William Dilthey

M. A. Hodges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415605113
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136227295
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XXII of twenty-two in the Sociology of Social Theory and Methodology series. Written in 1944, this book serves as an introduction to German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, whose trend of his interests and purposes were brought together in a great work, his Critique of Historical Reason, were established as early as 1880, but was unfinished upon his death.

I

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is a significant and influential figure in the history of German thought. Born two years after the death of Hegel, and dying three years before the outbreak of the Four Years’ War, he spans the generations between the post-Napoleonic Restoration and the onset of the present world disturbances. He carried over something of the spirit of the age of romanticism into the age of scientific humanism, and brought the enthusiasm of Goethe into the midst of the bewilderment of the twentieth century. He was twenty-one at the time of Schelling’s death, twenty-seven at Schopenhauer’s. His fife-time includes the entire career of Nietzsche and the publication of all the writings of Marx. He lived to read and discuss F. H. Bradley and William James, Bergson and Husserl, and to inspire a multitude of writers now living. Politically, he saw the work of Bismarck begun and ended, he saw the building up of Germany from a loose confederacy of States into a military empire which threatened the peace of Europe.

The age through which he lived had an inner unity ; it was the age in which Europe at large became aware of a challenge to its traditions and a growing uneasiness about the future. The social structure, already shaken by the impact of the French Revolution, was further threatened by the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Great masses of population were growing up with little attachment to existing social traditions and little reason to respect them. Their fives were dominated by the competitive spirit of industry, which left them little time and no background for the cultivation of the mind. Their influence was felt in literature, a debasing influence as Dilthey thought, in the coming of writers like Dickens, who were of this new urban public and wrote for it, sacrificing formal and constructive values for the sake of sentimental effect. The older cultivated classes felt a challenge to their existence and their way of life and thought, not only from the new public spawned by industry, but also from among themselves. The Christian mythology, which had served as a framework for the thoughts of Europe since St. Augustine, had been quietly set aside in the eighteenth century. The humanist philosophy which succeeded it was already showing its inability to produce agreement among its own exponents, to create or maintain a common body of convictions. Behind the facade of scientific progress, and partly because of it, all deeply reflective minds in the nineteenth century were disquieted.

The problem was both more and less urgent in Britain than on the Continent; more so, because the Industrial Revolution was further advanced here, and less so, in that the Christian tradition was more deeply rooted and there still seemed to be a chance of saving it. This determines the form of the question as it appears in a series of British poets and prose writers of the period : what are we to make of the universe and how are we to conceive our place in it, in the light of our growing scientific knowledge ? By some this question was linked with a concern about the social and cultural effects of industrialization, and so took on a different form : how can life be made really worth living in the new world of science and machinery ? This is the problem of Ruskin and William Morris.

For Dilthey, writing in Germany, the problem had a different shape from either of these. The Christian tradition was for him less in the centre of the picture. Though brought up in the Reformed Church and partly trained for its ministry, he found much in historic Christianity which was uncongenial, especially the otherworldliness of its outlook. His own ideals were Lessing and Goethe, the apostles of romantic humanism. To this, rather than to Christianity, he felt a threat in the prevailing spirit of contemporary science. He was aware of the Industrial Revolution, but it did not dominate his conception of the social problem. What was central in his view was the omnicompetent State of modern times, and over against it the social instability manifested in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century. He declared that the vital question of to-day is the problem of understanding and guiding the turbulent forces at work in modern society. He clung to the belief that the benevolent bureaucracy of Prussia could be combined with the romantic freedom of personal development.

Dilthey’s philosophy results from the mingling of two influences, both of eighteenth-century origin, and both concerned with the study of human mind and society. The one is the empirical philosophy whose home was Britain and France. The other is the transcendental philosophy of the post-Kantian period in Germany.

