The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy

Scott Campbell, Paul W. Bruno, Scott Campbell, Paul W. Bruno

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441127334
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

Life-philosophy, central to 19th-century philosophical thought, is concerned with the meaning, value and purpose of life. This much-needed study returns to the central philosophical questions of Lebensphilosophie and reveals the ascendency of 'life' in contemporary philosophical thinking. Scholars from the disciplines of political theory, aesthetics, bioethics and ontology examine how the notion of life has made its way into contemporary philosophical discussions. They explore three main themes: the shift toward biological and technological views of life; the political implications of our conceptions of life; and the re-emergence of the idea of life in recent philosophical discussions about, for example, care of the self, scepticism, tragedy, desire, the emotions, and history. Anticipating new directions of philosophical thinking, this study restores a vital school of thought to crucial considerations about the dangers of contemporary politics and the threat of new technologies.

Part I

Life-Contexts in Dilthey, Nietzsche, and Bergson

1

Dilthey as a Philosopher of Life

Rudolf A. Makkreel

Dilthey saw his project as a philosophy of life, but not in any reductive biological sense. Life is conceived as the overall context that frames not only all natural inquiry, but also all human spiritual strivings and historical concerns. This means that life is appealed to not as the antithesis of reason, but as a force that encompasses reason. Thus he devotes himself to the idea of a “critique” of historical reason as a broadening of the Kantian critical project. The goal is to ground the human sciences as Kant had grounded the natural sciences. Care must be taken, however, to not simply pattern these newly developing sciences on the law-based model of the natural sciences. The human sciences need to be understood in relation to the practices that gradually gave rise to them. Their conceptual framework must be organized in accordance with “the reason of things that was active in their history” (Dilthey 1989, 178). Consequently, they should not be constructed in the manner of Comte and Mill, but critically delimited according to their formation. Intellectual Konstruktion must be replaced with historical Aufbau.

“The first condition for the formation (Aufbau) of the historical world,” according to Dilthey, “is the purification of the confused and corrupted recollections of the human race about itself through a critique that is correlated with interpretation” (Dilthey 2002, 280). The critique of historical reason must be hermeneutical by acknowledging that “the nexus of history is that of life itself insofar as life produces connectedness under the conditions of its natural environment” (Dilthey 2002, 280). To the extent that this connectedness is rational it inheres in life and cannot be derived from any independent ground. Life is the ultimate context of an interpretive critique. It encompasses vital processes and forces, but it also frames the mechanical causality of classical physics. Life cannot be defined by contrast to anything, for it constitutes the overall givenness of things. This contextual approach to life allows Dilthey to consider both the biological conditions of human life as well as the reflective transcendental conditions for understanding its significance.

What Dilthey means by the given is not the sense-content of the positivists, but life as the unfathomable source and context of all experience. As he writes in his 1892 essay “Life and Cognition”: “no matter how hard I struggle to obtain the pure experience of the given, there is no such thing. The given lies beyond my direct experience. . . . Everything, absolutely everything that falls within my consciousness contains the given as ordered or distinguished or combined or related, that is, as interpreted in intellectual processes” (Dilthey 2010, 60). The given is not an immediate present available to observation, but a mediated presence that needs to be interpreted in relation to life. We can reformulate this hermeneutically and say that life is what is always there as contextually given. Life is the ultimate context that we cannot transcend or go behind. Every given of experience is already part of some larger whole.

Modern epistemology has ignored this contextual aspect of experience. It has tended to start with fixed elementary constituents such as impressions and sensations. Even Kant, who stressed the spontaneous aspects of the cognitive process, assumed that “the matter of what we cognize is . . . an incoherent manifold,” which needs to be synthesized by the formal operations of the transcendental ego (Dilthey 2010, 66). Dilthey argues that lived experience (Erlebnis) teaches us otherwise. What is given in lived experience already has an intrinsic connectedness and constitutes a continuum. To be sure, this connectedness is indeterminate and needs to be specified. The initial task here is to analyze and articulate the continuum or nexus of consciousness rather than synthesize discrete sensuous elements by means of some intellectual act. To derive the unity of objects of consciousness from the apperceptive activity of self-consciousness as Kant did is to invert the true course of things. There is already a reflexively given unity in what is perceived. Apperceptive activity is needed merely to reflectively specify that unity. Apperception is not an original or elementary function of consciousness, but acquired over time for scientific purposes.

