea here with historical references: “what the Stoics, Hobbes, and Spinoza have termed the drive for self-preservation or self-enhancement, understood as a striving to fulfill emotional states, or one’s life, or to develop one’s powers and drives. Inhibiting situations involve a feeling of oppression that regularly produces a striving to emancipate oneself” (GS :  / SW II: ). In a late text, Dilthey describes this process as “induction,” and stresses the revisability and corrigibility of value-judgments, goal setting, and the like (GS : – / SW III: –).

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



observing and analyzing the developmental process within typical individuals. In later texts, Dilthey’s terminology shifts, and much of the synthesizing work here ascribed to “essentiality” is ascribed to the category of “meaning” (Bedeutung). The main point, namely that “each life-unit comes to terms with itself by delineating a spectrum of interests from a central point to more peripheral interests on all sides” is retained (GS :  / SW II: ). “Life and Cognition” introduces other categories that concern the relation that “the milieu of objects has to this living core of our being” (GS :  / SW II: ), as well as categories of end or purpose and means (GS :  / SW II: ). In draft material dated to around , Dilthey revisits the importance of what he calls “real categories,” such as “meaning, value, sense, and purpose” in constituting the “intelligibility of practical life” (GS :  / SW III: –), something that is particularly apparent in autobiographical narratives, such as those of Augustine, Rousseau, and Goethe. Moments of life are connected and rendered intelligible in terms of such categories, which are (as the chosen examples illustrate), clearly variable in terms of their actual content – i.e., what functions as “meaning” or “purpose” in Augustine’s autobiographical narrative is clearly different from what we find in Rousseau or Goethe. Again, Dilthey explicitly draws out the pluralistic consequences of these observations: Each life has its own sense. It consists in a meaning-context in which every remembered present possesses an intrinsic value, and yet, through the nexus of memory, it is also related to the sense of the whole. This sense of individual human existence is unique and cannot be fathomed by conceptual cognition; yet, in its way, like a Leibnizian monad, it represents the historical universe. (GS :  / SW III: )

Prior to the explicit attempt at self-understanding represented in great works of autobiography, there is already a process of synthesis in which categories like “worth” and “meaning” furnish the connecting links (GS :  / SW III: ). Pace Kantian apriorism, these categories are 

 

This category of “essentiality” also shows up in the Ideas of . Individual processes and facts of mental life show up “as bearing different degrees of value for the life-nexus as a whole. Thus, within inner apprehension itself, the essential stands out from the inessential” (GS :  / SW II: ). See, for example, his discussion of meaning in the draft study “The Delimitation of the Human Sciences” (GS : – / SW III: –). Dilthey goes on to write: “What is it then, that constitutes a connectedness in the examination of one’s own life-course, and links the parts into a whole in which life attains understanding? The understanding of life requires, in addition to the general categories of thought, those of value, purpose, and meaning” (GS :  / SW III: ).



 

“not the kinds of form that are imposed on [life], but the structural forms of life itself in its temporal flow” (GS :  / SW III: ). This is reiterated in a later draft text: “it is decisive that these categories are not applied to life a priori as from the outside, but that they lie in the very nature of life” (GS :  / SW III: ). It will be recalled that this point had already been stressed in the  Habilitationsschrift. There, while Dilthey is willing to adopt the form / matter distinction as a kind of heuristic, he nevertheless argues that the impasses of ethical theory can only be overcome by abandoning the assumption that reason (or formative spontaneity) and affective “matter” are heterogeneous. Given the temporality of life, the synthesis of the parts of life into an intelligible whole through categories like meaning is never fully complete, since it is only at the end of a life or at the end of history that all of the parts have, as it were, fallen into place. Thus, within an individual’s life, it is a “life-plan” that “expresses a certain take on the meaning of life” and so allows for connections to be formed (GS :  / SW III: ). Returning to “Life and Cognition,” it is important to highlight Dilthey’s insistence that self-reflective inquiry into these categories must forgo the ultimately monistic philosophical urge for “regulating the consciousness of meaning,” “regimenting” it, “disciplining” it (GS :  / SW II: ) via a “final omnirational system” (GS :  / SW II: ). Dilthey’s pluralistic alternative is apparent in a number of passages from closely related texts, such as the comments on autobiography cited above. One of the more striking of these comes from the  Ideas, in the midst of a richly detailed description of the process of personality formation. Dilthey writes: Each epoch of life contains within itself an independent value. Each such epoch is capable of being fulfilled with vital feelings that intensify and expand its existence in a way that corresponds to its specific conditions. Indeed, the most perfect life would be one in which each moment is filled with the feeling for its independent value. (GS : – / SW II: )

It is important to recall, however, that this formative process is conditioned by a striving for stability and equilibrium, and that the practical categories that organize life into something intelligible are embedded in this functional totality. Thus, the formation of the person likewise gives 

In a passage from the later work The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences Dilthey makes a similar point about history as a whole that invokes Ranke’s historicism: “Ranke locates the sense, meaning, and value of eras and nations in themselves. They are, as it were, centered in themselves. In [his works], historical reality is never measured by an unconditional value or purpose or by a basic idea” (GS :  / SW III: ). Dilthey’s use of the qualification “unconditional” here signals his distance from Kant.

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory



rise to a “governing complex of ideas and of a well-articulated intellectual organization, which can continue to consolidate the gestalt [sic] of psychic life,” a “stable psychic nexus” that has a kind of resilience to it (GS : – / SW II: ). Indeed, in other texts, Dilthey seems to emphasize the importance of unity and stability over against the “fullness” that he cites in the previously referenced passage from the  Ideas. For example, in Ch.  of the “Breslau Draft,” composed in the early s, he writes that “[t]he pinnacle of human development is attained when the inwardness of the individual guides and shapes his perceptions and controls his actions at every moment. This occurs in the artist, the scientist, and the ethical type” (GS :  / SW I: –), a state that he goes on to describe as “freedom” (GS :  / SW I ). This stable structure is the expression or actualization of synthetic and spontaneous activity that the German Idealist tradition had ascribed to reason (GS :  / SW II: ). But, in an important departure from the intellectualism of this tradition, Dilthey does not make the same attribution at all. Pure practical reason has been dethroned in favor of a “system of drives and feelings.” Here, in the  Ideas, Dilthey is keen to highlight this difference: The defect, however, of transcendental philosophy was to start by looking for what is progressive and creative in abstract intellectual processes. Only then and quite separately did it analyze the other aspect of human nature. By contrast, we begin with the overall structural nexus. Indeed, it is this nexus that produces the purposiveness of the inner form of life. (GS :  / SW II: )

This anti-intellectualistic outlook is also apparent in several late texts on logic. Dilthey explains that logic investigates “regularity” (Regelmäßigkeit), i.e., various ways in which experiences are organized and rendered intelligible; crucially, this investigation is not limited to perception or cognition, but also takes in affect and volition (GS : ). The critique of intellectualism also surfaces in a related text (dubbed the Sommerredaktion by its editors), in which the “fundamental error [Grundfehler] of German philosophy since Wolff and Kant” is taken to be the “overestimation of the systematic” (GS : ). This is not to say that Dilthey is an irrationalist; his whole conception of the life-categories, including practical categories like value, rests on the recognition that “thought” (Denken) pervades life. Indeed, the developmental process that forms ethical life involves the constant correction and revision of “immediate value-determinations” found in feelings and drives. “Thought is continually at work in the midst of life, which means in the midst of the origination of valuedeterminations and of striving for goods” (GS : ). Multiple layers of



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synthetic activity are at work that collectively form ethical life as an intelligible totality. These include the “estimation” (Abschätzen) of values, the “prioritization” (Vorziehen) or ranking of goods, and the “derivation” (Ableitung) of maxims, rules, and guidelines (GS : ). Just as Kant’s theory of categories works backwards, as it were, from forms of judgment to “functions of thought,” so Dilthey aims to uncover a “foundational domain” that accounts for the formation of ethical life. The key difference is that Dilthey wants to dispense with any a priori scheme of classification, and instead pursue the actual “development in which the forms differentiate themselves and assume an ever more complex shape” (GS : ). In addition to essentiality and meaning, one of the most important of these forms is value. Already in draft material from the early s for what would have become Book Six of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey devotes considerable attention to the category of value. While Dilthey insists that there are indeed “[v]alues superior to the individual,” he characteristically eschews metaphysical hypostatization. Objective values exist as “facts of consciousness,” as ways in which our actual experience is organized and rendered intelligible in a way that is entirely accessible to psychological and historical reflection, “without recourse to any kind of metaphysics” (GS :  / SW I: ). There are values that transcend individual self-interest, and history shows not only that this is so, but also provides us with insight into how such values function, relate to one another, and develop over time. This is, for Dilthey, all the “objectivity” that they need to have. He returns to this issue of nonmetaphysical objectivity in a group of later texts that explore the “founding” (Fundierung) of value judgments in experience (GS : –). A value-attitude (Wertverhalten) is not  



It is a striking lacuna in Otto Bollnow’s (, –) otherwise perspicuous account of the “life-categories” that he does not include value at all. We read in this draft material, for example, that “[t]he value of a content apart from the volitional processes or feelings in consciousness where it appears is of course a metaphysical fiction, as much as the color blue is, considered apart from optic nerves” (GS :  / SW I: ). This position remains unchanged several decades later in texts on value theory. For example, in the Sommerredaktion, Dilthey insists that values “that are not felt,” or “feelings that do not belong within the conditions of life,” are “idle dreams” (GS : –). Thus, Dilthey objects to a kind of Platonizing tendency in value theory, which he associates in this case with Franz Brentano. He writes that a theory that ignores the origin of ethical evaluation in the analysis of the actual relations of individual contents to our feelings about them is objectionable for several reasons. It does not explain the power of our ethical motives. It does not explain the different ways in which this power can express itself. It contains no explanation of validity, for universal validity in this sphere can be the product of development just as in other spheres (GS :  / SW I: )

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necessarily a stable outlook; it can be revised, rejected, or modified on the basis of its aptness or appropriateness. This, however, presupposes that there is something in the object like a disposition to evoke, in lived experience, a particular value-attitude (GS : –). Dilthey does not, however, infer from this that value judgments that are founded in this way can pretend to any kind of ultimate objective validity. Instead, more immediate judgments of value can be refined, deepened, and corrected by life-experience, in which the immediate experiences of the individual receive a crucial supplement from the judgments of others and from history. The human sciences have a particular importance in this regard. All determinations of value are based upon “different types of positive or affirmative attitudes in our affective life” (GS : ). In keeping with Dilthey’s general suspicion of monism, he argues in these later texts that these positive or affirmative attitudes cannot simply be reduced to “pleasure” (GS : ; cf. GS : ). The object of these attitudes can be characteristics or capacities of the self, as well as external things. Indeed, in describing the process whereby life-experience refines and corrects these attitudes, Dilthey tends to highlight a developmental shift away from a focus on objects and toward a recognition of the value of the person (GS : –; cf. GS : ). In the Sommerredaktion, the central phenomenon for Dilthey is the experience of “overwhelming” (u¨berwältigen) value, of something that outstrips other valuable things or states of the self in a way that allows a person to experience “what he truly [eigentlich] is,” and that forms the basis of the “meaning” (Bedeutung) of an individual’s life (GS : ; cf. GS : –). Dilthey stresses that such affirmative attitudes come in degrees and that the existence of qualitative differences entails that the estimation of value cannot proceed in a straightforwardly additive manner, through “summing up” (Summierung) (GS : –). Dilthey elsewhere argues that basic life-values are fundamentally incommensurable (GS : –; cf. GS : ). Dilthey explicitly denies that there is any objectively valid criterion for evaluating the “moments of life,” or for determining the “meaning of life” as a whole. Each individual constructs her own concept of the “normative person” (Normalmenschen) in a different way. All such conceptions are, moreover, historically situated, and reflect social processes such 

Dilthey writes that “[t]he theory of value has in this respect a particular significance for the further development of the human sciences, since they illuminate [aufklärt] consciousness about founding in this domain, and thus also improve the determination of value in practical life, historical writing, etc.” (GS : ).

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as authoritative ratification. Indeed, few people are immune to the influences of public opinion, of the “conceptions of honor of their class or their nation,” in this regard (GS : ). This is not to say that Dilthey thinks value is somehow merely a social construction entirely determined by historical forces. Both individuals and even whole societies can pass through critical moments and periods of reflection in which the “sovereignty of thought” asserts itself, and that “enhance the capacity for an individual determination of life-values for the personality” (GS : ). Indeed, “[t]he famous revaluation of all values [Umwertung aller Werte] is constantly underway in society” (GS : ). The interaction between individual life-experience, which involves the revision of particular evaluations and of situational judgments, and the pressure exerted by others’ evaluations and judgments, gives rise to a striving for evaluations and judgments that are somehow untainted by subjective idiosyncrasy (GS : ). “We are, as it were, ashamed of our individuality, which shows its peculiar power in the bestowal of value, since our own limitations are thereby made apparent” (GS : ). Yet, Dilthey characterizes the striving that is thus engendered as an Irrfahrt. “We construct a normative person: a fiction that contradicts the evident claim that each possesses his own value [Eigenwert] and that only value criteria that are contained in one’s own feeling exist” (GS : –). Metaphysics is the hypertrophy of this striving. The same Kantian skepticism regarding metaphysics as a purely theoretical enterprise applies also to the metaphysics of value or of the Good (GS : –). In a series of late texts, composed beginning in , Dilthey’s value pluralism once again emerges quite clearly. In his discussion of the “founding” of value judgments in experience, Dilthey examines how value is ascribed to various characteristics and capacities of a subject (GS : –). Some of these have a kind of “effective” or, we might say, instrumental value; that is, they are valuable because they help to bring about or aid in the acquisition of some valuable state of affairs or object. But, they can also be valued in a different way. In actualizing our capacities, we can experience a kind of elevated or heightened awareness of ourselves (GS : ). The capacity that is being actualized endures independently of variations in the “milieu” (Umgebung) of objects. To this extent, what Dilthey here calls the “sphere of creation” (des Schaffens) remains “open,” and the personality takes on a kind of “absolute value.” Perhaps most interestingly, Dilthey argues that it would simply contradict experience to restrict this absolute value to the “moral” (GS : ). For Dilthey, it is simply not the case, as it is for Kant, that the only absolutely

Dilthey’s Ethical Theory

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or unconditionally good thing is the good will. Instead, the autonomous creative power of the person encompasses the moral will and more besides (GS : ). In another late text, Dilthey speaks of “values [plural] of personality,” and argues these cannot be reduced to a single value, as in the Kantian “doctrine” of the moral value of the person (GS : ).

 Concluding Observations Given its aims and subject matter, it is not surprising that Dilthey’s project of a “critique of historical reason” encompasses ethical theory at its very foundations. What is surprising is that Dilthey’s ethical theory has received little scholarly attention, particularly in recent years. I have certainly not done justice to the full scope of Dilthey’s work in this domain here. I have only brushed up against the deeply personalistic moral vision that Dilthey championed throughout his life, and that forms the central motivation for some of his most widely read works. Much more needs to be said about Dilthey’s analyses of value judgment, of norms and imperatives, and of practical rationality, which both overlap and diverge from theories developed by luminaries like Brentano, Husserl, and Meinong. A comparison of Dilthey’s ethical theory with that of some of the founding figures in the Anglo-American “analytic” tradition (Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross) likewise holds much promise. What I have argued here is that scholars who take Dilthey seriously need to pay serious attention to his ethical theory. His writings in this area form the crucible and the proving ground for some of his key ideas. But, philosophers who are interested in understanding ethical life in its historical complexity should also pay attention to Dilthey. His antiintellectualistic and broadly empirical approach to ethical theory marks him off from the more “orthodox” Kantian tradition in important ways. Those who, like Dilthey, admire Kant’s achievement but are dissatisfied with some elements of his practical philosophy, should find in Dilthey an ally in the endeavor to understand ethical life. Dilthey shifts focus away from the provision of normative theory and toward an examination of the formation of ethical or practical life as an intelligible domain of human activity. In so doing, Dilthey mounts a compelling case on behalf of a pluralistic and ultimately more satisfying understanding of how individuals organize their lives in meaningful and valuable ways.

 

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews Nicolas de Warren

I see the goal. If I am waylaid on the road, so I hope that my young companions, my students, shall finish the journey.

– Dilthey (GS : )

 The School of Athens On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in , Wilhelm Dilthey delivered at the University of Berlin a short talk recalling the formative influences on his intellectual development in which he evoked his still nascent theory of “historical worldview” (geschichtliche Weltanschauung) and the “anarchy of convictions” that historically plagued and continued to threaten the human aspiration toward objective knowledge and emancipatory freedom. This aspiration characterizes for Dilthey the essence of philosophy in its reach toward an unified worldview that would overcome the relativism of conflicting perspectives on the world as well as resolve a basic antimony between the historical character of human experience and the imperative of having the world in view through an universal form of knowing. This reconciliation of history and philosophy must neither reject the situated character of philosophical categories nor abandon the universality of reason, but take instead the form of a critique of historical reason. Dilthey’s proposed “philosophy of philosophy” was not merely an intellectual theory, to wit, the theory of Weltanschauung he would progressively formulate during the final years of his life. As a worldview in its own right, his envisioned “philosophy of philosophy” sprung from his own personal orientation toward the world and individual “feeling of life,” and although this motivating source of life for his philosophical thinking does not preclude, indeed, requires, conceptual articulation, it was an existential attunement that originally spoke to him in the intimacy of a dream. Much as with Descartes’ sequence of dreams in  that first implanted in his mind the “marvelous idea of a universal science,” Dilthey recounts to his 

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews

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audience a dream he had ten years earlier in which his vision of philosophy, as crystallized in his theory of worldviews, first took hold of his thinking. That Dilthey takes this opportunity to make known in public the defining dream of his late philosophical thinking stages his own selffashioning as a “great personality,” whose cultural prestige and power resides in the capacity of communicative inspiration. As Dilthey remarks elsewhere: How great is the power of a great personality to make a worldview credible! It does not seem to work there only as a force that affects foreign souls, which it touches: due to the vitality from which worldviews spring, we are seized; in ourselves something must be resonate and come before us: the depths of our being, which otherwise sleeps, is raised to a level of reflection. (GS : )

Dilthey underlines in his talk how this celebratory recollection of his intellectual formation is pervaded by a spirit of gratitude toward his teachers and mentors. This expression of gratitude extends to the present, to the circle of students and colleagues gathered before him, as well as to his own historical epoch. As he confides, he feels blessed to have experienced the fulfillment of the desire of his youth (he was born in ), the unification of “our beloved German Nation and the freer shaping of its orderings of life” (unserer geliebten deutschen Nation und die freiere Gestaltung ihrer Lebensordnungen) (GS : ). This conjunction of the unification of Germany with Dilthey’s own philosophical evolution toward his theory of worldviews makes his philosophical dream even more redolent with the historical promise of his times, standing at the gateway of a new century for an unified German nation in the making. Such a conjunction of the personal and the historical reflects the twofold significance of Bildung, individual and collective, that directed German philosophical consciousness since Fichte. As revealingly, it attests to the supreme cultural import ascribed to the concept of life, and, more generally, Lebensphilosophie, in Wilhelmine Germany. In this gathering of students and colleagues, this “philosophical symposium,” as he calls it, Dilthey offers his philosophical dream for the purpose of instilling an “attunement of life” (Lebenstimmung) through which his own systematic theory of worldview can gain life in others. Dilthey’s dream-vision is a twofold communication: as Dilthey’s own dream experience, it communicates a vision of the world to his individual consciousness from the depths of his own life; as a dream-vision presented to his students

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and colleagues, it communicates a philosophical worldview to the lives of others from Dilthey’s own consciousness, now awoken to itself. As with Descartes’ dream, philosophical thought begins as an awaking of life to itself. According to Dilthey’s narration of his dream, arriving on a warm summer evening at the castle of his friend Graf Yorck von Wartenburg in Klein-Oels, Lower Silesia (located today in Poland, Oleśnica Mała), he enjoys pleasant conversation extending late into the night. As he retires to bed with his mind still invigorated by the evening’s discussion, he admires a print hung above his bed of Raphael’s The School of Athens. This idealized depiction of Greek thinkers sends Dilthey into an aesthetic reverie. He is struck by the “harmonious spirit of the divine Raphael’s” representation of peaceful discussion among different philosophical schools. The Classical idea of rationality as the harmony of the whole is here portrayed in the communitarian spirit of philosophical debate. Raphael’s painting shapes a philosophical vision in Dilthey’s dream-reverie as an alternative to the “struggle of life and death among systems” that historically characterizes philosophical confrontation. With peace of mind, Dilthey (in his dream) falls asleep, but is immediately perturbed by a nightmare. The harmony of Raphael’s School of Athens mutates into a “temple of philosophers” filled with personalities from the history of philosophy: Bruno, Descartes, Leibniz, and others. The walls of the temple suddenly give way to an open field in which Greek philosophers now appear. More historical figures enter the scene. In another mutation, which, as Dilthey recalls, took him by surprise even in his dream, this gathering of philosophers begins to spontaneously divide into distinct camps: to one side, gathered around Archimedes and Ptolemy, emerges the camp of materialist and positivist thinkers, who seek to understand the world in terms of causal relations and natural laws; in the middle, where Socrates and Plato stand, emerges the camp of the idealists of freedom and personality; a third camp forms around Pythagoras and Heraclitus, who first gained insight into the divine harmony of the universe, and who are joined by Hegel and Schelling “walking hand in hand.” Dilthey is taken by this third group’s cosmopolitanism in which thinkers from “all nations are gathered.” As the crowning personality of these like-minded enlightened spirits, Dilthey beholds the majestic appearance of Goethe along with a retinue of his fictional characters (Faust, Wilhelm Meister, etc.). Confronted with these philosophical camps, Dilthey succumbs to “a peculiar anxiety” (eine seltsame Angst). He shuttles to and fro, moving from one camp to the next, as he feels the solid ground receding

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from under his feet. He senses that a “terrible and antagonistic [feindliche] alienation” separates these philosophical outlooks. His anxiety is quickened by a vertiginous multiplication of philosophy into philosophies that strikes at “the unity of his own being.” As with Descartes, who, in one of his dreams, is spun around and pushed back and forth by a strong wind as he searches for shelter, Dilthey experiences in his dream a complete loss of bearing and crisis of identity. Quod vitae sectabor iter? This maelstrom of doubt transforms into a grotesque carnival of metaphysical phantoms in which philosophical, religious, and aesthetic worldviews appear together in perpetual and unresolvable conflict. As Dilthey recounts: “This immense, incomprehensible, unfathomable universe is reflected in many ways in religious visionaries, in poets, and in philosophy” (GS : ). This “immeasurable” and “ungraspable” universe offers a vivid image of the “terrible anarchy of thinking” emerging from the historical character of worldviews as relative, finite, and contingent. Different worldviews – religious, artistic, and philosophical – succeed each other over the course of history, each a particular – and hence incomplete – perspective on the world. As the stage for the “anarchy of thinking,” history is this nightmare from which Dilthey is trying to awake. The form of this awakening is suggested to Dilthey in a reflection within his dream (or, one might surmise, a retrospective reflection on his dream). As with the structural sequence of Descartes’ dreams, Dilthey’s dream experience progresses from vision to nightmare to revelation. What is revealed to Dilthey is a fundamental tension between the historically relative character of worldviews and the metaphysical drive to achieve an encompassing view of the world and form of life in truth. This drive expresses itself in three types of worldviews: philosophy, religion, and art. Although each type of worldview offers a solution to “the enigma of the world and life,” only philosophy promises a solution with a universal form of knowing. This form of knowledge cannot be opposed to historical consciousness, but must fathom the conditions for historical consciousness, its different types of worldviews, and their structural composition. Philosophy must become inflected by historical consciousness and transform itself in a critique of historical reason. By the same token, philosophy must provide a foundation for the human sciences, and thus abandon its own isolation in a twofold sense: isolation from historical consciousness as well as isolation from other human sciences. As Dilthey states: “But the time seems to me to be coming to an end, when there was still a separate philosophy of art or religion, of law or of the state” (GS : ). In this interdisciplinary mold, philosophy must lead humanity toward an apprehension of the whole of human

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experience as historical. This aim is not merely theoretical, but imminently practical, since philosophical knowledge aims at a decision concerning the enigma of life. Such were the ideas that crisscrossed his mind as he finally fell asleep, gazing upwards to the “starry heaven above,” as dawn gave first light. As Dilthey concludes: “Yes, my friends, let us strive for the light, towards freedom and the beauty of existence” (GS : ).