At the root of the empirical philosophy of Locke and Hume lies an impatience with the inconclusive debates of metaphysics and a confidence in the power of experimental science to do better. They thought it their mission to examine the nature of thought and language in order to expose all meaningless terminology and futile speculation, and to lay firmly in the soil of experience the foundations of scientific method. This meant concentrating their energies upon psychological questions almost to the exclusion of questions about the nature of being ; and if they had been told that they would end by reducing philosophy to a kind of applied psychology, Hume at least would have felt no alarm. In the Preface to his Treatise of Human Nature—a. manifesto not less significant than Kant’s Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason—he set out a plan for the reconstruction of the whole edifice of knowledge on the basis of a psychology, itself newly constructed by the application of the experimental method. All questions of logic and methodology, of moral and political theory, of aesthetics, even of natural religion, could be dealt with by this instrument. A line of philosophers in Great Britain followed up this programme, down to J. S. Mill, whose System of Logic (1843) had an international reputation in its time, and affected Dilthey in his formative years. The last notable representative of the school, Alexander Bain, died as recently as 1903 : and to-day the revival of interest in Hume himself testifies to the continued vitality of his standpoint.

What attracted Dilthey in these philosophers was on the one hand their distrust of speculative theories and their faith in empirical methods, and on the other hand their conviction that the central concern of the philosopher should be the study of man and society. Both these lessons were being proclaimed in his early years by a yet more powerful voice in France. The British empirical philosophy, introduced into France by Voltaire, was crystallized into a new and original form by Auguste Comte, whose Cours de Philosophie positive (1830-42) set going a movement which is still vigorous in France and elsewhere. Comte did not merely proclaim the value and analyse the methods of empirical or, as he called it, positive science. He put it into a wider context, and gave an intelligible account of its relation to metaphysical speculation, by his doctrine of the three stages through which human thought has had to pass. He showed the theological way of conceiving things giving way gradually to the metaphysical, and this in turn being replaced by the positive outlook, which is alone capable of yielding genuine knowledge. He codified the logical relations between the various sciences, and showed how the progress of one depends upon progress having been previously made in another, and so explained why the positive outlook has appeared in them not simultaneously, but in a necessarily determined order of time. He added that the establishment of the positive method in the study of man and society had not yet been accomplished, and that it was his mission to accomplish it Declaring that psychology the study of the individual mind, can never become a science, and differing strikingly in this respect from the British school, he laid down the programme for a “ sociology ” an empirical or positive science of humanity in its social groupings. The British school themselves were influenced by this J.S Mill while holding firmly to the belief in the centralitv of psychology, found a place for sociology in his system of sciences. Herbert Spencer developed sociology very far and in Great Britain his influence has been determinative while Comte is hardly read or known. In France however the two sides of Comte’s teaching are alive and influential to-day. His doctrine of positive method has inspired a school of writers on the philosophy of the sciences while a sociolosrv conceived in his terms and inspired by his teaching is an important element in French education.

Dilthey’s attitude to Comte was twofold. He was fascinated by the clarity with which the Frenchman had described the positive method in the natural sciences, and the precision with which he had assigned to each of them its place in a logical edifice which explained their mutual relations and their history. He was equally convinced that Comte was wrong about the study of man. It was not merely that Comte was wrong in excluding the possibility of a scientific psychology, and the British school right in affirming it. Dilthey believed that they and Comte were alike wrong in assuming that the methods and presuppositions of the natural sciences could be transferred substantially unchanged to the human studies. In the latter field the conditions of observation and experiment are very different, and even the kind of questions which we are concerned to ask are not altogether the same as in the natural sciences. These differences are bound to be reflected in the methods and logical structure of the human studies, and in the course of their historical development. Dilthey set himself the task of making clear what the difference was, and so exhibiting the distinctive character of the human studies. He was the better able to conceive and execute this task because of the other influences which blended with those of the Anglo-French empiricists in his mind.

