Dilthey, Wilhelm: translation
DiltheyMichael LessnoffINTRODUCTIONWilhelm Dilthey was born in 1833 near Wiesbaden, and thus lived through the period ofBismarck’s creation of a unified German Empire by ‘blood and iron’. These turbulentevents, however, scarcely perturbed his career, which was wholly that of academic andscholar. For almost forty years he was to hold, successively, four university chairs ofphilosophy, the first as early as 1866, and culminating (from 1882 to 1905) in that ofBerlin. Crucial to Dilthey’s philosophical achievement, however, is the fact that he wasnot a philosopher only, but was equally interested, and distinguished, in the fields ofcultural history and biography. Small wonder, then, that Dilthey is famous as thephilosopher of the
‘Geisteswissenschaften’—the ‘sciences of mind’ or (as the term isoften translated), the human sciences, or the human studies.Indeed, the human mind and its products are the beginning and end, the alpha andomega, of Dilthey’s philosophy; so much so that it is hardly possible, from hisperspective, to draw a definite line between philosophy and psychology. Dilthey’sphilosophy is above all an epistemology, or theory of knowledge, and human knowledgearises in the human mind. Dilthey’s viewpoint here can be interestingly compared withthat of Hume. ‘It is evident’ wrote Hume in the Introduction to his great
Treatise, ‘that allsciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature [and] are in some measuredependent on the science of MAN; since they lie under the cognisance of men, and arejudged of by their powers and faculties’. With this proposition Dilthey was in fullagreement, but thereafter the two philosophers sharply part company. Hume, startingfrom the premiss that all knowledge is a judgement of the human mind, and deducingtherefrom the need to understand the operations of the human mind, ended up, somewhatparadoxically, with an account of the mind based on, and assimilated to, our (or its)knowledge of external nature, or natural science.Dilthey arrived at the opposite position.For him the mind is an autonomous realm, with its own principles of operation:correspondingly, knowledge of the mind is the discovery of these inherent principles, nota reading back of the way we know external nature, or natural science. The latter, indeed,are to be understood in a sense derivatively, as the mind’s response to the non-mental: tonature as it impinges on human consciousness, and is grasped from the perspective ofhuman life. Dilthey, who, it seems, took the primacy of the human mind more seriouslythan did Hume, was led by it to a philosophical and epistemological dualism,encapsulated by his famous distinction between two kinds of ‘science’ (knowledge): the
Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of the mind, or of the human) and the
Naturwissenschaften (sciences of nature).Dilthey fully shared Hume’s resolutely
empirical epistemology (as Hume puts it, noneof the sciences can go beyond experience). But he found many reasons to reject theHumean analysis of that experience—to reject, in other words, Hume’s psychology,which was accepted by British empiricism generally. In this empiricism, the mind isviewed as the passive recipient of ‘impressions’ (which it copies in the form of ‘ideas’),and as governed by mechanical laws of association of such ideas. To Dilthey (here,doubtless, the heir of Romanticism), this passive and mechanical picture of the mind isfalse: false, not only of human life as a whole, but even of the ‘knowing subject’. (In awell known passage, Dilthey charged that ‘no real blood’ flows in the veins of theknowing subject ‘fabricated’ by Locke and Hume—and also Kant.) ‘The core of what wecall life is instinct, feeling, passions and volitions’; and this ‘whole man’ must be taken‘as the basis for exploring knowledge and its concepts’ ([8.32], 13). Knowledge arises notjust in the mind but in ‘life’—the life of a feeling, willing, passionate human being.Indeed, the German words
erleben and
Erlebnis, used by Dilthey to express the idea ofexperience in the sense he considered fundamental, are derivatives of the word for life
(das Leben). In order to bring out the importance of this for Dilthey,
Erlebnis is oftentranslated into English as ‘lived experience’.As we saw, Dilthey’s epistemology is dualistic, which means that there are two kindsof human experience—external and internal. The difference between them isfundamental. Internal knowledge is the subject’s knowledge of itself—of its volitions andcognitions, its reasonings, decisions, values and goals, its mental states and acts ingeneral. In the very having of these states, we are conscious of them, and know them
directly and immediately. External knowledge also depends on the subjective states andacts of our minds, but it is not knowledge of them. Rather, we experience the externalworld in relation to our will, and especially in the frustration of our will, or as resistance.As Dilthey put it: ‘In the experiences of frustration and resistance the presence of a forceis given’—an external force, ‘a force [that] is acting upon me’ ([8.71], 58). Out of suchexperiences we construct our picture of the external world. This world, however, isknown to us only by inference, not directly, our knowledge of the external world is thus aconstruction only. We do not know it as we know ourselves, it is fundamentally alien tous. In a way, Dilthey’s view of our external knowledge is similar to Kant’s: we cannotknow things ‘in themselves’, but only as they appear to us. But he is more radicallysubjectivist than Kant—Dilthey refused to admit any
a priori element in our knowledgeof external appearances, ascribing it wholly to experience. And his view of our internalknowledge, our knowledge of our minds, is totally un-Kantian, for he held that in thisrealm we have direct knowledge, by experience, of a reality, of mental things-inthemselves.Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (things in themselves) and thephenomenal (things as they appear to us) is replaced by a distinction between internal andexternal knowledge. It is obvious that this distinction is the root of Dilthey’s famousdistinction between two kinds of sciences—
Geisteswissenschaften (sciences of mind orhuman sciences), and
Naturwissenschaften (sciences of nature).Dilthey’s interest, as we saw, was primarily in the
Geisteswissenschaften: he wasinterested in the
Naturwissenschaften mainly for the sake of showing that, and how, the
Geisteswissenschaften must differ from them. What then is the character of the naturalsciences? The most fundamental point is that they deal with a world that is, as we haveseen, external and alien to us—a world which impinges on our experience, to be sure, butof whose ultimate, elemental nature we perforce remain ignorant because it is beyond ourexperience. In Dilthey’s own words: our idea of nature is ‘a mere shadow cast by a realitywhich remains hidden from us’ ([8.32], 73). The picture of reality constructed by naturalscience therefore remains always ‘hypothetical’—Dilthey referred, in this connection, tothe ‘groping’ towards an adequate theory of nature which was initiated by thephilosophers of ancient Greece (and is still continued by physics today) but which cannever fully succeed, for ‘it is not possible to demonstrate a definite inner objectivestructure of reality, such that remaining possible structures are excluded’ ([8.32], 318).This does not mean, however, that Dilthey considered natural science to be useless orinvalid. On the contrary, it is a highly appropriate and fruitful way of conceiving ofexternal nature, from a human standpoint. Science conceptualizes nature in such a way asto facilitate its description in terms of precise, quantitative causal laws. It is thusconcerned, in relation to all phenomena, with their typical and quantifiable aspects. Inthis sense, it is an abstraction from reality, but (in part due to the development of theexperimental method) a hugely successful one, giving man mastery over nature: ‘Oncethe causes of change in nature become accessible to our will we can produce the effectswe want… A limitless prospect of extending our power over nature has openedup’ ([8.36], no). But Dilthey insisted on the distinction between mastery over nature andknowledge of nature-as-such:if one…investigates nature insofar as it is the object of intelligence or insofar asit is interwoven with the will as end or means, it remains for the mind only whatit is in the mind; whatever it might be in itself is entirely a matter of indifferencehere. It is enough that the mind can count on nature’s lawfulness for the mind’sactivities in whatever way it encounters nature.([8.32], 88)But scientific laws of nature are also hypothetical, at best probable, never provable byexperience; causal necessity (as Hume showed) is likewise a construction beyondexperience. In a rather extreme formulation of his position, referring to the scientificworld-picture of particles or atoms interacting with one another according to laws,Dilthey commented: ‘neither atoms nor laws are real’ ([8.32], 319).Dilthey’s conception of the natural sciences is based rather directly on his conceptionof external knowledge: his conception of the human sciences is based on his conceptionof internal knowledge, but less directly. Direct, internal knowledge is introspectiveknowledge, given in the experience of each individual person, of his or her own mentalstates and acts. Such knowledge is insufficient to constitute the human sciences ingeneral: the latter depend on the presumption of a world of ‘other minds’ with basicallysimilar contents to our own, revealed in words, deeds, and artefacts. In Dilthey’s view,we make this presumption quite unproblematically, and he himself never treated it as aproblem. The human world and its doings and makings (what Dilthey called the ‘mindaffectedworld’) indubitably exists, and provides the subject-matter of the humansciences. One should perhaps stress the phrase ‘mind-
affected world’, in order to avoidmisunderstanding of Dilthey’s term
Geisteswissenschaften. Human beings are, as Diltheyoften put it, psycho-physical complexes, not pure minds; and the human sciences dealwith what he called
objectifications of mind (sometimes he used the Hegelian phrase‘objective mind’, though not with Hegel’s meaning), i.e. the material world as formed bymental activity. Nevertheless the mental aspect is crucial.The fundamental difference between the
Geisteswissenschaften and the
Naturwissenschaften is that, whereas in the latter we construct hypotheses about a worldalien to us, in the former we deal with our own world, which we know directly. Thus,Dilthey thought, we can attain to a certainty in our knowledge which is beyond the reachof natural science, and which more than compensates for the much superior precision andgenerality of scientific laws. The latter can, in a sense, explain
(erklären) but in a deepersense the material world must always remain incomprehensible to us. But the humansciences deal with what we can and do understand
(verstehen). Dilthey’s starting-pointhere is the individual’s understanding of his or her own mental life, of the connections,for example, between one’s desires, beliefs and actions. By analogy with this directlyunderstood connection, one can understand the actions of others, as ‘expressions’ ofmind. As Dilthey put it, we understand the mental life of others by re-living or reexperiencing
(nach-erlehen) that experience. Actions are the most direct but not, Diltheyultimately believed, the most important expressions of mind from the standpoint of thehuman sciences: most important are the permanent or lasting expressions—socialinstitutions such as law and religion, human artefacts like the great cathedrals, and—perhaps most important of all—writings and works of art.Dilthey insisted on a number of crucial differences between the human and natural, ormental and physical worlds. The human world is not a world of strict causal determinism,but one in which individuals are free (within limits) to pursue chosen ends: not a deadand meaningless world, but one in which values are created and recognized; a
