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1 Chapter 1 : Understanding the Human World - Wilhelm Dilthey - Google Books 1. Dilthey's Life and Thought Brief Overview of Dilthey's Philosophical Development. Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in, two years after Hegel had died. His chief interest as a philosopher was in the logic and methodology of the historical and social studies Geisteswissenschaften. His conclusions are set forth in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften see Gesammelte Schriften, vol. These laws tell us nothing of the inner nature of the things and processes that we study. But with human beings there is a sense in which it is possible to go behind observable actions to something internal: We can know not merely what a man does but the experiences Erlebnisse, the thoughts, memories, value judgments, and purposes that have led him to do it. Knowledge in this field is not, as in natural science, merely phenomenal and external. We have direct insight into the transitions whereby perceptions lead to thoughts, these to feelings, and these again to desires and acts of will. The historical life of mankind is a continual process of interactions of this kind, and to under-stand a particular event or action or utterance, we must see it in this kind of context. They include an experimental and generalizing science psychology, a study of individual persons and societies in the concrete particularity of their lives and actions history, biography, autobiography, and normative and valuational studies jurisprudence, moral theory, political theory, literary criticism, etc. What all these have in common, according to Dilthey, is that they are all aspects of the study of human life and experience and that that study is not complete unless they are all brought in. Taken together, the Geisteswissenschaften show that men do live under conditions that can to some extent be formulated in general laws, whether of the individual psyche or of social groupings. Men are intelligible to us as individuals and interesting to us precisely because of their individuality and uniqueness. And all human experience and activity are shot through with choices, preferences, value judgments. Because human life as known to us is in itself more complex and many-sided than the phenomena of nature, the Geisteswissenschaften must also be a more various and many-sided body of disciplines, and no one method or principle can govern them all. In the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften Dilthey also argued that psychology has a fundamental place among these studies. He was not thinking of the experimental science of psychology as we know it today but of a descriptive and comparative kind of psychology that would culminate in a theory of personality types. Such a theory would be a useful tool in all the Geisteswissenschaften. While the Einleitung endorsed psychology, it was critical of sociology, which Dilthey considered to be a pseudo science. Such a grand synthesis, Dilthey held, would not give unity to the Geisteswissenschaften; they would achieve this unity only if world history were written in a way that made use of all the detailed insights that the Geisteswissenschaften can offer. Years later, in some notes made with a view to a revision of the Einleitung, Dilthey made it clear that he had no objection to sociology if it meant merely a comparative study of different forms of social groupings and stratifications. The process may be summed up in the words experience, expression, understanding Erlebnis, Ausdruck, Verstehen. We understand an expression by re-experiencing nacherleben in our own consciousness the experience from which the expression arose. This re-experiencing is, of course, not a perfect reproduction of the original experience; it is schematic, telescoped, incomplete, fallible. Dilthey distinguished different types of expression and different degrees of accuracy and confidence with which they can be interpreted. His particular approach to the problem of understanding led him to an interest in hermeneutics, that is, in the possibility of laying down principles and working rules for the guidance of those whose work is the interpretation of written texts. He showed how a theory of hermeneutics arose in patristic times out of the needs of scriptural exegesis, how it was developed under the influence of Reformation controversies and the beginnings of Biblical criticism, and how it was generalized and made into a philosophical discipline in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Schleiermacher. And taking the art of understanding expressions as the underlying factor common to all the Geisteswissenschaften, he showed that there is an easy transition from personal experience to auto-biography, thence to biographical and historical Page 1

2 writings, thence to the more abstract and generalizing studies and the sectional disciplines, and finally to the grand synthesis in world history. But by raising the question in the way he did, Dilthey touched off a lively and fruitful discussion, both among philosophers interested in the theory of knowledge and among those historians and social scientists who are interested in the aims and methods of their disciplines but are not satisfied with a statistical and behavioristic approach. He developed a typology of Weltanschauungen; the basic types are naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and objective idealism. Naturalism means that one is impressed chiefly by the impersonal order of nature; idealism of freedom, that one gives priority to the unique status of man as a free agent; and objective idealism, that one conceives of the universe as an organic whole. Schools of art, and religious and philosophical systems, can be classified by their conformity to and expression of one of the three main types of attitude or, as may happen, of any combination of these. Views such as these seem to verge on an ultimate skepticism. He was in fact no skeptic and did not believe that his principles must lead to skepticism; he believed rather that in those spheres where empirical methods can be applied, which include some sections of the Geisteswissenschaften as well as the natural sciences, real discoveries and real progress can be made, and there is objective knowledge. It is in the realm of value judgments and life attitudes that he felt that relativity is inescapable, but also that proper acceptance of it can lead to an enrichment of life rather than to frustration Hodges, pp. Page 2