The “ critical ” philosophy of Kant is not, at least ostensibly, a psychological study such as Hume undertook ; but it had a like effect in reducing philosophy to a study of the human mind, its activities and forms of experience. This revolutionary change coincided in date with a double movement of thought which made the years between 1770 and 1830 in Germany a period of concentrated intellectual activity such as has probably no parallel anywhere in modern history. 1. On the one hand there was the romantic movement, which in Germany, as in Britain, but to an even greater extent, was no mere change of literary fashions and styles, but the proclamation of a new philosophy, challenging the jejune rationalism of the eighteenth century with a new conception of man and the world. Coleridge in England united first-class poetic genius and critical ability with a real grasp of deep philosophical issues, and in him and Wordsworth and Shelley the spirit of Platonism broods over English romanticism. In Germany Goethe and Schiller, to name only the two greatest combined poetic genius with philosophical interests in such a way that each drew support from the other. Schiller adopted in essentials the philosophy of Kant. Goethe worked out a philosophy of a new type which Dilthey calls “ evolutionary pantheism ”, the doctrine of a universal mind which, unconscious at first in nature struggles towards consciousness in the animal world and reaches self-consciousness in man. Both found in the creative imagination of the artist a reflection of that power which underlies all the phenomena of nature and history. 2. At the same time there was also going on in Germany an intellectual revolution comparable with that which we associate with the of Galileo and Bacon This was a revolution not in natural science but in historical study and it meant that history itself acquired a consciousness of method and direction which transformed it into a progressive science, while kindred studies such as philology, archaeology, anthropology, comparative mythology, sprang into life to support it and feed it with facts and principles. A new intellectual world came into being over against the world of the natural sciences, a world where nature is only the environment, and human action the central fact-All these influences blended in the post-Kantian philosophy. In Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel the transcendental philosophy of Kant, the romantic faith in the creative powers of man and his close kinship with the world spirit, and the new vision of cultural and social development in human history, came together into a brilliant though short-lived unity.

In Dilthey’s generation the unity was already breaking up. A strong reaction had set in against metaphysical speculation. Materialism and positivism were coming into vogue. A cry was raised for a return to Kant : not the Kant of the second and third Critiques, who had inspired Fichte and his successors, but the positivist Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason. Dilthey shared in the reaction, but at the same time had a deep sympathy for the romantic ideal of life and art, and a comprehension of the historical movement, which made it impossible to write off the post-Kantians as his contemporaries were doing. He wished to do with them as Dr. I. A. Richards has recently done with Coleridge, accepting and developing his psychology and aesthetic while explaining his metaphysics away. Dilthey shows no trace of the influence of that Hegelian Left, represented by Feuerbach and Marx, which found it possible to discard Hegel’s idealism while retaining his dialectic. He joined in the cry for a return to Kant, but insisted on the whole Kant, the man who not only analysed the presuppositions of natural ‘science and showed its powers and its limitations but also pointed beyond it to the moral, aesthetic, and religious consciousness which is the root of metaphysics, even while he showed that metaphysics as a branch of knowledge is a vain dream. By doing all this, Kant set the problem for subsequent philosophers: to retain the deenest understanding of the moral aesthetic and religious elements in experience while redeeming them from speculative interpretations and making them the object of empirical scientific study It was the problem which the historical movement was solving in practice, and the task of philosophy as Dilthey saw it was to work out the epistemological and logical foundations of the historical studies and build these into the Kantian structure, side by side with Kant’s own epistemology and logic of the natural sciences.

Of the post-Kantians themselves, one stood out in his mind above the rest—Schleiermacher, whom he had met in the course of his early theological studies, and who continued to fascinate him throughout his life. His analysis of the religious consciousness, his conception of the dialectical relation between universal type and individual instance, and most of all his famous hermeneutic, or theory of the principles of understanding and interpretation, remained familiar themes in Dilthey’s own philosophy, where the two latter have a fundamental importance. One of Dilthey’s best-known works is his Life of Schleiermacher, a monumental achievement even though he did not live to finish it. Only in his last years, after 1900, did Dilthey give equally sympathetic attention to Hegel, but when he did so, he found in him, too, a great deal to admire.

Dilthey was fully aware of his dependence on these two main sources, the Anglo-French empiricism and the German blend of Kant with romanticism and the historical movement. He believed that each had faults which could be cured by combining it with the other, and that the union of these two traditions, so disparate and yet alike in making man their central object of study, was the peculiar task of the nineteenth century. In his own philosophy their union is carried far, but not so far that their tension is overcome, and there are points where he failed to reconcile the two sides of himself, and therefore failed to produce a coherent doctrine. He was right, however, in thinking that the two traditions need one another, and that each is strong where the other is weak. The empiricists are strong in their refusal to indulge in speculative theories, their determination to be scientific and realistic, and their successful attempt to make their knowledge a force for social reform, as in the outstanding instance of the philosophical radicals. They fail in their understanding of the deeper levels of experience. The Kantian-romantic-historical tradition has this understanding, but is apt to run off into speculation instead of girding itself for action. Dilthey repeats with approval Carlyle’s characterization of it in the typical figure of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, the Professor without a pupil, who sits in his tower and meditates on things in general, or descends only to utter cryptic epigrams in the Grüne Gans.¹ To give Bentham the wisdom of Goethe, and Goethe the practical genius of Bentham, would be the ideal.

