The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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According to Dilthey the reflexive awareness accompanying acts of will provides a crucial step in the process of differentiating self and world. In the 1890 essay “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,” he indicates that our relation to the world is mediated through voluntary movements that run into resisting pressures. But the reflexive awareness of pressure sensations as resistance (Widerstand) does not disclose the reality of something independent until this resistance is reflectively acknowledged as a restraint (Hemmung) of the original intention. Thus it is from within ourselves and our lived bodies that we understand the real gap between an intention and its frustration. These two volitional states allow us to recognize not only objects that passively stand in our way, but also persons who can more actively constrain our intentions (see SW2, 16–23).
Whereas representational consciousness projects the world as a theoretical horizon of natural science, reflexive awareness possesses the world as a temporal nexus in which one participates, but which is also full of things and persons that actively resist one’s will. The traditional epistemology of the natural sciences has made our practical relation to the world dependent on our theoretical relation, thereby ignoring our original access to it through reflexive awareness. Any new epistemology of the human sciences informed by self-reflection must reclaim this more basic access and thus cannot be merely an extension of the epistemology of the natural sciences.
The human sciences have an advantage over the natural sciences in being closer to the full scope and richness of lived experience. Dilthey increasingly stresses that our access to the human world of history is much more direct than our access to nature. Although Dilthey is still willing to accept that objects of outer experience are phenomenal, he no longer accepts the Kantian thesis that the contents of inner experience are phenomenal as well. They are real and the time that relates us to history is not merely the ideal form that Kant had exposited. The contents of inner experience are not discrete like those of outer experience, but possess an interconnectedness that is lived. As soon as it is recognized that inner experience forms a nexus, it becomes clear that that inner and outer are not strict counterparts. Inner experience is not just the interior aspect of outer experience, but can be more comprehensive than any outer experience. Thus Dilthey speaks of perceiving the picture of Goethe in his study as an inner experience because as he is looking at it he remembers that it was a gift from his father. This example also shows how inner experience can already capture some aspects of our involvement in the historical world. Inner experience is really a lived experience whose connectedness can be sensed and whose nexus can be described.
Dilthey sets out to show how these relations between the nexus of individual experience and the nexus of historical life are to be understood in his Introduction to the Human Sciences. But Books One and Two that were published together as volume 1 in 1883 do not fully broach the more encompassing issues of self-reflection that have been discussed already in relation to the Breslau Draft for Book Four. Instead they provide a preliminary historical account of the gradual development of the human sciences and how they can be delineated over against the better established natural sciences. Here Dilthey’s goal is much more modest than in the Breslau Draft, namely, to assert a relative independence of the human sciences vis-à-vis the natural sciences. From the realm of nature, human beings distinguish “a realm of history, in which, amidst the objective necessity of nature, freedom is manifested at countless points” (SW1, 58). Our mental life is admittedly dependent on the physiology of our body, but this is not always reducible to causal relations. Certain correlations between the physical and the mental are merely functional and allow the will to exert itself. But even when we can be said to be free, we must take the laws of nature into account in devising the means to accomplish our goals.
Dilthey asserts that his project of a “Critique of Historical Reason” is meant to delineate the human sciences “according to the reason of things that was active in their history” (SW1, 78). This approach is contrasted with that of Comte and John Stuart Mill who were attempting to construct the social and moral sciences as an extension of the natural sciences. The human sciences have to be understood in light of the historical practices that led to them and how they can continue to shape the future. This means that they do not merely observe what is and look for uniform patterns of human behavior, but also make evaluations and prescribe rules. It is the latter normative dimension that is lacking in Comte and Mill.
9.3 DELIMITING DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS, EXPLANATION AND UNDERSTANDING
The human sciences differ from the natural sciences in being less reliant on hypothetical explanations. Since the givens of the external or material world are discrete and obtuse, our only way to relate these phenomena is through inference. The law-based causal connections that we use to explain natural changes have their origin in theory and must then be experimentally tested. This works quite well in the natural sciences because predictions about physical phenomena can be subjected to mathematical measurement. False hypotheses can be readily disconfirmed and replaced with more reliable hypotheses. Dilthey admits that the inner experiences to which the human sciences turn are less readily measurable and that hypotheses about them are difficult to test. But this is not an insuperable difficulty because hypotheses do not need to play as large a role in the human sciences as in the natural sciences. The lived connectedness that has been ascribed to inner experience does not need to be explained by hypotheses but can be described. Inner experience constitutes a continuum in which one mental act or state goes over into another. The processes of interaction are given as well as the way specific mental functions relate to the whole of our consciousness. These relations are to be sure somewhat indeterminate, and may need to be refined with the help of hypotheses at some later point. But in its foundations psychology can dispense with hypotheses in a way that physics cannot.