3 Chapter 2 : Project MUSE - Dilthey's Philosophy of Religion in the "Critique of Historical Reason": historical awareness by developing a philosophy based on the ideas of "lived experience" and the "worldview," he laid the groundwork for the development of many twentieth century philosophical trends which view the scientific method as inadequate or irrelevant. Untimely death prevented Dilthey from finishing this project. His family was connected to the dukes of Nassau, serving as chaplains and councilors. His early education was at a local prep school where he graduated in Following family tradition, he entered the University of Heidelberg to study theology. After three semesters, he moved to Berlin for historical studies under Friedrich Trendelenburg. To please his father, he took the examination in theology and preached his first sermon in His preferred occupation was secondary teaching, but after two years he was forced to give it up due to persistent ill health. He spent six years doing historical research and philosophical study in Berlin. In, with an essay on the ethics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, he entered university teaching. He became a professor at Basel, Kiel, and Breslau He returned to Berlin as a professor of theology in, a post he held until In, he married Katherine Puttmann and they had one son and two daughters. Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences Naturwissenschaften, and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human sciences Geisteswissenschaften. His principles, a general theory of Understanding Verstehen or Interpretation, could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century. Kant and Dilthey The rise of modern science made a strong impact on philosophy. Natural sciences and mathematics were often understood as the model of knowledge and the methodology of the natural sciences were adapted to other areas of humanity and social, historical disciplines. For example, Descartes took geometry as the model of knowledge and tried to establish philosophy accordingly to the model, and Kant also recognized the effectiveness of mathematics and other empirical sciences. He tried to give philosophical justification to and clarification of their legitimacy, and attempted to elucidate the conditions of valid knowledge and the limits of what we can know. He carried out this task in his Critique of Pure Reason. Neither of them was fundamental or derivative. Kant tried to disclose a priori conditions of knowledge, which he argued existed in the human cognitive apparatus prior to experience. These a priori conditions of knowledge such as categories of space and time, quantity and quality, relations, modality, and others are, Kant argued, the conditions that make knowledge and experience possible. Major modern philosophers rejected the ontological or metaphysical orientation of Ancient and Medieval philosophies. Dilthey posed a question on this epistemology centered trend of modern philosophy and tried to find a methodology of being without falling into speculative metaphysics. Modern philosophers, including empiricists and the non-empiricist Kant, identified experience primarily as sense experience in their theories of knowledge. Hermeneutics Hermeneutics is a theory or methodology of interpretation. This technique was applied in interpreting scriptures, classic texts, and laws, and developed as particular theories of interpretation in the fields of philology, theology, and laws. One of key concepts in interpretation is the circularity between the parts and the whole. When one tries to understand a part of the text, for example, he has to understand the whole context. But one has to look at the constitutive parts in order to understand the whole context. The parts refer to the whole and the whole also refers to the parts. Understanding the text means to enter into this circle of the parts and the whole. Both Dilthey and Schleiermacher are linked to German Romanticism. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that an interpreterâ not necessarily a Cartesian subjectâ could use insight, combined with cultural and historical context, to bring about truer understanding of a text. Descriptive Psychology Dilthey found the realm of consciousness as the field of his studies of experiences, and developed descriptive psychology. Sociology Dilthey had a deep interest in what we would call sociology today, Page 3

4 although he strongly objected to being labeled a sociologist because the sociology of his day was mainly that of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. He objected to their evolutionist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Also, the word tended and tends to be used as a kind of umbrella term; since the term sociology covered so much it had little analytical clarity. Simmel was a colleague at the University of Berlin and Dilthey admired his work even though many academics were opposed to Simmel altogether, in part owing to anti-semitism and in part owing to the fact that Simmel did not conform to the academic formalities of the day in some of his published work. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists because of his important role in discussing Verstehen and his influence on interpretive sociology generally. Human life as a unified whole consisted of these three components, and worldviews are classified into three basic types: Dilthey, on the contrary, conceived reason as historical in the sense that reason is configured by and is relative to history. Dilthey passed away before completing his project and put it into writing. So there is no single work that contains his thought. His philosophical ideas are spread over several works. Introduction to Human Science Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology essay. Geammelte Schriften 20 vol. The Essence of Philosophy Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey: Introduction to the Human Sciences: Secondary sources Bambach, Charles R. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Cornell University Press, Ermarth, M. The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago University Press, Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton University Press, Mul, Jos de and Tony Burrett. The Tragedy of Finitude: Yale University Press, Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Cornell University Press, Credits New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats. The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here: Page 4

5 Chapter 3 : Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler - Shop Online for Books in Australia Dilthey set forth his meta-philosophy of world view in which he proposed an analysis and comparison of basic attitudes toward life as these are expressed in poetry. It [a world view] attempts to reproduce or Makkreel helps us to understand the relationship of Dilthey's concept of world view and his project of the critique of historical reason. Innovative thinking about a global world Friday, July 8, Dilthey on the human sciences Wilhelm Dilthey maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of physical events. Human life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of hermeneuticsâ the interpretation of meaningful textsâ are suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The human sciences form an epistemic nexus that strives to attain objectively engaged and objectively valid conceptual cognition of the interconnectedness of lived experiences in the human-historical-social world. The history of the human sciences shows a constant struggle with the difficulties encountered here. The investigation of the possibility of such objective conceptual cognition forms the foundation of the human sciences. In the following, I present some contributions to such a foundation. The cognitive process cannot produce such a copy. It is and remains bound to its means of intuiting, of understanding, and of conceptual thinking. Nor do the human sciences want to produce such a copy. Rather, they refer what happens and what has happened -- the unique, the contingent, the momentary -- to a system of value and meaning. As it progresses, conceptual cognition seeks to penetrate this system ever more deeply. It becomes ever more objective in its grasp, without ever being able to surpass its own essence, namely, it can experience what is only through re-feeling and re-construing, through connecting and separating, through abstract systems and a nexus of concepts. On that basis, one recognizes the relation of the particular human sciences to the coexistence and sequence of lived experiences upon which they are founded. The development of the human sciences must be accompanied by a logical-epistemological self-reflection, that is, by the philosophical consciousness of the way in which the intuitive-conceptual system of the human-socio-historical world is formed on the basis of the lived experience of what has happened. What is Dilthey saying here? What is the philosophy of society, history, and cognition that he is expressing? The first sentence defines two domains: Through the knowledge systems of the human sciences we arrive at representations of the social-historical world. The social-historical world is characterized in terms of the inter-connected lived experience of human beings; this implies communication, interaction, and subjectivity as crucial features of social life. The knowledge systems of the human sciences are characterized as being "objective" and "conceptual". The objectivity in question has to do with the fact that there is a reality associated with social life that serves as the object of knowledge; the conceptuality has to do with the fact that it is necessary to arrive at categories in thought in terms of which to organize and represent that reality. This interpretation of the first sentence sounds rather Lockean or Cartesian; knowledge represents the world. The first sentence of the second paragraph, however, unsettles that naive realism, because here Dilthey insists upon the distinctness of representation and reality. Our knowledge of the social world is not a "copy"; it is an abstract representation. This observation seems to be analogous to the obvious point that a verbal description of an apple is not similar to the apple; rather it is a syntactic construction that attributes characteristics to the features of the apple. The next several sentences in the second paragraph seem to change the subject slightly; Dilthey distinguishes between "copying or representing" and "interpreting and locating in terms of a meaning system. The "re-feeling and re-construing" seems to be an expression of the method of verstehen: And the final two sentences seem to suggest a refinement of knowledge through the discovery of finer detail in the interconnections among events and their connections to a system of meaning in the world of lived experience. There seem to be three high-level features of this conception: The objectivity that he seeks in these paragraphs seems to have at least in part to do with the idea of evidence-driven discovery. Page 5