 Hope of Our Times There is something powerfully utopic in Dilthey’s dream, then as now. At the beginning of our own century, Marjorie Garber () sees in Dilthey’s dream an “interdisciplinary moment in which everything in intellectual life is in the process of being discussed, negotiated and remade – where the artist is present to watch and participate” (). As with Dilthey’s fascination with Raphael’s School of Athens, Garber considers Dilthey’s dream as representing the cultural life of the mind as a “Great Conversation” spanning time and place; it is an image of intellectual life as the prototypical model of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace; and it presents the ideal thinker as philosopher, artist, scientist, and visionary, as with the polymath Goethe who crowns the “objective idealists” in Dilthey’s three types of metaphysical worldviews. Although Garber looks to this dream-vision for the purpose of addressing contemporary debates in the humanities, it was in this same spirit of fostering an interdisciplinary “great conversation” that Dilthey published in  a programmatic exposition of his philosophical dream-vision, Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen, in a collaborative volume of essays justly entitled Weltanschauung. As Dilthey’s last publication (he died in October ), it effectively stands as his philosophical last testament. As the opening text for a collection of leading figures from German academic life on the theme of Weltanschauung, it equally functions as a philosophical declaration of a “school,” where what binds its members together is neither a predetermined doctrine nor a particular discipline, but a shared concern and vocabulary for the problem of worldviews. A veritable “who’s who” of German academia, the list of illustrious contributors is ample evidence of Dilthey’s intellectual status at the beginning of the twentieth century: Bernhard Groethuysen and Georg Misch, Dilthey students who would begin editing his collected works in s; the Marburg Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp; the sociologist Georg Simmel; Paul Deussen, Nietzsche’s friend and acclaimed Indologist; the influential Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch; the cosmopolitan

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philosopher-aristocrat Hermann Graf Keyserling; the Kant scholar Erich Adickes; philosophers Karl Joël and Eduard Spranger (also a Dilthey student); the biologist Hans Driesch; the botanist and world-explorer Julius von Wiesner; the mathematician Hermann Schwarz; theologians Georg Wobbermin and Julius Kaftan; the philosopher of religion Carl Gu¨ttler; the Protestant minister Arthur Bonus; and the politician, writer, journalist, and self-professed anarchist Bruno Wille. This “School of Berlin” is neither a place nor a creed, but as with Raphael’s School of Athens, an utopic polis of philosophical conversation and commitment. The editor of the volume and Dilthey student, Max Frischeisen-Köhler outlines in his Introduction the ambition of this collection in a manner that anticipates the main tenets of Dilthey’s lead contribution while rendering more transparent how the problem of Weltanschauung responds to the crisis of the historical present. As Frischeisen-Köhler () announces: “The essays united in this volume seek to serve the effort of our time to achieve a uniform consideration of the world and consideration of life” (ix). This collective service to “our times” seeks from multiple perspectives to reinvigorate “metaphysical and religious problems” that have been deemed obsolete and surpassed by the scientific progress of the nineteenth century. As made clear from these introductory reflections, the motivation behind the concept of worldview is cultural as well as theoretical. As Frischeisen-Köhler argues, neither the “French Enlightenment,” “English Positivism,” or “German Criticism” have been successful in uprooting the need for metaphysical reflection from the existential ground of life, even if these philosophical movements stridently reject the primacy and meaning of metaphysical concerns. This metaphysical need is even more pronounced with the increasing fragmentation of modern life as manifest in culture and the sciences. In both instances, an encompassing sense of unity and unified significance of the whole is lacking. Neither modern culture nor the modern sciences speak to the inner depths of life, which, on this account, is shaped by a fundamental need for a sense of being in the world informed by “a total knowledge of the configuration of things” (einer Gesamterkenntnis des Zusammenhangs der Dinge). One can only be at home in the world in the having of the world as a totality. With this stated ambition for an unified worldview, the publication of Dilthey’s Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen in the collected volume Weltanschauung marks a high point in the philosophical and cultural proliferation of the concept of Weltanschauung (Glatz , ; see also Ermath , ff.). Although his theory of worldviews blossoms late in Dilthey’s intellectual



  

development, it remains to this day one of his most recognizable philosophical contributions, exercising a diverse influence on Jaspers, Scheler, Simmel, Weber, Franz Boas, and others. Ortega y Gasset () considered Dilthey “the most important philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century” (). R. G. Collingwood () dubbed Dilthey that “lonely and neglected genius” (). Dilthey’s philosophical theory of worldviews was, however, as much contested as it was influential, most trenchantly by Husserl in his essay “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” and still remains the object of considerable doubts and reservations, given its perceived irremediable subjectivism and relativism. The term Weltanschauung was first coined by Kant and enjoyed wide circulation in academic and cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century. Even today, the expressions “my philosophy” or “one’s philosophy” designate an encompassing outlook on the world based on fundamental assumptions of value. This general meaning of the term Weltanschauung was already firmly established in German dictionaries and lexicons during the final decades of the nineteenth century. The Meyers KonversationsLexikon of , for example, defines Weltanschauung as the totality of the views that one entertains about the nature and meaning of the whole world (including humankind) . . . In the narrower sense, one understands by worldview also a unified conception of merely human things, that is, a coherent sum of views concerning the origin, the nature and the destiny of the human, as well as the driving forces and the general direction and ultimate goals of historical life (Meyer ,  [entry Weltanschauung])

The term Weltanschauung was an equally popular fixture within academic discourse, with a veritable explosion of book and lecture titles sporting Weltanschauung at the beginning of the twentieth century. This inflationary presence of the term Weltanschauung provoked a counterreaction of linguistic fatigue and outright derision against its ubiquity. Fritz Mauthner 

 

For a critique of Dilthey’s “totalizing” and Neo-Hegelian conception of history, see Marquard (). Kurt Flasch () takes issue with Dilthey’s “totalizing” conception of history and the subjectivism of Erlebnis; for a critique of Dilthey’s “epistemological Cartesianism,” see Gadamer (, ff.); for a critique of Dilthey’s “psychological variant of transcendental philosophy,” see Schnädelbach (, ff.) – a critique equally advanced by Collingwood (), who observes that Dilthey’s theory of Weltanschauung collapses into “a study of the psychology of philosophers, on the principle that there are certain types of mental structure, and that each type has a certain necessary attitude to, and conception of the world . . . a philosophy handled from this psychological point of view ceases to be philosophy at all” (). For the history of the concept, see Bermes (); Naugle (). For a list of representative titles, see Bermes (, ff.).

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



() in his  Wörterbuch der Philosophie openly mocks its commonplace. In listing countless variations of phrases containing the term “world,” he observes: “Of all these words, none is currently as fashionable as worldview. He would have to be indeed a very poor fellow, he who today would not have his own world view” (Vol. III, –). In his  novel Der Weg ins Freie, Arthur Schnitzler’s protagonist Heinrich dismisses what he calls “the idle talk of worldviews” (Weltanschauungsgerede) and its pretense of sophistication: “For these people Weltanschauung is nothing more than a superior form of staunchness [Gesinnungstu¨chtigkeit] – staunchness in the midst of the infinite, so to speak” (Schnitzler ). This critical reaction to the uses and abuses of the term Weltanschauung increased significantly after World War I during the s and s (Bermes , ff.). The Nazi appropriation of the term Weltanschauung for their tailoring of an ideology of Weltanschaaungskrieg represents a further, albeit ignoble chapter in the storied history of its cultural and philosophical development. In his perceptive The Language of the Third Reich, Klemperer () identifies Weltanschauung as a critical term in the Nazi Lingua Tertii Imperii in observing that “what attracted the LTI to this word was not the idea of it being a translation into German of the foreign word ‘philosophy’ . . . but the all-important anti-thesis of philosophical activity” (). Against this broader historical horizon, the publication of Weltanschauung in  thus stands as a high point in the development of the concept of worldview amidst a mounting suspicion toward Weltanschauungsgerede and an ever-pronounced awareness of modernity’s crisis. Caught between Gerede and Philosophie, the concept of Weltanschauung defines a cultural topos of struggle in its very response to the struggle of how to shape and “think” culture. This theme of struggle more broadly animates Dilthey’s theory of Weltanschauung. Within his own theoretical statement of the “source,” “laws,” and “types” of worldviews, the language of “conflict,” “opposition,” and “struggle” (Streit, Widerstreit, Kampf) is pervasive and arguably exercises a critical role in the composition of his worldview of worldviews, or “philosophy of philosophy.” When seen in its own cultural context, Dilthey’s elevation of Weltanschaaung to a philosophical (read: wissenschaftlich) concept struggles on two fronts: against the dissolution of  

For an extensive survey of the frequency and appearances of the term in publications and lexicons, see Glatz (, ff.). The term “psychological warfare” first entered into English as a translation of Weltanschauungskrieg in . See Simpson (, ff.).



  

Weltanschauung into mere Gerede and against the crisis of philosophy and its loss of “scientific” (wissenschaftlich) identity. It is in this respect all the more revealing of this instability between Gerede and Philosophie inscribed within the term Weltanschauung that Dilthey’s elevation of Weltanschauung to philosophy was critically rejected by Husserl (and others) for precisely devaluing philosophy to a Weltanschauung. Philosophical concepts are often born of the world with an inherited instability to which they inevitably succumb. This is all the more the case for concepts meant to bear within themselves the instability of the world: when literally born of the world to which it bears witness, the life of such a philosophical concept, as with the concept of Weltanschauung, becomes marked from the beginning with an instability of form that both expresses and reflects upon the world it is meant to express.

 Struggle of Worldviews In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant fashioned an image of human thought as a history of incessant conflict. As he famously writes: “the battlefield of these endless controversies is metaphysics.” Different philosophical claims to knowledge of the unconditioned are pitched in unending struggle without any possible hope of achieving unanimity and resolution. Along with the evident political overtones of Kant’s language of sovereignty and legislation (“the tribunal of reason”), this basic metaphor of warfare structures his vision of the history of philosophy as an anarchy within the domain of reason. Kant’s own enterprise of a critique of pure reason is likewise couched in politically suggestive terms. Through the critical project of determining its own proper limits and powers, reason, in the form of a self-critique, submits to a regime of self-legislation and selfdiscipline – the maturity of genuine autonomy. The advent of reason’s autonomy does not abolish conflict among the faculties of reason, but ushers a condition of philosophical perpetual peace and end to an history of reason at war with itself. This Kantian image of metaphysics as a civil war within the state of reason becomes transposed by Dilthey into an image of metaphysics as an struggle of worldviews within the condition of life. Whereas Kant construed the history of metaphysics as the anarchy of reason, for Dilthey, the history of metaphysics is the anarchy of historical forms of life. Most significantly, whereas Kant’s vision of philosophical peace does not suppress conflict within the system of reason, but envisions 

Critique of Pure Reason (Avii–viii).

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



a condition of self-discipline and self-legislation, Dilthey’s vision of a philosophical peace, as with his dream-vision, critically depends on the uniformity of its achieved worldview. In the Introduction, “Über den Widerstreit der Systeme,” to his essay Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen, Dilthey appropriately begins with an evocation of the historical “anarchy of philosophical systems.” The chord of “battle” is struck immediately: “In every age since there have been worldviews, they have excluded and struggled against one other. And there seems to be no signs of hope that one could ever arrive at a decision amongst them” (GS : ). This struggle of worldviews has been the recurring plot of Western thought since its Greek origin and, indeed, of human existence as such. With each successive historical epochs, the clash of worldviews produces a recurrence of skepticism. Much as with Kant, the history of philosophy alternates between dogmatism and skepticism, without any decisive progress. As Dilthey remarks with an allusion to his original dreamvision: “Each of these systems excludes the other, each refutes the other, none can prove itself: nothing of the peaceful conversation in Raphael's School of Athens, which expressed the eclectic tendency of those days, we find in the sources of history” (GS : ). In this sweeping account of the historical anarchy of thinking, Dilthey ascribes a special significance to the nineteenth century. The rapid expansion of knowledge, the diversification of scientific disciplines, and increased encounters with other cultures accelerated the multiplication of worldviews during the nineteenth century. This accelerated relativism became in turn amplified through the emergence of a reflective historical consciousness, or consciousness of worldviews as historically contingent and finite. The nineteenth century represents in this regard a historical turning point. On the one hand, the development of modern historical consciousness “destroys in a more fundamental sense” the basis for any worldview to affirm universally its own validity. Historicism erodes the certainty of historical convictions and the “great philosophical systems” of the past. On the other hand, this modern historical consciousness attains in Dilthey’s thinking a critical form of consciousness that reveals life as the source of historical worldviews. For Dilthey, Kant’s Copernican Revolution is only fully achieved in light of the nineteenth century’s revolution of historical consciousness and his own proposed critique of historical consciousness. With this historical-reflective turn: “Not in the world, but in the human being must philosophy search for the inner configuration of its knowledge” (GS : ).



  

Dilthey’s theory of worldviews attempts to resolve the antinomy between historicity and universality through a philosophical reflection on the conditions for historical life, the different types of worldviews, and their structural composition. Worldviews are sourced from life. Although life expresses itself in the formation of a worldview, it is only through a worldview that life comes into its own as meaningful. Life, or more exactly, “the experience of life” (Lebenserfahrung), is composed of four essential features: temporality, relatedness or configuration (Zusammenhang), objectivation (Objektivation), and reflection (Besinnung). At the psychological level, an individual life is composed of sequences of experiences that are fundamentally temporal. Particular experiences are transitory in nature, yet integrated into an unfolding life as a whole. Past experiences are retained in memory and habit. Future experiences are anticipated and intended. The integrated temporality of life as a whole is structured into mutually implicating relations, not only of various types of psychological experience (perception, imagination, etc.), but as significantly, various aspects of the world as a function of lived-experience. Through regular patterns and stable forms of experiencing, a “general experience of life” emerges from the knitted composition of individual experiences. Life is a lived configuration of configurations: different configurations of relations are integrated into the configuration of life as whole. The term Zusammenhang, here translated as “configuration,” is one of the more recognizable and frequent terms in Dilthey’s thinking that does not admit of any obvious or single translation. The term serves Dilthey in a number of ways: to designate the totality of parts within a whole; the structural relations between parts of a whole; the holistic character of meaning as apprehended in understanding (Verstehen). As Dilthey writes: “We understand only configuration [Zusammenhang]. Configuration and understanding [Verstehen] correspond to each other” (GS : ). Within the knitted patterns of lived-experience, basic types of experiencing – affectivity, cognition, instincts, and volition – structure the configuration of life as a whole. These types of experience are structural relations between consciousness and its environment in terms of which an image of the world (Weltbild) is formed. This individual image of a world becomes integrated into denser configurations of structural relations through tradition, social habits, norms, and cultural values. The individual 

As Michael Lessnoff () notes: “it is the most characteristic and frequent used term in all of his writings . . . its translation into English is neither straightforward nor uniform, since it may refer either to a totality of parts (whole, structure) or to connections between elements” ().

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



self is a configuration of relations with other individuals as well as with their shared environments. In ever-expanding circles, the individual self becomes inscribed within an historical Zeitgeist, community of other individuals, and national identity. A historical epoch’s Zeitgeist refers to the uniform pattern of norms and practices that structure the meaning of objects and goals of collective and individual striving. An individual life exists within a community, without which an understanding of the world would be impossible. As Dilthey remarks: “Every word, every sentence, every gesture or formula of courtesy, every work of art and every historical act is understandable only because a commonality unites what is expressed in them with those who understand it; the individual always experiences, thinks and acts in a sphere of commonality, and only in such a sphere does he understand” (GS : –). National consciousness arguably enjoys an even more prominent role in determining the “atmosphere of life” since Dilthey argues that the unity of an individual consciousness must be integrated into a national consciousness. As he writes: “It is . . . the consciousness of belonging together, of nationality and national feeling, on which the unity of the subject finally rests” (GS : ). National ends are willed as individual ends; experiences of the nation are lived as experiences of the individual, including, as with Dilthey’s own reference to German unification in his  talk, memories of the nation. Nations are unilateral agents of history that develop within their own horizon of self-understanding and destiny. Although worldviews emerge from life, the particular configuration and content of any given worldview is conditioned by natural environments and resources as well as through interactions – political, social, and culture – with other worldviews. Worldviews do not develop in isolation. The basic form of interaction amongst worldviews is struggle, or, more specifically, the struggle for existence. As Dilthey writes: “As the earth is covered by innumerable forms of living beings, between which there is a constant conflict of existence and conflict about space for expansion, so in the human world, forms of worldviews develop and wrestle against each other for power over the soul” (GS : ). This parallel between the struggle of existence among natural species and the struggle of existence among worldviews does not imply a reduction of worldviews to evolutionary biology. On the contrary, Dilthey construes the plurality of worldviews 

As Karl Löwith () argues with respect to Dilthey, the formation of a common experience of reality does not depend primarily on a common environment (Umwelt), but on a common world with others (Mitwelt). It is only in a world with others that a world in common is experienced (ff.).



  

(die Mannigfaltigkeit der Weltanschauungen) as pitched in a perpetual struggle for existence in terms of the cultural system of values in which a given form of life has invested itself. Life strives to achieve “inner solidity” (inner Festigkeit), “security” (Sicherheit), and certainty (Gewissheit) in an encompassing worldview, where the meaning of these crucial terms is epistemological and existential. In having a world in view, life is housed within the world, but by the same token, life becomes at home with itself. As Dilthey writes: “We are at home everywhere in this historical and understood world, we understand sense and significance of this world, we ourselves are interwoven in these similarities” (GS : ). Worldviews are in caught in a struggle for existence where the meaning of “existence” is neither merely biological (survival of species and/or inheritance of genetic traits) nor simply about natural environments. The struggle here at issue is entirely “cultural,” or, in other words, entirely an issue of a worldview as an unilateral valuing of life and anchoring sense of being at home in the world. A worldview elevates life to consciousness of itself in a cognitive form of knowledge, an axiological form of valuing of life (Lebenswu¨rdigung), and in a practical form for the exercise of volition (Willensleistung). The solidity of a worldview is anchored in the investment of life in a basic orientation toward the world that renders the world a space for cognitive, axiological, and practical engagement. A worldview is thus a system of meaning with regard to the questions: what can I know?, what should hope for?, what should I do? Yet, even though these basic questions have their source in life, and hence, in the fundamental question “what is life?,” life nonetheless remains inscrutable. As Dilthey insists, worldviews are not first and foremost cognitively produced. Worldviews are not images in the mind but a configuration, produced through the imagination, in which the mind takes shape and experiences historically. In fact, worldviews are indemonstrable (unbeweisbar) and yet, despite this irrational ground, worldviews are inherently structured by a dominating metaphysical drive (Drang) toward an encompassing, or totalizing, having of the world. This drive toward totalization is comparable in part to Kant’s insight that reason intrinsically tends toward totalizing ideas with the crucial difference that for Dilthey, it is life, and not reason; life’s unilateral drive toward an encompassing having of the world in view is a function of a metaphysical need for certainty (Gewissheit) and security (Sicherheit) in the world (see Berner , ). Through this unilateral self-affirmation and self-aggrandizement as “the true, the beautiful, the good,” worldviews are necessarily in conflict with each other. As Dilthey writes: “The struggle of worldviews amongst each other has reached no decision at any major point. History makes a selection

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



between them, but their dominant figures stand upright side by side, indestructible and without proof” (GS : –). This struggle of worldviews is in turn situated within an existential conflict of life with itself. The sense of struggle that animates the objectivation of life in a worldview is thus twofold: different worldviews struggle for existence against each other; life struggles against itself in the formation of a worldview in which it comes to value and orient itself in the world. The formation of a worldview in its threefold configuration as knowing, valuing, and acting crystallizes within the incandescent light of an existential attunement (Lebensstimmungen) toward what Dilthey calls the enigma of life (das Rätsels des Lebens). Worldviews are attempts to resolve the enigma of life. Under the designation “the enigma of life,” Dilthey understands “incomprehensibility” (Unverständlichkeit) of procreation, birth, development, and – most significantly – death. Life is inscribed within its own irreversible transience. This transience threatens life from within in its defining moments of transition – hence the universality of initiation rituals and ceremonies of passage by which the punctuations of “incomprehensibility” are stabilized and domesticated within symbolic systems of meaning, or worldviews. What presses upon life as its own incomprehensibility is the inevitability of its own transience (Vergänglichkeit) and the horizon of mortality that hangs upon life as an absolute incomprehensibility. In its striving for wholeness, life struggles against its own transience; yet, it is a completeness that necessarily remains elusive. As Dilthey writes: “The attachments to life and the experience grounded in them seek to unite the soul into a whole, yet cannot do so” (GS : ). Worldviews are struggles against death and the transience of life. The fundamental enigma of life revolves around this tragic tension between life’s transience and life’s striving for Festigkeit in the having of the world in view. This tragic dimension of life in struggle with itself represents a more existential form of conflict on the basis of which the conflict of worldviews with each other is pitched. As emerging from an underlying “intuition of life” (Lebensanschauung) and “attunement to life” (Lebensstimmung) toward life’s transience and finitude, a worldview opens a space of meaning in terms of a coordination of questions and answers. As Dilthey writes: “That is the structure of worldviews. What remains confused as the riddle of life, contained as a bundle of tasks, becomes here raised in a conscious and necessary configuration of problems and solutions” (GS : ). 

This suggestion that worldviews are configured as hermeneutical coordinates for questioning and answering would have a strong impact on Gadamer and R. G. Collingwood.



  

The enigma of life can be addressed through this configuration of problems and solutions in terms of a worldview’s structuring ideal of knowledge, sense of highest good, guiding norms for action, and ideal for individual and collective existence. And yet, even if worldviews translate, as it were, the enigma of life into a system of meaning, the primordial conflict of life with itself remains irresolvable (kann nie aufgelöst werden). The tragedy of history revolves around the perpetual struggle of worldviews against each other, each of which fails in a more fundamental sense to domesticate the enigma of life. As Dilthey notes: “This riddle has preoccupied the Egyptian and Babylonian priests as well as today the preaching of the Christian clergy, Heraclitus and Hegel, the Prometheus of Aeschylus as well as Goethe’s Faust” (GS : ). With regard to the enigma of life, Faust’s lament rings true for the entire history of humankind: Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemu¨hn. Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

 War of the Worlds For the destiny of the German Nation,  was an auspicious year. As General Friedrich von Bernhardi (, iii) observed in the preface to his Germany and the Next War: All the patriotic sections of the German people were greatly excited during the summer and autumn of . The conviction lay heavy on all hearts that in the settlement of the Morocco dispute no mere commercial or colonial question of minor importance was being discussed, but that the honour and future of the German nation were at stake . . . Nobody can fail to see that we have reached a crisis in our national and political development. At such times it is necessary to be absolutely clear on three points: the goals to be aimed at, the difficulties to be surmounted, and the sacrifices to be made.

The time of the “glorious future” of “this great civilized nation” would come soon. With the outbreak of Germany’s “next war” in , “the 

“I have, alas, studied philosophy, / Jurisprudence and medicine, too, / And, worst of all, theology / With keen endeavor, through and through / And here I am, for all my lore, / The wretched fool I was before” (translation Walter Kaufmann).

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



goals to be aimed at, the difficulties to be surmounted, and the sacrifices to be made” became even more pressing in their need for clarity and commitment. Along with a historically unprecedented mobilization of men and materiel, the outbreak of war witnessed an unprecedented “spiritual mobilization” of intellectuals, artists, and university professors (see Flasch ; Hoeres ). In Germany especially, this engagement of intellectuals for the purpose of instructing and bolstering public opinion, at home and abroad, reached an unparalleled pitch of intensity. As Emil Lederer () remarked in his  essay “Zur Soziologie des Weltkrieges”: “There is no intellectual or cultural movement in Germany and beyond, which would not have been prepared to serve the war as ideology. Everyone wants to use the war as a source of power” (). Among other precedents, World War I was the first major European conflict emphatically about culture. This intellectual discourse of conflict mobilized two elemental terms within the German imagination, Kultur and Geist, both of which were held together in the configuring idea of Weltanschauung (see Flasch , ). As Werner Sombart formulated in his  Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen: In the age of nation-states and capitalism, the deeper antagonisms, which have come to a head in the great world wars, thus do not lie on the surface. Instead, pure hunger for power or economic interests appear to be the sole reasons for the struggles. These may very well be the driving forces. But one would not get beneath the surface were one not to recognize behind these motives, which are visible to the simplest intelligence as the causes of war in our era – and particularly the holy war that Germany is now fighting against a world of enemies – the deeper antagonisms that are at war; and these are none other than religious antagonisms or, as we say nowadays, Weltanschauung antagonisms. (Sombart , )

Sombart’s construal of the war’s “deepest antagonism” as a struggle of worldviews was not unique, even if his own account of a conflict between “merchants” and “heroes” represents one of its shrillest formulations. Significantly, a host of prominent contributors to the  volume Weltanschauung harnessed their respective philosophical perspectives to the cause of war: Ernst Troeltsch () lectured to thousands in Karlsruhe on the essential characteristic of the German people in December  and enthusiastically urged a “war of culture” (Kulturkrieg); Paul Deussen contributed an article “Unsere Bru¨der im Osten” to the Indian Nationalist journal Pro India published by the pro-German Champakaramen Pillai in Zu¨rich (see Fischer-Tiné ); Paul Natorp authored Der



  

Tag des Deutschen () and numerous articles during the war (see Bruhn ); Karl Joël addressed his fellow Germans from neutral Switzerland in Neue Weltkultur (); Georg Simmel delivered public speeches and published a volume of his wartime texts Der Krieg und did geistigen Entscheidungen () (see Flasch , –); Georg Misch produced Von Geist des Krieges und des deutschen Volkes Barbarei (); and Max Frischeisen-Köhler published Das Problem des ewigen Friedens (). A recurring motif throughout these wartime writings is a vision of the war as promising a fundamental decision, or verdict, concerning a “new world-culture.” As Joël () writes in Neue Weltkultur: “One can only be reconciled with this first and last world war if it is more than a struggle of national interests, that it wants to be in the strongest sense a struggle of cultures” (). In the upheaval of , war became a force that gives us meaning. This transformation of the aspiration of  (“the effort of our times to provide a unified consideration of the world and consideration of life”) into an aspiration for  is exemplified in the war-speeches of Frischeisen-Köhler. In October , Frischeisen-Köhler delivered three lectures at the Verein fu¨r Hochschulkurse von Berliner Hochschullehrern. These lectures were published in book form in  with the title Das Problem des ewigen Friedens. Betrachtungen u¨ber das Wesen und die Bedeutung des Krieges. In the introduction to his lectures, Frischeisen-Köhler () begins by acknowledging the traumatic awareness that this war would be a war unlike any other, “der Krieg aller Kriege.” As Frischeisen-Köhler remarks: “Wir alle fu¨hlen es, dass etwas Ungeheures sich begibt” (, ). In a contemporaneous war-speech, Simmel () speaks of the war as an “absolute situation” (absolute Situation) bringing “life to the brink of a tremendous intensity.” As a “metaphysical event,” the war calls for “an absolute decision” and decisive action concerning “human existence and institutions” as well as “worldviews and concepts of morality (Weltanschauungen und Sittlichkeitsbegriffe)” (Frischeisen-Köhler, , ). In the opening months of the war, causalities suffered on all sides proved to be staggering. In his introduction, written in December , Frischeisen-Köhler addresses the sacrifices already demanded upon the German people. As he writes: “The number of victims devoured by this war is horrendous . . . The streams of blood that are flowing, the nameless misery, the whole expanse of desolate lands, and even whole nations, bringing them to the edge of the abyss, this is not in vain” (, ). Even as he admits that such slaughter is “unforgivable,” it is a war, as he quickly reminds his readers, anticipated by all sides, even if each side desires peace.