Since the constitution of matter is hypothetical, the natural sciences cannot readily appeal to elements that are in principle indivisible. But for the human sciences, the human being conceived as a psychophysical life-unit can be considered as the indexical “element from which society and history are formed” (SW1, 80). This psychophysical life-unit serves as the main element of the socio-historical world that the human sciences have as their subject matter. It provides a reality that is directly accessible to us and psychology is the first of the human sciences to describe its basic structures.
However, the initial descriptions that psychology can offer of this basic life-unit are not truly foundational according to Dilthey, for “the subject matter of psychology is only a portion of that which takes place in each individual” (SW1, 81). The life-units that form the basic element of the human sciences are self-contained but not self-sufficient. They are inseparable from their historical and social context. Thus he writes: “Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction of genetic explanation; the human being which a sound analytic science takes as its object is the individual as a component of society” (SW1, 83). Psychology cannot be foundational in the traditional explanative sense. If it is foundational at all it is only to the extent that its descriptions are already oriented toward the larger context in which experience is situated. Particular states of mind must be described in relation to the overall structures of the human psychic nexus, and the latter must in turn be grasped as part of the larger socio-historical context.
At the same time, Dilthey warns that individual human beings are not to be viewed as submerged in some larger organically conceived communal whole. The attempts by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal to develop a psychology of peoples (Völkerpsychologie) were rejected by Dilthey as positing transindividual subjects. The concept of the soul of a people is no more useful for history than is the concept of life-force for physiology. Both are mystical synthetic posits and do not contribute to the real task of the human sciences, which is to describe and analyze the p
sycho-socio-historical world. Individuals are to be regarded as distinct points of intersection of at least some of the various systems of interaction of society that the other human sciences can bring into focus. Some of these systems of interaction we are born into and others we may decide to join. The former are institutional in nature and “arise through power relations and external bonds of will” (SW1, 98); the latter are systems of interaction in which we can voluntarily participate and which are called “cultural systems.”
Institutional systems constitute what Dilthey calls the “external organization of society” (SW1, 98). Institutions like family and state bind human beings to each other, and can supplement our grasp of human beings with what Dilthey calls second-order psychological concepts like loyalty and obedience. We can think of loyalty as a character trait, but psychology can only make sense of it with reference to the kinds of relations that are formed in institutions like the family. By contrast, the systems of interaction that we voluntarily participate in and that are called “cultural systems” include not only those more restricted associations that perform literary or artistic, academic or religious functions, but also economic and political associations that apply to the population in general. Whereas the external organizations of society foster hierarchical relations of dependence, cultural systems are viewed as involving cooperative relations among relative equals. Here too Dilthey points to second-order psychological concepts that will only arise in certain kinds of historical contexts. Thrift and the puritanical attitude would not have become prominent character traits without the rise of capitalism and Protestantism.
No human science can account for the complexity of the historical world by itself. Attempts by Hegel to develop a comprehensive philosophy of history are rejected by Dilthey as dogmatic metaphysics. Similarly, he attacks the overarching science of sociology that Comte aimed to put in its place. The human sciences should describe and analyze the socio-historical world from a plurality of perspectives. These sciences can only do justice to the complexity of the historical world if they are conceived as being pluralistic.
The importance of description and analysis as the basic methods of the human sciences is again confirmed by Dilthey’s next major work, the Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology of 1894. The roles of description and analysis are developed as the means of articulating the coherent structures of lived experience. The inherent connectedness of inner experience means that the synthetic and constructive methods of the natural sciences are not needed. Although the given connectedness found in lived experience is indeterminate, description and analysis can work together to explicate this connectedness without necessarily appealing to hypothetical explanations. But there are two further developments in the Ideas that are worth noting. As much as description and analysis remain the methods to be pursued, Dilthey begins to characterize their result as producing an understanding that establishes the meaning of experience. Thus instead of merely contrasting explanation and description, Dilthey works out his famous explanation-understanding distinction.
Henceforth the human sciences will be conceived as primarily concerned with the understanding of the meaning of human action and interaction, and the natural sciences with explaining the causal succession of natural events. The term “understanding” here is a translation of the German Verstehen and is not to be confused with the faculty of understanding (Verstand) that is purely intellectual. Kant’s Verstand is the synthetic faculty of imposing explanative connections of thought on a manifold of outer sense. Dilthey’s Verstehen by contrast explicates an indeterminate sense of connectedness to give it a more articulate structure. The understanding of lived experience provides a reflective sense of the rich complexity of psychic life that accords with historical life and can never be attained through the abstract hypothetical methods of the natural sciences. Thus Dilthey writes what may be the best known lines he ever penned:
We explain through purely intellectual processes, but we understand through the cooperation of all the powers of the mind activated by apprehension. In understanding we proceed from the context of the whole that is vividly given to us to then make the particular intelligible to ourselves (SW 2, 147).
