Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey

H.A. Hodges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136226151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998.This is Volume VIII of twenty-two in the Sociology of Social Theory and Methodology series. Written in 1952, this book looks at the concepts behind the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, whose ideas extend into several fields of learning, of which philosophy is only one. They include critical and historical studies of literature and music; studies in educational theory and in the history of educational practice, ancient and modern; researches into the history of religious and political as well as philosophical ideas, especially since the Renaissance and Reformation, which have shaped his thinking.

Chapter One

THE philosophical work of Wilhelm Dilthey all hinges upon his attempt to write a Kritik der historischen Vernunft. This fact tells us two important things about him, viz. that he was deeply interested in historical studies, and that his philosophical thinking was considerably affected by Kant. Something has been said in the Introduction about each of these facts. Let us begin here by giving further consideration to the second—the fact that Dilthey was in some sense a Kantian. In what sense and in what degree was he so?

The heart and soul of his Kantianism lies in the conception of philosophy as a critique of knowledge. The emergence of the critical movement in the eighteenth century, and its gradual victory over the traditional idea of philosophy as metaphysics, appear to him as the great turning-point in philosophical history. From the critical movement he has learned to see in knowledge not merely an apprehension, but a construction, and to recognise that the terms in which we think and speak of objects are determined in large measure by our own cognitive processes. From the same critical movement he has learned that knowledge cannot go beyond the limits of experience, and that therefore metaphysics, as a science of pure being and a reasoned explanation of the world order, is impossible. These are contentions which he could have learned from other sources than Kant— e.g. from some of the British empiricists or from French positivism. Yet in fact it was Kant whom he saw as the great representative of this standpoint, and it was in Kant’s footsteps that he wished to follow. Kant had made his critique, ostensibly of human knowledge, but in fact of mathematical and natural-scientific knowledge only. He had not recognised the distinctive character of the historical and social studies, and Dilthey’s task was to extend Kant’s critique and make it cover these.

Yet, when we come to the details of Kant’s teaching, we find that Dilthey departs from him very widely. Imagine a Kantian who does not believe in an a priori, and who thinks that the categories of substance and cause are not forms of the understanding, but projections into the outer world of the inner experiences of the will. Imagine a Kantian who rejects the doctrine of the phenomenality of the empirical self, and believes that in introspection we perceive our own mind as it truly is. Imagine a Kantian who says that philosophy must learn from psychology, and who boasts that his ethic is more empirical than utilitarianism. That is the kind of Kantian whom we meet in Dilthey. In fact, when it comes to points of detail, he is plainly not a Kantian at all. Throughout his life he was engaged in controversy with the more orthodox Kantians. He attacked their logic and their theory of knowledge, their moral theory, and their philosophy of history.

He could do this because Kant was not the only formative influence in his thought. There were in fact two others, which on points of detail count for more than Kant. The first is the set of ideas which were current in Germany in the generation after the publication of Kant’s writings—the set of ideas which were held more or less in common by poets such as Goethe and the romanticists, and by post-Kantian philosophers such as Schelling and Hegel. I shall refer to this set of ideas as ‘romanticism’, and this is one of the determinative influences in Dilthey’s thinking. The other is the empirical philosophy of the British school and the positivism of Comte. J. S. Mill’s System of Logic came out when Dilthey was 10, and Herbert Spencer’s First Principles when he was 30. Present-day philosophers, to whom Mill is a dim memory and Spencer hardly even a name, may yet bear in mind that in their own time these men were symbols of something, and these symbols fired Dilthey’s imagination.

The battle between these two strangely assorted influences in Dilthey’s mind will be found to be a recurrent theme as we follow the development of his work. Again and again we shall be faced with the spectacle of a positivist trying to do justice to a poet’s vision, or a romantic trying to analyse himself in positivist terms. And neither the romantic nor the positivist is a true Kantian, though the romantic at least has his own interpretation of Kant. It is a truism that Kant was one of the influences by which the post-Kantians were moulded; and there must have been something in him to account for what they made of him. What that was, we may dimly see from the ninth chapter of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, if we will not find out for ourselves by reading Fichte and Hegel. Let us begin at this point, and so move on from Kant to his immediate successors, who were the source of so much of Dilthey’s inspiration.