historicalworld which develops new forms through time, a creative world. Some of thesedifferences are brought out in this graphic contrast of Dilthey’s, between a waterfall (anatural phenomenon) and human speech:The waterfall is composed of homogeneous falling particles of water; but asingle sentence, which is but a noise in the mouth, shakes the whole livingsociety of a continent through a play of motives in absolutely individual units,none of which is comparable with the rest; so different is the ideal motive fromany other kind of cause.([8.71, 165)Clearly, Dilthey implies that, if the sentence were treated as nothing more than a noise orsuccession of noises (which, from the standpoint of natural science, is precisely what itis), the effects produced would be utterly incomprehensible. To understand them, acompletely different framework is necessary. Hence the need for a distinctive group ofdisciplines—the human sciences.Dilthey’s view of the relation between these disciplines differed at different stages ofhis career. At one, relatively early, stage he considered psychology to be fundamental(not, of course, a psychology modelled on natural science—on this, more below). Later,he came to the view that psychology is not self-sufficient but is as dependent on otherhuman sciences as they are on it: in particular, he was inclined to stress the importance,for all the human studies, of the interdependence of psychology and history. This,presumably, follows from the element of freedom and creativity which, Dilthey insisted,characterizes human life, making historical development an essential component of it, sothat only in history are the potentialities of human psychology—of human nature—revealed. Similarly Dilthey points to a like interdependence between what he calls thetwo great classes of the human sciences, the historical and the systematic (orgeneralizing) sciences. Clearly, it was no part of Dilthey’s intention to confine the humanstudies to particularities, and not infrequently he even referred to their discovery of laws(e.g. Grimm’s Law in linguistics). Presumably, however, these laws or generalizations donot have the strict deterministic status that Dilthey attributed to the laws of naturalscience. Indeed, notwithstanding the generalizing aspect of the human sciences, Diltheyregarded their historical aspect as so fundamental that he referred to the epistemology ofthe human sciences which he sought to develop as a ‘critique of historical reason’.The idea of a ‘critique of historical reason’, with its obvious Kantian echoes, occurs ina work published in 1883, the
Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction tothe Human Sciences), and Dilthey’s attempt to formulate it in a fully satisfactory formwas to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. That much remained constant, but there arenotable inconsistencies in the views Dilthey expressed over the years, and even in asingle work. In the
Einleitung, for example, the distinction between historical andsystematic (generalizing) sciences is made, but it is doubtful whether it is actually used inDilthey’s survey and classification of the various ‘special’ human sciences. This is asfollows. First, and most basic, are the sciences that deal with individual human beings—psychology and biography. (But biography is really an aspect of psychology—itshistorical aspect. It is also, in Dilthey’s view, a main component of history proper.) Inaddition there are two kinds of social science (as we would now call them): sciences ofsystems of culture, and sciences of external organization of society. By ‘systems ofculture’, Dilthey means complexes of interdependent actions devoted to some particularhuman purpose (examples are economics, religion and art); by ‘external organization ofsociety’ he refers to the state and other associations, communities and relations ofdominance and dependence (we might call these formal and informal social structures).Both types, Dilthey believed when he wrote the
Einleitung, are dependent on psychology:their fundamental concepts are psychological concepts. Examples are the concepts of‘need, economy [i.e. thrift], work, value and the like’, which are the foundation ofpolitical economy; or the ‘instinct for sociability’ which, Dilthey says, underlies humancommunal organization. Dilthey says that these concepts are, from the psychologicalpoint of view, ‘second-rank concepts’, i.e. non-basic; but he does not mean by this thatthey are simply deducible from the basic concepts and laws of individual psychology, asmight have been asserted by, for example, John Stuart Mill—rather, they are conceptshaving to do with
interaction between individuals, rather than concepts relating toindividuals as such. (Dilthey is not very forthcoming about the precise nature of thisrelationship, which he describes as ‘complicated’, but he is emphatic that the attempt toelucidate it in terms of deduction and induction is useless—it rests on a whollyinappropriate model borrowed from natural science.)The above schema may seem to be consistent with Dilthey’s distinction betweenhistorical and generalizing sciences, but this is actually doubtful, for in the
EinleitungDilthey gives prominence to—he repeats it several times—a different schema ofclassification involving not two but three elements, and which are said to distinguish notdifferent types of human sciences but different types of
assertion made within the humansciences generally. The three types of assertion are the particular or historical, thegeneralizing or theoretical, and—thirdly—the value-judging or prescriptive. It is clearthat Dilthey considers that a single human science can, or should, contain all three.Perhaps the difference between historical versus generalizing sciences, and historicalversus generalizing elements within a science, is a relatively minor discrepancy.However, the addition of evaluation or prescription is of the greatest importance. Diltheywas, indeed, insistent on the impossibility of separating factual statements and valuejudgementsin the historical and human sciences—though it is not clear in exactly whatsense he believed the value-judgements involved to be scientific. On this puzzling aspectof Dilthey’s thinking more will be said below. At any rate, it illustrates an importantpoint, namely, that Dilthey’s conception of the range of the human sciences is muchwider than the word ‘science’ might suggest to English speakers. Thus, a list (in a laterwork by Dilthey) includes not only history, economics, jurisprudence, politics andpsychology but also the study of religion, literature, poetry, architecture, music and‘philosophic world views and systems’ ([8.36], 170). The earlier
Einleitung mentionsthree ‘special human sciences’ which deserve some com-ment—philosophy, aestheticsand ethics.Ethics, Dilthey insists, is one of the ‘sciences of systems of culture’, it is the study ofsocial morality, rather than an ‘imperative of personal life’, or a ‘theory of the righteouslife’ separate from sociology, a view of ethics that Dilthey attributes to Herbert Spencer.Dilthey’s own view appears to be an example—even the most important example —ofhis general belief in the inseparability of fact and value in the human sciences. In thepresent case, it makes him an ethical empiricist. Put slightly differently, his view is thatvalues, like knowledge, arise within the context of human life, in experience. Weexperience them in ourselves, and attribute them to others, as motives and as grounds ofjudgement. Dilthey rejects the notion of any ‘transcendent’ ground of moral judgement,higher than human life itself. Nor, it seems, does he wish to make any sharp, qualitativedistinction between the ‘third person’ value-judgements that the human scientist maydiscover in his subject-matter, and ‘first person’ value-judgements that he makes
quahuman scientist. When we discuss (below) Dilthey’s view of history and the greatvariability of historical forms, we shall see that his view of ethics gives rise to a seriousproblem of relativism.Aesthetics and philosophy are said by Dilthey to be sciences that study, respectively,art and science. The two cases are of interest for different reasons. The case of aestheticsillustrates, again, Dilthey’s contention that, in the human sciences, knowledge andevaluation are inseparable and equally indispensable elements. (Some scholars, indeed,believe that Dilthey’s whole conception of the human sciences is rooted in his conceptionof aesthetics.) Equally important, art—especially literature—is for Dilthey itself anexpression of the attempt to understand human life. Great art—great literature—bydefinition abounds in such understanding. This does not mean that art or literature is itselfone of the human sciences, because it is not expressed in the systematic form of ascience. Nevertheless, art and the human sciences have in a sense a similar task. Thehuman sciences have much to learn from the arts: ‘None of us would possess more than ameagre part of our present understanding of human conditions, if we had not becomeused to seeing through the poet’s eyes’ ([8.71], 233). Furthermore, aesthetics must have aspecial status among the human sciences, being the attempt to understand attempts tounderstand human life, or expressions thereof taking a particular form. It is notsurprising, therefore, that Dilthey attached so much importance to aesthetics, and indeedcontributed largely to it.To call philosophy a human science, as Dilthey does, may seem surprising: it mayseem that philosophy has as its subject-matter all reality, not only human activity.Consistently with this, there can of course be historical and other study of humanphilosophizing (again a field in which Dilthey was himself prominent)—but that issomething different. The notion of philosophy as a human science is itself the staking outof a philosophical position, and follows from Dilthey’s oft-repeated, fundamentalstandpoint, the primacy of
life (that is, human life). ‘Thought cannot go behind life.’ Allspeculation about reality, therefore, must actually concern itself with the way in whichreality manifests itself in, or appears to, human life. In other words, genuine and validphilosophy must be epistemology or theory of knowledge. It is the attempt to achieve‘universally valid knowledge’ about human knowing. ‘As such a theory of knowledge itis a science’ ([8.36], 125). Dilthey’s own philosophy certainly takes this form—so it isafter all perhaps not so surprising to find him placing philosophy among the humansciences.Implicit (and explicit) in Dilthey’s philosophical stance is a repudiation of rivalphilosophical positions. Dilthey’s is an embattled philosophy, and two of his mainenemies are metaphysics and positivism. By metaphysics, Dilthey means abstract,schematic doctrines that claim to grasp the structure or essence of reality. Such doctrineshe rejects as false to experience, over-simplifications that cannot capture reality’s varietyand complexity, manifested especially in history. They are attempts to grasp the meaningof existence, but premature, one-sided attempts. On these grounds Dilthey repudiates, inthe
Einleitung, what he calls the philosophy of history as ‘not a true science’; he is herereferring to theories which see history as the unfolding of some masterplan, aiming atsome pre-given
telos, and interpret historical particulars in the light of, hence insubordination to, the supposed plan or
telos. To Dilthey this is a distortion that fails totake empirical history sufficiently seriously, in all its particularity and multiplicity. Anobvious exemplar of this style of theorizing, which Dilthey repudiates, is Hegel. Anotheris Comte, who from Dilthey’s point of view is a double sinner, author of a metaphysicalschematization of history (the Law of the Three Stages), and a metaphysic that ispositivist to boot, that is, which sees the application of the positivist method of naturalscience to all disciplines, including the human sciences, as the historical
telos (or at leastthe
telos of human thought).Another way in which Dilthey characterizes a metaphysical system is as a
Weltanschauung or world-view taking, or claiming to take, philosophical form: ‘When aworld-view has been raised to a level at which it is grasped and grounded conceptuallyand thus claims universal validity, we call it metaphysics’ ([8.32], 29). Hegel and Comte,in fact, can stand as exemplars of two of the three great ‘pure types’ of
Weltanschauungen that, Dilthey maintained, have constantly recurred in the history ofhuman thought and culture, namely naturalism (or materialism), and objective idealism.These are two opposed monistic views of the world, the one interpreting everything interms of matter, the other in terms of mind or spirit. Dilthey’s third pure type of
Weltanschauung, what he calls the idealism of freedom, is dualistic, seeing the mind asindependent of physical causality (and superior to it). Dilthey himself might well appearto be an exponent of this third, dualistic
Weltanschauung, but this categorization couldhardly be acceptable to him, given his view that all the
Weltanschauungen (including,explicitly, the idealism of freedom) are partial, incomplete views of reality, bound toencounter problems they cannot solve. However, metaphysical philosophy is only one ofthree spheres in which, Dilthey says,
Weltanschauungen manifest themselves—the othersare religion and art, especially ‘poetry’ (a term which for Dilthey applies to literaturegenerally). Dilthey’s view of the historical relation between religious and metaphysical
Weltanschauungen is reminiscent of Comte: ‘The mental law that general ideas can becompleted only in conceptual thought…forces the religious
Weltanschauung to becomephilosophical’ wrote Dilthey in
Das Wesen der Philosophie (
The Essence of Philosophy,1907) ([8.30, 51]) But of course he did not agree that Comte himself, in his positivisticphilosophy, had got beyond metaphysics.Dilthey’s famous typology of world-views can stand as an exemplification of his ownprescriptions for the carrying on of the human sciences. It results from a wide-ranginghistorical survey (in this case, of intellectual and cultural history); and it shows forth, inDilthey’s opinion, a constant of human psychology—for the drive to formulate worldviews,in the attempt to make sense of the universe, is, he thinks, precisely that. It thusreturns us to the twin premisses of Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences—psychology and history. We must now examine his views on both of these in more detail.