Understanding is always contextual for Dilthey: it aims to make parts intelligible on the basis of the whole to which they belong. Explanations by contrast appeal to hypothetical generalizations that operate on the model of universal laws to which particulars can be subsumed. This then marks a tension between the part-whole approach of the human sciences and the particular-universal approach of the natural sciences. Although Dilthey does not rule out the possibility of finding some explanative laws in the human sciences, they will not have the global scope of the laws of the natural sciences. The reason that the natural sciences can develop many laws of universal scope is that they abstract from concrete reality and isolate a limited number of variables. This is less feasible when it comes to understanding the complexity of historical development. The reflective understanding of history makes it possible to discern structural patterns and regularities that define the more specific systematic organizations that the different human sciences make possible. It is therefore unlikely that we will discover grand historical laws of progress as Hegel and Comte hoped, but we may be able to establish lawful patterns of development within the more specific socio-economic and cultural systems that the human sciences can establish through analysis. What the descriptive and analytic methods of psychology and other human sciences mainly aim at is an understanding of history as a process of the structural articulation of life. In some instances it may be possible to interpolate lawful explanations whose universality is limited to specific cultural systems or institutional contexts. Thus the explanation-understanding distinction of the Ideas is not an absolute one.
Another important advance of the Ideas concerns the analysis of the different kinds of structures that can be found in lived experience. According to Dilthey our lived experience of the world does not merely cognitively represent it. What is attended to in perception is already influenced by the interests of our feelings. Nor can we adequately know something without carefully focusing on it, which is a function of our will. Thus at any moment our lived experience is a nexus of representational, evaluative, and volitional responses to the world. The basic descriptive structure of psychic life is this nexus of lived experiences. Analysis can, however, distinguish states of mind that are primarily directed by a representational attitude from other states that are principally guided by an evaluative or volitional attitude. Dilthey writes: “The inner relation among these various aspects of my attitude or the structure that connects these threads is not the same in the affective state as in the volitional, which again is not the same as in the representational attitude” (SW 2, 175). These three aspects of our experience do not come separately, but on the basis of a functional analysis it is possible to relate representational states of mind into a structural cognitive system. Within this representational system we relate perceptual and conceptual aspects of experience and examine how memory and imagination contribute to cognition. The felt and evaluative aspects of experience can similarly be related functionally to form a second structural system that allows us to coordinate the value of things aesthetically and morally. Finally, Dilthey analyzes a volitional system that generates the overriding purposes of life and considers the means to attain them.
These three general structural systems of human experience are a product of a functional analysis and are thus somewhat abstract. However, each individual gradually develops what Dilthey calls an “acquired psychic nexus” that structurally recapitulates the results of past experiences. This acquired nexus is a concrete structure that sums up not only the overall cognitive sense of reality but also the composite of values and goals of an individual. At times Dilthey compares the acquired psychic nexus to an apperceptive fund that influences subsequent perceptions by selecting from what is given to sense those aspects that reinforce our expectations abo
ut reality, accord with our values, and favor our purposes. But the acquired psychic nexus is a dynamic structural system and adapts over time to also take into account experiences that do not conform to our expectations. Its apperceptive function is to orient us to the world so that we can respond to the world in light of what we have learned from the past and what we aim at for the future. The acquired psychic nexus gives a historical dimension to Dilthey’s descriptive psychology and provides the basic context for understanding the meaning of an individual’s experience. What we call “memory” is not to be regarded as a special storehouse of separate data, but is to be reconceived as a function of the overall acquired psychic nexus, namely, a growing organizational framework that constantly re-integrates the meaning of an individual’s life. It also entails that no experience can recur in exactly the same way.
Each time we look at a painting by Dürer we see it in a more enriched way informed by past viewings. When speaking of the imagination of great writers in his 1887 essay “The Imagination of the Poet,” Dilthey points to their power to complete their core imagery by evoking the rich scope of their acquired psychic nexus. “Only when the whole acquired psychic nexus becomes active can images be transformed on the basis of it: innumerable, immeasurable, almost imperceptible changes occur in their nucleus. And in this way, the completion of the particular originates from the fullness of psychic life” (SW 5, 104). Particular imagery can become typical of a poet’s worldview and can mark a work’s historical style. From this holistic perspective, the poetic imagination serves not to synthetically connect imagery in the traditional Kantian manner but to structurally articulate the indeterminate sense of connectedness that already comes with ordinary lived experience. The overall context of lived experience is given a focal point that concentrates our attention.