What did Kant’s philosophy mean to Kant’s younger contemporaries, to those men who were students at the time when his three Critiques came out? To them, as to Kant himself, it meant a Copernican revolution in thought. It meant the destruction of a great mass of traditional sophistry, and the opening of a new road into the study of the human mind and will. The Kritik der reinen Vernunft showed them the power of the mind, by its transcendental activities of synthesis, to give shape and meaning to sense-data and so to build up a world for itself. The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft showed that the shaping and legislative power of the understanding is paralleled by an even more deep-seated power of self-regulation in the moral will. Indeed, it was here in the will, not in the intellect, that Kant found the true meaning of ‘reason’, and gained direct access to the ultimate reality of man and the world. Finally the Kritik der Urteilskraft showed that there is in nature, in both organic and inorganic phenomena, a shaping power which seems to be akin to what we already know in ourselves. From this point it was a short step to the post-Kantian philosophies, with their insistence on a hidden power, spiritual in character, which manifests itself alike in natural phenomena and in the mind and life of man.

It is important to realise that Kant, for all his greatness, was only one of many voices which were saying new and exciting things at that time. He even stood somewhat apart from the intellectual movement of the day. In that movement, literary and philosophical ideas were inseparably blended. Poets and critics wrote philosophy, and philosophers wrote verses and borrowed ideas from the poets. Many of them were eager students of natural science, though of course from a point of view of their own. Most of them had views on the meaning of history and on the past, present, and future of religion. It was a ferment of new ideas, in which the central and unifying theme was an interest in the nature of man, his place in the universe, and the meaning of his achievements in thought and action. I shall venture to call the whole period of German thought from 1770 to 1830 the ‘romantic’ period, and the ruling ideas of the period I shall call ‘romanticism’, in spite of the fact that the ‘romantic’ movement commonly so called in German literature is only one of many streams which flowed together at this time. It is convenient to have a single word to cover the whole period, and no other seems so appropriate. The outlook of the period does answer pretty well to what we understand by ‘romanticism’ in the wider sense: a consciousness of hidden depths in human nature and hidden secrets in the natural world and history, and a determination to explore and enjoy them all.

Dilthey showed from his boyhood a keen interest in music and poetry, and early developed a strong enthusiasm for Lessing and Goethe. The humanism of these writers evoked an answer in his own spirit, and quickly obtained an ascendancy over him which was only strengthened when to his literary and musical studies he added an appreciation of Kant and other leading philosophers of that time. Dilthey’s interest in the thought of this great period never waned, and he did not a little, in various writings, to interpret its spirit and significance. Of especial value to us is the inaugural lecture which he delivered on being appointed to a Chair at Basel (1867), which has for its main theme a description of what he found valuable in the romanticists, and reveals the basis upon which he was later to build his own philosophy.

He begins by analysing the circumstances in which the romantic movement arose. It was a time when the growth of enlightenment and culture had awakened in Germany a strong patriotic feeling, while the condition of the Empire made it impossible for this feeling to find an outlet through political channels. Hence the spirit of the German people, newly aroused to a sense of its inherent powers, instead of moving outwards in a political and military nationalism, turned inwards upon itself. The problem of human life is always the same—to bring about a satisfactory adjustment between the self and its environment. The German mind, in face of a world which it was powerless to alter, set out to make the adjustment by altering itself, by adopting a new outlook upon the world, a new ideal of life.

Dilthey finds in Lessing the first formulation of such an ideal. According to him, the good life is the life of reason, a free, self-determining life, conscious of inherent worth by virtue of the control exercised by reason over the passions. Goethe took over this ideal and gave it a less narrowly rational form than it had in Lessing. Goethe saw the unity of life on all levels, from the highest to the lowest. He showed that the ‘rational’ activities of the mind are not distinct from and antithetic to the ‘irrational’, but are a more explicit development of something which is present even on the ‘irrational’ level. Logical thinking would be impossible if it had no basis in the life of the senses and the imagination; and here, in the keen sensibility and imaginative ‘genius’ of the artist, Goethe finds a shaping power at work, which is the same as the power which operates in logical thinking. Art, then, and the senses, no less than science and the understanding, feelings no less than moral maxims, are essential to the completeness of the good life. Even Lessing had recognised that poetry has a function in life; it gives imaginative expression, he said, to the ideal, and this expression is more practically effective than any ‘rational’ statement of it.