6 Chapter 4 : Wilhelm Dilthey blog.quintoapp.com Dilthey understands philosophy, first and foremost, as "a guide for methodically grasping reality, the real world in pure experience, and for analyzing it within the limits prescribed by the critique of knowledge" (Dilthey ). Life[ edit ] Dilthey was born in as the son of a Reformed pastor in the village of Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, now in Hesse, Germany. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology at Heidelberg University, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Boeckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He became a Privatdozent at Berlin in In he took up a professorship at the University of Basel, but laterâ in â he returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the University. In, he married Katherine Puttmann, and the couple had one son and two daughters. He died in Both figures are linked to German Romanticism. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by Droysen and Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities â a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career. Schleiermacher saw the approaches to interpreting sacred scriptures for example, the Pauline epistles and Classical texts e. The natural sciences observe and explain nature, but the humanities understand human expressions of life. But Heidegger grew increasingly critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence. Psychology[ edit ] Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his later work Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften,, he used the alternative term structural psychology Strukturpsychologie for descriptive psychology. Dilthey did, however, have good things to say about the neo-kantian sociology of Georg Simmel, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of nonpositivist verstehende sociology and the Verstehen method. Distinction between natural sciences and human sciences[ edit ] A lifelong concern was to establish a proper theoretical and methodological foundation for the "human sciences" e. He suggested that all human experience divides naturally into two parts: His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by German sociologist Max Weber. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension Verstehen could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century. Both the natural and human sciences originate in the context or "nexus of life" Lebenszusammenhang, a concept which influenced the phenomenological account of the lifeworld Lebenswelt, but are differentiated in how they relate to their life-context. Whereas the natural sciences abstract away from it, it becomes the primary object of inquiry in the human sciences. Dilthey defended his use of the term Geisteswissenschaft literally, "science of the mind" or "spiritual knowledge" by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human mind or spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable. An important debate between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the Neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Understanding the Human World: Hermeneutics and the Study of History Volume V: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften Volume 2: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes Volume 4: Die geistige Welt Volume 6: Die geistige Welt Volume 7: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften Volume 8: System der Page 6

7 Ethik Volume Erster Band Volume Zweiter Band Volume Zur Geistesgeschichte des Logik und System der philosophischen Wissenschaften Volume Psychologie als Erfahrungswissenschaft Volume Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie Volume Logik und Wert Volume Dichter als Seher der Menschheit Volume Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. Page 7

8 Chapter 5 : Wilhelm Dilthey - New World Encyclopedia In the 's, Carnap adopted argumentative strategies associated with Dilthey's project of overcoming metaphysics and articulating a contextual, holistic, and relational interpretation of phenomenal lived-experience. He objected to the pervasive influence of the natural sciences and developed a philosophy of life that perceived man in his historical contingency and changeability. Dilthey established a comprehensive treatment of history from the cultural viewpoint that has been of great consequence, particularly to the study of literature. Dilthey was the son of a Reformed Church theologian. After he finished grammar school in Wiesbaden, he began to study theology, first at Heidelberg, then at Berlin, where he soon transferred to philosophy. After completing exams in theology and philosophy, he taught for some time at secondary schools in Berlin but soon abandoned this to dedicate himself fully to scholarly endeavours. During these years he was bursting with energy, and his investigations led him into diverse directions. In addition to extensive studies on the history of early Christianity and on the history of philosophy and literature, he had a strong interest in music, and he was eager to absorb everything that was being discovered in the unfolding empirical sciences of man: Hundreds of reviews and essays testify to an almost inexhaustible productivity. In he took his doctorate at Berlin and obtained the right to lecture. He was appointed to a chair at the University of Basel in ; appointments to Kiel, in, and Breslau, in, followed. In he succeeded R. Lotze at the University of Berlin, where he spent the remainder of his life. During these years Dilthey led the quiet life of a scholar, devoid of great external excitement and in total dedication to his work. The second volume, on which he worked continually, never did appear. Opposed to the trend in the historical and social sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study of the relations between personal experience, its realization in creative expression, and the reflective understanding of this experience; the interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally, the logical development from these to the understanding of social groups and historical processes. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding, however, can never be final because history itself never is: Dilthey held that historical consciousnessâ i. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy of life emerge. Page 8

