Verstehen

The Uses of Understanding in the Social Sciences

Michael Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351327107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In late nineteenth-century German academic circles, the term verstehen (literally, understanding, or comprehension) came to be associated with the view that social phenomena must be understood from the point of view of the social actor. Advocates of this approach were opposed by positivists who stressed the unity of method between the social and natural sciences and an external, experimental, and quantitative knowledge. Although modified over time, the dispute between positivists and antipositivists--nowadays called naturalists and antinaturalists--has persisted and still defines many debates in the field of philosophy of social sciences. In this volume, Michael Martin offers a critical appraisal of verstehen as a method of verification and discovery as well as a necessary condition for understanding.

In its strongest forms, verstehen entails subjectively reliving the experience of the social actor or at least rethinking his or her thoughts, while in its weaker forms it only involves reconstructing the rationale for acting. Martin's opening chapter offers a reconsideration of the debate between the classical verstehen theorists--Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, R.G. Collingwood--and the positivists. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with positivist critiques of verstehen as a method of social scientific verification and understanding. In the subsequent chapters Martin considers contemporary varieties of the verstehen position and argues that they like the classical positions, they conflict with the pluralistic nature of social science. Chapter 4 discusses Peter Winch's and William Dray's variants of verstehen, while chapters 5 through 9 consider recent theorists--Karl Popper, Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz--whose work can be characterized in verstehen ist terms: In his conclusion Martin defines the limitations of the classical and recent verstehen positions and proposes a methodological pluralism in which verstehen is justified pragmatically in terms of the purposes and contexts of inquiry. This volume is the only comprehensive and sustained critique of verstehen theory currently available. It will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and anthropologists.

1

The Classical Verstehen Position

In this chapter, the views of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), Max Weber (1864 -1920), and R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) will be examined. A main point of contention in late-nineteenth-century German academic circles was the status of the human sciences. Should they be assimilated to the natural sciences as positivists such as Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill maintained or should they be regarded as autonomous? Two of the most important theorists who advocated an autonomous approach to the social sciences were Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber.¹ Both Dilthey and Weber argued that the separation was based on a difference in subject matter. They maintained that, unlike purely physical phenomena, social behavior has an inner dimension. In one standard interpretation of Dilthey, understanding social behavior involves reliving the subjective experience of the actor. For Weber, in contrast, understanding social behavior requires giving causal explanations that are subjectively meaningful, that is, comprehensible in terms of the actor’s point of view.

Collingwood is the prime representative of the Verstehen approach in the English-speaking world before the middle of the twentieth century. Although he seldom used the term “Verstehen” in his writings, his basic approach to the study of history could be embraced by the most radical Verstehenist, for he held that historical events must be understood from the inside, and that in order to understand the action of historical agents, historians must rethink the agents’ thoughts. Although Collingwood worked in virtual isolation at Oxford between the two wars, the posthumous publication of his The Idea of History in 1946 influenced a new generation of philosophers of history.²

In this chapter, I will show that these three classical Verstehen theorists placed unacceptable limitations on social science.

Wilhelm Dilthey

A historian of ideas and culture, Dilthey wrote extensively on the Renaissance, Reformation, and German Enlightenment as well as on the history of German idealism. He made contributions to metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, psychology, and moral philosophy. Dilthey’s philosophy of the social sciences can be understood in part as a reaction to the positivism of Auguste Comte and especially to the naturalistic view of the social sciences of John Stuart Mill. As Mill put it: “If we are to escape from the inevitable failure of social science when compared with the steady progress of the natural science, our only hope lies in generalizing the methods which have proved so fruitful in the natural sciences so as to fit them to the uses of the social sciences.”³ According to Dilthey, the philosophy of Comte and Mill “seemed to me to mutilate the historical reality in order to adapt to the idea and methods of the natural sciences.”⁴

Influenced by Kant and the idealists, and the romantic philosophies of Hegel, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, as well as by British empiricism, Dilthey argued that the methodology of the human sciences could not be reduced to that of the natural sciences.⁵ The proper object of philosophy, Dilthey maintained, is life in all its unique cultural and historical complexity. Social and historical reality are an accumulation of numerous individual human lives. Dilthey called the sciences that enable us to understand social, cultural, and historical reality Geisteswissenschaften (human studies). He argued that these sciences (psychology, history, philology, literary criticism, economics, comparative religion, and jurisprudence) are different from the natural sciences in that they require that the knower know the inner life of his or her subjects.⁶

According to Dilthey, a crucial difference between the natural and the human sciences prevents the reduction of social science methodology to natural science methodology. Although both the natural and human sciences are based on experience, the experience is different. The human sciences are based on inner experience and the natural sciences on outer experience. Dilthey maintained:

The motivation behind the habit of seeing these [human] sciences as a unity in contrast with those of nature derives from the depth and fullness of human self-consciousness. Even when unaffected by investigation into the origins of the mind, a man finds in this self-consciousness a sovereign of will, a responsibility of action, a capacity of subordinating everything to thought and for resisting any foreign element in the citadel of freedom in his person: by these things he distinguishes himself from all of nature.⁷

This difference leads to different results. In the natural sciences we unify the elements of experience by construction, that is, by inference and hypothesis. However, in the human sciences, Dilthey alleged, unity and coherence are not imposed but are found in their own inherent structure.⁸ This basic difference between the human and natural sciences leads to further differences between their subject matters. First, human beings are purposeful and nature is not. Second, the human sciences are not value-free whereas the natural sciences are. Third, the human sciences rely on rules, norms, and principles but the natural sciences do not. Fourth, humans are conscious of their history and shape their actions in light of this knowledge; the objects studied by the natural sciences do not.⁹