DILTHEY’S VIEW OF PSYCHOLOGYDilthey’s ‘Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology’
(Ideen über eineBeschreibende und Zergliedende Psychologie) was published in 1894. It is a majorelement of his
oeuvre, and a major source of his views on the subject, but by no meansthe only one. It must be supplemented by later writings, including some not published inhis lifetime.In developing his ideas on psychology, Dilthey had to fight a war on three fronts,against Comtean positivism, British empiricism and German neo-Kantianism. Comte’spositivism simply denied the validity of any independent science of psychologywhatever, on the grounds of its unamenability to investigation by what Comte took to bethe necessary method of all science, the ‘positive’ method of external observation. Theneo-Kantians, such as Heinrich Rickert (their most prominent spokesman), drew a sharpdistinction between the historical or cultural sciences, which focus on the particular, andnatural sciences, which seek general laws. They placed psychology in the latter category,at the same time denying that it could give knowledge of the transcendent ‘noumenal’self, or of the realm of
Geist or spirit. As for the British empiricists, they took psychologyto be a natural science like any other—on this point they agreed with the neo-Kantians,but differed as to whether there is some deeper spiritual reality undiscoverable by naturalscientific method. Dilthey took psychology to be a science, but not a natural science, ascience precisely of
Geist.In the
Ideen, Dilthey offers two somewhat different arguments against a psychologybased on natural scientific method, a project which he often refers to as ‘explanatorypsychology’. Natural science is hypothetical. More precisely, it breaks reality down intohypothetical elements, postulates laws connecting them and thus explains phenomena.Such a manner of explanation is called by Dilthey ‘constructive’—it constructs a pictureof reality out of hypothetical elements linked by hypothetical relations. This methodworks very well in certain areas, notably those dealing with phenomena that are preciselymeasurable and subject to controlled experiment. Neither of these conditions obtains inpsychology. The result is a chaos of competing theories: ‘To each group of hypotheses isopposed yet a dozen more… One sees absolutely nothing which can decide the issue ofthe struggle’ ([8.31], 26). Nor can one hope to improve matters by recourse to areaswhere the natural scientific method is applicable, such as physiology: ‘Consciousnesscannot go behind itself ([8.31], 75): in other words, the conscious cannot be explained bythe non-conscious. Thus, Dilthey concludes, ‘Explanatory psychology is not only nowunable, but will never be able to elaborate an objective knowledge of the nexus ofpsychic phenomena’. It is, Dilthey says, ‘bankrupt’ ([8.31], 49). Fortunately, however,there is no need, in psychology, to postulate hypothetical entities governed byhypothetical laws, and then construct a picture of reality—for in psychology knowledgeof reality is given to us directly. Such a psychology will, however, not be explanatory andconstructive, but descriptive and analytic.What exactly does Dilthey mean by a descriptive and analytic psychology? The crucialpoint, stressed over and over again by Dilthey, is that apprehension of the psychologicalis the directly lived inner cognition of systematically connected elements constituting afunctional unity or whole. It is not simply the individual elements but equally their unityand connectedness that are directly given to us. To designate this unity or connectednessDilthey used the word
Zusammenhang (literally, a hanging-together). The word isimportant, for two reasons: firstly, because it is perhaps the most characteristic andfrequently used term in all of Dilthey’s writings; secondly, because its translation intoEnglish is neither straightforward nor uniform, since it may refer either to a totality ofparts (whole, structure) or to connections between elements. This ambiguity is of someconsequence in Dilthey’s thinking, and can be illustrated by considering the followingpassages in the
‘Ideen’ which show how the term functions in his concept of a descriptiveand analytic psychology:Hypotheses do not at all play the same role in psychology as in the study ofnature. In the latter, all connectedness
[Zusammenhang] is obtained by means ofthe formation of hypotheses; in psychology it is precisely the connectednesswhich is originally given in lived experience.([8.31], 28)By descriptive psychology I understand the presentation of the components andcontinua which one finds uniformly throughout all developed modes of humanpsychic life, where the components form a unique nexus which is neither addednor deduced, but rather is concretely lived. This psychology is thus thedescription and analysis of a nexus which is originally given as life itself…Every connection
[Zusammenhang] utilized by it can be verified unequivocallyby inner perception, and from the fact that each such ensemble can be shown tobe a member of a larger whole, not as a result of deduction, but as givenoriginally in life.([8.31], 35)For psychology the functional system
[Zusammenhang] is
given from within bylived experience. Every particular psychological cognition is only an
analysis ofthis nexus… Psychic life is a functional system [whose] component parts…existwithin individual systems of a particular kind, [which are the source of]problems to psychology. These problems can be resolved only by means ofanalysis: descriptive psychology must be at the same time an analyticpsychology… Analysis separates the component parts which are united inreality.([8.31], 56–7; emphases in original)In brief, Dilthey, in the course of these three passages, moves from asserting theexperienced connectedness of psychological items, to asserting that these connectionsconstitute larger wholes or systems, also directly experienced (and the word
Zusammenhang, translated in the first passage as connectedness, refers in the thirdpassage to the total functional system). Thus Dilthey arrives at his conclusion thatpsychology should take the form of analysing the elements of given psychic wholes.The ambiguity of the word
Zusammenhang is significant primarily because of itsbearing on two concepts that are central to Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences,namely understanding
(Verstehen) and meaning
(Sinn, Bedeutung). Do ‘understanding’and ‘meaning’ turn on relations between connected elements or on relations between partsand wholes? Dilthey gives both answers, and the importance of this will become apparentfor the philosophy of social science as elaborated in his later work. But the point isalready prefigured in his writing on psychology. Here is one account given by Dilthey ofhis favoured method of psychological analysis. A state of human consciousnesscharacteristically involves, he says, three elements or modes, namely, representations (ofthe world), feelings and volitions. Dilthey stresses the interrelation of all three, butespecially the role of volitions, in producing action. Analysis, then, must ‘define theconcepts of goal-positing, motive, relation between ends and means, choice andpreference and unravel the relations which exist among these’ ([8.31], 70). It is, in otherwords, a process of relating actions and their outcomes to the motives, goals and volitionswhich produce them—and corresponds to the (or a) definition of
Verstehen(understanding) later given by Dilthey: ‘Understanding penetrates the observable facts ofhuman history to reach what is not accessible to the senses and yet affects externalfacts’—for example, values and purposes ([8.36], 172–3) But more often, in the
Ideen,Dilthey relates
Verstehen not to such connections but to the grasping of wholes. Forexample:The processes
of the whole psyche operate together in [lived] experience… Inthe lived experience a particular occurrence is supported by the totality ofpsychic life, and the whole of psychic life belongs to immediate experience. Thelatter already determines the nature of our
understanding (Verstehen) ofourselves and others… In understanding we proceed from the coherent wholewhich is livingly given to us in order to make the particular intelligible to us[emphases in original]… Precisely the fact that we live with the consciousnessof the coherent whole, makes it possible for us to understand a particularsentence, gesture, or action. All psychological thought preserves thisfundamental feature, that the apprehension of the whole makes possible anddetermines the interpretation of particulars.([8–31], 55)What exactly does Dilthey have in mind when he refers to a psychological (psychic)whole? The answer is twofold, but both aspects relate to the life of the human individual.One is what might be called the individual’s personality-structure
(Zusammenhang desSeelenlebens); the individual is a psychic unity or (in another of Dilthey’s phrases)
erworbener seelischer Zusammenhang (translatable as ‘acquired psychic nexus’). Thisphrase implies the unification of an individual’s experience, representations, feelings,purposes and values into a whole that makes one the person one is, and makes one pursuethe goals that one pursues. Thus, when Dilthey talks of a ‘descriptive and analytic’psychology, he means the description, analysis and classification of such structures. Sucha study should cover the entire range of human life, ‘from its more humble to its highestpossibilities’. But Dilthey was especially interested in the latter—in ‘religious genius,historical heroes, creative artists’. Since such outstanding figures are ‘motive forces inhistory and society’, psychology ‘will become the instrument of the historian, theeconomist, the politician’ ([8.31], 40–1).In referring to the acquired psychic nexus, Dilthey refers to the enduring values, habitsof will, and dominant goals that make it up. But values and goals generate action, andtherefore change. Thus the psychic structure is inherently dynamic. It develops over anindividual’s life. And the individual life is also, according to Dilthey, a systematicallyconnected whole—one that develops through time, and can be understood. The writing ofa biography is the attempt at such a coherent understanding of an individual life(autobiography is the individual’s attempt at such understanding of his or her own life).Dilthey frequently applies the concept of
meaning to this understanding of human life;but an ambiguity is detectable, similar to that mentioned above in relation tounderstanding itself. Is this ‘meaning’ the relation between an action and its purpose, goalor motive? or does it lie in the coherent relation of parts of a whole (life)? Again, Diltheygives (or at least suggests) both answers. Thus, his remark that the meaning of a life is therelation between its outer events and ‘something inner’ ([8.35], 91) suggests the former.But predominantly the latter interpretation is stressed, as in this typical passage:What is it that, in the contemplation of one’s life, links the parts into a wholeand thus makes it comprehensible? It is the fact that understanding involves…the categories of…value, purpose and meaning… Looking back at the past inmemory we see, in terms of the category of meaning, how the parts of a life arelinked together.([8.35], 103)Despite the importance of the concepts of value and purpose, ‘only the category ofmeaning’, Dilthey insists, expresses ‘the connectedness of life’ ([8.35], 104). Again thegrasping of meaning is the grasping of a
Zusammenhang.The quotation above is also significant for another reason, namely, the reference tomemory, for this relates to one of the most characteristic and suggestive, and possiblyinfluential, elements in all of Dilthey’s work, namely, the
temporality of life. To say that ahuman life is lived through a duration of time may seem banal; but Dilthey was at pains tostress the difference between
lived time and the abstract time of (say) the physicalscientist. Lived time ‘is not just a line consisting of parts of equal value… Nowhere [insuch a linear continuum] is there anything which “is”’. Indeed, the character of lived timeis paradoxical, in that we live
always in the present, but the present
includes the past,through memory, and the future, through our plans, hopes and fears.Concrete time consists…of the uninterrupted progress of the present, what waspresent becoming the past and the future becoming the present, [that is], thebecoming present of that which a moment ago we still expected, wanted orfeared…this is the character of real time… The present is always where we live,strive and remember: in brief, experience the fullness of our reality, [but] thecontinued effectiveness of the past as a power in the present, gives to what isremembered a peculiar characteristic of ‘being present’.([8.35], 98–9)In these passages, where human life is characterized as a continually moving presentwhich contains a (likewise continually moving) past and future, Dilthey is referring to thestructure of the life of an individual: but he could equally well be referring to his view ofhistory.