9 Chapter 6 : Understanding Society: Dilthey on the human sciences Hence, for Dilthey, philosophy not only had the epistemological responsibility for devising theories of knowledge for the natural and social sciences, but also had to present an explanation of mankind's metaphysical consciousness, that is, "the task of. He studied theology and philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin and combined both of these interests in his early work on the ethical and hermeneutical writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In, Dilthey received a professorship in Breslau now Wrocklaw, Poland. It was around this time that he met Count Yorck of Wartenburg, and their friendship produced an intellectual correspondence about the nature of life and the meaning of history that has inspired thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy would be the locus of his world for almost thirty years, until his death in This is the period in which he published most of his writings about the human sciences Geisteswissenschaften, a covering term for both the humanities and social sciences. These writings consider how the human sciences contribute to the understanding of life and history. Critique of Historical Reason Dilthey saw his overall project as a Critique of Historical Reason examining the conditions that make possible the respective cognitive results of the natural and the human sciences. Although influenced by both Immanuel Kant and Hegel, he rejected the transcendental and formal limits of the former and the metaphysical absolutes of the latter. His task was to translate the insights of idealism into a more open empirical approach to what it means to experience reality. Although the natural sciences are about nature and the human sciences about history, this does not justify hypostatizing history as a spiritual domain separate from nature. The spiritual life of human beings is conditionedâ but not determined byâ natural processes. Even when human beings set themselves free purposes, the realization of these purposes requires that the laws of nature be obeyed. In Book 1 of his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey grants the human sciences a relative cognitive independence from the natural sciences. Yet he assigns the human sciences a greater reflective scope in that they express more aspects of human experience. They not only ascertain what isâ as do the natural sciencesâ but also make value judgments, establish goals, and prescribe rules. For the human sciences, theory is always framed by practical considerations instigated by historical life. Therefore, philosophical reflection about their conditions of possibility makes it necessary to regress behind the logical and epistemological foundations of the natural sciences to establish the more encompassing life-nexus of all human experience. This reflective turn initiated in Book 2 of the Introduction to the Human Sciences and worked out in the posthumously published drafts for Book 4, shows the human sciences to have an important advantage over the natural sciences in that they preserve some of the intuitive access to the reality of experience as it is lived. The natural sciences merely construct a phenomenal or ideal world that abstracts from the overall nexus of life so that human beings stand as impartial intellectual observers of this abstractly represented nature. By contrast, the world that is formed by the human sciences is the historical-social reality in which human beings participate. It is a fuller world that is accessible not merely as conceptually mediated cognition Erkenntnis, but also as immediate knowledge Wissen found in lived experience. Conceptual cognition is representational and objectifying. Lived experience provides a prerepresentational self-presence that involves a direct knowing. Any state of consciousness is implicitly present to itself in what Dilthey calls "reflexive awareness" Innewerden. This does not require an explicit consciousness of being consciousâ such an act of self-consciousness would be more than reflexive, namely, reflective. At the basic level of reflexive awareness there is not yet a self as an object of reflection. According to Dilthey, there is no self underlying consciousness. Instead, the self arises out of consciousness as the correlate of the world. Within the nexus of consciousness as a function of life, reflection can differentiate between facts of inner perception and facts of outer perception, thereby producing a distinction between self and world. This world is not a product of an inference, but is felt primarily through resistance to the practical impulses of the will. Rather than grounding Page 9

10 the objectivity of the world on a transcendental "I think," Dilthey claims that its reality is given in the reflexive awareness of the relation between efficacy and resistance involved in willing. Through this expanded reflexive awareness, the life-nexus in which the self participates discloses things and other selves that can resist its will. Whereas Kant sought an explanative mode of understanding for natural phenomena by deriving them from the most general laws of scientific cognition, Dilthey seeks to understand the meaning of things in terms of their own inherent context. Hermeneutical understanding provides a kind of situated understanding that receives its bearings from the reflexive awareness of lived or prescientific experience. Here he works out the implications of his philosophical views about lived experience for psychology as a human science. Hitherto, psychology had been treated as a kind of natural science that synthetically constructs mental phenomena from atomistic elements such as sense-data by using hypothetical laws of association. This assumes