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



Moreover, “everyone,” as he continues this line of reasoning, understands that the “external circumstances” that provoked this war, namely, political and economic factors, do not in truth contain its genuine meaning. Despite the political chain of events leading to the declaration of hostilities, the meaning of the war remains inscrutable. It is a question that only future historians will be able to answer. And yet, as Frischeisen-Köhler here argues, even if it proves impossible to grasp in situ the war’s “genuine” meaning or speculate on how war might have been avoided, the fundamental question of whether human beings can ever arrive at a condition of peace still remains pressing. As he asks: “Is the most ancient dream of the peoples, is the Gospel which proclaimed to us that peace should reign on earth for the good of men, never to be fulfilled?” This desire for perpetual peace – the most archaic dream of humanity – is professed by all nations: “Is it possible that, with the present world war, the epoch of human development will be completed, thus marking the supremacy of the victorious type and the anarchy between states?” (). Is this the war to end all wars? Contrary to a possible optimism raised in the title of FrischeisenKöhler’s work and any reinforcement of this expectation through this evocation of the dream of all human dreams, the first lecture “Der Krieg und der Kampf ums Dasein,” with its very title, sets into motion an argumentation against peace and cosmopolitanism that critically hinges on a vision of worldviews as inherently antagonistically creative for life. Perhaps in no other expression of Kriegsphilosophie does Dilthey’s theory of worldview so readily serve a vision of the war as a clash of worldviews, or, to state the same point from the reverse angle of Frischeisen-Köhler’s own argument, does the war come to be so readily seen as an application of Dilthey’s theory of worldviews. This vision of the war centers critically on the constitutive meaning of Kampf ums Dasein for human life and culture. The German expression itself is a translation of Darwin’s interchangeable use of “struggle for life” and “struggle for existence,” and entered into wide circulation in scientific and cultural literature, where it increasingly served to justify war as a biological law of nature (Weingart , ). The dissemination of this metaphor during the final decades of the nineteenth century supported a popular association of militarism with Social Darwinism, or what the Italian historian of science La Vergata () has labeled “War Darwinism.” Klaus Wagner () in his book Krieg speaks of “the great cultural significance of the selective struggle for existence” 

On the source for Darwin’s expression “struggle for existence,” see Bowler ().



  

(quoted in Pick , ). The historian Heinrich von Treitschke writes that “the grandeur of history lies in the perpetual conflict of nations, and it is simply foolish to desire the suppression of their rivalry” (quoted in Pick , ). Although Frischeisen-Köhler joins this chorus of rejecting pacifism and the idea of perpetual peace in advocating for a vision of war in  as a culturally virile Kampf ums Dasein, the form of his argumentation is shaped by a theory of worldview that displaces this essential metaphor from the framework of Social Darwinism. The existential struggle here at stake is neither an issue of biological existence nor racial survival, as, for example, in the writings of Treitschke and Bernhardi. Rather, the struggle of existence of natural species becomes reconfigured conceptually into a struggle for national existence (national Dasein), where the meaning of “national” carries the full weight and force of the “culture creating forces” objectified in a worldview. This position against the “Darwinian militarism of eternal war” pivots in his second lecture, “Der Krieg und die Kultur,” against “Darwinian pacifism of perpetual peace.” The target of this polemic is the notion of culture as the “work of peace” (Friedensarbeit) and the future of Europe as emerging through the cultivation of the arts, the sciences, and commerce. Frischeisen-Köhler gives to this Enlightenment idea of culture as a unifying and cosmopolitan force for the elevation of mankind to a state of peace the etiquette of “culturepacifism.” Such an idea of culture rests on an understanding of the structural configuration (Zusammenhang) between individuals and community in terms of causal-cognitive relations, as opposed to the “affective-experienced relations” that configure “the true communities of life” (den wahrhaften Lebensgemeinschaften) into an organic totality (Frischeisen-Köhler , ). Whereas the first form of “culture” (read: civilization) is “artificial” and allows for the “forgetting of original life,” the second form of culture – veritable Kultur – represents a genuinely national form of existence stemming from the individuality of life. In both of these critiques against “Darwinian militarism” and “Darwinian pacifism,” Frischeisen-Köhler tacitly applies Dilthey’s critique of empirical psychology and the distinction between “explanation” and “understanding.” In both instances, the bite of his critique depends on a rejection of a “causal” and “discrete” notion of structural 



The essential relationship between war and the state has been an established feature of Western conceptions of nationhood since the eighteenth century; see the authoritative study by Jörn Leonhard (). On the biology of war in the nineteenth century, see Pick ().

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



relations (Zusammenhang) and effective relational action (Zusammenwirken). Both forms of Darwinianism, on this account, fall within an empirical and naturalistic form of explanation in contrast to an integration of “understanding” (Verstehen) and “configuration” (Zusammenhang) belonging to a genuinely vibrant and historical Weltanschauung. As with Dilthey’s own statements on “national existence,” culture, when understood in a “genuinely” integrated totality of meaning, is inseparable from the existence of state, or cultural-state (Kulturstaat). This “cultural-state” is in turn unapologetically a “power-state” (Machtstaat). In its drive toward a unified worldview, the cultural-state is animated by a vital force of life that seeks fixity and expansion in space and spirit. Indeed, Frischeisen-Köhler does not shy from declaring that a fundamental drive of life, in its objectification through culture, is to conquer the world (Erorberung der Welt). On this view, having the world in view is itself a conquering of the world. To bring this point home, Frischeisen-Köhler remarks that “even ideas reach into the distance.” This leveraging of the basic elements of Dilthey’s theory of worldview for the purpose of ascribing a culturally constitutive function to Kampf ums Dasein culminates in rejection of any form of “international culture,” world-government (Weltstaat), and cosmopolitan ideal. In a form of argument that anticipates Carl Schmitt’s comparable critique of the League of Nations in the s, Frischeisen-Köhler proposes that any cosmopolitan culture or state would in fact represent the expression of a historically particular culture, and hence a “generalization” of a determinate set of national interests and values (see Schmitt , ff.). In the absence of any “generally” valid “schema” of culture, there are only historical cultures, but no overarching cosmopolitan culture of humanity as such. Any ideal of a world-state would imply a “blindness towards the infinite values which reside in the formation of historical individuals and the plurality (Mannigfaltigkeit) of state- and cultural-forms, in which the free essence of human beings is determined and can impact [the world]” (FrischeisenKöhler , ). A world without conflict and, more specifically, a world without war, would mean a world in which human life, in its vital diversity 

This tailoring of Dilthey’s distinction “explanatory and empirical psychology” and “understanding psychology” returns in explicit form in Frischeisen-Köhler’s () critique of empirical and experimental pedagogy in his “Philosophie und Pädogogik” (Kant-Studien). See Bruch, Graf, and Hu¨binger (). When viewed through his own theory of pedagogy and culture, his  lectures serve as prime examples of his argument that questions of education and teaching (Bildungsfragen) lead toward and hence must make known questions of worldviews (Weltanschauungsfragen). See his later  work Bildung und Weltanschauung. Frischeisen-Köhler’s own wartime engagement as university professor mirrors this weltanschauliche ideal of pedagogy.



  

and free expression, would stiffen into a form of cultural “death” or “stasis.” War is thus not born of a natural necessity or biological imperative for survival, but stems instead, as a “creator of life” (Lebenschöpfer), from the “historical-national life of state-organized peoples” in mutual struggle for recognition and mastery over life. On this image of war as inscribed within the dynamic consolidation of worldviews from and for life, war is not merely an instrument of policy or means to realize political and economic goals. In a striking formulation, Frischeisen-Köhler writes: “One could invert Clausewitz’s famous conceptual definition of war ‘as the pursuit of politics of the state with new means’ into: politics is also a continuation of war with new means” (, ).

 Vergänglichkeit Within Dilthey’s theoretical framework, the concept of Weltanschauung was composed around three elementary statements: the facticity (Faktizität) of life from which worldviews are sourced; the structure of worldviews as the configuration of meaning and understanding (Verstehen); the encompassing or “totalizing” drive of worldviews as a unilateral having of the world in which life is at home. As a manifestation of life, a worldview brings to expression the tension between the transience of life and life’s own surplus of meaning extending to the unconditioned. This drive, or better: openness, toward the unconditioned finds symbolic expression in religion, poetry, and metaphysics, yet remained “absolutely unknowable” (GS VIII, ). Dilthey’s preferred metaphysical form of “objective idealism,” as one of three basic types of metaphysical systems, which he associated with Heraclitus, Schelling, and Goethe (among other historical figures), crystallized around an encompassing intuition of the whole in which the configuration of life would be elevated into a configuration of the world (Erhebung von Lebenzusammenhang in Weltzusammenhang). It represented a metaphysical intuition of immanence beyond the grasp of that “magic word of identity.” As an intuition of “das Unergru¨ndliche” and “das Unfassliche,” it gave form to a fundamental decision about the configuration of life in 

Frischeisen-Köhler glosses Clausewitz’s formula with revealing differences in expression: “as the continuation of state-politics with new means [als der fortgesetzten Staatspolitik mit neuen Mitteln].” Clausewitz’s original statement reads: “War is the mere continuation of politics with other means [Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln].” An inversion of Clausewitz’s formula is also proposed by Foucault (, ff., ff.) in his genealogical analysis of notions of race and class struggle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dilthey’s Dream and the Struggle of Worldviews



the midst of its own transience. Within the “tragic feeling of the restless push of time,” life could envision peace with itself in a metaphysical feeling of being at home in the world. With the advent of , Dilthey’s dream-vision of objective idealism gave way to another dream, or perhaps to the same dream, envisioned once again, but from the engulfing immanence of worlds at war where a form of metaphysical cosmopolitanism would be paradoxically found anew in the absoluteness of facticity in its struggle for existence, its having of the world in view. This war, as Frischeisen-Köhler writes, must lead to a “decision about life and death” (eine Entscheidung u¨ber Leben und Tod). In its destructiveness and danger, war renders more intimate the “correctness of life,” “infinite values,” and “living historical process” in which life has invested itself. War brings home the value and meaning of what we care for in the having of a world in view. War makes national existence great again and the other earth close and near. As he writes: “The infinite and the unconditioned, which receives us everywhere, upon which we depend in every moment of our existence, even if we do not see and feel it, does not approach us as near as in war . . . nowhere is death with its majesty and secret closer” (Frischeisen-Köhler , ). That secret resides in the magical spell by which the contingency, or “facticity,” of a world becomes lived as an absolute and always urgent necessity.

 

A Task Most Pressing Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel and His Rewriting of Modern Aesthetics Kristin Gjesdal “The theory of the novel is the most immediate, and by far the most pressing and important task of contemporary poetics.”

(GS :  / SW V: )

As a philosopher of contemporary culture, Wilhelm Dilthey finds little ground for optimism. In his view, European, and especially German culture finds itself at a crossroads. The sense of a cultural vacuum is widespread. Voicing his concern in the strongest of terms, Dilthey, in “The Three Periods of Modern Aesthetics and its Present Task” (), claims that his is a time of upheaval “unknown since the last days of the Greco-Roman world” (GS :  / SW V: ). However, unlike Hegel, for whom nineteenth-century life-forms implied the end of great art, Dilthey notes that new social forms give rise to new art – most notably that of realist and naturalist literature. Dickens, Balzac, Zola, and Ibsen are names to which he returns. Aestheticians, though, are at a loss when confronting the new literary forms. Weimar classicism, the golden era of German literature and letters, is long gone. The familiar language of idealism will no longer do. A gap has opened up between literature and the culture of which it is a part – and this gap most urgently needs to be bridged. As Dilthey sees it, this is a challenge philosophy presently faces: “It is one of the most vital tasks of contemporary philosophy to reestablish,  

In the following, I will use the term “naturalism” to address naturalist literature (rather than the larger naturalist worldview Dilthey discusses for example in GS : –). As Dilthey puts it, the audience is no longer acquainted with ideal characters such as Iphigenia, Wilhelm Meister, and Lothario, who transcend time and place. . . . Everywhere the natural tendency to elevate the ideally beautiful above common reality – that is, the traditional well-ordered delineation of form – is being sacrificed to the need for uncurtailed, untrammeled reality and truth. What our age finds most important is to see reality, or at least, the desire to see it – the striving to subordinate all of our thought, production and action to it, and to submit our deepest wishes and ideals to its laws. (GS :  / SW V: )



Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



through the further development of aesthetics, the natural relationship among art, criticism, and an engaged public” (GS :  / SW V: ). For Dilthey, however, such a further development need not imply a complete break with past aesthetic models. What is needed, rather, is a reassessment of traditional aesthetics – its history, concepts, and relevance – so as to ignite a discussion of how literature, yet again, can function as an expressive form through which a culture gains credence and selfunderstanding. In the late s and early s, Dilthey, following a strategy plotted in his study of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic system, responds to this challenge by calling for a return to eighteenth-century aestheticians such as Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder. Upon returning to this paradigm – these broader Enlightenment and Sturm und Drang discussions – Dilthey does not seek to rekindle Winckelmann’s Platonism or Lessing’s Aristotelianism, but, rather, what he sees as a shared commitment to a work-oriented methodology and, as he calls it, inductive approach to philosophy of art. At stake, as he argues, is an approach that allows us to combine historical critique and sensitivity to style. This, Dilthey suggests, is the kind of approach that can help us generate meaningful responses to the new literature. As it is closely tied up with his rewriting of the aesthetic tradition, Dilthey’s philosophy of the novel highlights his oft-overlooked reflections on the philosophical, social, and existential challenges of late modernity. Further, an emphasis on the double challenge Dilthey sets himself – that of accounting for the new art by way of a return to older aesthetics and of returning to older aesthetics with a set of new problems in hand – serves to balance a tendency to read his aesthetic contribution only or primarily along the lines of Kant’s transcendental program, whether this is understood as a weakness (as in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reconstruction of modern hermeneutics) or as a strength (as in Rudolf Makkreel’s interpretation).  

 

I discuss Dilthey’s placing of Schleiermacher in the tradition from Herder (indeed, as synthesizing Herderian and Fichtean impulses), in Gjesdal , –. These categories, though, are not exhaustive of Winckelmann’s and Herder’s works. Even a critic like Herder, who rejects the relevance of Winckelmann’s doctrinal history (the term is Winckelmann’s own), admires how Winckelmann, at his best, transcends his Platonism and approaches classical sculpture in a historical and work-oriented way (see Herder , vol. I, ). In a similar way, Herder criticizes Lessing, but also expresses admiration for his work (Herder – , vol. II, – / , ). This partly explains the affinity with Herder and his methodology, which Dilthey draws on and endorses. See, for instance, GS : – / SW I: –. Thus my discussion here only covers Dilthey’s use of these aesthetic models, not the question as to whether he is justified in reading Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder in this manner, though I am by and large sympathetic to his approach.



 

 New Life, New Art In spite of his suggestion, quoted at the opening of this chapter, that “[t]he theory of the novel is the most immediate, and by far the most pressing and important task of contemporary poetics,” Dilthey’s philosophy of the novel has not received much attention in nineteenth-century scholarship. From the side of aesthetics, likewise, philosophy of the novel is typically associated with Georg Lukács’ contribution, and Dilthey’s name is hardly brought up. Dilthey, though, discusses (or at least touches on) the modern novel in virtually all his contributions to aesthetics throughout the s and s. Moreover, between  and , he wrote book reviews and magazine articles published under the pseudonyms of Wilhelm Hoffner, Karl Elkan, and W. von Kleist. Dilthey even published a short novel (under the pseudonym Friedrich Welden). With reference to writers from Dickens to Ibsen, he sought to understand the new literature – its historical mandate and aesthetic implications – and to analyze its reception in the German-speaking world. In “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics” – a text that opens with a quotation from Schiller asking Goethe if the demand for beauty must now give way to that of truth (GS :  / SW V: ) – Dilthey makes it clear that he is no unconditional supporter of the new literary forms. While he clearly appreciates the realist contributions of Balzac and Dickens, it seems that Zola, Ibsen, and the naturalist movement prove too much for him. Yet, he maintains that “a few displeasing works of art produced by this new moment should not make aesthetics blind or deaf to its legitimacy” (GS :  / SW V: ). He thus sets out to discuss how best to approach these new movements so as to be able to distinguish, critically and thoughtfully, their productive from their less productive aspects. In Dilthey’s view, art grows out of and responds to a particular historical and social environment. The new art evidences a new life-mode (GS :  / SW V: ). From a philosophical point of view, though, it must be understood not only as a historical phenomenon, but also in systematic terms. Dilthey provides three systematic theses – theses that take into account art as diverse as social-realistic drama, the nineteenth-century  



In this early work, Lukács makes it clear that he was inspired by Dilthey, Simmel, and Weber. See Lukács (, –,  / , –, ). Some material from these reviews later found its way into the more well-known studies of Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (). See Mu¨ller-Vollmer (, ). See, for example, System der Ethik, GS : .

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



novel, and the work of Gottfried Semper, whose historicist approach to architecture came in many ways to incarnate Dilthey’s hopes for the future of European art – that are intended to provide the intellectual scaffolding for a better understanding of the role of art in the late modern period. Dilthey first reiterates that the new generation of writers, as it rose to prominence in nineteenth-century France, sought to cut ties with the past. Balzac and Zola voice “the oppressive feeling that the structures of life in society have become old, senile, and untenable” (GS :  / SW V: ). They manifest a “striving to subordinate all of our deepest wishes and ideals [to the laws of reality]” (GS :  / SW V: ). Just as the early modern masters created a style that left behind the artistic paradigms of the ancient world, so we now face a set of aesthetic aspirations that cannot be understood solely or primarily with reference to a dominant paradigm of aesthetic idealism. If the realist and naturalist novels seek to cut the bonds with the past, Dilthey’s second thesis addresses the way in which such a break is envisioned. The new artist, he points out, “wants to manifest reality, as it actually is, and to analyze it as do the sciences of anatomy and physiology” – he seeks, as it were, to take the temperature of a sick society (GS :  / SW V: ). At stake is a form of art that, above all, seeks to penetrate reality – grit, sweat, and tears. Through a “correct, thorough, and precise presentation of facts,” it sees its mission as descriptive or even diagnostic. In Dilthey’s view, the new art is driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge. For the artists of the late nineteenth century, “their strongest literary impulse is to bring out the physiological, indeed the bestial, aspects of human nature, i.e., the irresistible instincts for which the intellect merely lights the way” (GS :  / SW V: –). This impulse does not stop with literature, but extends to painting and music (ibid.) – and even, one could add, history and philosophy. 







Dilthey writes of Semper that in “our century aesthetics owes more to him than to anyone” (GS :  / SW V: ). For a helpful study of Semper’s historicism, see Hvattum (), especially chapters  through . In this context it is worth noting that from Charles Bovary (Flaubert), to Doctor Pascal (Zola), Dr. Stockmann, and Dr. Rank (Ibsen), the physician is a recurring figure in realist and naturalist literature. Interestingly, Wellek remarks how Lessing can be seen as a predecessor to the social realism of the nineteenth century. See Wellek (, ). Dilthey’s own opening of “The Three Periods” with Schiller’s sense of a shift in art from beauty to truth indicates, instead of a sudden break, a gradual maturing of such notions. For a study of how Dilthey’s hermeneutics is motivated by a consciousness of historical and scientific crisis, see Bambach (, –).



 

Third, Dilthey points out that the new art is no longer oriented toward general principles or ideals of beauty. In its French, English, and later German garbs, the new artistic movements, in their quasi-scientific approach to life, are guided by a willingness to “move from the bottom up, to ground each art more firmly and solidly in reality and in the nature of a particular medium” (GS :  / SW V: ). Dilthey finds this tendency in Zola, but also in Wagner and Semper. In a lengthy essay on Dickens, focusing on what he calls Dickens’s narrative genius (das Genius des erzählenden Dichters), Dilthey, calling for a theory that can match the new art and its methodologies, thus identifies a need for an “inductive aesthetics” (Dilthey , ). While Dilthey, in an essay such as “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” speaks of the entire spectrum of human sciences as “inductive,” he does not, in this context, further substantiate his claim. In “The Three Epochs,” Dilthey does not spend much time analyzing the content of realist and naturalist literature. For that we need to turn to his literary reviews, first and foremost his essays on Balzac (, under the pseudonym of Wilhelm Hoffner) and Dickens (, under his own name). According to Dilthey, the new literature is expressive of a fundamental pessimism (ein pessimistischer Grundzug, Dilthey , ). Pessimism, though, is no historical novelty. While Dilthey would sometimes speak of the pessimistic Grundstimmung of modern art – and in an early text, he describes Shakespeare’s tiefsinnige Pessimismus (Dilthey , ) – he also mentions Theognis and Petrarch and suggests that all time periods bring forth writers of a pessimist disposition (Dilthey , ). Yet, in confronting the special case of modern pessimism, Dilthey is ready to draw a new distinction: that between pessimism as a character trait (Grundstimmung des Charakters) and what he calls objective pessimism. While Schopenhauer, somewhat surprisingly, is placed in the first camp, Dickens, Balzac, and the writers of the late modern, industrialized era represent the latter (Dilthey , ). Dilthey does not do much to redeem this claim. In his treatment of Balzac, he hardly mentions his oeuvre. What fascinates Dilthey is first  

 

See Dilthey “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” in GS : – / SW IV: . In this period, Dilthey also writes an essay on George Sand, yet her work is characterized as an exception in that it still reflects an era of splendid idealism (Dilthey speaks of the großartigen Idealismus ihre Natur). See Dilthey (, ). For a discussion of pessimism and Lebenstimmungen, see GS . Rudolf A. Makkreel offers a brief discussion of pessimism in Makkreel (, –). The exception being a brief discussion of Balzac’s Louis Lambert (), which, with its mystical undertones and references to Swedenborg, is included in the philosophical section of La comédie humain (Dilthey , –).

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



and foremost Balzac the man: his pecuniary quandaries, his family relations, his rapid mood swings, and, in the midst of his existential trials, the creative victory and final redemption in producing La comédie humaine. At stake, in other words, is a piece of biographical-historical writing. Balzac is portrayed as a product of his age, as an exemplary expression of modern urban life, the brutality of its class relations, and its obsession with money (or, more often, the lack of such). From this point of view, the study of Balzac, though dealing with a different language, a different time period, and a different set of existential sensibilities, is but a shorter version of Dilthey’s more well-known studies of Schleiermacher, Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin. It is an endeavor to explain a certain outlook on life, voiced through literature, as it reflects a particular cultural, historical, and sociological constellation. Balzac is a genius who, through his work, is able to elevate himself above his surroundings and the lives of ordinary, average people (gewöhnlichsten Durchscnittsmenschen), and, in so doing, offers a lasting picture of their toils and travails (Dilthey , ). Dilthey’s descriptions of Dickens, some of which are already integrated into the Balzac essay, are slightly different in form. That is, while Dilthey offers an overview of Dickens’ world, his place in English literature, and the way he positions himself within the tradition of the modern novel from Cervantes to Goethe (Dilthey , ), the essay does not, to the same extent, anticipate the cultural panoramas that characterize his studies of eighteenth-century German writers. The focus now is on the challenge of developing an aesthetic model that can adequately explain the realist novel. Dilthey describes how Dickens’ nocturnal wanderings through London left him with a deeply felt empathy with the plight of ordinary people and an equally intense hatred of “the cold affluence” of the ruling classes (Dilthey , ). It is his class-consciousness, his realization that modern life is a life of struggle, that gives Dickens his ethical substance (ethische Gehalt, Dilthey , ). Dickens describes his world with surgical precision – and the modern aesthetician must aspire to an equally precise analysis of the new literary expressions. As Dilthey would later put it, Dickens “gave the novel the most perfect form which it has yet attained” (GS :  / SW V: ). In this way, Dickens is to the modern novel what Hume, Schelling, and Schopenhauer were to modern philosophy (Dilthey , ). While the traditional epic had found its center of gravity in the great actions of its protagonist(s), the new novel prioritizes in-depth character studies (Dilthey , ) – mostly of characters who, 

Such sentiments are also aired in Dilthey’s Poetics. See GS :  / SW V: .



 

much like their authors, display a Grundstimmung of pessimism and alienation in the new, industrialized phase of modernity. Honing his voice as a cultural critic, Dilthey shares the concerns of nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists such as Nietzsche, Simmel, Brandes, and Ibsen. He worries about a lack of continuity with the past, the loss of traditional meaning, and the sense that a shared cultural selfunderstanding is swiftly evaporating in a new atomistic mass society. In this spirit, Dilthey emphasizes the contrast between the genius and the masses and airs sentiments that later resonate in Nietzsche and Heidegger’s reflections on the difficulties of carving out an authentic life-form in the anonymous existence of das Man. In light of Dilthey’s effort to understand the phenomena of realism and naturalism, as it develops over a period of two decades, his studies of Dickens and Balzac raise a number of questions: How can Dilthey, on the one hand, pursue a Sturm und Drang-infused rhetoric of genius and individual biography, i.e., a vocabulary that is associated with, precisely, what he speaks of as the dying tradition of great European art, and, on the other, make it clear that the new literary forms of realism and naturalism cannot be understood in terms of old aesthetic models? In spite of his openness to the new literary movements and his sympathy with their ethical-political ambitions, it seems that Dilthey, both in what he says about the genius of the novelist and in his focus on individual biography, falls back on a more traditional (idealist) model. This, at least, would be the case if we were to stop at this point and thus fail to ask if there are other, hermeneutically more charitable and philosophically more interesting aspects of Dilthey’s approach to contemporary literature. This question gets particularly urgent if we take into account how Dilthey, in “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics,” does not only describe the new authors and novels of the era, but also discusses how the new literature, in its breaking down of all kinds of idealism, motivates a return to the history 





Here Dilthey anticipates Lukács’ later suggestion that the novel arises out of the disintegration of a world in which the coherent meaning (essence) of the epic makes sense. See Lukács (, –, – / , –, –). Dilthey knew Nietzsche through his brother Karl and his colleague, the classicist Wilhelm Ritschl (Nietzsche’s teacher). Albeit critical, Dilthey saw Nietzsche as a philosopher working in the wake of Hölderlin. See Dilthey (b, –) / SW : –. For Dilthey’s criticism of Nietzsche, see Stegmaier (, –). Dilthey met Ibsen and, even though references to his work are few and rather negative, Katharina Dilthey reports on their conversations during a six-week stay in Gossensass in the summer of . See Dilthey (). See also Fulsås and Ku¨hne-Bertram . Needless to say, the question of how best to square Dilthey’s appeal to the biographical method and his criticism of a new, atomized society also has ramifications for his hermeneutic theory. A discussion of these ramifications goes beyond the scope of the present chapter.