Dilthey’s view of the unique aspects of the human sciences was part of his “critique of historical understanding” in which he used Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment as models. Dilthey based his own critique on the following three principles:

1. The manifestations of human life are part of a historical process and should be explained historically. The state, the family, even human beings cannot be satisfactorily characterized abstractly because they are different in different ages.
2. Different times and different human beings can only be understood by projecting oneself imaginatively into their specific points of view. Thus, what was thought during a particular time or what ideas an individual had must be taken into account by the historian.
3. The historian is restricted by the perspective of his or her own times. How the past manifests itself to a historian in light of his or her own concerns becomes a justifiable aspect of the meaning of that past.¹⁰

These principles formed an important aspect of what has come to be known as historicism, that is, the view that all human behavior must be understood historically. Dilthey, himself, thought that this historicism was liberating because it delivered us from illusions and superstition.¹¹

For Dilthey, the differences he perceived between the human and the natural sciences on his analysis of historical understanding necessitated a special methodology for the human sciences. In brief, he held that although the human sciences as well as the natural sciences employ methods such as observation, description, classification, induction, deduction, the testing of hypotheses, and so on, they also used the method of Verstehen.

For Dilthey “Verstehen” had a technical meaning that was not to be confused with the ordinary meaning of the German term—to understand or comprehend—although it was continuous with this meaning. According to H. P. Rickman, a Dilthey scholar writing in the 1960s, Verstehen is “the comprehension of some mental content—an idea, an intention, or feeling—manifested in empirically given expressions such as words or gestures.”¹² The use of this method, Dilthey argued, enabled social scientists and historians to arrive at more reliable results and more intelligible findings than the natural sciences since, in his words, “only what the mind has produced, the mind can fully understand.”¹³ Natural phenomena are relatively opaque and can be explained only by abstract theoretical models that postulate general laws and causal relations. As Dilthey put it: “Nature we explain, psychic life we understand.”¹⁴

But what this comprehension of mental content includes is not completely clear. The most common and widely accepted interpretation is that empathy is the reliving of the mental content of the social actors. Dilthey said: “On the basis of this empathy or transportation there arises the highest form of understanding in which the totality of mental life is active—recreating or re-living.”¹⁵ Dilthey says that although most people today could not live through a religious experience such as Martin Luther’s, they can empathize with Luther. By using historical documents and cultural records “I can re-live it. I transpose myself into” Luther’s circumstances and relive his experience. “Thus, inner-directed man can experience many other existences in his imagination.”¹⁶

This reliving is not an inferential process. When one sees a person stricken with grief one does not first see that the person’s expression is that of grief, and then infer from this that the person whom one is observing is experiencing grief. The sight of the expression induces in the observer an immediate emotional response. Dilthey maintains that what happens to the observer when a grief stricken-figure is seen is the reverse of what happens to the figure. In the figure, the experience of grief has manifested itself in an external expression. In the observer, the perceived experience of grief has internalized itself in what Dilthey calls a reproduction [Nachbild] of the experience expressed by the grief stricken-person.¹⁷

Although the intellectual activity of constructing a coherent picture by fitting the evidence together and filling in the gaps plays a large role in understanding a complex historical period, reliving the events is still essential. H. A. Hodges, another Dilthey scholar writing in the 1960s, puts Dilthey’s position this way: “This process of assembling the evidence and filling in the gaps includes, of course, a great deal of reasoning on the lines made familiar to us by formal logic; but it is wholly misconceived if it is thought of as entirely or even primarily that. It is based on the thought processes of imaginative amplification whose nature we shall understand if we go back to the root from which understanding grows—the mirroring in one mind of experiences taking place in another.”¹⁸

Positivist critics of Verstehen have supposed that classical Verstehenists have assumed that Verstehen helps confirm hypotheses about a social actor’s inner life. But Dilthey scholars do not interpret his view of Verstehen in this way and this interpretation is not the most convincing reading of Dilthey’s intentions. A more plausible construal is that he considered Verstehen to be a necessary condition for understanding. Unless one relives a person’s experience one does not really understand him or her. How one verifies the hypothesis about the person’s inner life is an independent issue. Although this reading of Dilthey is hardly new among Dilthey scholars, it is in conflict with a popular and widely shared construction of his views.

In any case, on the basis of the above exposition one can formulate the reliving interpretation of Dilthey’s position as follows:

• (1) In order to understand human beings it is necessary to empathize with them.
• (2) In order to empathize with them it is necessary to relive their experience.

However, not everyone agrees with this interpretation. Passages in his later writings have suggested to some scholars that Dilthey held the view that in order to understand human beings it was not necessary to relive their experience but only to know what these experiences were. For example, Dilthey distinguished a reconstruction of the thoughts and feelings of another person from the thoughts and feelings manifested in his or her actions and the reliving of this person’s experience, and argued that it is possible to understand this person via a reconstruction of these thoughts and feelings.¹⁹ On the reconstruction interpretation of Dilthey, it is crucial to understanding human beings that one must know what their thoughts and feelings are; but it is not necessary to actually empathize with them in the sense of reliving their experiences.²⁰ On this interpretation, Verstehen is also not a method of verification. Rather it is a necessary condition for understanding human beings. Let us state the position as follows:

• (3) In order to understand human beings it is necessary to reconstruct the inner life of these human beings from its manifestation in their actions.
• (4) This reconstructing involves knowing what the inner lives of these human beings are.

According to some scholars other passages in Dilthey’s later work suggest a still different interpretation.²¹ As they treat him, Dilthey gave up the psychological view of understanding and maintained that one understands a human action by situating it in a larger cultural whole which gives it its significance.²² Let us call this the ...