German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Dilthey to Honneth

Julian Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000603668
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

The path taken by German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting and controversial in the history of human thought, by turns radical and conservative and secular and religious. In this outstanding introduction, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth—the third and final volume in his trilogy—Julian Young examines the work of eight German philosophers and theologians of the period. He discusses their engagement with the deepest existential questions, their critique of the rationalization and mechanization of modernity, and their commitment to varying forms of liberalism, socialism, and democracy.

Young introduces and assesses the thought of the following figures:

• Wilhelm Dilthey: the need for 'worldviews', and the distinction between 'explanation' and 'understanding' as a bulwark against the reduction of human beings to scientific quanta
• Karl Jaspers: existentialism, the challenge of nihilism, and the turn to theology
• Edith Stein: the phenomenology of empathy, community versus society, and the turn to Catholicism
• Paul Tillich: philosophical theology and the 'theonomous' life
• Martin Buber: recovering the 'thou' in the face of modernity's reduction of everything to an 'it'; the kibbutz as the paradigm of a socialist community
• Hans Jonas: the mortal threat posed by the unknown consequences of modern technology and the ethics of responsibility for the planet
• Erich Fromm: the 'art of loving' as a bulwark against hard and soft totalitarianism; the replacement of capitalism by communitarian socialism
• Axel Honneth: contemporary Hegelianism and the ethics and politics of recognition; the nature of real freedom.

Lucidly and engagingly written, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology, and theology and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, political theory, and sociology.

German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger (2018) and German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Lukács to Strauss (2020) are also available from Routledge.

1 Wilhelm Dilthey Explanation and understanding

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279495-2

Wilhelm Dilthey was born near Biebrich am Rhein in 1833, and attended gymnasium in nearby Wiesbaden. Though not a Christian (his disposition was towards pantheism [p. 11 below]), to please his parents, he enrolled to study theology at Heidelberg University. He was more interested, however, in the philosophy classes he took from Kuno Fischer (the author of a nine-volume history of modern philosophy that was the source of almost all of Nietzsche’s knowledge of the subject). He continued his studies in Berlin where he came under the influence of students of the founder of modern hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher; one of his unfinished projects was an intellectual biography of Schleiermacher. In 1867, he obtained a position at the University of Basel and became friends with the great historian Jakob Burckhardt, in spite of Burckhardt’s Schopenhauerian pessimism which horrified him. In 1869, he moved to a position in Kiel, just missing Nietzsche who arrived in Basel a few months after his departure. In 1882, he became professor of philosophy in Berlin, occupying the chair once occupied by Hegel. Having been born a decade before Nietzsche, he died a decade after him in 1911.

As Hannah Arendt observes, Dilthey was a comfortable member of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, devoid of sympathy for its ‘great haters’, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. He would have been appalled, she observes, by Nietzsche’s contempt for the life of the scholar. Nonetheless, she allows, he does represent what was best in the ‘spirit of his age’.¹ Politically Dilthey was a German communitarian (p. 13 below) who supported German unification. But while no revolutionary, he was also a supporter of reform, a believer in liberalism, democracy, human rights, and the Rechtsstaat (state founded on the rule of law). Both commitments find expression in a speech delivered on the occasion of his seventieth birthday: his greatest happiness, he says, is that he had lived to see ‘the unification of our beloved German nation [1871] and the more liberal shaping of its regulations’ (SW VI 163).

Dilthey had the habit of beginning large-scale projects and never finishing them. And so what confronts the reader is a large collection of fragments: unfinished books, unpublished drafts, long essays, and public lectures. Perhaps appropriately, given that one of his main topics is hermeneutics, understanding Dilthey confronts one with a particularly difficult hermeneutical task. The somewhat unusual approach I shall take is to begin with his final writings and then work forwards to his earlier concerns.

Philosophy and worldviews

In the final years of his life, Dilthey began to reflect on the nature and value of his chosen profession, and in particular, on the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and ‘worldviews (Weltanschauungen)’ on the other. Like those before them, thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed that human nature, its emotional repertoire and modes of cognition, remained constant throughout history. Locke and Hume, for instance, speak only of the human mind, confident that their observations are as true of the fifth-century Greeks as of the eighteenth-century English. Nineteenth-century Germany, however, discovered ‘history’. Influenced by Hegel, historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen discovered ‘historical consciousness’, the fact that different historical epochs possess different, as Hegel called them, ‘shapes of consciousness’: different perspectives on life, different ways of conceptualising the real, different moralities, different fundamental moods, in a word, different ‘worldviews’. There is a temptation to say that if consciousness is always historically (and culturally) local, then so, too, is truth; to believe that all truth is confined or ‘relative’ to a particular historical epoch. But while postmodernism is generally happy to accept such a universal relativism, this is not how the nineteenth century saw matters. Whatever might be true of questions of value and of everyday commonsense, it assumed genuine ‘science’ to be unaffected by the historicality of consciousness and thus to be a—or rather the—source of, as Dilthey puts it, ‘universal validity’: ‘objective’, non-relative truth.