Dilthey is one of those philosophers who are drawn to philosophy not only by the direct study of it, but also by questions which arise in their study of other things. His interests ranged widely. In particular he was so deeply interested in history, and wrote so much on historical and biographical subjects, that to many people he is better known as a historian than as a philosopher. It was not political and institutional history that he wrote, but the history of ideas : history of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of various stages in the development of European and especially German thought and culture from this period to the age of the post-Kantians. His Life of Schleiermacher and his Early Life of Hegel belong to this historical category of writing as much as to the strictly philosophic, and together with his Conception and Analysis of Human Nature in the ijth and 16th Centuries and other essays they have given him a secure reputation in this field of learning. His writings on the Renaissance and the subsequent centuries show a great interest in the attempt then made to establish a rational anthropology or doctrine of the nature of man, and to discover a natural law which might be the basis for a generally agreed moral and political system. He also traces through the same period the development of hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation which, arising in antiquity and kept alive by the Church, came to maturity in Schleiermacher, who generalized it and made it an integral part of ordinary epistemology and logic.

With this interest in history went an interest in the fine arts, especially in poetry and music. This was, however, a philosopher’s or a historian’s interest in art rather than that of an artist. It was less concerned with technique and formal values than with the content expressed in the work of art, and its significance as a revelation of the mind of man in general and of particular ages and cultures. It found an outlet in numbers of historical and critical essays, in most of which the historical or biographical interest is well to the fore, and in several works on aesthetics, which concern themselves with the psychological mechanism of artistic creativity and the social and intellectual influence of the arts. This side of his work naturally shows close links with his interest in hermeneutics.

In view of Dilthey’s interest in historical and social questions, the British reader will probably learn with surprise that he wrote only one short book on ethics, and nothing at all devoted specifically to what in this country is called political theory. This was not due to indifference, but to a feeling that much spadework remained to be done about the foundations on which any future moral and political theory would have to rest. In an age when scientific method was being brought over from the natural sciences and acclimatized in the human studies, it seemed to him that the rough-and-ready introspective psychology, eked out by metaphysical abstractions, which is the stock-in-trade of so many moral and political theorists, was becoming out of date, and that what was needed was a thorough grounding in psychology and social science before the attempt was made even to formulate the questions in the moral and political field. Dilthey never supposed that he himself had done the necessary spadework. He thought that he had blazed a trail which others would be able to follow to the end. This was a just estimate of his achievement. In moral and political theory he appears not as the prophet of a particular doctrine, but as the forerunner and inspirer of a movement from which light has come in various ways. He is Socrates rather than Plato.

In his early years Dilthey was very conscious of isolation in his philosophical work. He was asking questions which ran counter to prevailing habits of thought, trying to unite elements from mutually hostile traditions, and antagonizing each by questioning what it held to be axiomatic. He writes of himself as “ moving in an unknown country ”² as working towards a new way of philosophizing, and indeed he was one of those who have dared to call in question not this or that philosophical opinion, but the future of philosophy itself. His writings of all periods show traces of attempts to find common ground with contemporary movements, some of which were only verbally in unison with him, while none shared his vision of the amplitude of the task to be done. Once he suffered the mortification of being attacked with violence and contempt by a psychologist with whom he had thought himself to be in agreement. In his later years the intellectual climate changed, and before he died he saw the questions which he had raised being taken up seriously by other philosophers, and a group of pupils gathered round himself who promised to continue the work which he had begun.

Since that time, at least until the Nazi purge of German thought, his influence has continued to grow in various directions. His hermeneutic, his psychological and sociological programme, his conceptions of life, history, culture, have all proved fruitful and have become starting-points for work by later writers. To-day he is recognized as one of the mos...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Selected Passages from Wilhelm Dilthey
• Notes on some Technical terms in Dilthey
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Index of Persons