PSYCHOLOGY, HISTORY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCESMany commentators on Dilthey have remarked on a pronounced change in his thinkingabout the human sciences in the years after he wrote the
Ideen, and especially in the lastperiod of his life. In brief, the change discerned is a down-grading of individualpsychology, and a corresponding turn to emphasizing the importance of concrete,objective manifestations (‘expressions’) of mind in history and society, and theinterpretation of such expressions. Michael Ermarth, for example, in his
Wilhelm Dilthey:The Critique of Historical Reason, speaks of Dilthey’s thought moving away fromsubjective acts of experience to intersubjective and mediated contexts of experience, or inother words from the psychological to the cultural and historical ([8.65], 232). There isundeniably much truth in this perception of the trend of Dilthey’s thought. He certainlyabandoned his view of psychology as the very foundation of the human sciences, and heat least wavered of one of the cornerstones of his early thinking, namely the certainty ofthe knowledge afforded by introspection of lived experience. On the other hand, thecontinuities between the earlier and later phases of his think-ing should not beoverlooked. For example, already in the
Ideen, Dilthey clearly stated the need to studynot just the individual psyche but all of human history and culture, in order to arrive at afull description, classification and analysis of the mental. The following passage in the
Ideen puts the point quite bluntly: ‘Man does not apprehend what he is by musing overhimself, nor by doing psychological experiments, but rather by history’ ([8.31], 62). Tounderstand human psychology, also, we must study the mind’s
creations—in literatureand art, but also ‘in language, myth, religious ritual, customs, law, and in the externalorganization of society’—in brief, in all historical processes which are products of thehuman mind. Recourse to ‘the objective products of psychic life’ must supplementperception of inner states, is indeed, Dilthey says, of the greatest importance: ‘it is aninestimable advantage to have before us stable and enduring formations, to whichobservation and analysis can always return’ ([8.31],81). As for methods, we learn about‘inner processes’ of mental life by recourse to such evidence as diaries and letters, thereports of poets on poetical creation and the lives of religious geniuses, such as StFrancis, St Bernard and Luther.It is clear, then, that the theory of mental expressions—certainly the most celebratedidea in Dilthey’s ‘critique of historical reason’, and probably his most admiredcontribution to philosophy—was already present
in nuce at a relatively early stage, evenif it had to await its fullest and most systematic formulation till much later. And thereferences (above) to Sts Francis and Bernard, and to Martin Luther, serve as a reminderof another continuity between the earlier and the later work, namely, the pivotal role ofbiography. Biographies are both source and subject-matter for psychology and historyequally. Biography and history, of course, cannot be simply equated, as Dilthey was wellaware—he never reduced history to the doings of ‘great men’, however much he stressedtheir historical importance. Rather, the point is what might be called the structuralhomology between history and biography. The individual human life, Dilthey says, is the‘germinal cell’ of history, in which ‘the specific historical categories arise’ ([8.35], 73).The individual life, as we noted above, ‘is present in the memory’ of the individual; thus‘the sequence of a life is held together by the consciousness of identity…the discrete islinked into continuity’. Likewise, historyis only possible…through the reconstruction of the course of events in amemory which reproduces…the system of connections and the stages of itsdevelopment. What memory accomplishes when it surveys the course of a life isachieved in history by linking together the expressions of life which havebecome part of the objective mind, according to their temporal and dynamicrelationships. This is history.([8.35], 89)Just as the individual life is lived always in the present, but a present which includes(memories of) the past, so the present of collective humanity also includes its past—ishistorical:We are hourly surrounded by the products of history. Whatever characteristicsthe mind puts into expressions of life are tomorrow, if they persist, history. Astime marches on we are surrounded by Roman ruins, cathedrals, and thesummer castles of autocrats. History is not something separated from life ordivided from the present by distance in time.([8.35], 124)And in another striking passage, Dilthey suggests that the role played by memory in thelife of the individual is played, in that of ‘nations, communities, of mankind itself by thehistorian. But for his efforts, their past would mean as little to them as would his to aperson without a memory. ‘The ruins, the remnants of things past, the expressions ofmind in deeds, words, sounds and pictures, of souls who have long since ceased to be’surround us but are in themselves dead and meaningless. The historian ‘stands in themidst’ of these things: his task is to ‘conjure up’ the past, by ‘interpretation of theremnants that remain’ ([8.35], 139). He provides human communities with an essentialpart of human life.It may seem from the above quotations as if Dilthey,
qua historian, was a believer inwhat could be called ‘collective minds’ of human communities such as nations. This,however, is at best an oversimplification, at worst misleading. Certainly he accepted thereality of peoples or nations
(Völker) as significant social and historical entities: this isexplicit, for example, in the
Introduction to the Human Sciences ([8.32], 100). But in thatbook he immediately went on to reject as mystical any suggestion that these entities aresupra-individual organisms, or possess a supra-individual ‘folk soul’ or ‘folkspirit’
(Volksgeist). Such notions were unacceptable from Dilthey’s fundamentallyempirical standpoint: empirically, the only bearer of mind is the individual. The relationbetween the individual and collective entities like nations was therefore a problem thatDilthey took seriously. He later posed it as follows:The question now arises, how can a system which is not produced as such inone mind, and which is therefore not directly experienced nor can be reduced tothe lived experience of one person, take shape as a system in the historian’smind from the expressions of persons and statements about them? Thispresupposes that logical subjects can be formed which are not psychologicalsubjects. There must be a means of delimiting them, there must be a justificationfor conceiving them as units… And here arises the great problem.([8.71], 289)Dilthey’s solution to the problem was to identify the nation or people with the nationalconsciousness of individuals: ‘It is…the consciousness of belonging together, ofnationality and national feeling, on which the unity of the subject finally rests.’ Thisconsciousness is firmly rooted by Dilthey in individual psychology: ‘The consciousnessof belonging together is conditioned by the same elements that assert themselves in theindividual’s consciousness of himself ([8.35], 152–3). Yet the consciousness ofbelonging together creates a collective entity, which in turn influences the consciousnessof individuals: ‘The common experiences of a nation, common purposes and memoriesare real. They are the source of the communally determined purposes of individuals.’ It isa commonplace, Dilthey says, that only individuals can experience the satisfaction ofrealized purposes: yet such satisfaction may come from identification with one’s nation.‘An individual wills national ends as his own, experiences the nation’s experiences as hisown, has memories of such experiences as belonging to himself, is filled with them andcarried along by them’ ([8.71], 294). A nation, therefore, is not only a reality but adistinctive unity: ‘Nations are often relatively self-contained and because of this havetheir own horizon’ ([8.35], 130). By this Dilthey means that they have a characteristicconception of reality and system of values. They are not only (through, for example, stateorganization) historical agents, but appropriate contexts for the interpretation ofindividual acts and expressions, which they condition. In this, non-metaphysical sense,the term
Volksgeist can be accepted.Much the same may be said about the term
Zeitgeist (or
Geist des Zeitalters). The
Zeitalter (epoch, era or historical period) is in Dilthey’s thought an important andundoubted reality, often indeed referred to alongside, and in similar terms to, the peopleor nation, as a ‘structural system’ or ‘unit of the world of mind’. Dilthey puts it thus:The common practices of an epoch become the norm for the activities ofindividuals who live in it. The society of an epoch has a pattern of interactionswhich has uniform features. There is an inner affinity in the comprehension ofobjects. The ways of feeling, the emotions and the impulses which arise fromthem, are similar to each other. The will, too, chooses uniform goals, strives forrelated goods… It is the task of historical analysis to discover the consensuswhich governs the concrete purposes, values and ways of thought of a period.([8.36], 198)The
Zeitgeist is, once again, an appropriate context for the understanding of suchexpressions, and vice versa. Thus (to cite an example given by Dilthey), the historian canuse the civil law of the ‘age of Frederick’ to ‘understand the spirit of that age; he goesback from the laws to the intentions of the legislature and from there back to the spiritfrom which they arose’, or in other words ‘the social values, purposes [etc.] present at acertain time and place and which [thus] expressed themselves’ ([8.35], 76). Anotherexample, developed at some length by Dilthey, is Teutonic society in the time of Caesarand Tacitus:Here, as in every later period, we find economic life, state and law linked tolanguage, myth, religiousness and poetry… Thus heroic poetry arose from thewarlike spirit in the Teutonic age of Tacitus, and this poetry invigorated thewarlike spirit. From this same warlike spirit inhumanity arose in the religioussphere, as in the sacrifice of prisoners and the hanging up of their corpses insacred places. The same spirit then affected the position of the god of war in theworld of the gods.([8.35], 150–1)It must be stressed, once again, that for Dilthey the
Zeitgeist is an empiricalgeneralization, not a deterministic force—for if it were the latter there would,presumably, be no change—no history. Yet historicity is, as we know, central toDilthey’s vision of human life. Thus every ‘historical configuration’ is ‘ephemeral’. Buthistorical change is of course neither random nor total. According to Dilthey it arises (inpart at least) from the perceived imperfection inevitable in every age, from man’s‘unfulfilled longing’ (due, for example, to the social inequalities—‘impoverishment ofexistence’ and ‘servitude’—said by Dilthey to spring from the power relations that areinseparable from human social life). Thus successive ages are linked in the followingway:Every age refers back to the preceding one, for the forces developed in the lattercontinue to be active in it; at the same time it already contains the strivings andcreative activities which prepare for the succeeding age. As it arose from theinsufficiency of the preceding one so it bears in itself the limits, tension,sufferings, which prepare for the next age.([8–35], 156)Thus Dilthey integrates his conception of the