Goethe went further, and applied his principle to the reconstruction of science. Taught by Spinoza and by Shaftesbury, he thought of nature as a living unity, and it was his ambition to make the detailed workings of nature intelligible by intuitive insight into the life of the whole. To this end the same imaginative power which is exercised creatively in art must be applied heuristically in the field of scientific knowledge, and the result is a philosophy of nature which is one of Goethe’s most striking achievements. The universe is treated as a living being, whose life develops stage by stage, through inorganic nature, through plant life and animal forms, up to man and his activities, where it attains its end by becoming an object of consciousness to itself. Dilthey emphasises the philosophical originality of this theory. The universe had been treated as a living organism before, by the Stoics, by Bruno, by Spinoza; but no one had taken this thought so seriously as to credit this organism with a life-history, and to seek this life-history in the geological past. That was Goethe’s contribution, and it amounted to the creation of a new metaphysical genre, to which Dilthey gives the name of ‘evolutionary pantheism’ (entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Pantheismus). Dilthey also points out how strikingly this half-poetic theorising of Goethe anticipates the growth of evolutionary theories and the expansion of comparative methods in nineteenth-century science.

It was with ideas such as these in his mind that Dilthey began his student career. It is therefore not surprising that he soon felt the attraction of historical studies, and devoted himself to them with an ardour which may partly be explained by the circumstances of the time and place. Looking back in later years (Rede zum 70 Geburtstag, G.S., V, 7 ff.), he spoke of the ‘inestimable good fortune’ which took him to Berlin at a time when he could watch a new historical science being constructed before his eyes. As the seventeenth century had seen a great forward movement in mathematics and natural science, so in the nineteenth a revolution took place in the conceptions and methods of historical study, and this new movement, comparable in its effects with the scientific work of the late Renaissance, was nowhere more active than at Berlin.

Dilthey distinguishes two wings of the movement. (1) One was based on an analysis of culture into its component factors, i.e. language, law, mythology and religion, poetry, philosophy and the like. By comparative research and genetic analysis it was shown how each of these elements of cultural life is governed by an inner law which determines its general structure and the course of its development. Bopp, the Humboldts, Savigny, W. Grimm, and others were the founders of this school. (2) The other wing of the movement studied the life of nations, treating each nation as a cultural unity; it traced their interactions as organised forces, and tried to find laws which determine their rise and fall. Dilthey speaks with praise of the work done in this way for Roman history by Niebuhr, for Greek antiquity by Böckh, for ancient Germanic studies by J. Grimm, and above them all he places Mommsen. What these scholars did for individual nations was gathered up into a whole by Ritter and Ranke, and world history was presented as a self-contained process, coextensive with the inhabited earth and with recorded time. Dilthey confesses an especial debt to the teaching of Ranke (G.S., V, 4, 9).

The significance of the historical movement lay in this, that it extended the dominion of organised knowledge over a region not less rich in content than the physical universe, but of a very different character. After the scientific movement of the seventeenth century had made current a mechanical view of the universe, and the dogma that all scientific knowledge must be mathematical, the historical movement redressed the balance by calling in a new world of experience. This new world was not a mechanical system, but one in which the apprehension of meaning and value by human agents is a determinant force, and in it the enquiring mind finds not an alien object, but its own kin. The attempt to study this new world systematically raised, accordingly, a number of philosophical questions, of which the members of the historical school themselves were not aware, but Dilthey was. What is the nature of those groups of recurrent phenomena which can be abstracted from the historical process as a whole and studied by themselves, such as law, religion, or poetry? What is it that constitutes each of them a unit? By what fundamental concepts must the interpretation of them proceed? And how are they related to those temporally circumscribed but more complex wholes, such as a nation or a cultural period, which are also in some sense units? Is their unity in some way analogous to that of a physical organism or of an individual mind? How far can such an analogy take us, and how must we proceed at the point where it breaks down? Such questions as these, questions at first sight concerning method, but involving deeper epistemological and perhaps even metaphysical issues, arise naturally out of historical study for a mind which is philosophically awake. They arose in Dilthey’s mind.