that psychic life comes in discrete states that must be connected. Dilthey argues, however, that psychic life presents itself as a continuum in which states are already connected. It is the task of psychology to attempt to describe this general nexus of psychic life and to analyze specific states on its basis. The first delineates the general structural systems of consciousness that can be differentiated at the levels of cognition, feeling, and volition. The cognitive system relates the acts of perception, imagination, and memory on the basis of which we conceptually represent the world. The felt and instinctual aspects of consciousness can be related to form a distinct structural system whereby we coordinate the value of things. A volitional structural system functions to link and rank the purposes we set. A cross-sectional analysis of any lived experience will manifest aspects of each of these three functional structures. Indeed, the structural systems manifest a degree of interdependence belying the traditional hierarchical assumption that the cognitive level is fundamental and that feeling and willing merely respond to what has been perceived. Thus we do not perceive impressions of sense unless there is a felt interest in them and the will is stirred enough to attend to them. The second main part of psychology as a human science traces the development of psychic life. It examines how psychic structures are defined and articulated over time. Here Dilthey stresses the importance of treating each phase in the teleological development of a psychic life-course as having its own inherent worth. Every phase has its immanent purposiveness and is to be treated as a kind of epoch. Although an epochal phase may contribute to its successor, it should never be treated as a mere means. The values of childhood, for example, should never be sacrificed for the goals of adulthood. The acquired psychic nexus becomes the individualized framework according to which each self tends to specify its own experiences. It provides a historicized apperceptive mass that influences what will be perceived. It is like an implicit worldview that can regulate further experiences and actions. Dilthey initially formulated his conception of the acquired psychic nexus as part of an effort to understand artistic creativity. In his essay "The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics" Dilthey, Dilthey argues that what distinguishes artists from other human beings is the capacity to articulate their acquired psychic nexus in typical ways. In ordinary life, our experience and behavior reflect contingent local conditions as well as our acquired psychic nexus. Playwrights and novelists can establish fictional contexts that limit the extent to which characters will be distracted by local contingencies. By more adequately reflecting the acquired psychic nexus of their creators, the actions of fictional characters can also address more general aspects of life. The literary imagination produces typical situations and characters that help focus the meaning of human existence. Individuals manifest creativity when the perspective that informs their acquired psychic nexus becomes more than regulative, but constitutively typical. The self-givenness of reflexive awareness and the self-presence of lived experience provide an implicit kind of understanding of life that psychological description and literary expression can make explicit. The inherent connectedness of consciousness renders it unnecessary to introduce hypothetical explanative links into the foundation of psychology. On this basis, Dilthey claims that the natural sciences are mainly about causal explanation and the human sciences about description and structural understanding. But this contrast is not absolute. Sometimes natural sciences must be content with description and interpretation, and sometimes human sciences cannot rely on general descriptions to account for significant details and must appeal to hypotheses. The difference is Page 10

11 that the natural sciences tend to begin with explanative hypotheses, whereas the human sciences may end up with explanative hypotheses. Hermeneutics Unlike the natural sciences, the human sciences do not abstract from ordinary life, but analyze it. Analysis is compatible with understanding because, unlike abstraction, it need not isolate things from their overall context. The hermeneutical task of analysis is to enable us to recognize the whole in its parts and the parts in the whole. There is always this circularity in coordinating parts and wholes when reading a text. Hermeneutics as a human science reflects on what it means to apply the art of exegesis from texts to the experience of life in general. Here he begins to sketch out a position that would define his final work. While he does not abandon the project of describing and analyzing lived experience, he came to view description and analysis as limited in their ability to capture the full meaning of life. To truly understand ourselves is to be able to see ourselves as others see us. One of the most revealing ways in which we manifest ourselves is through linguistic expression and communication. But Dilthey defines hermeneutics as the theory of interpreting all human manifestations, including actions that are not intended to communicate. The range of objectifications needing interpretation is broad. It includes impersonal theoretical judgments, abstract mathematical formulas, concrete poetic expressions of lived experience, personal correspondence, journal entries, works of art, historical monuments and archives, and political deeds and their aftereffects. They are important because only that which is publicly accessible and has been objectified in a common medium can produce determinate meaning. The work that best articulates this hermeneutical approach to the human sciences is The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences The human sciences form the historical