Zeitgeist into his concep-tion of historicalchange in a way that allows for individual freedom and creativity. Although we quotedDilthey (above) on the historian’s task of discovering ‘the consensus which governs’ thevalues and conceptions of an epoch, ‘governs’ is really too strong a word; for almost atonce Dilthey adds that the historian must assess ‘what the individual has achieved withinthis context,
and how far his vision and activity may have extended beyond it’ ([8.36],198, emphases added). History is not a realm governed by scientific causality but of‘action and reaction’. The coherences and structures that the historian seeks and discoversare real but ‘can never bind or determine what is new, or may appear in the future’.Historical events and changes can be understood after the event, but not predicted inadvance. As Dilthey sums it up, ‘History does not cause, it creates’. He adds: ‘It createsbecause the structure of life is at work in the acts of knowing, evaluating, setting of goals,and striving for ends’ ([8.65], 308). The concepts of all the human sciences (not onlyhistory) reflect this fact. Despite the limits placed on human freedom by the causalnecessities of nature (within which humanity exists), the freedom due to the humanelement is real:Surrounded though it is by that structure of objective necessity which natureconsists of, freedom flashes forth at innumerable points… Here the actions ofthe will—in contrast with the mechanical processes of change in nature (whichalready contains from the start everything which ensues later)—really producesomething and achieve true development both in the individual and in humanityas a whole.([8.32], 79)
DILTHEY’S HERMENEUTIC TURNIn only the last decade or so of his life, Dilthey elaborated what is probably now the mostcelebrated aspect of his philosophy of the human sciences, or critique of historicalreason—namely, hermeneutics. Not that hermeneutics was by any means a new interestfor Dilthey—his first major work, indeed, was a notable biography of Schleiermacher(the ‘father of modern hermeneutics’), so that the late ‘turn to hermeneutics’ was forDilthey a return to scholarly beginnings. Nevertheless, the innovation was marked, foronly in his late phase did hermeneutics become for Dilthey the centre of his philosophyrather than an object of historical study.Dilthey defined hermeneutics as the ‘science’ of ‘the interpretation of the writtenrecords of human existence’ ([8.36], 228). Thus, his hermeneutic methodology of thehuman sciences gives pride of place to a science of linguistic interpretation. This is not tosay that Dilthey wished these sciences to take as their object of study only writtendocuments: the latter are only one (though very important) category of the ‘expressionsof mind’ which form their subject-matter. Nevertheless, the hermeneutic emphasis doesput a particular slant on the mode of interpreting these expressions: they are to beinterpreted, so to say, ‘as if they were verbal expressions. This has significantimplications for some of the central concepts of Dilthey’s philosophy of the humansciences—notably understanding
(Verstehen) and meaning
(Sinn, Bedeutung).Some of these implications emerge from a consideration of the two typical concerns ofhermeneutic technique as it developed prior to Schleiermacher and Dilthey (according tothe Dilthey scholar Use Bulhoff). One (dubbed ‘philological’) was concerned to restorecorrupt texts (e.g. classical texts) in which errors had accumulated through repeatedcopying. Another (called ‘theological’) aimed at grasping the ‘true meaning’ of Biblicaltexts ([8.60], 56). Different though these are, both make sense only given a presumptionof
unity or
coherence in the texts handled. Errors in corrupt texts become apparentthrough their failure to ‘fit’, to ‘make sense’, in terms of the text as a whole—correctionrestores the ‘fit’; similarly, the exegesis of biblical texts proceeded on the assumption thatthey are mutually coherent and consistent—it might be described as the enterprise ofdemonstrating their coherence or unity. Dilthey’s hermeneutic methodology of the humansciences bears the marks of this ancestry, in its preoccupation with relations of coherencebetween
wholes and
parts. To be sure, we have already seen a similar preoccupation inDilthey’s earlier work; however, some problematic aspects thereof are thrown into reliefby the later hermeneutic emphasis.Perhaps the best-known element of hermeneutic methodology is the so-called‘hermeneutic circle’. Here is how Dilthey at one point defined it: ‘The general difficultyof all interpretation [is that] the whole of a work must be understood from individualwords and their combinations, but full understanding of an individual part presupposesunderstanding of the whole’ ([8.36], 259). Another passage elaborates the point. Inhermeneutics,understanding must try to link words into meaning and the meaning of the partsinto the structure of the whole given in the sequence of words. Every word isboth determined and undetermined. It contains a range of [possible] meanings…In the same way…the whole, which is made up of sentences, is ambiguouswithin limits, and must be determined from the whole [
sic—error for parts?].This determining of determinate-indeterminate particulars is characteristic ofhermeneutics.([8.36], 231)In brief, hermeneutics is a procedure in which the parts and whole of a text mutuallyclarify each other, on the presumption that the whole is a meaningfully coherent relationof parts.To repeat, this is the
model for Dilthey’s late philosophy of the human sciences which,however, embraces not just texts but also non-linguistic expressions of the human mind.Thus extended, the analogy gives rise to certain problems (or at least issues), of whichthree sources may be mentioned, (1) Not all ‘expressions’ express meanings in the samesense as do words and texts; (2) Dilthey applies (or seems to apply) the hermeneuticmethodology to a range of expressions much wider than the purely linguistic, but not to
all expressions; (3) in applying the hermeneutic analogy to the human sciences generally,rather than the exegesis of texts narrowly, Dilthey greatly expands the range of‘wholes’ (and parts) relevant to interpretation, understanding and the elucidation ofmeaning.Regarding the first of the three points above, Dilthey himself explicitly distinguishedseveral different sorts of ‘expressions’ relevant to the human sciences. Particularlygermane is the distinction between
actions and so-called
Erlebnisausdrücke (‘expressionsof experience’), which are verbal, usually written, accounts. The former are ‘expressions’in the sense that they reflect purposes, the pursuit of goals etc., and are in this sensemeaningful or have a meaning ([8.97], 65–6). Verbal utterances are no doubt likewisepurposeful acts, but they also have a meaning in another sense, that is, wordsconventionally signify some semantic content. It therefore seems as if the fundamental, ormost general, sense in which expressions of mind have a meaning which can be graspedor understood is not the same as the straightforwardly hermeneutic sense. This introducessome ambiguities into Dilthey’s terminology in that, alongside the hermeneutic version ofmeaning and understanding, he continued to make use of the ‘pre-hermeneutic’ sense.Thus, he remarks on ‘the fact that inner states find outward expressions, and that the lattercan be understood by going back to the former’ (this is the business of the humansciences) ([8.35], 75). But he adds that there are two ways in which ‘an outermanifestation is the expression of an inner state, namely, ‘by means of an artificialconvention’ [e.g. as in language], or ‘by a natural relationship between expression andwhat is expressed’ (as in non-linguistic expressions such as actions which express, andcan be understood as expressing, a purpose). It seems that Dilthey is reluctant to makeany sharp distinction between the two cases.It is arguable that the blurring of this distinction encouraged Dilthey to apply hishermeneutic methodology to a wider range of ‘expressions’ than may be justified. Buthow widely did he wish to apply it? It appears (though it is difficult to be certain on thispoint) that the hermeneutic methodology is
not coextensive with all acts of understandingof expressions. Dilthey makes a distinction between ‘elementary’ and ‘higher’understanding. The distinction is not particularly clear, but one aspect of it seems to bethat ‘elementary’ understanding is understanding of a
single expression, such as ‘pickingup an object, letting a hammer drop, cutting wood with a saw’—actions which ‘indicatethe presence of certain purposes’ ([8.36], 220). All that is involved in this understandingis ‘to spell out the mental content’ which constitutes the goal of the action. Theimplication is that ‘higher understanding’ goes beyond this, and involves the placing ofactions in a wider context. It appears to be Dilthey’s view that the hermeneuticmethodology is a means to ‘higher understanding’, and is required, or appropriate, wherethe understanding of expressions is not straight-forward but problematic ([8.97], 101).Clearly this is liable to be the case in relation to textual records emanating from distantperiods or cultures; but it is equally likely to be true wherever ‘understanding’ has to gobeyond the everyday intercourse of participants in a common culture—in other words, toembrace the understanding required of historians and social scientists. It looks, therefore,as if Dilthey considered the range of the hermeneutic methodology to be more or lesscoextensive with that of the human sciences. It is to apply, that is, to actions (as studiedby historians and social scientists), as well as to written material.From Dilthey’s assimilation of these different kinds of expressions arise someproblematic implications. One is that he is led, quite explicitly, to detach theunderstanding of expressions, and their meaning, from the goals and intentions of agents([8.35], 163). For this there seem to be two slightly different reasons, both howeverderived from the hermeneutic perspective. One is that the meaning of language (which isthe focus of hermeneutic interpretation) is a matter of public conventions, rather than theintentions of language users. The other is that, as we saw, the fundamental tool ofhermeneutic interpretation is the ‘hermeneutic circle’, which rests understanding and thegrasping of meaning on the part-whole relation, on the presumption that one is dealingwith a coherent whole made up of consistently related parts. Dilthey applies this idea (oranalogy) quite universally to the categories of understanding and meaning in the humansciences. For example: ‘Meaning means nothing except belonging to a whole’ ([8.36],233); ‘The category of meaning designates the relationship, inherent in life, of parts of alife to the whole’ ([8.36], 235). Dilthey makes it clear that these definitions follow froman analogy between linguistic meaning and the understanding of life in passages such asthe following:As words have a meaning