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



of modern aesthetics and its nonidealist dimensions. For Dilthey’s engagement with (his) contemporary literature connects two aspects of his work: his interest, already displayed in his work in hermeneutics, in eighteenthcentury philosophies of art, on the one hand, and, on the other, his analysis of late modernity as it is about to get a foothold in German culture. It is to this peculiar – and, indeed, highly interesting – synthesis that I now turn.

 Contemporary Challenges and Traditional Aesthetics In “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics,” Dilthey’s coverage of contemporary literature centers on the swiftly expanding capitals of Paris and London. Yet, he remarks that Germany, too, is and has been changing. In his words: “Since we Germans now have a capital city, a new task exists for the German novel; and whoever solves it will be the most widely read author in our nation” (GS :  / SW V: ). New life requires new poets and, as Dilthey puts it, in Germany one is still “awaiting the poet who can speak to us about our sufferings, our joys, and our struggles with life!” (GS :  / SW V: ). However, if the Germans do not yet have novels of the kind produced by Dickens, Balzac, and Zola, they have excelled in a different, but not entirely unrelated area – that of philosophical aesthetics. While the French and the English cultivate new literary forms, the Germans cultivate philosophy of literature; while the French and the English establish the vanguard of realism and naturalist prose, it was the Germans, half a century earlier, who first addressed the novel in philosophical terms. Hence, in spite of his worry about outdated aesthetic paradigms, it makes sense for Dilthey to return to German philosophy – after all, aesthetics, and especially philosophy of the novel, turns out to be the particular strength of his culture – and see to what extent the old aesthetics can help us bridge the gap between new literary forms and past tastes and traditions. If it is clear to Dilthey that the new literature will, eventually, arrive in Germany, then his job will be to prepare the readership and  



In other places, Dilthey describes the new European capitals in more positive terms. See, for example, his  “The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World,” GS :  / SW IV: . As Dilthey clarifies his point, “[i]t was the great service of Friedrich Schlegel that he first made prose aesthetically respectable, particularly through his studies of Boccaccio and Lessing” (GS :  / SW V: ). A century earlier, similar sentiments had been aired by, among others, Jean Paul and Herder. See Jean Paul (, vol. V, ); Herder (, vol. I, , –).



 

develop an aesthetic vocabulary through which the new art can be discussed and appreciated. Along fairly traditional lines of historicizing, Dilthey outlines three major paradigms in aesthetics – rationalism (associated with French philosophy), empiricism (associated with British philosophy), and the synthesis of these outlooks in German philosophy – each of which highlights and addresses art in helpful ways, but also displays a particular set of limitations that beg overcoming. Dilthey, first, discusses the paradigm of seventeenth-century aesthetics, which he associates with Descartes and French classicism. In Dilthey’s view, these philosophers, albeit in different ways, defend the view that aesthetic satisfaction depends on “logical character of poetic form” (GS : – / SW V: ). For Dilthey, this is a paradigm that reflects the twin phenomena of absolutism (in which “the forces of regularity, rationality, and fiscal and administrative control gained the upper hand,” [GS :  / SW V: ]) and a scientific celebration of mathematical clarity and abstraction (ibid.). Dilthey does not say much about the artistic dimensions of this culture – how it could foster a Batteux, a Corneille, or a Racine, for example – but seeks to extract its lasting contribution to philosophy of art. The full value of this paradigm only emerges when French seventeenth-century philosophy is taken up by Leibniz, whose notion of unity in multiplicity goes beyond the celebration of abstract rules and principles (GS :  / SW V: ). This is an idea that Dilthey endorses and to which he frequently returns. He views Leibniz as a key figure in the German adaptation of rationalism and, all the same, a philosopher who points beyond it. For, in the end, what limits the rationalist approach is, in Dilthey’s opinion, its one-sided perception of  

  

It would not take long, though, until a post-idealistic German literature finds its articulations in masterpieces such as Bu¨chner’s Woyzeck or Fontane’s Effi Briest. For Dilthey (at this point following a distinctively Hegelian path), this is not a question of criticizing philosophical mistakes per se, but, rather, of highlighting the historical limitations of each position. As he puts it, “[t]he development of aesthetics in modern times is similar to that through which jurisprudence, theology, and modern philosophy have passed. These have similar histories in that each of them is addressed to a certain sphere of culture and is aimed at deriving, from the knowledge thus attained, principles for the further evolution of that same sphere” (GS :  / SW V: ). This point is later rehearsed in GS : – / SW I: . Anticipating Russell’s famous criticism, Dilthey also points out Leibniz’s more problematic “metaphysical fairy tale about monads” (GS :  / SW V: ). See also Russell (, xiii). Dilthey even takes the Bildungsroman, as we find it in Goethe and Hölderlin, to be influenced not only by Lessing and Herder’s ideal of humanity, but also by the Leibnizian notion of individuality and “a natural education in conformity with the inner development of the psyche” (Dilthey b,  / SW V: ).

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



“beauty only as an intelligible unity” (GS :  / SW V: ). Later aesthetic models seek to mend this flaw. While Dilthey acknowledges that there are no watertight distinctions between rationalism and empiricism (Baumgarten, for instance, synthesizes the two perspectives), Dilthey next turns to British empiricism. If the seventeenth century was a time of absolutism, the eighteenth century witnesses the birth of the new middle class and its ideal of the cultured and self-cultivating gentleman. As it takes form in Britain (though Dilthey also discusses the Dutch contribution) this aesthetic paradigm replaces a classicist orientation toward artistic rules with a new analysis of sensation, feeling, and sympathy. Criticism, the ability to draw distinctions, is brought to the fore, and so is also the capacity for self-expression and self-formation through letters and essays. Shaftesbury, Young, Kames, Hume, and Burke give voice to such sentiments. However, just as the seventeenth century, for all its achievements, was limited by its historical and social conditions, so, too, is the eighteenth. If the empiricists had abandoned the mathematical ideals of the earlier period, they clung to the ideal of scientific generalization – only that the science at stake now turns out to be classifying and empirical and biology replaces mathematics as the science of choice. But, by following this trend, eighteenth-century aesthetics, in Dilthey’s eyes, fails to take into account its own historical and cultural presuppositions – it fails to see that its approaches, too, are prone to draw conclusions that are colored by the context in which they emerge. As Dilthey puts it, “[t]he aesthetic impression produced by a property of objects can be tested on only a limited circle of persons and only for a given time” (GS :  / SW V: –). Thus, at the end of the day, empiricism also turns out to be limited. Finally, Dilthey reaches late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy and an aesthetic model that, in his view, draws on and synthesizes the strengths of the preceding moments. In its orientation toward aesthetic rules, its perception of beauty as “intelligible,” rationalism had recognized that there is a need to conceive of art in terms of unity (GS :  / SW V: ). And, if empiricism, on its side, had been “unable to explain how the work of art is more than a heap of impressions,” it had been right in emphasizing the sensual aspect of aesthetic experience and, relatedly, in its turn to criticism and judgment (ibid.). In the German language area, this aspect of early eighteenth-century aesthetics 

Here, Dilthey follows Hegel. See Hegel (, vol. XV, – / , –). See also Rutter (, –).



 

later reverberates in the Literaturbriefe and various magazine publications from Mendelssohn and Lessing through the Jena romantics. As Dilthey sees it, German philosophy seeks to combine the previous approaches. Top-down decrees now give way to an experimental (bottom-up, rather than top-down) aesthetics, yet without a willingness to let go of the capacity of aesthetics to address and analyze art more broadly. Dilthey approves of this development and claims that it has shaped his own time (GS :  / SW V: ). What he has in mind, though, is not the famous Kantian effort to synthesize rationalism and empiricism through a deduction of the subjective universality of pure aesthetic judgment, but the budding literary and art-historical discourse of the late Enlightenment and its interest in developing an approach to art that allows us to see it as an expression of humanity in its manifold and diverse manifestations. In Dilthey’s view, this interest animates the works of Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, and the historical turn in aesthetics. Winckelmann contributes with a hermeneutic-historical approach to art, Lessing pays attention to “the relation of artistic practice to the means of representation of the particular arts,” and Herder expands this field to poetry in particular (thus also enabling its application to later literary paradigms such as realism and naturalism) (GS :  / SW V: ). Against the background of these three approaches, nineteenth-century aestheticians lay the ground for a notion of historical style. In this way, Dilthey’s call for a reassessment of the realist novel goes hand in hand with a reassessment of the previous aesthetic tradition. The point at which Dilthey deviates from the standard narratives, though, is that the German philosophy he is interested in is not primarily the great contributions of Kant and the idealist system makers, but, rather, the historically oriented paradigm of the mid-s and its inductive approach to art. It is symptomatic that Dilthey, with reference to Herder’s philosophy, speaks of this tradition as taking its point of departure from  





For a study of this transition, see Kuehn (). As both Herder and the precritical Kant point out, German philosophy, in their time, was understood as a synthesis of French and British impulses. See Herder (, vol. I, ); Kant (–, vol. II,  / , ). Dilthey does not reference the original works or discussions. Helpful references include Winckelmann (), G. E. Lessing (, . / ), Herder (–, vol. II, – / , –). It is worth noting that the discussion of empirical and inductive approaches – as they were part of Lessing’s criticism of Winckelmann (Winckelmann was accused by Lessing and Herder of working off ahistorical, Greek ideals of beauty), Winckelmann’s response to Lessing (Lessing falls short of a proper empirical approach to Greek sculpture), and Herder’s efforts to synthesize the above in his first Critical Forests – further consolidates the Laocoön debate as a question of aesthetic methodology.

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



Kant, “but at the same time being in diametrical opposition to him” (Dilthey b,  / SW V: ). A study of pre-Kantian philosophy, Dilthey claims, is key to our understanding of aesthetics. For, as he puts it, the accomplishments of German aesthetics “can be correctly evaluated only when it is not investigated solely in terms of abstract systems” (GS :  / SW V: ). It is, in other words, not history plain and simple, but a particular kind of history Dilthey wishes to retrieve – the kind of history that can help him understand the emerging phenomena of realism and naturalism in literature. In Dilthey’s view, transcendental philosophy, especially the aesthetics that builds on the Kantian-Fichtean analysis of aesthetic subjectivity, remains at a distance to the works and thus cannot provide much help in the face of a swiftly changing society and artworld. As he puts it, the idealists “all stopped short of the decisive point, namely, the psychological analysis of the creative process in a particular art” (GS :  / SW V: , emphasis added). What Dilthey is interested in, by contrast, is to develop, out of the resources provided by the pre-idealist models of the eighteenth century, a new and relevant aesthetic methodology: a work-oriented and historically sensitized approach to style as it manifests itself across different media and genre. This – the analysis of the conditions for representation in the individual arts – is the basis out of which we can construct a model that is “empirical and well-balanced historical,” and that, in this way, can try to meet the vital task of aesthetics, namely “to make itself heard and to foster a mutual understanding among artists, art critics, and an interested public” (GS :  / SW V: ). In his return to eighteenth-century aesthetics, Dilthey, in other words, does not endeavor to bring to life the ideals that realism and naturalism debunked (e.g., notions such as harmony and beauty), nor does he try to retrieve a set of ahistorical aesthetic categories. What Dilthey seeks to do, rather, is to rescue a methodological ideal – one that, as it were, is minimally shared by and thus provides a point of affinity between mid-eighteenth-century intellectuals and realist authors of the following centuries. Even though Dilthey, in his readings of the new novel, at times resorts to a Sturm und Drang-infused language of aesthetic genius, his engagement with eighteenth-century aesthetics (as it paves the ground for later art and aesthetics) is much more complex than his rhetoric initially 

If Goethe and Schiller are both mentioned, thus suggesting a strong link to neo-classicism, their being situated between Herder and the Schlegels seems in line with Dilthey’s different, more methodological orientation in the essays under discussion.



 

betrays. His goal is not to bring back a set of aesthetic ideals (such as genius or beauty), but to retrieve a work-related methodology that can help us expand on and challenge our aesthetic horizons.

 Medium, Representation, and the Analysis of Style With his call for a historical-stylistic approach to art, Dilthey does not only suggest that the Lessing, Winckelmann, Herder lineage in aesthetics is historically important, but also, systematically speaking, that it can help us put aesthetics back on a better track – one that can bridge the gap between the new art and its tradition-bound audience. How, then, should his return to pre-idealist aesthetics be envisioned? How can we imagine, further, that mid-eighteenth-century aesthetics can be of help in our approach to a literature written around a century later? Dilthey addresses this question in “The Three Epochs,” but also, and in an even clearer form, in the slightly earlier “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics” (). Here, Dilthey presents the return to eighteenth-century aesthetics through four separate, yet closely related systematic points. Dilthey’s first point concerns the relationship between art and truth. While Lessing in Hamburg Dramaturgy had emphasized that art should not be understood in terms of truth (as representation), but in terms of truthfulness, Dilthey traces this way of thinking back to Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and the Schlegels. He rejects the criterion of representation. Dilthey further emphasizes how the work discloses reality in a new and revealing way. As he lays it out in his first systematic point, a work of art externalizes a view of the world and thus put forth a claim to knowledge (GS : – / SW V: ). In this way, art presents “a way of philosophizing” (GS :  / SW V: ). Dilthey’s second point concerns aesthetic experience. Influenced by Young, Hume, Shaftesbury, Mendelssohn, and others, Lessing and Herder had emphasized how aesthetic production and experience must involve a dimension of feeling. To a certain extent, this position is adopted by Kant, who describes reflective judgment from the point of view of the feeling evoked in the disinterested contemplation of the formal qualities of the beautiful object. While Dilthey draws on eighteenth-century aesthetics, he  

See G. E. Lessing (, vol. VI / , no. ). He also, at this point, avoids a reference to authorial psychology, a position with which his name is frequently associated. See, for example, Gadamer (a, – / , –).

Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Novel



also traces the discussion of aesthetic feeling back to Schopenhauer. At stake in aesthetic production is an expression of feeling – and to the extent that aesthetic experience, too, is based on feeling, this allows for a continuity between production and reception (and thus for envisioning aesthetics as a discipline covering the aesthetic sphere as such). Eventually, Dilthey casts this experience as a reawakening of life. Third, Dilthey discusses what he takes to be the intricate “conditions which external reality must satisfy in order for it to be aesthetically intuitable as something living” (GS :  / SW V: ). Dilthey is particularly interested in Herder’s philosophy of sculpture and the way in which this work explores artistic medium, a thought he later finds rearticulated in Hegel’s philosophy of the arts. In Dilthey’s view, this is a valid point and, further, indicates that contemporary aesthetics must go beyond the subjective presuppositions of creation and reception and address the objective conditions for artistic production. Finally, and again with reference to Herder, Dilthey discusses the historical conditions of art. Dilthey points out that Kant had stressed the subjective universality of pure aesthetic judgment and thus transferred “the concept of universal validity from the field of knowledge to that of taste.” In both cases, Dilthey writes, “Kant envisions a timelessly valid system of determination” (GS :  / SW V: ). Herder, by contrast, “took as his starting point literary works completely beyond the scope of technical poetics” (GS :  / SW V: ). In this, he became “the founder of the historical study of literature” and “[t]he infinite variations of man’s sensuous-spiritual constitution in its relation to the external world is for him the condition of beauty as of taste, and these change as man’s disposition changes” (GS :  / SW V: ). In Dilthey’s view, Herder is therefore justified “not only over against Aristotle, but also against Kant and Schiller” (GS :  / SW V: ). His methodology, Dilthey concludes, gave rise to the explanatory approaches we later find in the Schlegels and that Dilthey greatly admires. It is with these systematic points in hand that Dilthey expounds on the relationship between past aesthetics and contemporary literature in  



Dilthey thus underlines the affinity with Schopenhauer that he had already established in the discussion of pessimism. Dilthey does not speculate on the transitions from Herder to Hegel, but it would not be unreasonable to point out that Winckelmann, who anticipates this point, significantly influences both Herder and Hegel. Dilthey, though, sees Herder’s style as counterproductive and partially to blame for his lacking reception (GS :  / SW V: ).

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 

“The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics.” And, from this point of view, his aim, as I read him, is not so much to analyze the nineteenth-century novel per se, but, rather, didactically and propaedeutically, to help us question and eventually also overcome our inadequate responses to it. In “The Three Periods of Modern Aesthetics,” Dilthey makes it clear that under no circumstances can we hope for a return of traditional or religious art (GS :  / SW V: ). Further, regardless of this historical observation, Dilthey notes that literature, at a systematic and a priori level, follows no rules. Philosophy cannot prescribe art or artistic movements. In his view “it is clear that there is within art no right or wrong path, no absolute beauty, and no final authority” (GS :  / SW V: ). This, however, does not mean that art is entirely free (in the sense of being subjective or contingent). The style establishes the unity of the work – the way in which it discloses a worldview, evokes feeling, and responds to the material and historical conditions by which it is shaped. If successful, art, by way of its style, engenders a pleasurable feeling that “fulfills us completely because it increases the vitality of our mind and leaves no striving which has been awakened in us unfulfilled” (GS :  / SW V: ) – but what kind of art will best evoke such feelings is relative to a historical paradigm. Philosophy can articulate the conditions for art’s situatedness in history and culture and provide a basis for critique and reflection on new literary forms. This is why a proper philosophy of the novel – as it facilitates an adequate response to new art and new cultural patterns – is needed in an age that, as Dilthey puts it, is prone to pessimism, boredom, and lethargy. It can help us understand the relationship between a particular, historical outlook and the forms of art (and styles) through which this outlook finds its voice. If we are able to find a language that describes the new literature and its “matrix of a language of form,” then this will help us interpret reality (GS :  / SW V: ). How reality is interpreted, though, will be a question of what reality artists and critics are facing, i.e., the historical conditions for aesthetic production and appreciation. Hence, if Dilthey draws on the 



Dilthey thus follows Herder’s methodology in Fragments on Recent German Literature. Fragments does not only address contemporary literature, but also focuses, with reference to the Literaturbriefe, on the reception of literature and the way in which literary canons prioritize some kinds or aspects of literature and overlook others. A similar approach gives direction to Herder’s later work, including Shakespeare and The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. Interestingly, Schlegel’s “Letter About the Novel” addresses a predicament similar to the one described by Dilthey: on the one hand, a rejection of the contemporary novel and, on the other, the common conflation of the idea that times are no longer conducive to traditional literature with the idea that literature as such has reached its end. See Schlegel (, – / , –).

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aesthetic resources of the late eighteenth century so as to illuminate the nineteenth-century novel, he is not looking, say, for a priori criteria of art or beauty (the latter would necessitate an a priori rejection of realist and naturalist literature), but, rather, to its work-oriented and historical methodology. If modern audiences depreciate naturalism for its “disregard [of] valid aesthetic laws” (GS :  / SW V: ), they concomitantly fail to realize that such laws were never constitutive of art in the first place. If art, through its awakening of life, allows reality to be seen (i.e., it expresses a worldview), then “[t]he craving to let reality be seen demands freedom from the fetters prescribed by old-fashioned rules of style” (GS :  / SW V: ). The purpose of art, as Dilthey puts it (in a language again resembling that of the young Nietzsche), is to enhance life (GS :  / SW V: ), but exactly how this is best achieved will vary across historical periods and cultures. With his reassessment of aesthetics, Dilthey focuses on the reception of realism and naturalism. He also engages the self-understanding implied by the propagators of these movements. This in particular applies to his reading of Zola, of whose work Dilthey is quite critical. According to Dilthey, Zola and his naturalist peers fell prey to a self-misunderstanding. In a quasi-scientific spirit, they thought of their art as an effort to copy reality. But, as Dilthey, Lessing and Herder in hand, has pointed out, art neither can nor should seek to copy reality, but strive, rather, to transform it (GS :  / SW V: ). As such transformative endeavors, the works of realism and naturalism are indeed related to past masters like Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe (GS :  / SW V: ) – expressive, to be sure, of a new historical reality, yet being so in a way that aspires to bring forth a heightened feeling of life and hence also a respite from the ennui of late modernity. Merging his interest in the contemporary novel with his interest in preKantian aesthetics, Dilthey suggests that, in order to alleviate the present aesthetic conundrum, and give realist and naturalist novels a fair chance, what is needed is not a brand new aesthetic model, but, rather, a reinterpretation of the history of the discipline. And, likewise, he suggests that the new art can indeed be understood as new, challenging, and provocative when we realize that its style is indebted to the very tradition it takes itself to have left behind. The problem of the realist and naturalist novel is thus not, as its critics had thought (following, as it were, the “official” selfunderstanding of these movements), that it breaks with the past, but, rather, that it relies on too crude and simplistic an understanding of what past aesthetics amounts to.

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 

 Conclusion As a critic of contemporary culture, Dilthey, like Nietzsche, Simmel, and others, realizes that the period of aesthetic idealism is over and a new mass society threatens or even obliterates the possibility of individual excellence. Responding to this predicament, Dilthey, with reference to the aesthetic methodologies of the eighteenth century (its nonidealist wings), offers an alternative route: a work-oriented, historical, media- and style-sensitive aesthetic model. Thus, Dilthey’s philosophy of the novel does not so much provide a particular set of aesthetic ideals as it promotes a particular way of reading. This, indeed, is what makes the philosophy of the novel a task most pressing: If previous literature had oriented itself toward eternal truth and beauty, the new novel, if read in an adequate way, seeks to capture the conditions of late modern life (and its lack of traditional beauty). However, precisely in expressing these conditions does it also transcend them. And, in so doing, it creates a literary experience that heightens the sense of life. In his engagement with literature, Dilthey seeks to defend the importance, as he puts it, of art for humanity (GS :  / SW V: ). Dilthey also insists that “[o]nly in so far as philosophical thought exerts an influence does it have the right to exist.” From this point of view, his defense of art cannot take the form of armchair theorizing alone. Hence, we find in Dilthey’s early reviews a case-based, essayistic study of literature and its place in an ever-evolving, historic culture. He seeks to do for his time what philosophers like Lessing, Herder, Novalis, and the Schlegels had done for theirs: to help a broader readership see contemporary art as a new and challenging way of making sense of a new and challenging world. With this tripartite approach to art (systematic, historical, and practical-interpretative), Dilthey, in other words, does as he preaches: his reviews of contemporary literature are theoretically justified by his studies of eighteenth-century aesthetics and vice versa is his aesthetics realized through his criticalhermeneutic exercises. In my view, this is a promising and relevant aspect of Dilthey’s philosophy, and it is a pity that it is often overlooked when his work in aesthetics is placed in unbroken continuity with the Kantian project of providing a transcendental psychology of imagination, creativity, and aesthetic judgment.