world, not by producing it, but by giving it a multifaceted discursive shape. Determinate meaning will never be found by confronting the course of history monolithically. The human sciences can give a cognitive form to various strands of history that we knowingly participate in. They allow use to analyze the overall stream of history and direct it, as it were, into a variety of structural systems in which selected currents can be examined for specific interacting forces. Some of these historical structures had already been identified in the Introduction to the Human Sciences as cultural and social organizational systems. Cultural systems were conceived as purposive systems that bring individuals together to achieve certain voluntary goals. These purposive systems are not limited to the goals of high cultureâ the sciences, the arts, and religionâ for they also include economic and social cooperation. Dilthey distinguished these cultural systems from institutional structures which make up the external organization of society. Institutions such as families, tribes, and nation-states are also interactive, but not primarily voluntary. We do not choose our parental family but are born into it. One of the advances of The Formation of the Historical World is that all these historical structures are no longer subsumed under the concept of "purposive system. The efficacy of history is to be understood in terms of productivity before any causal or teleological account is given. The carriers of history, whether they be individuals, cultures, institutions, or communities, can all be considered as productive systems capable of exerting influence, and in some cases, realizing purposes. Each productive system of history should be approached as being centered in itself. Individuals too are productive systems when they appropriate new impressions into their acquired psychic nexus: They cognize the present on the basis of past evaluations and future goals. Page 11

12 Chapter 7 : Dilthey, Wilhelm (â ) blog.quintoapp.com art, worldview, and life-stance were critically deployed against traditional authorities, beliefs, and institutions in order to prioritize lived and scien- tiëœcally comprehended experience (Erlebnis and Erfahrung) and a more. Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey proposed a return to the more focused viewpoint of Kant, but not without also taking account of the broader perspective of later idealists like Hegel. Dilthey characterized his own expansive view of philosophy as one of establishing integral relations to all the theoretical disciplines and historical practices that attempt to make sense of the world. Instead of demarcating the boundaries that set philosophy apart from other ways of engaging life, Dilthey conceives its critical task as articulating the overall structures that define the human spirit in general. Philosophy should aim to preserve the scope that idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel once gave it, but it must do so by recapturing the Kantian rigor that had been lost and by applying it empirically. These goals, as formulated in the inaugural lecture that Dilthey gave in on assuming his first professorship in Basel, were already prefigured in his early journals. Thus in Dilthey wrote that a new Critique of Reason must proceed on the basis of the psychological laws and impulses from which art, religion and science all derive. All intellectual systems are mere crystallizations of more generic schemata rooted in life JD, The early Dilthey conceived his goal as a broadening of the critical project that would ground the human sciences as Kant had grounded the natural sciences. His hope then was that the human sciences would be able to arrive at lawful explanations just like the natural sciences. Up until at least, when he published his Poetics, Dilthey was confident that inner explanations of human creativity could be arrived at. He himself formulated three laws of the imaginative metamorphosis to account for the powerful effect that poets can have on us. But through his efforts to work out the psychology that could be appealed to by such inner explanations, Dilthey came to modify some of his basic assumptions. He increasingly stresses that our access to the human world of history is much more direct than our access to nature. Although Dilthey is still willing to accept that objects of outer experience are phenomenal, he no longer accepts the Kantian thesis that the contents of inner experience are phenomenal as well. They are real and the time that relates us to history is not merely the ideal form that Kant had exposited. The human sciences will henceforth be conceived as primarily concerned with understanding the meaning of human action and interaction. Our initial access to the external world is not inferential, but is felt as resistance to the will. The world of lived experience is not merely a theoretical representation, but is directly present to us as embodying values that are relevant to our purposes. If the first phase was characterized by a search for inner explanation and the second phase by direct understanding, the third phase can be characterized by the need for interpretation. Self-understanding can only come from without. The way we express ourselves, whether in communication or in action, is a crucial intermediary in defining ourselves. Understanding can only be reliable if it proceeds through the interpretation of human objectifications. Thus we understand ourselves not through introspection but through history. In Dilthey published a seminal work on the young Hegel that made use of recently discovered theological and political fragments. There he was also introduced to the philosophical systems of the idealists by Kuno Fischer. Because Fischer was accused of being a pantheist, his right to teach was withdrawn in That year the Schleiermacher Society also organized an essay competition. The first volume of this biography was published in It places Schleiermacher not only in his theological setting but also in the context of the literary and philosophical movements astir in Berlin from to As a theology student, Dilthey had begun a study of many early formulations of the Christian worldview, which though never completed, continued to influence his subsequent writings. In Dilthey writes that it is my calling to apprehend the innermost nature of religious life in history and to bring this to the attention of our times which are moved exclusively by matters of state and science. JD, This means looking for religiosity not so much in its institutional practices and its theological doctrines as in the recesses of human experience. It is a total experience that interweaves a feeling of dependence with an awareness of a higher life independent of nature. Religious life is regarded as the enduring Page 12