(Bedeutung) by which they designate something…soon the basis of the determined-undetermined
(bestimmt-unbestimmten) meaningof the parts of life, its structure
(Zusammenhang) can be figured out. Meaning isthe special kind of relationship which the parts of life have to life as a whole.([8.60], 121)In detaching the meaning and understanding of expressions from the intentions of agents,Dilthey appears to risk an incoherence in his philosophy. For he never abandoned hisoriginal insight, on which he based his distinction between natural and human sciences,namely thatwe understand others, their doings and their products in fundamentally the sameway as we understand our own. Thus: we cannot understand ourselves andothers except by projecting what we have actually experienced into everyexpression of our own and others’ lives. So man becomes the subject-matter ofthe human studies only when we relate experience, expression andunderstanding to each other.([8.36], 176)
This concept of understanding surely cannot be detached from agents’ goals andintentions—rather it seems to require our empathizing with them.Displacement of understanding of actions and their meaning from agents’ intentions tothe place of the action in a larger whole raises another problem: how to specify therelevant whole. In the strictly or narrowly hermeneutic case, this problem may not appearto be insoluble; but when a hermeneutic approach is applied to history and the humansciences in general, it becomes acute. We have already taken note (above) of Dilthey’spredilection for treating the individual human life as a meaningful unity, in terms ofwhich the meanings of its parts are to be discerned. A similar approach is applied tohistorical events. But as we shall now see, this—and especially the latter—appears tointroduce an intrinsic uncertainty or relativism into Dilthey’s central concept of meaning(and hence of understanding, which is the grasping of meaning). Dilthey writes:The category of meaning designates the relationship, inherent in life, of parts ofa life to the whole. The connections are only established by memory, throughwhich we survey our past… But in what does the particular kind of relationshipof parts to a whole in life consist? It is a relationship which is never quitecomplete. One would have to wait for the end of a life, for only at the hour ofdeath could one survey the whole from which the relationship between the partscould be ascertained. One would have to wait for the end of history to have allthe material necessary to determine its meaning… Our view of the meaning oflife changes constantly. Every plan for your life expresses a view of the meaningof life.([8.36], 235–6)Some obvious problems arise from this passage. So far as the individual life is concerned,Dilthey vacillates between two points of view: namely, that a human life is a natural unitystretching from birth to death, from which the meaning of its parts derives; and that it is acontinually developing and changing unity, with corresponding change in the meaning ofparts. Something similar applies to history. ‘One would have to wait for the end of historyto have all the material necessary to determine its meaning.’ But Dilthey elsewhere hasexplicitly stated that history as a whole has no single meaning, no over-arching
telos orgoal ([8.71], 303). Where then can the historian find the unity needed to discern meaningand permit understanding? Does he or she need to find such a unity? Undoubtedly,historical development continually reveals new connections (as Dilthey might have put it,
Zusammenhänge) which call for reinterpretation of past events, and the historian’sfunction is a continual analysis and re-analysis of these connections. But a
Zusammenhang, in the sense of structured connection, is not a definable
whole made upof definable parts. Or to put it another way, to ask the historian to convert a pattern ofconnections into a meaning-conferring whole seems to give him or her a great deal oflatitude in the assignment of meaning. One has to wonder if this is any longer ‘science’.
HISTORICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF RELATIVISM: DILTHEY’S SOLUTIONThere is one answer given by Dilthey to this problem of the definition of historicalwholes, which is of particular interest because, in so far as it does help to solve thatparticular problem, it immediately raises another. We noted above the importanceattached by Dilthey to the concept of the historical period
(Zeitalter) and its unifying‘spirit’: we must now note his view that this constitutes a whole that confers meaning onits parts:Everything in an age derives its meaning from the energy which gives it itsfundamental tendency… All the expressions of the energy which determines theage are akin to each other. The task of analysis is to find the unity of valuationand purpose in different expressions of life… The context forms the horizon ofthe age and through it, finally, the meaning of every part in the system of theage is determined.([8.35], 156)For the sake of argument, let us suppose that this particular kind of unity is a more or lessobjective fact that can be discovered by the scientific historian. If so, we have solved oneproblem only to raise another—one of which Dilthey was acutely aware, indeed itconcerned him deeply. Each age takes its own values, its own world-view, asunproblematically valid—this is even the necessary condition of its creativity—buthistoriography shows such assumptions to be naive and untenable. The historical study ofhuman life reveals—this indeed is its point, and its glory—the immense variety ofexpressions of that life, including values and world-views. But the obverse of this is theproblem of historical relativism:Historical comparison reveals the relativity of all historical convictions. Theyare all conditioned by…circumstances… Historical consciousness increasinglyproves the relativity of every metaphysical or religious doctrine which hasemerged in the course of the Ages.([8.36], 112)The same applies to ‘values, obligations, norms and goods’. Dilthey writes:History does indeed know the positing of something unconditional as value,norm, or good… But historical experience knows only the process of positing…and nothing of their universal validity. By tracing the course of development ofsuch unconditional values, goods or norms, it notices that life has produceddifferent ones and that the unconditional positing itself becomes possible onlybecause the horizon of the age is limited… It notices the unsettled conflictamong the unconditional positings.([8.35], 165)This state of affairs Dilthey called ‘the wound brought about by the knife of historicalrelativism’ ([8.60], 21).Is the wound so fatal? Does the ‘chaos’ of conflicting world-views and values meanthat none of them can be objectively true, or—worse—that there is no such thing asobjective truth in these realms? It might well seem that such sceptical and unsettlingconclusions do
not follow from any amount of historical evidence. But here we mustremind ourselves of Dilthey’s philosophy of values, which like everything else in hisphilosophy rests finally on the bedrock of ‘life’—values arise
in life, and there is nothing‘behind’ life to which we can appeal. The relativist implications of Dilthey’s combinationof ethical subjectivism and historicism seem inescapable.Yet Dilthey sought to escape them, and to assert at least some universal values—evento deduce them as implications of his philosophy of history and the human sciences.These are values of individualism, freedom and creativity. According to Dilthey ‘thedignity and value of every individual’ is an unconditional value ([8.35], 74); ‘theindividual is an intrinsic value [which] we can ascertain beyond doubt’ ([8.36], 224).Why so? Because says Dilthey, the individual is the ultimate ‘subject-matter ofunderstanding’. ‘Understanding has always an individual for its object’ ([8.71], 276). Aphilosophy of human sciences which proposes to understand mental life must presupposethe value of the bearer of mental life, the human individual.Furthermore, Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences is posited on a conception ofmankind as being (unlike nature) free and genuinely creative. A historiography whichreveals a multiplicity of values and world-views is a revelation of this freedom andcreativity. Revelation of this truth is liberating. Historicism, therefore, continues and evencompletes the increasing realization of man’s potential for freedom and creativity thatwas earlier carried forward by such episodes as the Renaissance, the Reformation and theEnlightenment:The historical consciousness of the finitude of every historical phenomenon…and of the relativity of every kind of faith, is the last step towards the liberationof mankind. With it man achieves the sovereignty to enjoy every experience tothe full and surrender himself to it unencumbered, as if there were no system ofphilosophy or faith to tie him down… The mind becomes sovereign over thecobwebs of dogmatic thought… And in contrast to relativity, the continuity ofcreative forces asserts itself as the central historical fact.([8.35], 167)Alas, this resolution of the problem hardly seems satisfactory. Dilthey seems to oscillateuneasily between spelling out what he takes to be the moral implications of a humanisticscience, and extracting a historicist ethic from its findings. This latter kind of argumenthardly seems open to him, given his denial that history has any necessary
telos or goal.We surely do not want to put the values of individuality, freedom and creativity at themercy of unpredictable historical trends. The last quotation cited above bristles withproblems. How can Dilthey predict with such confidence the liberating effects of the‘historical consciousness’, given his view that history is inherently unpredictable? Andsuppose his prediction is right—is it really desirable that people become free ‘to enjoy
every experience to the full’? The problem of liberty and its proper limits cannot besolved by invoking history in this way. A historicist ethic is liable to end up with eitheran arbitrary interpretation of history, or an undiscriminating endorsement of whateverhappens. Dilthey, unhappily, falls into the latter trap. Let us fill in some gaps left in thelast quotation above. ‘The mind’ writes Dilthey ‘becomes sovereign over the cobwebs ofdogmatic thought’. He continues:Everything beautiful, everything holy, every sacrifice relived and interpreted,opens perspectives which disclose some part of reality. And equally, we acceptthe evil, horrible and ugly, as filling a place in the world, as containing somereality which must be justified in the system of things.Do we? Must it? Surely not.