Another epistemological prejudice that has to be overcome is that consciousness is inherently phenomenal, representational, and set apart from the world. Even when consciousness is directed at so-called phenomenal objects, it possesses its own reality and is present to itself as a “reflexive awareness (Innewerden)” (Dilthey 1989, 6, 26, and 202). This translation is intended to underscore that the older translation of Innewerden as “inner experience” is too narrow. What I mean by reflexive awareness is the self-givenness or the being-with-itself (Innesein) of consciousness. Whereas consciousness is characterized by an aboutness that can be directed at what is within or without, reflexive awareness is the being-with-itself of consciousness. This is how reflexive awareness is described by Dilthey himself: “it is a consciousness that does not place a content over against the subject of consciousness (it does not re-present it); rather, a content is present in it without differentiation. That which constitutes its content is in no way distinguished from the act in which it occurs” (Dilthey 1989, 253–4). Reflexive awareness is originally a pre-representational consciousness, but it can also access states of representational consciousness. Just as for Kant “the I-think must be able to accompany all my representations,” reflexive awareness can potentially accompany any worldly content of consciousness, whether representational or not (Kant 1998, B131). It involves an implicit self-givenness that precedes an explicit or reflective sense of self. The felt self-givenness or with-itselfness of reflexive awareness comes before any introspective observation available to a self that is for-itself. Thus Dilthey writes that

if we call “observation” the directing of attention to something-placed-before-me . . . then there can be no observation of reflexive awareness (Innewerden) or its content. Attentiveness directed at reflexive awareness produces merely an intensification in the degree of consciousness connected with the exertion of effort. This intensification in the field of reflexive awareness . . . is the most simple form in which psychic life can appear. (Dilthey 1989, 254)

Reflexive awareness as the being-with-itself of consciousness constitutes its real connectedness. This connectedness can be articulated into cognitive, affective, and volitional structures, each of which provides its distinctive nexus to things. But Dilthey warns that however much we may want to focus on one of these structures, we should never lose sight of the overall life of the mind. Thus the cognitive nexus should not be fully isolated from the affective and the volitional. Cognition is not possible without some inquisitive interest, which is a function of feeling; nor can it produce determinative results without attention, which is a function of willing.

The reflexive awareness that informs the connectedness of the processes of consciousness includes worldly content, but the latter is not explicitly recognized as belonging to an external world until an adequate sense of self is developed. Gradually, what is given as interconnected in consciousness undergoes differentiation. Dilthey illustrates this by the following experience of musical appreciation: “In the nexus of psychic life, hearing and taking delight in the tone . . . become constituents of the self that perceives and experiences, while the tone becomes a constituent part of the external world which confronts the listening subject as something distinct” (Dilthey 1989, 255). The reflexive taking delight in a sequence of tones can serve as an initial reference point for the perceptual taking of them as sounds stemming from a piano and the more reflective take on them as a phrase from a sonata composed by Beethoven.

Traditional epistemologists had attempted to account for our sense of the distinctness of objects and other subjects in representational terms. But what is represented in consciousness can never reach beyond itself except in hypothetical, inferential terms. What Dilthey is looking for is a non-inferential access to the world, and he finds this access in the volitional nexus rather than the cognitive nexus. In “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification,” he writes that “the consciousness of a volitional impulse and of an intention on the one hand and that of the intention being restrained on the other, that is, two volitional states, constitute the core of the experience of resistance and thereby of the reality of objects” (Dilthey 2010, 21). We have here the reflexive awareness of the will that it has met resistance within itself.

When resistance to our striving is felt reflexively, the will senses a diminution. But not until this immediate feeling of resistance (Widerstand) is acknowledged reflectively as a restriction (Hemmung) on the will does a consciousness of the world as distinct from the self arise. On the basis of the recognition of a restraining limit a distinction can be made in consciousness between an inner experience of the self and the outer experience of the natural world.