13 background of human intellectual development, and that development can manifest itself in mythical representation, in theological doctrine, in metaphysical conceptualization as well as in scientific theory. Dilthey rejected attempts to find the roots of religion in myth. He saw myth as an attempt to represent and explain the world in religious terms. Myth is not so much a primitive mode of religion as it is a primitive mode of scientific theory. Later as he reflected on the nature of worldviews, Dilthey would occasionally return to the problem of religion. What distinguishes the religious worldview from artistic and philosophical worldviews is that it relates the visible to what is invisible, life to our awareness of death. Enlightenment thinkers regarded mystical experience as irrational. But according to Dilthey, Schleiermacher was able to avoid this charge of irrationalism by relating core aspects of religious experience to the insights of transcendental philosophy. He gives a transcendental reading of what is intuited and felt in the religious mood by transforming it into a creative principle. The human sciences Geisteswissenschaften encompass both the humanities and the social sciences. They range from disciplines like philology, literary and cultural studies, religion and psychology, to political science and economics. Dilthey insists that the human sciences be related not by some logical construct on the order of a Comte or a Mill, but by means of reflective considerations that take their historical genesis into account. Dilthey writes that the human sciences as they exist and as they are practiced according to the reason of things that were active in their history â contain three classes of assertions. I, 78 These are 1 descriptive and historical statements, 2 theoretical generalizations about partial contents and 3 evaluative judgments and practical rules. The human sciences are more obviously normative in nature than the natural sciences for which formal norms related to objective inquiry suffice. The fact that the human sciences are forced to confront substantive normative issues puts a limit on the kind of theoretical regularities that can be established in the human sciences. Given the core role that human beings play in the socio-historical world, the understanding of individuality is as important in the human sciences as are the explanations to be found through generalizations. But the human science of psychology that deals with human beings cannot examine them apart from interactions with society. This means that psychology can be a foundational human science only if it is conceived as being primarily descriptive. Psychological explanations may still be possible, but only by starting with a non-hypothetical base that describes how our experience assimilates social and cultural features. Many human character traits are not purely psychological. Thus when we speak of a person as thrifty we are combining economic and psychological features. Individual human beings are important for the understanding of history, but instead of making them the monadic building blocks of history, they are to be considered as points of intersection. Only a multidisciplinary approach to human history can do it justice. Qua conscious living beings, individuals are the carriers of history, but they are just as much the products of history. Individuals are not self-sufficient atoms. But neither are they to be regarded as swallowed up by encompassing communities like nations or peoples. Suspicion of overarching forces like peoples led Dilthey to distance himself from the nationalism of his contemporary Heinrich von Treitschke and to ally himself with a political gradualism reminiscent of Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Dilthey conceives of most of the human sciences as analyzing human interactions at a level that can mediate between individual initiative and communal tradition. Cultural systems are associations that individuals join voluntarily for certain purposes that they can only achieve through cooperation. These systems are cultural in the widest possible sense and include all aspects of our social life. They can be political, economic, artistic, scientific or religious in nature and are not bound by local or national interests. External organizations of society by contrast are those institutional structures like a family and a state that we already are born into. I, 94 within which relations of power, dependence and property can be established. It is important to cross-reference cultural systems and institutional organizations. Enlightenment thinkers had focused on cultural systems and their potential universal scope while overlooking how they are rooted in real life. Although Dilthey received his training from members of the Historical School, he recognized that many of them had been equally one-sided by stressing the distinctive institutional organizations that separate different peoples while ignoring the role of generalizations made possible through the analysis of cultural systems. Dilthey aims to combine these two Page 13