DILTHEY’S HUMANISMDilthey’s attempts to solve the problem of relativism led him to an unacceptableconclusion; however, the problem itself is, in part, the obverse of what is perhaps mostattractive in his philosophy, namely what may be called his humanism—his passion tounderstand all the varied and multifarious expressions of the human spirit. Diltheystressed equally the enormous variety of these expressions, and the fundamental unity ofhuman nature from which they spring. As he put it in a famous remark, for interpretationof the expressions of human life to be necessary—to be a science—there must besomething alien about them, something puzzling that sets us a problem of understanding:on the other hand, if they were utterly alien, interpretation and understanding would beimpossible. His entire enterprise therefore presupposes a fundamental unity of the humanrace.
DILTHEY’S INFLUENCEDilthey’s influence on later thought has undoubtedly been significant, in both philosophyand the social sciences. So far as philosophy is concerned, a recent discussion underlineshis relevance to the shaping ‘of the dominant Continental movements of phenomenology,existentialism, and hermeneutic philosophy’ ([8.87], vii). In Dilthey’s relations withEdmund Husserl (the chief creator of phenomenological philosophy) influences in factran in both directions. The two men met in the winter of 1905/6, and, according toHusserl’s own testimony, thereafter ‘the problems pertaining to phenomenology as ahuman science…occupied me more than almost all other problems’ ([8.87], ix–x). Thereis no doubting the influence of Dilthey’s ‘philosophy of life’ on Husserl’s central conceptof the ‘life world’. Equally clear is the kinship between some of Dilthey’s ideas and thoseof the existentialism of Martin Heidegger—for example, the key role of time and memoryin human life, the conception of man as essentially free and creative, and thecorresponding relativity of values. Another existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers,explicitly acknowledged Dilthey’s influence on his thinking (in his
AllgemeinePsychopathologie, a work of psychiatry rather than philosophy—nevertheless theinfluence is likely to have been more general). Dilthey’s importance for the hermeneuticmovement in philosophy is almost too obvious to mention (a recent review in the
TimesLiterary Supplement, 24 July 1992, p. 7, refers to him simply as ‘the founder of modernhermeneutics’). But it is perhaps worth pointing out, in this connection, that (forexample) Hans-Georg Gadamer’s well-known concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’ seemsclearly to be a response to Dilthey’s references to the ‘closed horizon’ of the historicalperiod
(Zeitalter). Equally obviously, Jürgen Habermas, leading contemporaryrepresentative of the ‘critical theory’ of the Franfurt School, is indebted to Dilthey for hiscategorization of human knowledge—or rather for two-thirds of it, since Habermas hasturned Dilthey’s dichotomy into a trichotomy. However, Habermas’s category of‘historical-hermeneutic sciences’ has an unmistakable Diltheyan ring, while his categoryof ‘empirical-analytic sciences’ stemming from a human interest in technical control ofnature has much in common with Dilthey’s conception of the
Naturwissenschaften.Even more important, perhaps, has been Dilthey’s influence on social science andpsychology, or rather on those within these ‘human sciences’ who resist their assimilationto the natural sciences. In anglophone psychology Dilthey’s influence has not been great(it has been swamped by the behaviourists and Freudians) but in the German-speakingworld it has given birth to a movement known as
verstehende Psychologie and has beeninfluential with a number of psychiatrists, such as Heinz Hartmann and LudwigBinswanger ([8.60], 160). Cultural anthropology is another field in which significantinfluence has been attributed to Dilthey—Franz Boas attended his lectures in Berlin,while Ruth Benedict explicitly invokes Dilthey in her
Patterns of Culture ([8.60], 175).But if Dilthey has been influential within the social sciences, it has been above all byinfluencing one of the most influential of all social scientists, Max Weber. MarianneWeber, in her famous biography of her husband, informs us that Dilthey was a frequentvisitor to the Weber household in Berlin ([8.111], 39) and confirms that Weber based hisown concept of
Verstehen, so central to his sociology, on that of Dilthey ([8.111], 312).Another central concept of Weberian sociology—that of meaning and the meaningful—likewise looks to have a Diltheyan ancestry. However, some care is needed here, and it isperhaps as important to point to the differences as to the similarities in the conceptualschemes of the two men. According to Weber, the subject-matter of the social sciences is‘social action’, and by ‘action’ he means ‘all human behaviour when and insofar as theacting individual attaches a subjective meaning to it’ ([8.112], 88) In other words, forWeber, the meaning of an action is defined by the agent’s motives and intentions:understanding is grasping these motives and intentions. Weber’s concept ofunderstanding or
Verstehen, therefore, seems to derive from the earlier, pre-hermeneuticphase of Dilthey’s thought—the later, hermeneutic phase had no influence on him. Nordid Weber (unlike Dilthey) see any incompatibility between understanding
(Verstehen)and causal explanation
(Erklären)—in his view of the social sciences the two must gohand in hand.
BIBLIOGRAPHYOriginal language editionsOnly a fraction of Dilthey’s work was published in his lifetime. Since his death, hisstudents and followers have undertaken a multi-volume publication in German of hisentire
oeuvre, the
Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works). The undertaking, not yetcomplete, projects a total of thirty-two volumes. So far, twenty volumes have beenpublished. The first twelve volumes were published jointly by B.G. Teubner of Stuttgart,and Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht of Göttingen; subsequent volumes by Vandenhoeck &Ruprecht alone. The titles, editors and original publication dates of individual volumesare as follows:8.1 Vol. 1:
Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für dasStudium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, ed. B.Groethuysen, 1922.8.2 Vol. 2:
Weltanschauung und Analyse der Menschen seit Renaissance undReformation, ed. G.Misch, 1914.8.3 Vol. 3:
Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes, ed. P.Ritter, 1921.8.4 Vol. 4:
Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und andere Abhandlungen zur Geschichte desdeutschen Idealismus, ed. H.Nohl, 1921.8.5 Vol. 5:
Die geistige Welt: Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Erste Hälfte:Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. G.Misch, 1924.8.6 Vol 6:
Die geistige Welt: Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Zweite Hälfte:Abhandlungen zur Poetik, Ethik und Pädagogik, ed. G.Misch, 1924.8.7 Vol. 7:
Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed.B.Groethuysen, 1927.8.8. Vol. 8:
Weltanschauungslehre: Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie, ed.B.Groethuysen, 1931.8.9 Vol. 9:
Pädagogik: Geschichte und Grundlinien des Systems, ed. O.F. Bollnow, 1934.8.10 Vol. 10:
System der Ethik, ed. H.Nohl, 1958.8.11 Vol. 11:
Vom Aufgang des geschichtlichen Bewusstseins: Jugendaufsätze undErinnerungen, ed. E.Weniger, 1936.8.12 Vol. 12:
Zur preussischen Geschichte, ed. E.Weniger, 1936.8.13 Vol. 13:
Leben Schleiermachers, Erster Band (in two half-volumes), ed. M.Redeker, third edn 1970.8.14 Vol. 14:
Leben Schleiermachers, Zweiter Band (in two half-volumes), ed. M.Redeker, 1966.8.15–17 Vols. 15–17:
Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. U.Herrmann,1970–4.8.18 Vol. 18:
Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte:Vorarbeiten zur Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, ed. H.Johach and F.Rodi,1977.8.19 Vol. 19:
Grundlegung der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und derGeschichte: Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum zweiten Band der Einleitung in dieGeisteswissenschaften, ed. H.Johach and F.Rodi, 1982.8.20 Vol. 20:
Logik und System der philosophischen Wissenschaften, ed. H.Lessing andF.Rodi, 1990.N.B.Rickman 1976 [8.36], contains (pp. 264–6) an extremely useful English translationof the table of contents of each volume of the
Gesammelte Schriften up to vol. 17.
Other works by Dilthey, not yet included in the Gesammelte Schriften8.21
Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, first published1906, and frequently reprinted, e.g. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1970.8.22
Mozart: Figaro, Don Juan, die Zauberflöte, Tiessen, 1986.8.23 Gadamer, H.G. ed.,
Grundriss der allgemeinen Geschichte der Philosophie,Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1949.8.24 Nohl, H., ed.,
Die grosse Phantasiedichtung und andere Studien zur vergleichendeLiteraturgeschichte, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954.8.25 Nohl, H. and G.Misch, eds,
Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik: Aus den Studien zurGeschichte des deutschen Geistes, first published 1932, 2nd edn, Stuttgart:B.G.Teubner; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957.
Letters and diaries8.26 Misch, C. ed.,
Der junge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern,1852–70, first published 1933, 2nd edn, Stuttgart, B.G.Teubner; Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960.8.27 Schulenburg, S. v.d. ed.,
Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem GrafenPaul Yorck v. Wartenburg 1877–1897, Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1923.8.28 ‘Der Briefwechsel Dilthey-Husserl’ (with introduction by W.Biemel),
Man andWorld, 1 (1968): 428–46. (English translation in P.McCormick and F.Elliston, eds.,
Husserl: Shorter Works, Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame University Press, 1981.)
English translations8.29
Dilthey’s Philosophy of Existence: Introduction to Weltanschauungslehre, trans.W.Kluback and M.Weinbaum, London: Vision, 1960.8.30
The Essence of Philosophy, trans. S.A.Emery and W.T.Emery, New York: AMS,1969.8.31
Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, The Hague: MartinusNijhoff, 1977. Contains ‘Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology’,trans. R.M.Zaner, and ‘The Understanding of Other Persons and their Expressions ofLife’, trans. K.Heiges. There is a lengthy introduction by R.A.Makkreel.8.32
Introduction to the Human Sciences, trans. R.J.Betanzos, London: HarvesterWheatsheaf and Wayne State University Press, 1988.8.33 Makkreel, R.A. and F.Rodi, eds.,
Poetry and Experience, Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985. (This is vol. 5 of a projected
Selected Works in six volumes.)8.34 Makkreel, R.A. and F.Rodi, eds.,
Introduction to the Human Sciences, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1989. (Vol. 1 of the
Selected Works.)8.35 Rickman, H.P., ed.,
Meaning in History: W.Dilthey’s Thoughts on History andSociety, London: Allen & Unwin, 1961. Contains selections from vol. 7 of the
Gesammelte Schriften, with commentaries.8.36 Rickman, H.P., ed.,
Dilthey: Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1976.8.37 Hodges, H.A.