For a solution he looked first to the romantics. After all, it was Lessing who had made current the conception of historical progress as ‘the education of the human race’. It was Herder who had laid down that every nation is a cultural unit with a character of its own and an inherent value which is unique. His Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit met with a welcome from Goethe. And Goethe himself recognised that the highest rung in his ladder of sciences must be the sciences of man, viz. history and anthropology. He saw that the study of man’s activities must be based on an understanding of man’s nature, and therefore set himself to disengage from the various phenomena of human life and character the structural type to which they all conform. As every animal species is known by the structure which all its individuals have in common, so a similar unity of type or structure betrays itself in the lives and actions of men. In such works as Faust and Wilhelm Meister, Goethe tried to portray the principles which govern the development of human character. All his writings are instinct with a certain wisdom derived from his insight into the nature of man.

A similar approach to the problem found expression in the writings of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801), by whom Dilthey was attracted and to whom he devoted a special study (Novalis, first published 1865: now printed in Das Erlebnis u. die Dichtung, pp. 268 ff.). Novalis had the same encyclopaedic interests as Goethe and Schelling. Like them, he saw in the phenomena of nature the expression of a living power which is akin to the human spirit. In history he saw the expression of the human spirit itself, whose hidden depths he sought to penetrate. He began by seeking in vain to obtain access to the mystery through empirical psychology. He found no help in psychology as his contemporaries practised it. He speaks of it as ‘one of the spectres which have taken those places in the temple where genuine images of gods ought to stand’. It is stupid, mechanical, analytical, abstract. In its place Novalis wishes to put a study which is to ‘consider man purely as a whole, as a system’. He calls it reale Psychologie or Anthropologie, and his own contributions to it are fully in the spirit of his age. At the root of human nature he finds the will. ‘Every man, at bottom, lives in his will.’ And he analysed the life of feeling and will with a penetrating vision. Dilthey ranks him with Spinoza, the philosopher of the conatus, and with Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, all of whom in various ways held the same view that the fundamental secret of life lies not in thought, but in will. But he sees in the fragments, which were all that Novalis was able to write before his early death, a greater modesty in speculation and a greater respect for positive knowledge than in some of the others. Novalis meant his Anthropologie to be the basis of all the studies concerned with human life: history, moral theory, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion. Eight years before Hegel’s Phänomenologie, and twenty years before the Enzyklopädie, Novalis had in germ the idea of a grouping of all the human studies on a single basis, which is to be a deep study of human nature.

The reader should keep in mind this reale Psychologie or Anthropologie of Novalis. We shall find it over and over again, under various names, in Dilthey’s writings.

We have mentioned Hegel, and in view of the range of Hegel’s interests and the magnitude of his achievement it is natural to ask whether Dilthey could not find in him the guide to follow in his own researches. The question arises very naturally in Britain, since in this country a philosophical interest in history, or in historical methods and principles, has long been associated with adherence to Hegelian doctrine. Some of us have read Croce on the subject, and he and his disciple, Collingwood, make no secret of their Hegelian affinities. It is therefore necessary to say quite distinctly that Dilthey was never a Hegelian in any sense whatever. Certainly he avoided holding Hegel in that uninformed contempt which was the usual attitude eighty years ago, and in his inaugural lecture at Basel, in the very act of proclaiming himself an adherent of Kantianism, he could plead for a better recognition of Hegel’s lasting achievement. But his understanding of Hegel was imperfect. He saw him as one who gave a systematic form to Goethe’s evolutionary pantheism (in which Dilthey himself did not believe); but he showed no sign of appreciating his work in connection specifically with history, and he distrusted him profoundly as a dogmatic metaphysician.

It was not in Hegel that he found his philosophical guide, but in another thinker of the post-Kantian generation. It was in F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the theologian-philosopher, Hegel’s colleague at Berlin, that the various tendencies of Dilthey’s thought were able to find a focus of unity. Schleiermacher represented the religious spirit in the closest alliance with philosophy and with literary and historical studies. He was in the full stream of the romantic and post-Kantian movement, in close touch with Fichte and the Schlegels; but it was an added attraction in Dilthey’s eyes that, of all the philosophical writers of that time, Schleiermacher stands furthest from metaphysical speculation, and nearest to the critical position of Kant.

Schleiermacher’s philosophy is a large system, and I shall describe only thos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Indices