 

Experience and Metaphysics The Anti-Hegelian Aesthetics of Dilthey and Santayana Paul Guyer

 Introduction In his major work in aesthetics, The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics () (SW V: –), Wilhelm Dilthey writes that “German aesthetic theory was . . . negatively influenced by its use of the metaphysical method” () and more specifically that “The interpretation of literary works as presently dominated by Hegelian metaphysics must be opposed” (). Although in a subsequent essay, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Task” (), Dilthey identifies historical consciousness of the variety and change of artistic styles as the major contribution of nineteenth-century aesthetic theory (SW V: –), in The Imagination of the Poet he further rejects the Hegelian thought that there is a progressive evolution in the intellectual aspects of human history, explicitly in the case of the history of philosophy but implicitly in other cases as well, including the history of the arts: “The Hegelians have ruined our understanding of modern philosophy with their fiction of the logical unfolding of one standpoint from another. In reality, a historical situation contains, first of all, a multiplicity of particular facts” (SW V: ). He is prepared to accept that there is such a thing as the spirit of an age that is manifested among its several arts and other aspects of culture as well, for example, that “the rational and mechanistic spirit of the seventeenth century puts its stamp on the poetry, the politics, and the warfare of that period,” but not that there is any further “spirit” progressively realized and expressed throughout human culture and history as a whole. In his first book, and first in aesthetics as well, published just a few years after these two works by Dilthey, namely The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (), George Santayana expresses a similar animadversion to metaphysical aesthetics, although his brush tars more than Hegel. Santayana writes that “Such value as belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful, comes to them not because they 



 

explain our primary feelings, which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact, constitute some of our later appreciations.” That is, if one has already internalized a metaphysical (or theological) view, then one will interpret aesthetic experience in those terms too: the “expressiveness of the sky is due to certain qualities of the sensation, which bind it to all things happy and pure, and, in a mind in which the essence of purity and happiness is embodied in an idea of God, bind it also to that idea” (Santayana /, ). But, the metaphysics does not explain the aesthetic experience, instead merely offering a way of expressing that experience for those who find that expression congenial: for example, “Platonism is a very refined and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience and utters our inmost hopes” (ibid.), but we have those instincts, conscience, and hopes without Platonism, and can find other ways to express them. If aesthetics is not grounded in metaphysics, then in what is it grounded? For both Dilthey and Santayana, aesthetics must be grounded in psychology. Dilthey aims to discover universally valid rules or principles for poetics, describes “the difficulty, which all human sciences must face, of deriving universally valid principles from inner experiences, which are personally limited, composite, and yet incapable of analysis,” but affirms that “contemporary empirical and technical horizons do indeed allow us” to find such rules and then even “to ascend from poetics and the other particular aesthetic disciplines to a universal aesthetics” (SW V: ). Specifically, “the law of beauty and the rules of poetry can be derived only from human nature. At first, poetics had a firm basis in a classical model from which it abstracted, then later in some kind of a metaphysical concept of the beautiful. Now poetics must seek this firm basis in the life of the psyche” (SW V: ). Human nature expresses itself in various ways over the course of human history, but the ways in which it expresses itself are determined not by the logic of any concept, but by human psychology, and it is from a basis in psychology that “the aesthetics of the Hegelian school[, which] brought poetic states of mind in relation to one another by means of an external dialectic” (SW V: ), must be resisted. Similarly, Santayana rejects a “didactic” method in aesthetics, which would just be practical criticism, “the actual pronouncing of judgment and giving of praise, blame, and precept,” and also “the historical explanation of conduct or of art as a part of anthropology” without benefit of psychology, in favor of a “psychological” method, which “deals with moral and æsthetic judgments as phenomena of mind and products of mental evolution. The problem here is to understand the origin and

Experience and Metaphysics

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conditions of these feelings and their relation to the rest of our economy” (Santayana /, ). In spite of their common rejection of an aprioristic metaphysical method and insistence on an empirical psychological method, however, the aesthetic theories of Dilthey and Santayana might appear to reach very different conclusions. For the central thesis of Dilthey’s poetics is that the poet must express his own Erlebnis, translated by Agosta and Makkreel as “lived experience,” which can sound quite subjectivist, while the thesis of Santayana’s aesthetics is that beauty is “value positive, intrinsic, and objectified,” or, expressed in “less technical language,” that “Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing” (Santayana /, §, ), which can sound quite the opposite. On one theory, it seems, aesthetic experience is something inward, which might be communicated to someone else by a vehicle that might arouse a related inward experience in the other, but where in either case the experience remains separate from the vehicle that communicates it, whereas on the other theory it seems that beauty is a property of objects, although presumably one that triggers characteristic experiences both in artists and audiences. But, terminology can be misleading, and I will argue that the aesthetic theories of Dilthey and Santayana are far more alike than different. Despite their terminological differences, both offer models of works of art as expressions of human thought and emotion that are both objective and subjective: that is, works of art are ontologically distinct from both intentions in the minds of their producers (contrary to the theory of another contemporary, Benedetto Croce) as well as from responses in the minds of their audiences, but are so fully saturated with psychic life, thought, and emotion, both peculiar to the artist but typical to broader populations of humankind, that the ontological difference between object and subject is phenomenologically unimportant. This point might best be put by saying that both Dilthey and Santayana offer a phenomenology of works of art according to which such works are experienced as filled with cognitive and affective significance rather than as mere triggers or signs of such significance. It is in light of this approach that their common rejection of Hegelian aesthetics should be understood, for by their lights Hegel treats works of art as mere signs for abstract ideas, without much recognition of the emotional impact of art at all. To be sure, there may seem to be some more than merely terminological differences between Dilthey and Santayana, specifically the latter’s organization of his book around the three concepts of matter, form, and expression might seem like a difference from and possibly improvement over the former, who seems to



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have more to say about form and expression than about matter; but when we look closely at both what Santayana means by matter and at Dilthey’s exposition of Erlebnis, we will see that even here the difference between them is not very great. In what follows, I will expound the similarities between the views of Dilthey and Santayana, in a way that I take to reflect the good sense of each. In conclusion, I will briefly suggest that in spite of a glimmer of recognition of the emotional dimension of aesthetic experience by Hegel, his aesthetics is permeated by the metaphysical cognitivism to which both Dilthey and Santayana object.

 Dilthey Like the founder of the modern discipline, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Dilthey cast his aesthetics in the form of a poetics, although with remarks in passing on the application of his approach to other arts. Also, like Baumgarten, who expounded his poetics in the form of an analysis of the qualities of the felix aestheticus, or “fortunate aesthetician,” who is more like the poet than the reader of poetry, Dilthey, as his title suggests, expounds his view in the form of a description of the qualities of the poet and the rules for poetic creation. Thus, Dilthey presents a theory of “aesthetic creativity” rather than “aesthetic receptivity.” It is as if he had read Nietzsche’s remark, published the same year as his own Imagination of the Poet, that it had been a mistake for “Kant, like all philosophers, [to have] just considered art and beauty from the position of ‘spectator’ instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experience of the artist (the creator)” (Nietzsche , third Essay, §, ). But, Nietzsche’s remark had not been fair to Kant, who after all complemented his theory of the judgment of taste (aesthetic receptivity) with a theory of genius (aesthetic creativity), and Dilthey himself says that what Kant enunciated “in his analyses of taste and pleasure . . . can be extended to the creative process by means of the claim that the same complex process is involved in aesthetic receptivity as in aesthetic creativity, though the former is less strong” (SW V: ). The difference between aesthetic creativity and receptivity is one of degree, not kind. It will therefore be ignored in what follows, although it is reflected in some quotations, beginning with the next one. This is Dilthey’s opening sally, in which he expands Aristotle’s claim that “the objects of literature are human actions” into the broader one that “only to the extent that a psychic element, or a combination of them,

Experience and Metaphysics

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stands in relation to a lived experience [Erlebnis] and its presentation can it be a constituent of literature.” He continues, “the substratum of all true poetry is a lived or living experience [Erlebnis oder lebendige Erfahrung] and whatever psychic contents are related to it. Every image of the external world can indirectly become the material for the creativity of the poet through just such a relationship” (SW V: ). We will see shortly that Dilthey’s term “relation” has to be interpreted carefully, perhaps best as meaning internal relation, but for the moment we can focus on the terms of the relation that he has in mind. What he is saying is that the images created by the poet, or by extension the practitioners of other arts, capture the “lived experience” of the artist, and convey that to the audience, together with all of the cognitive and affective significance of that experience. The cognitive dimension of experience is part of what is captured by the poetic image because “Every operation of the understanding which generalizes experience, orders it, and increases its applicability assists the work of the poet,” while the affective dimension of experience is also part of what is captured by the image because “A powerful psychic life, intense experiences of the heart and of the world, [as well as] a capacity for generalization and demonstration – all these form the fertile ground for human accomplishments of the most diverse kinds, including those of the poet” (SW V: –). Both cognition and emotion are comprised in lived experience, and lived experience is captured in artistic images. We can return shortly to the relation between lived experience and artistic image or work that Dilthey has in mind, but first we should say something more about his concept of Erlebnis or “lived experience.” This is contrasted to Erfahrung without the adjective lebendige, thus ordinarily translated as “experience” sans phrase, and we might think of Erlebnis as the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of our moment-to-moment encounter with the world, to borrow a phrase from another of Dilthey’s contemporaries (James , ), while Erfahrung is something abstracted out of that, for example, one or some set of observations made and recorded in the hopes of confirming or disconfirming some hypothesis. The crucial thing about Erlebnis is that it is 

James is describing (what he takes to be) the experience of a baby faced with the task of discerning objects out of that initial consciousness; but he also says that the cognitive task of separating discrete objects out of that experience remains with us “to the very end of life.” So, we might at least analogize Dilthey’s Erlebnis to James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion” and Dilthey’s Erfahrung to Jamesian discernment of discrete objects out of that; what Dilthey will add, in his work published three years before that of James, is that a poetic or artistic image is also a way of separating something more discrete out of the blooming, buzzing confusion of Erlebnis or as he also calls it lebendige rather than mere Erfahrung.

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always part of a continuum, or what Dilthey calls a “nexus.” “Contents are linked with one another in perception and thought in the most varied ways to form a nexus of psychic life which continually orients, as it were, whatever occurs in consciousness” (SW V: ). Particular “perceptions, representations, or their constituents, which are similar or alike, interpenetrate one another” (SW V: ), and “perceptions, representations, or their constituents, which were unified in the unity of one process of consciousness, can reproduce each other reciprocally under certain conditions of interest and attention.” (Dilthey calls these the two laws of “fusion” and “association” – see SW V: ). In other words, although we can isolate out particular Erfahrungen for scientific or practical purposes, the idea of a particular Erlebnis is misleading: an Erlebnis is more like a node or focal point of consciousness that has neither determinate parts nor determinate boundaries, but into which we can always delve further or out of which we can always travel farther. Thus, insofar as the artist captures “an” Erlebnis in an image, he does not break its connections to the nexus of psychic life, but rather somehow communicates the density of that Erlebnis, its constituents and connections. This is the first aspect of what Dilthey means by his statement that “The poet’s creative work always depends on the intensity of lived experience” (SW V: ): whereas scientific Erfahrung might be thought of as like extensive magnitude, which can be decomposed into separable parts, Erlebnis is more like intensive magnitude, which can be experienced as complex without being composed of discrete parts. The second aspect of the nexus of lived experience is that it always has an affective as well as a cognitive dimension. This is what Dilthey conveys in the continuation of the description of the “poet’s creative work” just begun: Through his constitution, which maintains a strong resonance with the moods of life, even an impersonal notice in a newspaper about a crime, a dry report of a chronicler, or a strange, grotesque tale can be transformed into lived experience. Just as our body needs to breathe, our soul requires the fulfillment and expansion of its existence in the reverberations of emotional life. Our feeling of life desires to resound in tone, word, and image. Perception satisfies us fully insofar as it is filled with such content of life and reverberations of feeling. This to and fro of life, of perception enlivened and saturated by feeling, and of the feeling of life shining forth in the clarity of image: that is the essential characteristic of the content of all poetry (SW V: ) 

For the distinction between extensive and intensive magnitude, see Kant (), the “Axioms of Intuition” and “Anticipations of Perception.”

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– and by extension, all other art. This passage actually makes not one but two further claims that are crucial to Dilthey’s aesthetics. First, as promised, it claims that perception always contains “reverberations of feeling” or is “enlivened and saturated by feeling”; in other words, while it might be a goal of Erfahrung, for example scientific observation, to separate out feeling and preserve only the “objective” properties of external objects, in real Erlebnis there is no rigid separation between the inner and the outer, properties of objects and our feelings about them; these are fused. Second, it is the task of poetry (and other art) to capture this fusion of “subjective” feeling and “objective” property in its images, to convey both objects or experiences of objects and how we feel about them (how the artist feels about them, but the artist feels for all of us, thus how we feel about them, at least within a culture and a period). Thus, for example, when “the nexus of events provided by our experiences of life . . . undergo a transformation in order to become an aesthetic plot” (SW V: ), that plot will bring with it feelings as well as representations of characters and events – and one would be hard-pressed to draw a rigid line between the way in which the play presents characters and events and the way in which it presents and arouses feelings. The former are not externally related to the latter like artificial signs to what they signify; the relation is more immediate than that. This is what I tried to convey earlier by calling the relations “internal,” although that is not meant in the technical sense of F. H. Bradley criticized by Bertrand Russell. Dilthey also makes this point in language close to that of Santayana. He states that “value” is “only the representational expression of what is experienced in feeling. And precisely because certain processes produce feelings with a constancy similar to that with which certain stimuli produce sensations, . . . the elementary feelings disclose a sphere of experience whose objects we can characterize as evaluations” (SW V: ). We might be inclined to think of evaluations as subjective responses to objects that serve various of our interests, arouse various associations for us, and so on; but for Dilthey the distinction between object and evaluative response is artificial because valuation is based on pleasure, and “In pleasure we partly enjoy the properties of objects – their beauty and their meaning – and partly the intensification of our own existence – properties of our own person that give value to our existence. This twofold relation is based on 

This is also the thesis of Book II of R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art, written a half-century after Dilthey’s work (Collingwood ). There is no reference to Dilthey in The Principles or any of Collingwood’s other writings on aesthetics.

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the interaction between ourselves and the external world” (ibid.). That is, we can of course draw an ontological distinction between ourselves and external objects, so to speak in the philosophical laboratory, but in our lived experience, or phenomenologically, since we can take pleasure in both the properties of objects and the activity of our own mental, cognitive and affective, powers, and the experience of pleasure is not divided into parts, value too feels like something unitary, something present in both object and ourself at the same time, rather than like a merely subjective response to something entirely unitary. At the bottom of aesthetic response is pleasure, thus the phenomenology of pleasure determines the phenomenology of aesthetic experience. It is ultimately on the unity of pleasure that the fusion of meaning and affect, object and subject, depends: Each thing integrally connected to our life embodies, as it were, all that we have experienced about it or about things similar to it. How much a fragrance we inhale or a leaf blowing in the autumn wind can mean to us! This dry leaf, floating slowly to the ground, contains little – when considered merely as a sensible image – that could evoke an aesthetic impression; but all the thoughts that are evoked by it revive feelings in us which unite to form a strong aesthetic impression. In addition, by means of a kind of transference, the affective content from one part of the representational structure of an image can also spread to other parts that are not related to it (SW V: –).

that is, not “objectively” related. This passage with its simple images of a scent or a falling leaf sums up all of Dilthey’s themes thus far: that in lived experience there is no rigid or perhaps we should say felt distinction between cognition and emotion, between object and subject, and that such a felt integration of object and feeling can be captured in an artistic image. Now, let us look at Dilthey’s account of how artistic images capture and convey Erlebnis. As we shall see shortly, Santayana holds that the matter, form, and expression of works of art can all contribute to their “value objectified,” and glosses expression in terms of the “affinities” of perceived objects “to what is not at the time perceived” (/, Part IV, §, ). Dilthey’s emphasis on art’s presentation of the Erlebnis of the nexus of what is immediately perceived with both the cognition and affect of what is not would seem to restrict his catalog of the sources of pleasure in art to the last of Santayana’s three categories. But, in fact he does not restrict Erlebnis to what Santayana calls expression. Dilthey too recognizes the contributions of what Santayana calls matter and form as well as expressive associations to the capture of Erlebnis by works of art. Dilthey

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enumerates the multiple sources of aesthetic pleasure as “spheres of feeling.” His introduction to his exposition of these spheres emphasizes form and expression: Since the formative processes of the artistic imagination are produced by the play of feelings, the basis of their explanation must be sought in an analysis of feelings . . . The experience of the relation of forms to our feelings is the source of the significance possessed by relations of line, by the distribution of force, weight, and symmetry in architectural and pictorial compositions. From the perception of the relations between our feelings and vocal changes in pitch, rhythm, and volume, we develop accentuated speech and melody. Acquired insights about the effects of characters, fates, and actions on our feelings have produced ideal formations of character and plot. What is ideal in the plastic arts emerges from mysterious relations between felt distinctions in psychic life and the manifold of corporeal forms. (SW V: )

There is no suggestion that instances of what here might seem like matter, for example lines, weights, or pitches, have any aesthetic qualities in isolation; the suggestion seems rather to be that relations among things or properties such as these, thus forms of them, as well as relations between those forms and “felt distinctions in psychic life” such as “the effects of characters, fates, and actions on our feelings,” that is, emotions triggered by forms in art or images of objects presented through such forms, constitute the sources of aesthetic response. But, Dilthey’s ensuing survey of five “spheres of feelings” includes what may be regarded as matter along with form and emotional associations. The first sphere of feeling is that of “general and sensuous feelings”; “What is characteristic about them is that a physiological process evokes pain or pleasure without the mediation of representations” (SW V: ). Dilthey gives no example of what he has in mind here, so I will not speculate. “The second sphere of feelings” is constituted by those elementary feelings that emerge from the contents of sensation when accompanied by a concentrated interest,” which may produce varying degrees of pleasure or pain depending on their intensity. Here, Dilthey clearly has in mind the kinds of sensations and correlative properties of objects that would ordinarily be considered matter in the case of, for example, visual arts and music: “Goethe carried out experiments about these sorts of effects of simple colors. Such an effect also exists in the sensation of simple tones” (SW V: –). The suggestion seems to be that (some) colors and tones are intrinsically pleasing, at least when sensed at some particular intensities even if not at others. “The third sphere of feeling encompasses those feelings which originate in perceptions, and are evoked by the relations of sensuous

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contents to one another,” for example “harmony and contrast . . . in tone and color,” “symmetry” among “spatial feelings” and “rhythm” among “temporal feelings.” Further, “an immeasurable expanse of a uniformly blue sky or of the sea also evokes a strong aesthetic feeling” (SW V: ). Here, the thought seems to be that the particular blue shade of (a particular experience of ) a sky or a sea may or may not be intrinsically pleasing, but an expanse of it may be, an expanse that might plausibly be considered a form if it is delimited by a horizon, a beach, etc. The difference between the “relations” that are the subject of this sphere of feeling and the “connections” that are the source of the next is not immediately apparent: “The fourth sphere of feelings comprises the great variety of feelings that spring from the cognitive connection of our representations and which are aroused by the mere forms of our representational and thought processes, without regard to their relationship of their content to our being” (SW V: ). But, the examples that Dilthey then offers suggest that the cognitive “connections” he is now talking about differ from the previous “relations” in the degree of conscious and perhaps intentional mental activity that it takes to cognize them: In this wide sphere of feelings we find, among others, gradations in the feeling of success which accompanies our representing and thinking, the agreeable feeling of confirming evidence and the disturbing one of contradiction, pleasure in the unity underlying the manifold, enjoyment in comprehending change, the feeling of boredom, the enjoyment of jokes and of the comical, the surprise evoked by a penetrating judgment, and so on. (SW V: )

To put the contrast in Kantian terms, perhaps the relations underlying the third sphere of feeling are somewhat passively recognized by the “lower” cognitive faculty of sensibility, while the “connections” underlying the fourth sphere are more actively cognized by the “higher” powers of understanding, judgment, reasoning, wit, and so on. But, perhaps these two spheres can also be lumped together as the sphere of feelings produced by the cognition of forms relating the matter afforded by sensations or sensory qualities such as colors, tones, etc. If this is permissible, then, given our previous decision to ignore what Dilthey called the first sphere of feeling, what he now lists as the fifth would actually be the third, the sphere of emotional associations: “The fifth sphere of feelings results from the particular material impulses which pervade the whole of life and whose entire content is possessed in a reflexive awareness obtained through feelings.” For example,

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The list of drives that emerge from the depths of sensory feeling includes the drives for nourishment, for self-preservation or the will-to-live, for procreation, and love of offspring . . . When these feelings are either obstructed or furthered and their relations are apprehended, then particular, and often composite, feelings of vanity, honor, pride, shame, and envy arise. But society is just as thoroughly dominated by a second group of feelings in which we experience the pain and pleasure of others as our own. We appropriate another’s life in our own ego, as it were, through sympathy, pity, and love. The more subtle activities and attitudes of society rest primarily upon these two major traits of human feeling. (SW V: )

Dilthey’s argument is thus that there are three great sources of feeling in Erlebnis, the feelings associated immediately with sensation, those associated with the cognition of form, although this draws upon a range of cognitive faculties, and those associated with the whole range of emotions generated by our intercourse with the world of objects, with ourselves, and with each other, and that insofar as it fixes Erlebnis in images or other works – songs, poems, etc. – the arts have these same three funds of feeling to draw upon. A cognitivist and metaphysical approach like that of Hegel, which locates the importance of art in its sensuous presentation of the Idea, an abstract, metaphysical conception of reality – if I were talking with the emphases possible in speech, “the sensuous presentation of the Idea” rather than “the sensuous presentation of the Idea” – fails to recognize that the point of art is to fix the feelings of Erlebnis rather than abstract ideas, and fails to recognize the full range of feelings upon which art can draw. Dilthey follows the last passage I quoted by saying that “The elementary material of poetry is to be found in this sphere of feelings. The more firmly motif and plot are rooted in life, the more powerfully do they move our senses” (SW V: ). This might seem to undermine the tripartite division of sources of feeling that has just been proposed by collapsing the third, emotional association, back into the first, matter. But, perhaps we can distinguish between the matter of a work of art in the sense of its literal components – colors in painting, tones in music, phonemes in poetry, and so on – and its material in the sense of its subject-matter. Then, Dilthey’s claim would be that the (typical) subject-matter of a poem or other kind of art work is some human emotion, while it must also have a medium and form, which not only communicate the subject-matter and the feelings it triggers but can also trigger feelings of their own, all of which join together in our pleasure in the object and in the Erlebnis that it captures. The crucial point is that our feelings about matter, form, and human significance are integrated with each other and with our experience of

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objects in a successful work of art. Dilthey illustrates this in a discussion of a passage from Goethe’s Faust: Images are transformed under the influence of feelings. They are shaped by our emotions, just as the uncertain outlines of rocks and trees are transformed by the influence of the emotions of a traveler in the woods at night. Goethe describes the experience: And the cliffs that bow with ease, Craggy noses, long and short, How they snore and how they snort! And the roots, as serpents, coil From the rocks through sandy soil With their eerie bonds would scare us, Block our path and then ensnare us; Hungry as a starving leech, Their strong polyp’s tendrils reach For the wanderer. (SW V: –, quoted from Goethe , , )

To be sure, Goethe’s poetry is extraordinary in its intense physicality as well as emotionality, which may be why Dilthey so admires it but may also be why it might better be regarded as one ideal for art rather than the model of all art. In particular, it would be hard to explain the pleasure of listening to a cerebral musical composition, for example The WellTempered Clavier, in exactly the same way as the pleasure of reading this intense passage from Faust, which is on the one hand utterly original in its image of the cliffs while on the other hand it captures a common experience of gnarled roots in a forest. But, although Dilthey does not make this explicit, it need not be part of his argument that every work of art must draw on all the spheres of feelings, nor that any work of art is better than another for drawing upon more of them rather than fewer. The argument need only be that they are all there to be drawn upon, and all need to be recognized in aesthetic theory, which the cognitivist and metaphysical approach of Hegelian aesthetics does not do. The risk of conflation between the first and third of Dilthey’s sphere of feelings (as renumbered) having been avoided, this is a good point to turn to Santayana, for there may appear to be a similar conflation between the first and third of his aesthetic categories as well.



Santayana

Santayana identifies the three elements that contribute to beauty as “value positive, intrinsic, and objectified” as “materials,” “form,” and

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“expression.” The chapter on “The Materials of Beauty” starts off with an assertion of Santayana’s pluralistic approach: “All human functions may contribute to the sense of beauty” (/, §, ). This sounds as if intended to prepare the way for the discussion of the contributions of sensation, cognition, and emotion in the three chapters to follow, which would parallel Dilthey’s three main spheres of feeling connected with sensuous qualities, the cognition of forms and relations, and the emotional associations of fundamental human drives. But, it is also meant as the premise for the discussion of the materials of beauty itself. For Santayana does not immediately turn to the discussion of such obvious sensory qualities as color and sound, although he will reach them, and they are what he is referring to when he says that “Form cannot be the form of nothing,” so that “The beauty of material is thus the groundwork of all higher beauty, both in the object, whose form and meaning have to be lodged in something sensible, and in the mind, where sensuous ideas, being the first to emerge, are the first that can arouse delight” (§, , ). Instead, and surprisingly, the chapter follows its opening claim with sections on “The influence of the passion of love” and “Social instincts and their æsthetic influence” (§§, , , ). These sections, presumably influenced by Edmund Burke’s location of the two fundamental sources of beauty in the drives for sex and society (see Burke , Part I, §§VIII–IX, –), argue that the “capacity to love” both sexually and more generally, in friendship, family life, and social life, “gives our contemplation that glow without which it might often fail to manifest beauty” (Santayana /, §, ). Thus, “sexual emotions are simultaneously extended to various secondary objects” such as “colour, grace, and form, which become the stimuli of social passion” (ibid.), while an idea like “‘home,’ which in its social sense is a concept of happiness, when it becomes materialized in a cottage and a garden becomes an æsthetic concept, becomes a beautiful thing. The happiness is objectified, and the object beautified” (§, ). Santayana might seem to be jumping the gun, subsuming under the rubric of material what ought to be saved for that of expression or association; but perhaps his justification is that, at least phenomenologically, the pleasure attached to properties like colors (for example, of skin, hair, and eyes) and sounds (of an attractive voice) or images like those of a typical home are so inseparable from what pleasure those properties or images might yield without such associations that they should be grouped together as the building blocks of beauty in complex natural objects and artistic works. And, even without this speculation, we might also propose that Santayana is using the term “material” in precisely

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the twofold sense that Dilthey also did, that is, that under the rubric “material” he is discussing both the matter which is what aesthetic form is the form of but also the typical subject-matter of many works of art, among which sexual and social relations are surely foremost. As Santayana says, “Friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence,” and of course sex, “constitute surely the main elements of happiness” (ibid.), and, as such, also constitute the chief subject-matter of art. Of course, we could add that these subjects are also the main sources of human unhappiness; but since for Santayana aesthetic value is positive, pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing, recognition of that point will have to await the account of the transformation of elements of unhappiness into pleasure by other elements of the aesthetic, such as form, knowledge, and association. He subsequently offers such an account, above all in his discussion of tragedy (§§–, –). Santayana’s second source of beauty is form. Form “is found where sensible elements, by themselves indifferent, are so united as to please in combination” (/, §, ). Santayana illustrates this definition with a little diagram showing how the same set of lines of various lengths can be combined into profiles of three different faces, two of them ugly and one handsome and refined. The larger argument of the chapter is that “The synthesis . . . which constitutes form is an activity of the mind,” and pleasurable precisely because it is an activity of the mind (§, ). But, Santayana is no believer in a rigid distinction between mind and body, so he might better have put his point by saying that form arises from enjoyable activities of the person, which may be more physiological and unconscious, such as the “natural and rhythmical set of movements in the optic muscles” in the perception of “the curves we call flowing and graceful” (§, ), or more intellectual and conscious, as when symmetry appeals to us “through the charm of recognition” as well as that of “rhythm” (§, ) or “infinity . . . moves us in the sense of multiplicity in uniformity” (§, ). The pleasure in the cognition of such relations and connections, to borrow Dilthey’s terms, are typically added to the more immediate pleasures of the materials of beauty, or, to use Santayana’s own language, the pleasures of apperception are typically added to those of mere perception. For example, “a word in a poem” is “more effective by its fitness than by its intrinsic beauty, although that is requisite too” (§, ), where “fitness” connotes the relation of one word to its context of other words, and thus to such aspects as rhythm, rhyme, and ultimately of course cognitive and emotional meaning created by that larger context and cognized by us in pleasurable mental activity.