The standard contrast between inner and outer experience has an initial plausibility, but it is not easily defined or maintained. The awareness of my state of mind and my feelings are obvious examples of inner experience. Perceived objects like the rocks and trees on my path tend to count as outer experience. But the perception of some external object like a tree in my garden can also become an inner experience for me if I remember planting it and think of how much pleasant shade it has provided me. Then I see it as a valued object that belongs to my life-history. A statue in a church is another example of a perceptual object that can be more than an outer experience. But in this case, it provides the basis for what Dilthey called a “transcendental experience” in his “Contributions to the Study of Individuality” (Dilthey 2010, 217). This third kind of experience could be said to apperceive a perceived outer object as possessing a value or meaning not derived from my own life, but from a pre-given life-context with which I identify. I recognize that the statue is of a revered figure from the past who embodies virtues that endow human life with dignity. This third kind of experience involves an understanding that locates an “inner sense” in something outer. I find a shared meaning in this statue from my cultural heritage.

The fact that Dilthey spoke of this cultural experience in the context of a discussion of transcendental reflection allows us to also think of it as a reflective experience. It appeals to transcendental conditions, not as Kant did to gain access to the natural world of outer experience, but to reflect on our place in the spiritual-cultural world. This is not a world that stands apart from us or even in opposition to our will, but a social world that is co-constituted by us. In doing so, we apperceive certain objects as more than external givens, but as objectifications of human activity. What outer experience perceives as a natural object can, under certain conditions, be apperceived by reflective experience as expressing something about human life. Reflective experience is “transcendental” in giving our life-context a spiritual significance.¹

This reflective experience finds its pre-reflective basis in what Dilthey calls the inherited common context for all elementary understanding. What is “inner” here is not primarily mental or psychological or introspective. I quote from Dilthey’s “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Life-Manifestations” of 1910:

Before the child learns to speak, it is already wholly immersed in the medium of commonalities (Gemeinsamkeiten). The child only learns to understand the gestures and facial expressions, movements and exclamations, words and sentences, because it constantly encounters them as the same and in the same relation to what they mean and express. Thus the individual becomes oriented in the world of objective spirit (Welt des objektiven Geistes). (Dilthey 2002, 229–30)

The inner nature of value and meaning resides in contextual immersion before it can be located in introspective insight. Elementary understanding is oriented by the normative authority of a local commonality, which encompasses what is taken for granted on the basis of custom, social convention, even prejudice. What Dilthey has done here is to take Hegel’s metaphysical concept of objective spirit and give it a basis in common life. But in order to grasp its full spiritual significance he appeals to something akin to transcendental reflection in Kant.

Our historical embeddedness in life is also confirmed by Dilthey’s reflections on ethics. In 1890 he offered a lecture course at the University of Berlin (now the Humboldt University) entitled “Ethics: Its Principles and Its Particular Manifestations.” In these lectures, which were posthumously published with the title System of Ethics,² Dilthey sets himself the task of developing a “psycho-ethical” approach that is rooted in “anthropological-historical analysis” (Dilthey 1965, 79). Whereas traditional psychology has analyzed feelings mainly as responses to sense impressions that come from without, a psycho-ethical understanding of the feelings that can motivate us to act must be rooted in an anthropological analysis of our drives, instincts, and desires. Instead of focusing on the intellectual processes whereby human beings adapt to their surroundings, Dilthey argues that most of our responses are basically instinctive. The feelings that measure the effect the world has on us are not just the subjective aspect of our representations of the world. They are really rooted in our drives and inseparable from them.

Traditional psychology tends to construct epistemically geared levels of mental life where sense-impressions constitute the basic level, and these are then assessed by feelings so that finally the will can decide how to act in the world. But this intellectual reconstruction of psychic life merely skims the surface of our lived experience and ignores the real ways in which our sensations, drives, feelings, and desires are interwoven and merge all levels. The anthropological considerations that Dilthey is willing to include in ethical self-reflection go all the way back to our biological makeup. Thus he states that “instinct and feeling cannot be separated from each other within the concret...