Wilhelm Dilthey: An Introduction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,1944. Contains some fifty pages of selections in translation.8.38 ‘The Dream’, trans. W.Kluback, in his
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History,New York: Columbia University Press, 1956.8.39 ‘The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Life-Expression’, trans. J.J.Kuehl,in P.Gardiner, ed.,
Theories of History, New York: Free Press, 1959.8.40 ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics’, trans. F.Jameson, in
New Literary History, 3(1972):229–44.8.41 ‘The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World’, trans. J.W.Moore, in P.Gay andG.J.Cavanaugh, eds.,
Historian at Work, vol. 4, New York and London: Harper &Row, 1975.
Bibliographies8.42 Diaz de Cerio, F. ‘Bibliografia de W.Dilthey’,
Pensamiento, 24 (1968): 196–223.8.43 Herrmann, U.
Bibliographie Wilhelm Diltheys, Weinheim: Julius Beltz, 1969.8.44 Weniger, E. ‘Verzeichnis der Schriften Wilhelm Diltheys von den Anfägen bis zurEinleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften’, in
Gesammelte Schriften, 22:208–13.8.45 The
Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften,Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (first published in 1983), regularly includesbibliographical supplements on Dilthey.
Commentaries and other relevant literature8.46 Abel, T. ‘The Operation Called
Verstehen’, in H.Feigl and M.Brodbeck, eds.,
Readings in the Philosophy of Science, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953.8.47 Antoni, C.
From History to Sociology, trans. H.V.White, Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press , 1959.8.48 Apel, K.O.
Analytic Philosophy of Language and the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’,Dordrecht: Reidel, 1967.8.49 Aron, R.
La Philosophie critique de l’histoire: Essai sur une théorie allemande del’histoire, Paris: J.Vrin, 1950 (originally published in 1938 as
Essai sur la théorie del’histoire dans l’Allemagne contemporaine).8.50 Bambach, C.R.
The Crisis of Historicism: Neo-Kantian Philosophy of History andWilhelm Dilthey’s Hermeneutics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1987.8.51 Bauman, Z.
Hermeneutics and Social Science, London: Hutchinson, 1978.8.52 Bergstraesser, A. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber’,
Ethics, 62 (1947): 92–110.8.53 Betti, E.
Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften,Tübingen: Mohr, 1962.8.54——
Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, Tübingen:Mohr, 1967.8.55 Binswanger, L.
Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins, 4th edn,Munich and Basel: Ernst Reinhardt, 1964.8.56 Bollnow, O.F.
Das Verstehen: Drei Aufsätze zur Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften,Mainz: Kirchheim, 1949.8.57——
Dilthey: Eine Einführung in seine Philosophie, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,8.58——
Die Lebensphilosophie, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1958.8.59 Brown, D.K. ‘Interpretive Historical Sociology: Discordances of Weber, Diltheyand Others’,
Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990):166–91.8.60 Bulhoff, I.N.
Wilhelm Dilthey: a Hermeneutic Approach to the Study of History andCulture, The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.8.61 Choi, J.-U.
Die geistig gesellschaftliche Krise des 19. Jahrhunderts und dieAufgaben der Diltheyschen ‘Kritik der historischen Vernunft’, 1987.8.62 de Mul, J. ‘Dilthey’s Narrative Model of Human Development: NecessaryReconsiderations after the philosophical Hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer’,
Man and World, 24 (1991):409–26.8.63 Donoso, A. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Contribution to the Philosophy of History’,
Philosophy Today, 12 (1968):151–63.8.64 Ebbinghaus, H. ‘Über Erklärende und Beschreibende Psychologie’,
Zeitschrift fürPsychologie und Physiologie, 9 (1895):161–205.8.65 Ermarth, M.
Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978.8.66 Friess, H.L. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey: a Review of his Collected Works as an Introductionto a Phase of Contemporary German Philosophy’,
Journal of Philosophy, 26 (1929):5–25.8.67 Gadamer, H.G.
Truth and Method, trans. G.Burden and J.Cumming, New York:Sheed & Ward, 1975.8.68 Habermas, J.
Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J.J.Shapiro, Boston: BeaconPress, 1971.8.69 Herva, S. ‘The Genesis of Max Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie’,
Acta Sociologica,31 (1988):143–56.8.70 Heinen, M.
Die Konstitution der Ästhetik in Wilhelm Diltheys Philosophie, Bonn,Bouvier, 1974.8.71 Hodges, H.A.
The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1952.8.72 Holborn, H. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason’,
Journal of theHistory of Ideas, 11 (1950):93–118.8.73 Horkheimer, M. ‘The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the Work ofWilhelm Dilthey’,
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 8 (1939):430–43.8.74 Hughes, H.S.
Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European SocialThought 1890–1930, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1958.8.75 Iggers, G.G.
The German Conception of History, Middletown, Conn.: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1975.8.76 Ineichen, H.
Erkenntnistheorie und geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Welt: DiltheysLogik der Geisteswissenschaften, Frankfurt: Klostermann,8.77 Jalbert, J.E. ‘Husserl’s Position between Dilthey and the Windelband-Rickert Schoolof Neo-Kantianism’,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26 (1988):279–96.8.78 Jaspers, K.
General Psychopathology, trans. J.Hoenig and M.W.Hamikon, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1963.8.79 Johach, H.
Handlender Mensch und Objektiver Geist: Zur Theorie derGeisteswissenschaften bei Wilhelm Dilthey, Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1974.8.80 Kluback, W.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1956.8.81 Knüppel, R.
Diltheys erkenntnistheoretische Logik, Fink, 1991.8.82 Krausser, P.
Kritik der endlichen Vernunft: Diltheys Revolution der AllgemeinenWissenschafts- und Handlungstheorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968.8.83 Linge, D.E. ‘Dilthey and Gadamer: Two Theories of Historical Understanding’,
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 41 (1973):536–53.8.84 Makkreel, R.A.
Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1975.8.85——‘Husserl, Dilthey and the Relation of the Life-World to History’,
Research inPhenomenology, 12 (1982):39–59.8.86——‘Traditional Historicism, Contemporary Interpretation of Historicity, and theHistory of Philosophy’,
New Literary History, 21 (1990): 977–91.8.87 Makkreel, R.A. and J.Scanlon, eds.,
Dilthey and Phenomenology, Washington, DC:Centre for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America,1987.8.88 Masur, G. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey and the History of Ideas’,
Journal of the History ofIdeas, 13 (1952):94–107.8.89 Misch, G.
Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie: Eine Auseinandersetzung derDiltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl, 3rd edn, Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967.8.90——
Vom Lebens- und Gedankenkreis Wilhelm Diltheys, Frankfurt am Main:G.Schulte-Bulmke, 1947.8.91 Morgan, G.A. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’,
Philosophical Review, 42 (1933):351–80.8.92 Müller-Vollumer, K.
Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Literature: a Study ofWilhelm Dilthey’s Poetik, The Hague: Mouton, 1963.8.93 Nenon, T. ‘Dilthey’s Inductive Method and the Nature of Philosophy’,
South-Western Philosophical Review, 5 (1989):121–34.8.94 Ortega y Gasset, J. ‘A Chapter from the History of Ideas—Wilhelm Dilthey and theIdea of Life’, trans. H.Weyl, in
Concord and Liberty, New York : Norton, 1963.8.95 Orth, E.W., ed.
Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Freiburg: Alber, 1985.8.96 Palmer, R.E.
Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey,Heidegger, and Gadamer, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.8.97 Plantinga, T.
Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1980.8.98 Rickman, H.P.
Understanding and the Human Studies, London: Heinemann, 1967.8.99——
Wilhelm Dilthey—Pioneer of the Human Studies, Stanford: University ofCalifornia Press, 1979.8.100——
Dilthey To-day, New York: Greenwood, 1988.8.101 Rand, C.G. ‘Two Meanings of Historicism in the Writings of Dilthey, Troeltschand Meinecke’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (1964): 503–18.8.102 Ricoeur, P. ‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action considered as a Text’,
Social Research, 38 (1971):529–62.8.103 Rodi, F.
Morphologie und Hermeneutik: Zur Methode von Dilthey s Aesthetik,Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969.8.104 Sauerland,
Dilthey’s Erlebnisbegriff: Entstehung, Glanzzeit und Verkümmerungeines literaturhistorischen Begriffs, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972.8.105 Spranger, E.
Lebensformen: Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychologie und Ethik derPersönlichkeit, 5th edn, Halle (Saale): Max Niemeyer, 1925.8.106 Tapper, B. ‘Dilthey’s Methodology of the
Geisteswissenschaften’, PhilosophicalReview 34 (1925):333–49.8.107 Taylor, C. ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’,
Review of Metaphysics, 25(1971):3–51.8.108 Tuttle, H.N.
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of Historical Understanding: A CriticalAnalysis, Leiden: Brill, 1969.8.109 Wach, J.
Die Typenlehre Trendelenburgs und ihr Einfluss auf Dilthey, Tübingen:Mohr, 1926.8.110——
Das Verstehen: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols, Tübingen: Mohr, 1926–33.8.111 Weber, Marianne
Max Weber: A Biography, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,1988.8.112 Weber, Max
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Glencoe: FreePress, 1964.8.113 Weiss, G. ‘Dilthey’s Conception of Objectivity in the Human Studies: a Reply toGadamer’,
Man and World, 24 (1991):471–86.8.114 Wellek, R. ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Poetics and Literary Theory’ in
Wächter und Hüter,Festschrift für Hermann J.Weigand, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.8.115 Wilson, B.A.
Hermeneutical Studies: Dilthey, Sophocles and Plato, Leviston:Mellen Press, 1990.8.116 Zöckler, C.
Dilthey und die Hermeneutik: Diltheys Begründung der Hermeneutikals ‘Praxiswissenschaft’ und die Geschichte ihrer Rezeption, Stuttgart: Metzlersche,1975.See also editorial introductions to works listed under
English translations.