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In this chapter, Santayana argues that since so much of aesthetic pleasure and value depends upon cognitive activity, and different individuals, even if their basic physiologies are much the same, will bring such different cognitive and ultimately emotional backgrounds to their apperception of particular objects, “The ideal enlargement of human capacity, therefore, has no tendency to constitute a single standard of beauty,” rather there will be a plurality of standards remaining “the expression of diverse habits of sense and imagination” (/, §, ). Santayana’s rejection of any unitary standard of taste seems to be in tension with Dilthey’s search for rules for the poetic imagination. But, since Dilthey was an historicist, whose rules in fact guaranteed that there would be differences in aesthetic preferences in different periods and cultures because of differences in cognitive connections and emotional associations, any difference between Santayana and Dilthey on this point seems minor; Santayana emphasizes differences in taste among individuals and Dilthey among cultures and periods, but both agree that the complexity of the sources of aesthetic response or pleasure is enough to undermine the ideal of a single standard of taste for all human cultures and periods. There is much else in Santayana’s discussion of form, for example his account of the relation between utility and beauty (/, §§–, –), that we will have to pass over in order to reach his third main category and area of agreement with Dilthey. This is what Santayana calls “expression.” He begins the final chapter of his book with the remark that “human consciousness is not a perfectly clear mirror, with distinct boundaries and clear-cut images, determinate in number and exhaustively perceived” (§, ). In other words, Santayana agrees with Dilthey that we do not experience objects or images in isolation, but always as part of a nexus including recollection and anticipation, nor do we separate the pleasures of sensation from those of cognition and emotion in what Dilthey calls the fixation of Erlebnis in an image and what Santayana calls value objectified. Santayana then defines expression as “The quality . . . acquired by objects through association,” and means primarily emotional association: “We not only construct visible unities and recognizable types” in the cognition or constitution of form, “but remain aware of their affinities to what is not at the time perceived; that is, we find in them a certain tendency and quality, not original to them,” in the way that their merely sensuous qualities are, “which upon investigation we shall see to have been the proper characteristics of other objects and feelings, associated with them once in our experience” (ibid.). “Expressiveness is thus the power given by experience to any image to call up others in

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the mind; and this expressiveness becomes an æsthetic value, that is, becomes expression, when the value involved in the associations thus awakened are incorporated in the present object” (§, ). But, it is clear that the “images” that Santayana has in mind are chiefly emotions, or at least emotionally charged images. For example, “Thoughts of labour, ambition, lust, anger, confusion, sorrow, and death must needs mix with our contemplation and lend their various expressions to the objects with which in experience they are so closely allied. Hence the incorporation in the beautiful of values of other sorts . . .” (§, ). As already mentioned, the emotions that are thus associated with and objectified in works of art will hardly always be pleasant emotions. Addressing this fact as a possible objection to his thesis that aesthetic value is pleasure regarded as a quality of a thing is the main business of Santayana’s chapter on expression, and his strategy is the division of the expressive aesthetic object into two “terms,” the first the artistic image or work comprised of sensuous quality plus form, the second that which is expressed by the first. His argument is then simply that “the value acquired by the expressive thing is often of an entirely different kind from that which the thing expressed possesses” (/, §, ), because the pleasures of the first term can outweigh or transform the displeasure that might be associated with the second term. “The agreeableness of the presentation is thus mixed with the horror of the thing; and the result is that while we are saddened by the truth we are delighted by the vehicle that conveys it to us” (§, ); and pleasure in the knowledge of truth itself can outweigh the unpleasantness of the truth: “We covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can also afford” (§, ). This approach to the paradoxes of the tragic and the comic is, of course, wellworn, previously exploited by Baumgarten, Moses Mendelssohn, Kant, and many others. But, it is none the less reasonable for that. Santayana has thus argued that pleasures of perception and cognition can outweigh and transform displeasures of association or expression. It can work the other way around as well, that is, pleasures of expression and cognitive activity can transform sensually indifferent material into something beautiful: “A word, for example, is often beautiful by virtue of its meaning and associations; but sometimes this expressive beauty is added to a musical quality in the word itself” (/, §, ). In other words, sometimes all three sources of aesthetic pleasure are active in the experience of a particular object, sometimes fewer. When they are all active, the experience of pleasure will be unitary, and the separate sources

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may be teased out only by art criticism in particular and philosophical analysis in general. But, they need not all be active in any particular case, although comparing cases in which more or fewer are involved may be one of the critical and philosophical techniques for separating in theory what is usually fused in phenomenology. We have now seen the deep methodological and substantive affinities between the anti-metaphysical, psychological aesthetics of Dilthey and Santayana. It remains only to ask how fair their common contrast of their own positions to the allegedly metaphysical aesthetics of Hegel really is.

 A Brief Conclusion It might seem that the criticism of Hegel is not entirely fair. After all, Hegel defines beauty as the sensuous appearance of the Idea, and “art’s vocation” as “to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration” (, vol. I: ), thus “the content of art is the Idea, while its form is the configuration of sensuous material” (vol. I: ). This seems to acknowledge the importance of sensuous material and its form (“configuration”) as well as intellectual content (“Idea”) in art, and thus to do justice to at least some of the complexity that Dilthey and Santayana insist upon. But, it also seems fair to observe that although Hegel defines one moment in the history of art, what he calls the “classical,” by its harmony between sensuously realized form and intellectual content, he does not seem to locate much pleasure in the experience of the sensuous and formal sides of art themselves, and further, in his account of “romantic” art, which is to say the paradigmatic art of modernity, he generally finds the sensuous side of art a constraint and limitation on its potential for conveying the Idea or intellectual content. That is why “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (vol. I: ), to be superseded by religion and then philosophy. The pluralistic approaches of Dilthey and Santayana never see the sensuous side of beauty in art as a limitation and they are therefore under no pressure to regard art as a thing of the past. Further, Hegel expressly criticizes any view of the “aim of art” on which it “is supposed to consist in awakening and vivifying our slumbering feelings, inclinations, and passions of every kind, in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, educated or not, to go through the whole gamut of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret recesses can bear” (vol. I: ), but precisely this is the third and culminating source of aesthetic pleasure for both Dilthey and Santayana.

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But, perhaps Hegel’s bark is worse than his bite. Sometimes, he does recognize the emotional dimension of the experience of art, the omission of which is really Dilthey’s and Santayana’s most serious objection to him. Here, for example, is a passage, not from H. G. Hotho’s posthumous edition of Hegel’s lectures but from his original transcription of Hegel’s course of , in which Hegel emphasizes the emotional aspect of the experience of music: What music touches is feeling, the initial self-expansion of subjectivity, the I that, in this abstraction, receives specificity. For instance, we speak of sadness, fear, and cheerfulness as feelings. There is a content, and when I have these feelings in relation to my subjectivity, I experience this content . . . The feeling is what envelops the content insofar as it relates to my subjectivity. And this is the sphere to which music principally lays claim. (, )

Well, even Homer nods, or Hegel wakes up. Here, Hegel clearly does recognize the emotional associations of music as crucial to our experience of it. But, it nevertheless seems fair to say that music does not loom large in Hegel’s philosophy and historiography of the arts. His account of the rise and fall of art as a whole, in which architecture, sculpture, and literature play a larger role than any other arts, is predicated on his conception of the tension between the sensuous form and intellectual content of art, rather than on the recognition of the potential contributions to aesthetic experience of the three dimensions of sensation, cognitive activity, and emotional association that is central to the aesthetics of both Dilthey and Santayana. Thus, it seems fair for them to distance themselves from Hegel as much as they do.

 

Dilthey and Wittgenstein Understanding Understanding Lee Braver

Certainly, there are important differences between Wilhelm Dilthey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most important philosopher of the analytic tradition. Dilthey’s project is to provide a foundation for the human sciences, based largely on indubitable introspection; I don’t think there’s a single part of that description – foundation, sciences, indubitable, introspection – that wouldn’t fill Wittgenstein with horror. On the other hand, Dilthey is more broadly seeking to understand how understanding and interpretation work, and that central topic the two share. I have argued elsewhere that given the centrality of understanding and interpretation in his work, Wittgenstein can also be seen as one of the great hermeneuticists (Braver ). The two make a number of substantial and interesting points of contact on this general topic. Dilthey’s term “nexus” (Zusammenhang) indicates the way various components of something hang together holistically, such that we cannot understand any isolated from the others, nor reduce any to the others, nor can we construct a nexus by adding components together, like bricks combining into a wall. The facets of a nexus intertwine and depend on each other intrinsically. Dilthey sees this holistic interconnectedness as one of the defining features of the human world, his chosen subject of study, for we ourselves are never isolated atoms but always already integrated into history and society as well as within ourselves through time and meaning (GS : ,  / SW III: , ). “Everything having to do with spirit manifests this connectedness of a nexus,” so “wherever these sciences reach, they deal with the connectedness of some whole” (GS : ,  / SW III: , ). Since the human sciences are about spiritual matters, they themselves only achieve “a certain degree of completeness by a set of  

Wittgenstein’s early work can be read as foundationalist, but his later work is as anti-foundationalist as they come. Others have noted this overlap, e.g., Apel (, ch. ).

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

 

various interlocking theories” (GS :  / SW I: ), that is, they themselves must partake in the holism of their subject matter. Only a nexus can capture a nexus. This “results in a reciprocal dependence” of whole and part known as the hermeneutic circle, which Dilthey calls “the most general feature of the structure of the humans sciences” (GS : – / SW III: –). In light of this, his general working strategy is that “we start with the whole” since “the whole is primary” (GS : ,  / SW I: , ); it cannot be put together later if we start with pieces (I call this holistic principle the Humpty-Dumpty Thesis – see Braver , –). Although we naturally begin with wholes – this is how life and lived experience manifest – we rarely preserve their integrity. We have an almost irresistible tendency to abstract: isolating individual elements and treating them as self-sufficient, analyzing them by themselves via explanatory hypotheses. This works in the natural sciences, but it is fundamentally inappropriate to the holistic subject matter of the human sciences; breaking these topics down distorts them. This penchant for abstraction is perhaps Dilthey’s counterpart to what Kant saw as reason’s propensity, outlined in the first sentence of the first Critique, to ask questions that “[transcend] all its powers,” thereby producing antinomies and confusions (Kant , A vii). Abstraction from context is the source of the conceptual errors that Dilthey’s critique of historical reason avoids by returning what has been isolated back to its context, where it has meaning. “The first insight generated by lived experience and understanding is that they are about connectedness. We understand only connectedness. Understanding and connectedness or nexus correspond to one another” (GS :  / SW III: ). This marks the distinctiveness of the human as opposed to the natural sciences. Nature we explain, but psychic life we understand . . . The lived whole is primary here; the distinction among its constituent parts only comes afterwards. It follows from this that the methods by means of which we study psychic life, history, and society are very different from those that have led to the conceptual cognition of nature . . . In psychology it is precisely the connectedness that is originally and continually given in lived experience: life presents itself everywhere only as a continuum or nexus. (GS :  / SW II: –)

Natural scientists explain nature by means of hypotheses that separate individual constituents; human scientists understand art, minds, society, 

See also GS : ,  / SW III: , .

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



history, religion, etc., by engaging with these subjects as coherent complexes within larger contexts. Every element gets its meaning from its background so that, e.g., for historians, “each part of this historical whole, has its significance through its relationship to the whole of the epoch or age” (GS :  / SW III: ). Thus, a human scientist’s method almost reverses the natural scientist’s, reconstructing contexts and placing phenomena back into them. Wittgenstein operates with a very similar approach, absent the focus on the sciences. The later Wittgenstein, that is; his early work has a certain degree of holism, but ultimately compromises it by basing all language on self-sufficient relationships between names and simple objects that consist of “unalterable” internal properties that “[subsist] independently of what is the case” throughout the rest of the world (Wittgenstein b, ., .). Each state of affairs exists in complete isolation of all others, unaffected by everything else (., .–., ., .); correlatively, each elementary proposition enjoys a truth-value independently of all other facts (., .). Wittgenstein soon spotted the flaws in this atomistic theory. Color properties, for example, are not independent but mutually exclusive; if a point is blue, then it cannot be red or mauve or any other color. This allows one to deduce supposedly elementary propositions (“Point a is not red”) from others (“Point a is blue”), violating his logical atomism (.–., .–.). Once holism gets a foothold in his early system, it grows over the next several years until it takes over Wittgenstein’s later thought. In , he claims that “a proposition cannot be significant except in a system of propositions” (b, , see also ), presumably like color-space. These internally interconnected but separate groups then combine into language as a whole: “it is only in a language that something is a proposition. To understand a proposition is to understand a language” (, ). Language evolves into language-games that include not just other propositions, but “the actions into which [language] is woven” (a, §). The study of language can no longer just look at words since the context defining them encompasses behavior as well. This holism keeps enlarging and deepening until “what determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurlyburly of human actions, the background against which we see any action”   

See also GS : ,  / SW III: –, ; GS :  / SW II: . See also Wittgenstein (a, §; b, ; , §; , ; , §). See also Wittgenstein (a, §; b, , ; , , ) and Bouwsma (, ).



 

(, §; see also , §; , , –, ). Starting from Frege’s context principle that words only have meaning within a sentence, Wittgenstein’s holism expands from closed systems of propositions to encompass a meaning-giving background of cultural practices and the basic patterns of behavior that make up ordinary human life. He and Dilthey are very close on this basic commitment; compare these two remarkably similar passages: When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole). (Wittgenstein a, §; see also §, §§–, §) This results in a reciprocal dependence of the way we apprehend each particular state of affairs of the human sciences within the communal, historical whole of which it is a part and of the way we grasp the conceptual re-presentation of this whole in the systematic human sciences. In the progress of the human sciences, we see at every point the reciprocal influence of lived experience and understanding as we apprehend the human world [around us], then the reciprocal dependence of universal and singular knowledge, and finally the gradual illumination of the world of human spirit. (GS :  / SW III: )

Games replace pictures as Wittgenstein’s later model of language partly because they present such a clear and forceful alternative to atomism. The “meaning” of a queen is neither contained within the piece of carved wood (we can use almost anything as pieces), nor does it stand for a metaphysical queenly quintessence. Rather, each part of a game derives its sense from its relations to all the other parts, each of which in turn gets determined by its relationships. As Dilthey argues regarding aspects of the human sciences, isolating an individual piece for study doesn’t improve our understanding, but prevents it. No matter how closely you examine a single piece or move, you cannot grasp its significance without a sense of the other pieces and the game as a whole. It isn’t that discovering this quality would be difficult outside the proper circumstances, but that its meaning simply doesn’t exist there. The use of a word in such a case is like the use of a piece in a game, and you cannot understand the use of a queen unless you understand the uses of the other pieces. What you do with one sort of piece is intelligible only in terms of what you do with it in relation to what is done with the other pieces. (Bouwsma , ).  

Expressed at Wittgenstein (b, .) and approvingly mentioned at Wittgenstein (a, §). Dilthey dances around this topic at GS :  / SW III: –. See also Wittgenstein (, ; , ; a, §, §, §, §).

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



Since each part of a language-game derives its meaning from the other aspects, none retains its meaning outside its normal context. “Understanding p means understanding its system. If p appears to go over from one system into another, then p has, in reality, changed its sense” (Wittgenstein , §; see also a, §§, §§–). Alter the circumstances surrounding the pushing of chess pieces around a board enough – put the tableau on stage as part of a play, say, or make it the transmission of a coded message between spies – and you fundamentally alter the significance of the “same” motions (Derrida extends a similar idea into what he calls iterability). Conversely, under the right conditions just about anything can count as chess pieces and moves. This holistic semantics explains Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as creating insoluble pseudo-problems by removing words from their customary language-games. “Someone who idealizes falsely must talk nonsense – because he uses a mode of speaking that is valid in one languagegame in another one where it doesn’t belong” (, ; see also , §, ). Philosophers transfer words and ideas to outlandish scenarios of demons and caves, or isolate them from all contexts whatsoever. They ascend Plato’s divided line from various concrete instantiations to a pure unwavering essence in search of its absolute form, what it really is regardless of what people think or how they use it. We don’t want plain old certainty, but Cartesian certitude that can’t be false no matter what, or Kantian goodness where actions are good regardless of what occurs. It’s philosophy’s “no matter what,” the italicized “really,” this demand for the absolute (whose etymological root means set off by itself ) that lops off connections to local conditions. Philosophers want to make unqualified statements that remain true come what may, but this only works if, contra meaning-holism, words retain the same meaning in all situations. Once philosophy’s ascent leaves behind the atmosphere in which words breathe, their use dissipates, leaving us grasping for guidance from wildly inappropriate pictures or analogies that fizzle out even as they seem to yield profound insights. “‘But this supposition surely makes good sense!’ – Yes; in ordinary circumstances these words and this picture have an application with which we are familiar. – But if we suppose a case in which this application falls away we become as it were conscious for the first time of the nakedness of the words and the picture” (Wittgenstein a, §; see also §; §, ). This represents Wittgenstein’s



See also Bouwsma (, , ), Wittgenstein (a, §, §; , §§–, §; , §; , I-§, III-§, III-§§–; , ), and Medina (, , , , ).



 

version of Kant’s transcendental illusions: demands for the unconditioned that produce antinomies. Just as Dilthey returns isolated phenomena to their context, so Wittgenstein wants “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (a, §). It is in ordinary language that we know what to do with these words, and this meaning cannot be simply transplanted into new situations; sometimes the new host rejects the semantic implant. “It is as if ‘I know’ did not tolerate a metaphysical emphasis” (a, §). Ordinary language doesn’t have an absolute privilege, or fix meanings once and for all. Wittgenstein explicitly acknowledges that languages develop and he builds an openness to new uses into philosophical investigation (a, §, §, §; , §; , I-§, II§, III-§). The problem is that philosophy sketches situations that muddy meaning, like trying to figure out who won a game of tennis played with an imaginary ball. “The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules” (a, §; see also §, §, §, §). Wittgenstein insists that we must know how to apply our words if we are to understand what we’re saying. He never objects to words or ideas because they’re wrong, but because they fall apart in our hands. We ourselves don’t know how to use them, leaning on misleading pictures or superficial resemblances for guidance. “We learn to use the word ‘think’ under particular circumstances. If the circumstances are different we don’t know how to use it” (, §). Wittgenstein uses meaning-holism to dissolve various philosophical problems, such as skepticism. Doubting has a particular meaning; it cannot be employed any which way and remain doubt. Only certain uses succeed in doubting, whereas others, as Austin puts it, misfire. “So how does the doubt get expressed? That is: in a language-game, and not merely in certain phrases . . . But this expression of doubt by no means always makes sense, nor does it always have a point. One simply tends to forget

  

See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §, §, §, §; , , ). See also Wittgenstein (, , , CV ; , , ). See also Wittgenstein (b, –, ; , , , , –, ; , , ; , , , ; , , , , , , , ). “It’s no help to us that we find a way of speaking ready-made in our ordinary language, since this language uses each of its words with the most varied meanings, and understanding the use of the word in one context does not relieve us from investigating its grammar in another” (, –).

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



that even doubting belongs to a language-game” (Wittgenstein a, §). Our ability to apply terms like “doubt” or “know” presupposes certain conditions that their skeptical employment does away with, leaving only confusion. Using the terms meaningfully however prevents constructing the skeptic’s scenarios. When you say “Suppose I believe . . .” you are presupposing the whole grammar of the word “to believe,” the ordinary use, of which you are a master. – You are not supposing some state of affairs which, so to speak, a picture presents unambiguously to you, so that you can tack on to this hypothetical use some assertive use other than the ordinary one. – You would not know at all what you were supposing here (that is what, for example, would follow from such a supposition), if you were not already familiar with the use of “believe.” (Wittgenstein a, )

This is how he analyzes the phrase at the heart of both epistemological foundationalism and its evil twin, skepticism: “I know.” “I know that that’s a tree.” Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the sentence? though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind? It is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning. Simply because I don’t look for the focus where the meaning is. As soon as I think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary. (Wittgenstein a, §; see also §, §, §; Medina , )

The philosophical use attempts to retain the phrase’s meaning away from its everyday context, depriving it of the friction needed for movement. We want to make claims of absolute knowledge that could never be wrong no matter what, yet we have no idea how to operate this phrase in such abstract, airless conditions. It is queer: if I say, without any special occasion, “I know” – for example, “I know that I am now sitting in a chair,” this statement seems to me unjustified and presumptuous. But, if I make the same statement where there is some need for it, then, although I am not a jot more certain of its truth, it seems to me to be perfectly justified and everyday. In its language-game it is not presumptuous. There, it has no higher position than, simply, the human language-game. For there it has its restricted application.



See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §§–, §, §, §, §, §§–, §, §, §, §, §, §, §, §, §§–; , §, §, §, §; , §§–; , ; , , –, , ; a, §, §).



  But, as soon as I say this sentence outside its context, it appears in a false light. For then it is as if I wanted to insist that there are things that I know. God himself can’t say anything to me about them. (Wittgenstein a, §–)

Just as with Dilthey, problems and confusions arise when we take something out of its context and they are resolved by its return. Now the most important context for Dilthey, the alpha and omega, the starting point and final court of appeal is always the psychic nexus. Whereas the physical sciences study physical nature, the human sciences are ultimately about human nature. As they are about and by humans, the human sciences must be conditioned by the facts of consciousness, the ways we experience, an idea Dilthey calls the principle of phenomenality (GS :  / SW I: ; GS :  / SW III: ). It is his version of Kant’s “highest principle of all synthetic judgments . . . that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (Kant , A/B). Of course, Dilthey finds Kant’s subject wanting, bloodless, (GS : xviii / SW I: ; GS : – / SW III: –) since it isolates our thinking, representing faculties from the rest of our being, thus violating the very notion of a nexus (Dilthey raises the same objection against Hegel at GS : – / SW III: –). “The psychic life-process is originally and everywhere – from its most elementary forms to its highest – a unity. Psychic life does not grow together from parts; it is not composed of elements; it is not a composite . . .; it is originally and always a comprehensive unity” (GS :  / SW II: ; see also GS :  / SW III: ). Therefore, exclusively focusing on any single aspect of human nature distorts matters, obscuring rather than illuminating. He singles out reason because “philosophy has been misled by the illusion of an isolated formation of the intellect” (GS :  / SW I: ). Dilthey’s remedy for this isolation is, as always, to return the detached element to its element. Since the psychic nexus is the ultimate context for all thinking, he establishes the “second main principle of philosophy: the nexus that encompasses the facts of consciousness . . . is contained in the totality of psychic life. Accordingly, the explanation of this nexus . . . must be based on the analysis of psychic life as a whole” (GS :  / SW I: –). He proposes to “relate every component of contemporary abstract scientific thought to the whole of human nature . . . and thus seek 

See also GS :  / SW I: ; GS :  / SW III: ; GS :  / SW I: –.

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



the connection of these components . . . In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects” (GS : xviii / SW I: ). In a strategy that Heidegger adapts (after stripping away the lifephilosophy elements) for his own fundamental ontology, Dilthey argues that we must understand thinking by understanding the nature of the thinker, and above all, that this is a living being who also feels and wills. This approach guides Dilthey’s descriptive psychology: “epistemology must begin with whole and concrete human beings in their vitality and fullness . . . The function of thought can only be grasped naturally as part of the system or structure of all the functions of life” (GS :  / SW II: ). We must understand thought not as a disembodied, abstract process of combining ideas, but rather as something that a particular kind of living being does to further its interests. Abstract cognition cannot be removed from its context of the psychic nexus without distorting it, misrepresenting representational thought. This applies to the most abstract forms of thought, such as logic: “logical processes are to be regarded not as isolated elements that enter into combinations, but as parts of a whole whose constitution is dependent on the latter. The parts are conditioned by the entire acquired nexus of psychic life” (GS :  / SW I: ; see also GS :  / SW II: ). As we have seen, Wittgenstein also returns phenomena to their contexts, especially restoring words to their normal usage: “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (a, §). However, this context must itself be placed in a larger context that corresponds to Dilthey’s “biological perspective” (GS :  / SW II: ), i.e., the idea that we must grasp thoughts and ideas from the perspective of life and human nature. Although Wittgenstein has reservations about naturalism’s reliance on science, he repeatedly portrays thinking as “a human activity” or “just a phenomenon of human life,” depicting what he is doing as offering “remarks on the natural history of man” (, , , ). “Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive, kinds of behaviour towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and 

  

See also GS : – / SW I: –; GS : , ,  / SW I: , , ; GS :  / SW III: . Interestingly for our study, Dilthey applies this method to types of assertions, whose variety beyond mere statements of fact to include what we would call “speech acts” (an important point in later Wittgenstein) is due to our multifaceted nature, in that different types of utterances emerge from different aspects of our psyche (GS : ,  / SW I: , ; GS : , ,  / SW I: , , ). See also GS : ,  / SW II: , ; GS :  / SW II: ; GS :  / SW III: . See also GS :  / SW II: ; GS :  / SW II: . See also Wittgenstein (, , , –, , ; a, §, n., §).



 

further extension of, this relation. Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct)” (, §; see also , , ). Wittgenstein’s counterpart to Dilthey’s psychic nexus would be forms of life: “here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a life-form” (Wittgenstein a, §; see also §). We should not approach thinking or speaking as if they were activities of a pure intellect that merely happens to be instantiated in a human life. No, the way we think and speak is specifically the way we do it, due to all sorts of factors particular to our nature. Absent these, we either could not think or speak or would do so profoundly differently. This is how I understand his well-known remark that, “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (a, ; see also ). A very different animal endowed with reason or speech would not be able simply to communicate with us, for the enormous difference between our forms of life – our natures, our interests, etc. – would create a massive, perhaps insurmountable divergence between the ways we think and speak. Dilthey agrees that we understand others on the basis of our own psychic nexus, which greatly limits our ability to understand those who do not share our basic ways of engaging in life, including animals (GS : – / SW I: ). Rather like Wittgenstein’s thought experiments of Martians or strange tribes, Dilthey imagines “merely a representational being” with no affective states, arguing that such a being would be profoundly disinterested in the world around them, unmotivated to make judgments or to act, thus indicating the tight integration among reason, feeling, and volition (GS : ,  / SW II: – , –). It is not merely our intellect that enables us to cognize; rather, cognition rests in a nest of other capacities such as feelings and volition that make it what it is. This is why we must take the whole person, the entire psychic nexus, into account to understand any particular aspect, such as reason. One of the central themes of Wittgenstein’s later work is a similar contextualization of speech and reason within a wider human setting. These sophisticated capacities emerge from a particular form of childhood development that itself relies on certain prerational or instinctive features of human nature. From its beginning, Philosophical Investigations insists that teaching a child to talk “is not explanation, but training” (a, §).  

See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §§–, §, §, §, §, §, §; , , ; , , , ); Apel (, ; ). It is hard not to think of Heideggerian care here.

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



“The child learns this language from the grown-ups by being trained to its use. I am using the word ‘trained’ in a way strictly analogous to that in which we talk of an animal being trained to do certain things. It is done by means of example, reward, punishment, and suchlike” (b, ; see also , ). Explanations only work if the child reliably reacts in certain ways: finding some similarities relevant and others not, attending to what ostensive definitions point to, reading pictures and taking rules the way others do, and so on. Once these tendencies are in place, the student can learn more advanced rules and can do so in more explicit ways, just as ostensive definitions are perfectly serviceable for learning new words after one has mastered the skill of looking at what is being pointed out and associating it with a word. But, instilling these baseline, enabling reactions cannot themselves be accomplished by teaching, since all teaching presupposes them. “To regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination . . . Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (a, §). We only react to orders and rules appropriately on the basis of training, and training can only instill these reactions in certain kinds of beings. Necessary for successful conditioning is a conditionable human nature which reliably reacts in certain ways rather than others. Without these natural reactions, we could never rise to reasoning, and the ways we naturally react are species-specific. One of Wittgenstein’s favorite examples is the way dogs easily take to tasks that cats simply will not; this is due to a disparity in natures, not intelligence or vigor in training. “Acts of encouragement will be of various kinds, and many such acts will only be possible if the pupil responds, and responds in a particular way . . . Imagine . . . that you tried to teach a cat to retrieve” (b, –; see also , §). Without the right kind of reactions, no amount of instruction can succeed; with them, a single gesture may suffice. Certain instinctive orientations – a sensitivity to other people’s reactions and a desire to please and fit in with others – must be in place if training is to find purchase upon the soul. In sum, we must possess a certain “form of life” in order to be socialized, even humanized; training cannot form character ex nihilo, but only cultivate. Our apparently “spontaneous expression[s]” actually arise on the basis of two factors: “by nature and by a particular training” (a, §). This helps explain the problems that both philosophers believe ensue from decontextualizing. If one takes a word out of its usual usage, a phrase  

See Wittgenstein (a, §, §, §§–, §§–; , ). See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §; , §, §, §; a, §).



 

from its normal practice, or a faculty apart from the psychic nexus or form of life that conditions and enables it, one deprives it of the very features that render it comprehensible. The purported explanation obfuscates. Dilthey argues that explanative psychology is misguided since, like the natural sciences, it takes phenomena out of their context to examine on their own. When applied to a nexus like the mind, this approach eliminates the very thing it is trying to study. “The intellect can merely dissect the living core and synthesize it again . . . But these operations destroy the living facts as such. That which has once been separated is now asunder, and it is inconceivable how through synthesis something sundered into atoms should become once again the unity of a manifold” (GS :  / SW II: ). In his version of the Humpty-Dumpy Thesis, the intellect dismembers; in any whole it assembles out of pieces the stitches will show, undermining the nexus’ essential original integrity. This places a limit on the extent to which mental life and, by the principle of phenomenality, anything, admits of explanation. Explanations use hypotheses to trace the origin of individual phenomena that can then be joined together, but such an approach can never truly grasp something like a holistic psychic nexus. Thus, Dilthey insists that we acknowledge that explanation ends: “all these differences are not intellectual; rather, they are conditioned by a system of different life processes or functions. Again and again we must be warned against wanting to explain this system” (GS :  / SW II: ). If we persist, then “imminent antinomies” (GS :  / SW I: –; GS : ,  / SW II: , ) arise, that is, contradictions and incomprehensible riddles within experience rather than, as Kant has it, just when we use concepts to transcend experience. “Insoluble contradictions only arise if one wants to explain the flow of life” (GS :  / SW III: ; see also GS :  / SW II: ). We understand particular behaviors and thoughts by placing them within the context of the entire psychic nexus, and we understand this nexus by sympathetically recreating it within our own, but this marks the end of the explanatory journey. “All science is experience; but all experience must be related back to and derives its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature. We designate as ‘epistemological’ this standpoint which consistently recognizes the impossibility of going behind these conditions”



See also GS : ,  / SW II , ; GS : , ,  / SW II: , –, ; GS : , ,  / SW I: , , ; GS : – / SW III: .

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



(GS : xvii / SW I: ). The attempt to go behind experience to explain its origin corresponds to Kant’s transcendent illusions where “explanative psychology transgresses human limits” (GS :  / SW III: ). We cannot explain the psychic nexus because it is holistic whereas explanations separate, but also because any explanation would have to employ the categories that emerge from life and consciousness, thereby presupposing what the account is attempting to explain (GS : –, ,  / SW I: , , ). If we cannot explain the ultimate ground of the psychic nexus by grounding it in anything further, then how should epistemology and psychology approach these matters? For Dilthey, “we can merely accept them as givens; their facticity is unfathomable for us” (GS :  / SW I: ; see also GS : , ,  / SW I: , , ). Rather than starting with simpler components and combining them to form a nexus, which as we’ve seen cannot achieve true unity, we must start with the nexus without attempting to account for it. “Psychology . . . must begin with developed psychic life, rather than derive it from elementary processes” (GS :  / SW II: ). That does not mean that we merely gape at it wordlessly, of course; we substitute the project of description for explanation. “What life is remains an insoluble riddle. All reflection, inquiry, and thought arise from this inscrutable [source]. All cognition is rooted in this never fully cognizable [ground]. Yet it can be described” (GS :  / SW II: ). Hence, Dilthey’s preference for descriptive over explanatory psychology. Wittgenstein is not interested in constructing an anatomy of the mind, but he certainly agrees that we run into perplexities, and that “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work” (a, §). Removing words from their normal contexts to focus on them in isolation strips away our understanding; we go on talking nonetheless which produces nonsense, i.e., philosophy. We strip away the rules and practice of the game, the board and other pieces, and then are flummoxed when the rook just stands there, inscrutable. Instead of looking at the whole game, we seek quintessential rookness. Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object. – And you really get such a queer connexion when a philosopher tries to bring out the  

See also GS : , , – / SW II: , , ; GS : –,  / SW II: , ; GS : – / SW III: . See also GS :  / SW II: ; GS :  / SW II: ; GS :  / SW I: ; GS :  / SW I: .



  relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word ‘this’ innumerable times. For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. (Wittgenstein a, §; see also b, , ; , ; a, §)

In his famous discussion of rule-following, we encounter a “paradox” or “misunderstanding” when we remove the rule from what “is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases,” how we “have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way . . . a custom” (Wittgenstein a, §, §). Our perplexity is due to isolation, since “interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning” (§). We must instead look to normal usage, customs, social practices, and ultimately some very basic facts about human nature and upbringing for their significance and normative force. Although everything there is to know about language lies out in the open (Wittgenstein a, §, §, §, §) – a bit like the psychic nexus, “a sentence has not got its sense ‘behind’ it; it has it in the calculus in which it is used” (c, ) – we lack a clear overview (Übersehen) of this sprawling knotted mess due to “the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in” (, ; see also ; , ; a, §, §). Instead of zooming in to focus on individual utterances, we should zoom out to grasp the broader context, at which point puzzlement, along with philosophical interest, dissolves. While this broader context illuminates instances of use, Wittgenstein holds that it cannot itself be explained. For one thing, all explanations must come to an end somewhere: “‘why do you demand explanations? If they are given you, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present” (, §). If reasons only make sense within a game, then there will always be a further game outside any explanation, giving it meaning but necessarily remaining unexplained itself. “A reason can only be given within a game. The links of the chain of reasons come to an end, at the boundary of the game.” We must, as Dilthey tells us, switch from explanation to description: “we must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place” (Wittgenstein 

 

See also Wittgenstein (a, §). Note the intriguingly Diltheyan claim (albeit distancing himself from psychology): “psychology connects what is experienced with something physical, but we connect what is experienced with what is experienced” (Wittgenstein , III-§). See also Wittgenstein (a, §; b, , , , ; , , ; a, §; , ). See Wittgenstein (, , , ; , ; , , –, –, –, , ).

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



a, §). This goes against the grain of our intellectual tendency to look for reasons for every reason. “Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to look at what happens as a ‘proto-phenomenon’ [Urphänomene]. That is, where we ought to have said: this language-game is played. The question is not one of explaining a language-game by means of our experiences, but of noting a language-game” (ibid., §–; see also , §; , , ). Instead of trying to account for our form of life on simpler grounds, we must simply accept it and start there. “What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life” (Wittgenstein a, ). It is not something we can explain or justify; rather, “the language-game . . . is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there – like our life” (a, §; see also a, ; Bouwsma , –, ). Compare that passage with this one from Dilthey: “life is the basic fact that must form the starting point of philosophy. Life is that with which we are acquainted from within and behind which we cannot go. We cannot bring life before the tribunal of reason” (GS :  / SW III: ). One can be forgiven for wondering if Wittgenstein sneaked into Dilthey’s lectures while both were at the Technische Hochschule at Charlottenburg from  to , although this would have been rather unlikely for a mechanical engineering student (McGuinness , ). Despite these many and deep agreements, there are also important disagreements between the two. Dilthey’s system is largely based on inner experiences. “Only in inner experience, in the facts of consciousness, have I found a firm anchor for my thinking,” which provides the sciences with their foundation (GS : xvii / SW I: ). Initially, he thought that these were accessed through absolutely certain introspection. As his thought developed, Hegel’s influence won out over Descartes’ as he came to see our access as mediated, partially through biology (GS :  / SW II: ) but especially through expressions such as art or government, and history. Wittgenstein would view this as a step in the right direction, but be concerned that it still enshrines inner experiences, relying on them to decipher these outer expressions.   

One scholar has argued that Dilthey’s thought was “quite likely discussed at some length in [Wittgenstein’s] home” (quoted in Gier , ; see also ). See also GS : ,  / SW I: , ; GS :  / SW III: . See also GS : , , ,  / SW III: , , , .



  The human sciences have the objectification of life as their comprehensive data. But, once an objectification of life becomes something we understand, it involves the relation of outer to inner throughout. Accordingly, this objectification is always related in understanding to lived experience through which a life-unit becomes aware of its own meaning-content and capable of interpreting that of others. (GS :  / SW III: –)

All understanding takes the form of recreating in one’s self others’ inner states that found expression in various outward forms. “Individuals understand each other because any individual has the possibilities, within certain limits, to re-experience from the expressions and effects produced by a very different individual the inner states and processes belonging to his inner life” (GS :  / SW III: ). Wittgenstein is enormously suspicious of the idea that inner experiences play a fundamental role in meaning or understanding, and for holistic reasons that Dilthey should be sympathetic with. The physical action of pushing a piece of wood across a checkered board cannot by itself constitute a move in chess, regardless of what mental contents you throw into the mix. “A move in chess doesn’t consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board – nor yet in one’s thoughts and feelings as one makes the move: but in the circumstances that we call ‘playing a game of chess’” (Wittgenstein a, §). It expresses nothing internal, nor does it require any internal recreation to comprehend. The right kind of setting – a standard practice, the right kinds of actions and statements from the players before and after, etc. – makes it a chess move, regardless of inner experiences, and no set of facts can constitute a move in the absence of these. “Reading is connected with certain experiences: but with these experiences in certain cases I would not say I read, and in others without them I would say I read” (, ). It’s not that he denies the existence of these inner experiences, as some have thought, but rather the way we think about them. “Does something happen when I understand this word, intend this or that? – Does nothing happen? – That is not the point; but rather: why should what happens within you interest me? (His soul may boil or freeze, turn red or blue: what   



See also GS : , ,  / SW III: , , . See also GS : , ,  / SW III: , , ; GS :  / SW : ; GS : , SW : . See also Wittgenstein (b, ; , §; , , –; , , –, , , , , , , , , ; a, §, §, §, §, §, §, §, II. xi ). See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §§–, §, §, §, §, §, §).

Dilthey and Wittgenstein



do I care?)” (, §). To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms, Dilthey is arguing that we can only have a sense of what others are thinking or feeling by gazing upon the beetle in our own private box. However, public language-games are not mere outward expressions that direct our attention to internal, intrinsically meaningful terms; according to Wittgenstein’s holism, language-games constitute meaning in the sense of creating and sustaining it. No holist should believe in anything intrinsically meaningful, since that forms self-sufficient meaning-atoms from which one could construct and explain life. Everything gets its meaning from its place in the language-game, which means that even inner experiences come in from the outside, so to speak. We must learn their significance, be trained into the language-game that gives them sense, rather than constructing the game around their inherent meaning. This is also why Wittgenstein places more emphasis on our upbringing than Dilthey does. Although Dilthey is certainly interested in developmental matters (GS : xviii / SW I: ; GS : –,  / SW I: , ), his focus on inner experiences as the ultimate source of meaning makes maturation external, accidental, and of limited interest since children are not yet capable of accessing the nuggets lodged in their psyche. The point of departure for every developmental study [on the one hand] is a grasp and analysis of the nexus of a fully developed human being. Only there do we find a reality available to the inner experience of the psychologist in bright midday light, whereas we can obtain only uncertain glances into the dim first stages of development by means of observing and experimenting with children. (GS V:  / SW II: )

We shouldn’t focus on children for we cannot get at their inner experiences, whereas for Wittgenstein, meaning resides in the context, which can be fully examined without going through the mind. Thus, a Wittgensteinian could argue that Dilthey’s holism does not sit well with his focus on inner experiences and, between the two, he should opt for the former. Such a change would alter Dilthey’s system, but in the service of the holism at the heart of so much of his thought.





See also Wittgenstein (a, §, §, §; b, ; , §; , §, §, §, §, §, §, §; , , ; , , , , ; a, §, §, §, §, §, §, II.vi, ; , , –). Stanley Cavell writes that after Kant depsychologized knowledge and Frege and Husserl did the same for logic, Wittgenstein is attempting “to undo the psychologizing of psychology” (Cavell , ).

 

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophical Hermeneutics Jean Grondin

 Dilthey’s Spark One of the essential convictions of hermeneutics is that the reception of a work of the spirit is part of the work itself and its fruitfulness. Judged by this criterion, Dilthey’s “hermeneutic” philosophy found fertile ground in the thinking of the main figures of the philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century, those of Heidegger, Gadamer and even Ricoeur, even if their reception of Dilthey’s contribution, especially in the case of the first two, was often critical and polemical. First and foremost, Dilthey is the author who bequeathed the title of hermeneutics to philosophy. Before him, say, in the work of authors such as Kant, Hegel or his quasicontemporaries Nietzsche or Husserl, the name of hermeneutics was not common. Hermeneutics was an unassuming auxiliary discipline that proposed technical rules and guidelines for the interpretation of texts and was only known to interpreters of Sacred Scripture and the limited circle of classical philologists. Dilthey was familiar with the term because he wrote an early study on the hermeneutics of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and its relation to older hermeneutic (and mainly theological) theories, with which he displayed an impressive familiarity, perhaps owing to the fact that he had studied theology and that his father wanted him to become, like him, an evangelical pastor. This familiarity led him four decades later to pen an influential study on “The rise of hermeneutics” (GS : – / SW IV: –). With this seminal piece, it can be said that Dilthey also established the outlines of the history of hermeneutics and its leading figures, which would be retold by the main 

This momentous and instructive study of  was only published in  in GS : – / SW IV: –) under the title “The real merit of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is to be put into light by comparing it with the older treatments of this science, especially those of Ernesti and Keil.” On the intensity of the young Dilthey’s involvement with Schleiermacher’s work see Lessing (, –).



Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophy



proponents of philosophical hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur, but also in the many historical treatments of hermeneutics, beginning with that of Joachim Wach on Understanding, three vols. –) and in which Dilthey himself would be ritually included as a “classic” of hermeneutics. What was new in this study of  and of great significance was the link Dilthey established between hermeneutic theory and his lifelong quest of a philosophical foundation for the human sciences. This association of hermeneutics with a reflection on the truth experience of the humanities will be maintained, for instance, in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur (Heidegger will for the most part dismiss it as “derivative”). Somewhat surprisingly, in light of Dilthey’s early and late interest in this remote discipline of text interpretation, hermeneutics played seemingly no part in Dilthey’s productive middle period, say, at the time he was working on the first volume of his Introduction to the Human Sciences, in which the name “hermeneutics,” mind-numbingly, does not appear a single time. It has been convincingly argued by Hans-Ulrich Lessing (, ) that this has to do with the fact that in his understanding of the human sciences Dilthey did not really highlight the more philological or interpretive disciplines (such as literary studies, theology and history), but understood under Geisteswissenschaften the whole realm of sciences that deal “with the historical and social reality,” i.e., the “sciences of man, history and society” (GS : –), which included what we would call the more social sciences such as sociology, economics, law and political theory. To lay the foundations of the so-understood human sciences, logic and epistemology (and of course psychology) would have been more relevant for Dilthey than hermeneutics. According to Lessing’s reading, hermeneutics would have found its place in the projected sixth book of his Introduction to the Human Sciences that was meant to tackle methodological questions. As Lessing (, ) points out, there are however very few texts in Dilthey’s Nachlass that really deal with issues of methodology and the methodologies of the various human sciences. The linkage between hermeneutics and the foundation of the human sciences can only be found in the essay of  and some of the texts of his later period. Does it attest to a change of perspective on the part of the later Dilthey, who would have moved from a psychological to a more “hermeneutical” foundation of the humanities, as Georg Misch and Otto Friedrich Bollnow argued long ago? According to this credible hypothesis, this shift was in all likelihood influenced by the devastating review Dilthey’s  essay on “Descriptive Psychology” received from Hermann Ebbinghaus.



 

If this criticism convinced Dilthey to “return,” as it were, to hermeneutics, it was a boon for the hermeneutics of the twentieth century. However that may be, it must be underlined that Dilthey maintained throughout his work a traditional, more methodical understanding of hermeneutics that is quite different from the philosophical hermeneutics that would be developed in the twentieth century (see Rodi ) that sees in hermeneutics a general philosophy of human understanding and its historical character. Indeed, the most common criticism that his hermeneutical heirs will level against Dilthey is that his “hermeneutics” remained too methodical and too focused on the task of a methodology of the human sciences, in other words, that it was not philosophical enough. This charge is in a sense trivial, in another unfair. It is trivial in that one cannot reproach Dilthey for remaining faithful to a technical understanding of hermeneutics that was a matter of course at his time and had been common before him. He simply understood hermeneutics as it had always been practiced. The attack is also unfair because the hermeneutic critics of Dilthey thus overlooked the extent to which Dilthey himself had developed the outlines of a philosophical hermeneutics (without using the term) in that he viewed the understanding of the human sciences as rooted in the quest of meaning of life itself and its historical nature. In his work, Dilthey was clearly after a philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie, as it would later be called) centered on the notions of understanding, interpretation, expression, meaning, purpose as they are experienced in life itself. Even if Dilthey for this reason has to be viewed as a “classic” of hermeneutic theory, the fact remains that he would never have placed his philosophy of life under the title of a hermeneutics, which was still too exotic for his time. The irony here, painfully conscious to most Dilthey scholars, is that Dilthey clearly elaborated what would have to be called by later standards a hermeneutical philosophy, but that he himself did not and could not present it under that heading. It probably did not help matters that Dilthey was compulsively shy about publishing many pieces of his systematic work, which he kept for himself in often extensive and impressive manuscripts (now published in his Complete Works edition) because he was unsatisfied with them. As has duly been noted, there thus hangs a certain tragedy (Lessing , ) over Dilthey’s chronically unfinished work and it is certainly true of his understanding of and contribution to hermeneutic philosophy. Dilthey’s hermeneutics very much remains in the polemical shadow of his hermeneutical heirs, especially Heidegger and Gadamer (Ricoeur will show far more sympathy for Dilthey’s methodological concerns when he

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophy



will address head-on the conflict of interpretations in the humanities). Both owed a great deal to Dilthey, but in their published work they appeared very critical of his preoccupation with methodology and objectivity, feeling he remained too subservient to the template of the exact sciences. The bitter irony here is that Dilthey himself wanted to free the humanities from the methodological blueprint of the natural sciences and develop a specific foundation for them, based on the understanding of meaning of life itself, a project Heidegger and Gadamer seemed to continue. Their more subtle point however was that by obsessing about the “foundations” of the humanities and their “epistemological” and logical requirements, Dilthey tacitly remained under the spell of the natural sciences. There is quite a bit of understandable grumbling, not to say resentment, on the part of many Dilthey scholars about this, which probably dates back to Georg Misch’s early reception of Being in Time. Few of them would claim that Heidegger or Gadamer “stole” ideas from Dilthey to present them as their own, but many Dilthey scholars have faulted them for painting and spreading a caricature of Dilthey that would still overshadow the reception of his work. This grumbling was only heightened by the fact that Being and Time and Truth and Method were very successful and influential books. While recognizing for the most part the philosophical merits of both works, Dilthey specialists could only feel that some impulses of Dilthey anonymously survived in them, a fact that would have been concealed by the unfair and overly polemical portrait Heidegger and Gadamer drew of Dilthey to raise the profile of their hermeneutical works.

 Heidegger’s Idea of a Hermeneutics of Existence, Not of the Human Sciences Dilthey played an important role in the incubation period of Heidegger’s major work, Being and Time (he played no meaningful role for the later Heidegger). This influence, which for a long time could only be suspected, was confirmed by the publication of Heidegger’s lecture courses and 

See Ricoeur (,  ff.), where Ricoeur criticizes Heidegger’s short or direct way of hermeneutics, as one that would only focus on understanding and interpretation as existential features of our Being, in the name of the longer way of hermeneutics, which would take up the dialogue with all human sciences and address their pressing epistemological and methodological issues. This long way is one he will identify with Dilthey and follow in his own hermeneutical inquiries. On the difference in this regard between Gadamer and Ricoeur, see Grondin (; ). I will only concentrate in the present chapter on Heidegger and Gadamer for reasons of space and because their polemical criticisms of Dilthey were more influential in Dilthey scholarship.



 

unpublished manuscripts in his Complete Works edition (Gesamtausgabe = GA), especially in the s and s. Heidegger seems to have read Dilthey extensively (as evidenced by GA : –) and to have been genuinely impressed by his effort to grasp the historical reality of man and of life itself, but also appears very early on critical of his “ocular” or objectifying vocabulary, his methological motive and his uncritical reliance on the sciences of the soul. In a lecture course of , where he reflects on the problem and origin of philosophical expressions, he provides a “destruction” of Dilthey’s philosophy (GA :  f.). As is well known, the word Destruktion does not only have a negative ring for Heidegger: a destruction wants to sort out the motives, presuppositions and “structures” of a certain philosophy in order to understand its basic theme and think it more thoroughly. This central issue in the case of Dilthey is life itself. It is obvious, Heidegger states, that contemporary philosophy “is centered on life as the original phenomenon (Urphänomen)” (GA : ). Heidegger was quite taken by Dilthey’s attempt to interpret life out of itself (GA : ) and defends him in this regard against those of his time who only viewed in him the historian of ideas and not the philosopher (GA : ) as well as against those who accused him of relativism (GA :  – it is the fear of this phantom that one must lose, he proclaims). This attempt to understand life, or, as Heidegger will prefer to put it, facticity (GA : ) or human Dasein, i.e., the individual existence of man that is a task for itself, is very much that of Heidegger at the time, indeed in all his productive decade of the s. But, since he speaks of Destruktion, Heidegger deems that Dilthey’s philosophy remains inadequate in many respects. Dilthey, he first bemoans, wants to understand life out of itself, but does not escape the (transcendental and Neo-Kantian) tendency to understand life out of its “constitution” and its “conditions of possibility” (GA : ). Lurking in this tendency, he argues, is the danger of a perspective on life and its self-understanding as an objective thing that could be observed from the outside (GA : –). Heidegger suspects that this perspective on the “soul” (das Seelische), another infelicitous term for him, remains too “aesthetic” in that it would lead Dilthey to focus on the “form,” the structural order (Zusammenhang), and the harmony of life, especially as it comes to be expressed in the humanities (GA : ). The verdict of Heidegger’s early Destruktion is that Dilthey, in spite of his best intentions, lacks radicality (GA : ) and fails to do justice to “actual Dasein” (GA : ). This more radical understanding of human existence is one Heidegger will express under the title of a hermeneutics of facticity in his lecture

Dilthey’s Hermeneutics and Philosophy



course of the summer semester of , a decisive year for Heidegger’s engagement with Dilthey for at least two reasons: it is in that semester that he adopted the title of hermeneutics as his own, and it is shortly thereafter that he read the recently published correspondence between Dilthey and Count Yorck. It would lead him to a more systematic criticism of Dilthey in a study on the concept of time (GA ) and his Kassel lectures of  (Heidegger /, –; ). By the time Being in Time was published in , his interest in Dilthey had already started to wane (see Rodi /, ). Emblematic of Heidegger’s philosophy around , the program of a hermeneutics of facticity shows at the same time his debt and distance toward Dilthey’s own hermeneutics. The title “hermeneutics of facticity” must be understood in the two senses of the genitive (see Grondin ,  / , ). In the subjective sense, this hermeneutics is the one that is constantly performed by facticity itself insofar as factual human existence understands itself and can spell out its interpretation of itself. In the objective sense, the title means that facticity, as it understands itself in the sense just mentioned, is the prime object of hermeneutics, which is now the new name and task of philosophy. Philosophy is a hermeneutics because its object, human existence, Heidegger argues, is hermeneutical to begin with in that it is “capable of interpretation and in need of interpretation” and because “to be in some state of having-been-interpreted belongs to its being” (GA :  / Heidegger , ). Furthermore, this philosophical elucidation of facticity is by no means merely theoretical. Its aim, states Heidegger combatively, is to render the Dasein, which is in each case our own, accessible to this Dasein itself in order to “track down the self-alienation with which it is smitten” (ibid.). Hermeneutics thus hopes to achieve a “wakefulness of Dasein for itself” (GA :  / Heidegger , ). An “awakening” is thus envisioned, presupposing that existence is somehow alienated from itself because it is prey to some kind of slumber, leading it to miss out on itself and its possibilities of existence. This motive echoes Kierkegaard and gives an appellative, even “ethical” bend to Heidegger’s hermeneutics. Heidegger’s notion of conscience (Gewissen) in Being and Time will inherit this ethical and awakening function, that of calling existence back to itself. Out of this “radicalized” understanding of hermeneutics and life itself, Heidegger cannot be too happy with Dilthey’s own methodical understanding of hermeneutics. Even if Heidegger follows Dilthey’s essay on “The Rise of Hermeneutics” in his brief overview of the history of the discipline in his lecture course of , he deplores a “disastrous



 

limitation” (verhängnisvolle Beschränkung, in GA :  / Heidegger , ) in Dilthey’s position that would have taken up Schleiermacher’s understanding of hermeneutics as “the formulation of the rules of understanding.” Dilthey would only pursue hermeneutics “to the extent that it displayed a tendency to what he himself considered to be its essential dimension – a methodology for the hermeneutical human sciences” (ibid.). For Heidegger, hermeneutics’ purpose is not to provide a methodology of the human sciences, but a direct clarification of facticity (of “life itself” in Dilthey’s words and Heidegger’s earlier terminology), grounded in the tendency of this facticity toward self-understanding and with the goal of awakening existence to its own self. It is shortly after this lecture on hermeneutics, in the fall of  (Rodi , ), that Heidegger read with fascination the correspondence between Dilthey and Count York. Heidegger was so overwhelmed by it that he made it the starting point of an essay on “The Concept of Time,” which was dubbed by its editor, when it was published in the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger in , the “original version” of Being in Time (GA : ). It was destined for publication in a journal published by Erich Rothacker and Paul Kluckhorn, the Vierteljahrsschrift fu¨r Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, but was pulled back by Heidegger when the publishers, not knowing whom they were dealing with, requested modifications and cuts. If Heidegger insisted in  on the task of understanding life out of itself, in the essay on “The Concept of Time” it is historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) that stands front and center. Historicity, Heidegger insists, is a Seinscharakter, a character of being, of human Dasein. This historicity is ultimately grounded in the temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Dasein (GA : ), Heidegger says in an anticipation of developments of the second part of Being and Time. In this task of understanding historicity, Heidegger acknowledges he stands in the continuity (Erbe) of Dilthey and Yorck. While aware that there were much more substantial investigations of this subject in Dilthey than in Yorck, he will nonetheless express his utmost solidarity with Yorck’s criticism of Dilthey, as it appeared in the correspondence between the two that came out in . Heidegger will notoriously restate this solidarity with York in §  of Being and Time, so much so that he will be content with quoting over many pages excerpts from Yorck’s letters (as he does in GA : –). His aim, Heidegger 

See the correspondence between Rothacker, Kluckhorn and Heidegger published in Strock and Kisiel (/) and the Nachwort of F.-W. von Herrmann to GA : –.

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

states, in the  essay on time and in Being and Time, is “to cultivate the spirit of Count Yorck in the present in order to serve the work of Dilthey” (GA : ; Heidegger , ). Heidegger wants to “serve” Dilthey’s attempt to grasp historical life, but believes that Dilthey fell short because of his lack of philosophical radicality. This shows itself, Heidegger claims, in , in Dilthey’s attempt to understand historical life out of “inner experience” and the “facts of consciousness.” This approach would lay bare the extent to which Dilthey would still depend on the thinking and categories of Descartes in his effort to grasp the cogitationes of consciousness (GA : ). This is a limitation that Yorck would have clearly identified: his friend Dilthey would not have destroyed the basic mentalist assumptions of constructive psychology. In Heidegger’s enthusiastic reading of Yorck, a philosophy of historical life should not borrow its concepts from an existing science such as psychology, it should precede the sciences themselves, ground them and unfold the basic categories “of the being that is nature, on the one hand, and of the being that is history, on the other” (GA : ). Heidegger likes to quote and underline the passage where Yorck claims that Dilthey “does not insist enough on the generic difference between the ontic and the historical” (ibid.; Heidegger , ). This basic difference is that between the thing-like objects that can be observed in nature (the “ontic”) and the Being that we are, which is historical and cannot simply be observed like a thing present-at-hand. The disregard for this difference would reveal itself in Dilthey’s focus on the humanities and his preference for the comparative method in them. The comparative method is always “aesthetic,” Yorck argues, in that it dwells on the superficial level of the outside appearance or form (Gestalt, GA : ). Dilthey’s objectifying categories would remain “ocular determinations” (GA : ) that would observe life from the outside. In this, the philologists Dilthey considers would turn out to be closet “natural scientists,” Yorck contends (ibid.). For Yorck, our historical reality is not something that “is,” i.e., something that could be observed from afar, but something that is “lived” (GA : ). It is this historicity that Heidegger wishes to conceptualize, but in order to do this, one would have to relinquish the “ocular,” i.e., objectifying vocabulary of Dilthey and overcome his dependence on the objectifying human sciences, which would manifest itself in Dilthey’s preoccupation with methodology and the “objectivations” of life studied by the Geisteswissenschaften. What has to be provided, and what Yorck himself did not provide either in Heidegger’s eyes, is an ontology that would attend to the specific being that is characterized by historicity and temporality, a task that would only have been possible since the



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emergence of phenomenology (see Heidegger /, –). It is thus Yorck’s “spirit” that Heidegger wants to honor in order to “serve” the work of Dilthey, that of a genuine ontology of historical life. Dilthey certainly helped Heidegger to unfold his own ontology of Dasein by supplying him with the name of hermeneutics and by formulating the task of a philosophy of life and historicity out of itself. More importantly perhaps, he provided Heidegger with a negative foil against which he could polemically present his own hermeneutic phenomenology as more radical. Yet, this devastating criticism (of Dilthey’s use of objectifying, “ocular” categories, of his concentration on the Geisteswissenschaften and their methodology), Heidegger did not present as his own, but as one that Dilthey’s best friend, Count Yorck, who knew him better than anyone, had already expressed. Yorck would thus have delivered the destruction of Dilthey on which Heidegger could build his own ontology. The philosopher Dilthey, who had written wide-ranging studies on historical life, thus stood in the shadow of Count Yorck who did not really have a comparable philosophical œuvre. As Frithjof Rodi has argued, certainly with a sigh of deep regret, Dilthey, as far as his reception is concerned, never came out of this shadow (Rodi /, ; , ).

 Gadamer’s Idea of a Non-Methodological Hermeneutics of the Humanities Hans-Georg Gadamer studied under Heidegger’s guidance in Freiburg during the crucial summer semester of . He even lived for four weeks in Heidegger’s Black Forest hut, where he could witness first-hand his mentor’s fascination with the Dilthey–Yorck correspondence. It would have lasting influence on Gadamer himself who would also quote it at the beginning of the original version of Truth and Method. The subtitle of this work, published in , promised to deliver The Outlines of a Philosophical Hermeneutics. It is revealing that this subtitle was originally intended as the main title of the work, but it was demoted at the request of the publisher who felt that the word hermeneutics was too far-flung. This would all change with Gadamer, whose philosophy would from now on become largely identified with the suddenly fashionable term of  

Gadamer, “Erinnerungen an Heideggers Anfänge,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch  (–), ; now (in an enlarged version) in Gadamer (,  f.). See Gadamer, “Wahrheit und Methode. Der Anfang der Urfassung (ca, ),” herausgegeben von Jean Grondin und Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Dilthey-Jahrbuch  (–), .

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hermeneutics. His groundbreaking study could appear closer to Dilthey than Being and Time was in that it is Gadamer’s stated intention to inquire about the adequate understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften and their claim to truth. The starting point of his hermeneutics is thus the same as Dilthey. Yet, if Gadamer rekindles Dilthey’s question about the proper understanding of the humanities, he criticizes what he saw as Dilthey’s solution, the notion that the humanities were in dire need of a specific methodology. This criticism of Dilthey is already hinted at in the title and subtitle of Gadamer’s book: Truth and Method means that the truth experience of the humanities does not depend on a particular method (as Dilthey would have believed according to Gadamer). The subtitle alludes for its part to a “philosophical” hermeneutics, thus stressing that hermeneutics does not only have to be (or provide) a methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften, but can also be a form of philosophy. In both cases, it is obvious that Dilthey is the negative backdrop against which Gadamer presents his own hermeneutics, even if he generously names Dilthey and the breadth of his historical horizon amongst the three major inspirations of his work besides Heidegger and Husserl. For Gadamer, Dilthey’s concern with methodology would presuppose that the humanities suffer from an inferiority complex with regard to the natural sciences. In his finally unresolved quest for an epistemological foundation of the human sciences, Dilthey would have believed that a methodology was needed to help them solve their pressing existential problem, which is, as the end of his essay on “The Rise of Hermeneutics” would famously frame it, “to preserve the universal validity of historical interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification for such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded” (GS :  / SW IV: ). This longing for universal validity only underscored for Gadamer the extent to which Dilthey remained reliant on the model of the methodical natural sciences (a criticism similar to the one expressed by the early Heidegger, whose aim however was not to reflect on the truth experience of the humanities). Gadamer wishes to free the humanities from the straitjacket and alienating model of the methodical sciences. How are then the humanities to understand themselves if not methodically? To answer this question, Gadamer draws on a tradition that was by no means foreign to Dilthey, that of humanism. The initial contention of Truth and Method is that the humanities are better understood out of the 

See Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode () in Gadamer (a,  / , xxv).



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guiding notions of humanism than those of methodical science. For the humanist outlook, knowledge is there to educate and form the individual and his or her capacity of judgment. It would be nonsensical to exclude the determining role of the human subject in this process on the grounds that it would endanger the objectivity of the humanities. At the outset of Truth and Method, Gadamer thus powerfully rehabilitates the humanist notion of Bildung (education, formation), and the key notions that are related to it – the development of common sense, taste and judgment – to understand the contribution of the humanities to knowledge. In so doing, Gadamer never alludes to Dilthey’s own wide-ranging and unfortunately littleknown historical studies on humanism (it would be a worthwhile inquiry to compare Dilthey’s and Gadamer’s account of humanism). According to Gadamer, this tradition of humanism, out of which the humanities obviously grew and out of which they could still properly understand themselves, was no longer a tradition on which the Geisteswissenschaften could rely in the nineteenth and twentieth century because it had ceased to provide a credible cognitive option. In its place, it is the model of the methodical natural sciences that has imposed itself as the only respectable and justifiable type of knowledge. In this process, in which Kant’s philosophy played an important role, all the guiding concepts of humanism were subjected to a fatal “subjectivization”: Bildung, common sense, taste and judgment were bereft of any real and reliable cognitive import and seen as merely subjective under the pretext that they would not deliver objective, independently verifiable knowledge. Taste and judgment have indeed become for us merely subjective matters, in the bad sense of the word, yet Gadamer recalls that they used to be seen, until the end of the eighteenth century, as forms of knowledge that yielded truth. In the nineteenth century, the humanities turned away from such uncertain notions to adopt the methodical model, but which is basically foreign to their type of wisdom following Gadamer. Despite his stated goal that was to defend the specificity of the humanities, Dilthey would have succumbed to this seduction when he claimed that only a hermeneutical methodology could help the human sciences achieve universally valid knowledge of individual and historical life. Now, it was obvious to most, including Dilthey of course, that the methodical paradigm had its limits for the humanities. For this reason, another model also came to silently suggest itself to the humanities. It was the “aesthetic” model. It only came to prominence in the nineteenth century, as a consequence and, according to Gadamer, as an unacknowledged by-product of the methodical prototype. According to this “aesthetic” view of things, matters of culture and history do not really deal with truths

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and knowledge claims, all of which are to be left to the methodical natural sciences, but with “expressions” and feelings. To understand a work of art or of philosophy, for example, would be to understand them as the “expression” of their author (according to a psychological perspective) or their times (following a historicist view of things). In both instances, Gadamer argues, the understanding of the expression would remain “aesthetic,” in that it disregards from its truth claim – the arts and the humanities would have relinquished such a strong claim to knowledge – to zero in on the expression as a “manifestation” of a subjectivity, an author or its times. For Gadamer, Dilthey is a prime example of this tendency. He was in effect one of the main proponents of the new notion of Erlebnis in German, which can be translated as “lived experience.” It figures in the title of his famous work of , Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Lived Experience and Poetry). It takes it for granted, Gadamer alleges, that poetry is essentially a matter of Erlebnis or feeling, on the side of the writer as well as that of the recipient: what is “expressed” in a poem is the “inner feeling” or Erlebnis of its author and to understand the work of a poet would be to “recreate” in one’s own lived experience (nacherleben) this Erlebnis. This tacitly aesthetic model would have infiltrated Dilthey’s own hermeneutical project, especially when it was based, as is the case in Dilthey’s later work, on the triad of understanding, expression and Erlebnis. It fatally assumes according to Gadamer that the understanding of the humanities is concerned with “expressions” as manifestations of a given life or Erlebnis. Gadamer denounces in this an “aesthetization,” a subjectivization and hence a trivialization of the truth claim of the arts and the humanities. As we have seen, Heidegger had already criticized Dilthey’s “aesthetic” vocabulary. Gadamer was certainly influenced by him, but his aim is different: it is not to impugn categories that would view life from the outside, but to question the use of aesthetic notions, such as expression, lived experience or nachereleben (and a host of others such a geniality, creativity, etc.), for the humanities. They would imply that the humanities do not deal with truth and knowledge but with matters of expression. For Gadamer, to understand in the humanities does not mean that one “recreates” a lived experience or that one sees an “objectivation” as an expression of its times, it is to participate in a truth experience. The intent of Truth and Method is to reflect on this truth experience and to defend its legitimacy against the aestheticization to which it would have been subjected. Gadamer recognizes a link, and ultimately an unresolved aporia, between Dilthey’s aesthetic categories and his methodological approach. He argues that both are consequences of the attractiveness of objective



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science. It is clear enough that the quest for a methodology that would keep in check the subjectivity of the interpreter (to contain the perilous “inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity” (GS :  / SW IV: ) is borrowed from the natural sciences. However, the notion that the humanities deal with matters of expression and lived experience also presupposes according to Gadamer the hegemony of natural science on issues of truth and knowledge. It alone would explain reality, whereas the humanities would merely understand “expressions” as manifestations of life. In his decisive chapter on Dilthey in Truth and Method, decisive because the book will unfold its own hermeneutical project on the “ruins” of Dilthey’s, Gadamer pinpoints an unresolved contradiction (Zwiespalt) in Dilthey’s analysis of historical consciousness: on the one hand, Dilthey was acutely aware of the utterly historical nature of the humanities and all things human, on the other, he wanted to contain this historicity with the help of a methodology that would mimic the methodical model. There was thus a conflict between Dilthey’s more romantic leanings and his quest for scientificity, propelled by the exact sciences. This conflict or aporia would ultimately explain why Dilthey’s epistemological foundation remained unfinished: the romantic, historicist impulse could not be reconciled with the more positivist one. Gadamer’s solution will be to overcome both impulses: first, one has to overcome (u¨berwinden) what he will call the “epistemological” problem of Dilthey, i.e., the idea that a methodology or an epistemological foundation alone could secure the scientific status of the humanities; second, one has to resist the romantic, more aesthetic and subjective approach that views in understanding the recreation of a lived experience and not a bona fide experience of truth. In both instances, the epistemological as well as the aesthetic, it can be said that Dilthey was for Gadamer a countermodel, yet one that could help him realize Dilthey’s life-long dream of an appropriate hermeneutics of the human sciences.

 Conclusion Dilthey thus lives on in the hermeneutical endeavors of Heidegger and Gadamer. The first wanted to bring to fruition Dilthey’s intention to 

On this see also Gadamer’s later essay “Das Problem Diltheys. Zwischen Romantik und Positivismus” in Gadamer (, –), as well as his answer to his critics from the school of Dilthey “Die Hermeneutik und die Dilthey-Schule” in Gadamer (, –).

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understand life and historicity out of themselves, whereas the second developed a full-fledged hermeneutics of the human sciences that wanted to do justice to both the historicity of interpretation and its strong claim to truth. In so doing, both came to criticize Dilthey rather harshly and quite unjustly in the eyes of many Dilthey scholars. While Heidegger stigmatized Dilthey’s objectifying and ocular categories, Gadamer took issue with his methodological and aesthetic tendencies. Yet, in philosophy as in matters of the spirit more generally, severe criticism more often than not betrays a secret proximity. Heidegger stigmatized Dilthey’s objectifying, aesthetic and ocular concepts because they would fail to understand historical life out of itself, as Dilthey purported to do. His hermeneutics of facticity could thus claim to liberate Dilthey’s project from its infelicitous formulations, a shortcoming Dilthey himself would have recognized by never bringing his life project to the promised end. Gadamer was more interested in a genuine hermeneutics of the human sciences, but he felt that Dilthey’s preoccupation with method, which was also, if more subtly evidenced by his use of aesthetic categories, made his project unrealizable. In this regard, it can be argued, as Rodi said, that Dilthey never came out of the shadow cast upon his life-work by the criticisms of Heidegger and Gadamer. One can understand why Dilthey specialists might view this as unfair. Yet, they could perhaps get over their misgivings and enjoy the hermeneutics of the twentieth century for what it is, an impressive continuation and realization of the type of philosophy Dilthey envisioned and that can rightly be called a hermeneutics.

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[SW] Selected Works, ed. Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. SW I: . Introduction to the Human Sciences. SW II: . Understanding the Human World. SW III: . The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. SW IV: . Hermeneutics and the Study of History. SW V: . Poetry and Experience. SW VI: in press. Ethical and World-View Philosophy. . Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society, ed. Hans Peter Rickman. New York: Harper Row. . Dilthey: Selected Writings, trans. Hans Peter Rickman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, trans. R. M. Zaner and K. I. Heiges. Intro. R. Makkreel. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 

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Adorno, Theodor W. . Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Amaral, Nazaré de Camargo Pacheco. . “Sozialethik bei Dilthey und Schleiermacher.” Dilthey-Jahrbuch fu¨r Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften : –. Apel, Karl-Otto. . Understanding and Explanation: A TranscendentalPragmatic Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. . Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Arthos, J. . “To Be Alive When Something Happens: Retrieving Dilthey’s Erlebnis.” Janus Head , . Bakker, J. I. (Hans). . “Wilhelm Dilthey: Classical Sociological Theorist.” Quarterly Journal of Ideology , : –.

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Index

acquired psychic nexus (erworbener seelischer Zusammenhang), –, – Adickes, Erich,  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, rd Earl of Shaftesbury, ,  Apel, Karl-Otto, ,  Aristotle, , ,  Ast, Friedrich,  Augustine, , , 

cognitive science, , ,  Collingwood, R. G.,  Comte, Auguste, , , , , ,  consciousness, historical, , , –, , , , –, , , , ,  critique of historical reason (Kritik der historischen Vernunft), –, –, , , , , , –, –, , –, , –, 

Bacon, Francis,  Baeck, Leo, ,  Balzac, Honoré de, , , , – Bauer, Ferdinand Christian,  Bäumer, Gertrud,  Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, , ,  beauty, , , , –, , –, –, , , – Benjamin, Walter,  Berlin, Isaiah,  biological sciences, , , –, –, , , , , , ,  Boas, Franz,  Boccaccio, Giovanni,  Boeckh, August, , , ,  Bradley, F. H.,  Brandes, Georg,  Brentano, Franz,  Buber, Martin, , ,  Buckle, Henry Thomas, – Burke, Edmund, , , 

Dante,  Darwin, Charles, , ,  de Mul, Jos, – Democritus,  Derrida, Jacques,  Descartes, René, , , , , –, , ,  Deussen, Paul, ,  Dickens, Charles, , , , , – doubt, , , , – Driesch, Hans,  Droysen, Johann Gustav, , , ,  Du Bois, W. E. B., 

capitalism, , ,  Carlyle, Thomas,  Carnap, Rudolf,  Cartesianism, , , , –, , ,  Cassirer, Ernst,  Cervantes, Miguel de,  Chladenius, Johann,  Christianity, – Clausewitz, Carl von, 

Ebbinghaus, Hermann,  Einfu¨hlung, , –,  Empathy, , , –,  empiricism, , , , , –, –, –,  Enlightenment, , –, , , , , , ,  epistemology, –, , , , , , , , –, –, , ,  Ernesti, Johann August,  ethics, , , , –, –, –, , –,  Fechner, Gustav, ,  Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, , , , ,  Fischer, Kuno,  forms of life, , , , , , 



Index



foundationalism, ,  freedom, , , , , –, , , ,  Frischeisen-Köhler, Max, , –

James, William,  Jaspers, Karl, ,  Joël, Karl,  Jung, Matthias, 

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, –, –, , , , , , , –, –, , –, – Garber, Majorie,  Geiger, Moritz, –, – Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences), –, , –, , , , , –, , , –, , , , , – Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, , , , , , , , , , , –, , ,  Groethuysen, Bernhard, , 

Kant, Immanuel, , , –, –, –, , , –, –, , –, , , –, , , , –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , –, ,  Keyserling, Hermann Graf,  Kluckhorn, Paul, 

Habermas, Ju¨rgen, , ,  Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , –, , ,  Hegelianism, , , , , , , , –,  Heidegger, Martin, –, , –, , , , , , –, –, , , , , –, , , , , –, – Henry Home, Lord Kames,  Heraclitus, , , ,  Herder, Johann Gottfried, , –, , , , , , , , , –, – Historical School, , –, , , , –, –, , , ,  historicism, , , –, , –, , ,  historicity, , , , –, –, –, , , ,  Hobbes, Thomas, ,  Hölderlin, Friedrich,  Homer, ,  Horkheimer, Max, , – Humboldt, Wilhelm von, , ,  Hume, David, , , , , , , ,  Husserl, Edmund, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Ibsen, Henrik Johan, , , ,  idealism of freedom, –, ,  idealism, German, ,  idealism, objective, , –, , , – idealism, subjective,  idealism, transcendental,  Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, , , ,  Introduction to the Human Sciences, , , –, , , , , , , –, , , 

Lebensphilosophie, , –, , –, , , –, , , ,  Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, –, ,  Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, , , , , , – Lessing, Hans-Ulrich, ,  Lipps, Theodor, –,  Lived Experience and Poetry, , ,  Locke, John, , ,  Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, ,  Lukács, Georg, ,  Makkreel, Rudolf A., , , , ,  Marcuse, Herbert, ,  Marx, Karl, , – Marxism, ,  materialism, , ,  Meinong, Alexius,  Mendelssohn, Moses, , ,  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,  Mill, John Stuart, ,  Misch, Georg, , , , , ,  modernity, –, , , , –, , , , , , , , –,  Mommsen, Theodor, , ,  Moore, G. E.,  music, , , –, , , , ,  nationalism, ,  Natorp, Paul, –, , ,  natural science, , –, , , , –, –, , , , –, , , –, , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , –,  naturalism, , –, , , –, , , , ,  naturalism, aesthetic, –, , –, –, –,  Nelson, Eric S.,  Neo-Kantianism, , , , , , , , , , 



Index

Neurath, Otto,  Niebuhr, Barthold Georg,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, –, –, , –, ,  Nohl, Herman,  Novalis, , ,  novel, the, , , , , –, , , , , , – ocularity, , –,  Ortega y Gasset, José, ,  painting, –, , , ,  personalism, ,  pessimism, , , ,  Pessimismusstreit,  Petrarch,  phenomenology, , , –, , , , , , , ,  Plato, , , ,  Platonism, ,  Plessner, Helmuth, ,  pluralism, , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , ,  poetry, , , , , , –, –, –,  positivism, , –, , , , , –, , , , , ,  Protagoras,  purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit), , –, –, –, , –, –, , ,  Quine, Willard Van Orman, , ,  Ranke, Leopold von, , ,  Raphael, ,  rationalism, , , , –,  relativism, –, , –, , , , , , , ,  Rickert, Heinrich, –,  Ricoeur, Paul, , , , –, , , – Rodi, Frithjof, , , ,  Romanticism, –, , , , , –, , , , , , ,  Ross, W. D.,  Rothacker, Erich,  Rouse, Joseph, – Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, , –,  Russell, Bertrand,  Scheler, Max, , ,  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, , , , , , 

Schiller, Friedrich, , , , – Schlegel, August and Friedrich, , –,  Schlegel, Friedrich, , , , ,  Schleiermacher, Friedrich, , , , , , , –, , , –, , –, , , –, , , , ,  Schmitt, Carl,  Schopenhauer, Arthur, –, , , , –,  sculpture, –, ,  self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung), , , , , , – self-reflexive awareness (Innewerden),  Semper, Gottfried, –,  Shakespeare, William, , ,  Sidgwick, Henry,  Simmel, Georg, , –, , , , ,  skepticism, , , , , , , , , – Socrates, , ,  Spencer, Herbert,  Spengler, Oswald,  spirit, objective, , , , , , – Spranger, Eduard,  Stein, Edith, ,  Stöcker, Helene,  Stoicism,  Strauss, David Friedrich,  Strauss, Leo, ,  struggle for existence, , –, ,  Sturm und Drang, ,  subjectivity, , , , , , , , , , , , – System of Ethics, , , , ,  Taylor, Charles,  temporality, , , , , , , ,  The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, , , , –, – Theognis,  Thompson, Evan, , – Tieck, Ludwig,  transcendental philosophy, , , , ,  transposition, , ,  Trendelenburg, Friedrich von, , ,  Troeltsch, Ernst, ,  Vico, Giambattista, – Vienna Circle,  Vischer, Robert, 

Index Wagner, Klaus,  Wagner, Richard,  Wartenburg, Paul Yorck von, , , , , ,  Weber, Max,  Wehrenpfennig, Wilhelm,  Winckelmann, Johann, , ,  Windelband, Wilhelm, 



Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , ,  worldview, , , , , – Worldviews, Conflict of (Streit der Weltanschauungen), , , , ,  Wundt, Wilhelm,  Zahavi, Dan,  Zola, Émile, , , , –, , 