Dilthey sets out to resolve this tension between the universal truth of science and the historicality of consciousness. He frames the problem in terms of ‘worldviews’. Worldviews—for example, that of Christianity—claim to be universally true. But they are the products of historically local consciousness and so, it seems, their truth must be historically local too. This would not be a matter of concern to philosophy, says Dilthey, save for the fact that the great philosophies of the Western tradition have all been, at least in part, worldviews. So it seems that philosophy, too, is involved in a kind of fraudulence: in making claims to universal truth that cannot be justified. The project of Dilthey’s final years is to resolve this ‘antinomy’ (SW VI 169)—to show that while consciousness is indeed historical, the claim which the ‘science’² of philosophy makes to universal truth is genuinely warranted.

To approach his discussion, we need, first, to explore in greater detail his conception of a worldview, and, second, to determine what the relation between the philosophies of the past and worldviews is supposed to be.

What is a worldview?

The word Weltanschauung was coined by Kant (in Section 26 of the Critique of Judgment) who, in his discussion of the ‘mathematically sublime’, identifies a worldview as something infinite and as thus extending beyond ‘every standard of sense’. By the mid-nineteenth century, the word had come to mean a global outlook without rational pretentions. For Dilthey, the essential thing about worldviews is that they offer answers to the ‘riddle’ of life (SW VI 164, 168 et passim), to the fact that we are born (‘thrown’, as Heidegger puts it) into a problematic situation: a will to permanence combined with the certainty of death, a will to harmony combined with a world of conflict. What then should we do about our difficult situation? How should we live, if indeed we should continue to live at all? Worldviews provide answers.

Worldviews, says Dilthey, all have the same triadic structure: they provide an account of the ultimately real, an evaluative appraisal of life, and finally a prescription of ideals and goals. This structure corresponds to the three principal capacities of the mind: cognition, feeling, and volition (PE 25–7; EP 64), the cognitive, affective, and conative. Together, the three interconnected elements of a worldview provide a reading or interpretation of life in general, and of one’s own life in particular, that provides us with ‘sense and meaning’ (EP 64).

Worldviews, says Dilthey, can be broadly classified as either optimistic or pessimistic. Every worldview has a distinct ‘attitude’ or mood (EP 64), a fundamental mood that generates both evaluation and volition. Thus, to take (at least Schopenhauer’s version of) the Buddha’s worldview (EP 70), according to its cognitive component, life is craving and hence suffering, and hence worthless, from which it follows that we should have as little to do with it as possible and hope that death comes sooner rather than later. Notice that within worldviews, there is no separation between fact and value. The mood expressed by Buddhism’s negative evaluation of life, says Dilthey, is as much the ground as the product of its perception of life: it generates a cognitive bias that makes some things salient while obscuring others. And, of course, the volitional element in Buddhism is already contained in its evaluative, axiological element. For this reason, Dilthey describes the three components of worldviews as ‘equi-original’.³

By the time Dilthey came to write about them, the fashion for talking about worldviews had begun to wane and a counter-reaction had set in, a reaction that culminated in Husserl’s savage attack on ‘worldview philosophy’ in his ‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’ of 1911.⁴ Dilthey, however, likely influenced by Schopenhauer’s account of our ‘metaphysical need’ (the idea of life as a ‘riddle’ [p. 7 above] probably comes from Schopenhauer), takes the possession of a worldview to be a prerequisite of a properly flourishing life. Kant had viewed the idea of ‘world as a totality’ as an ‘idea of reason’ and the drive to a synoptic vision as intrinsic to the faculty of reason. But for Dilthey, it is not the intellect but rather ‘life’ that generates worldviews: ‘every true worldview’, he writes, ‘is an intuition which emerges from standing-in-the-middle-of-life’ (GS VIII 99).

Artists and philosophers are, he says, exceptional in that they ‘raise [worldviews] to consciousness’ (EP 40). But healthy, everyday being-in-the-world requires at least an inarticulate ‘view’ of the totality. Why should this be so? One reason is that, in modern life, we are bombarded with contradictory worldviews that are locked into a struggle for existence, that is, for converts. The ‘naïve consciousness’ that has not determined which one to adopt will thus be indecisive in the face of the swirling flux of opinion (EP 40, PE 28). But why cannot we just ignore them all, why do we need to adopt any worldview? On account, says Dilthey, of an inner flux, the flux of feeling and desire produced by our continual exposure to environmental stimuli. What the combination of ‘knowledge of the world, evaluation of life, and principles of action’ within a worldview does is to provide the ‘inner unification of personality in its various activities’ (EP 64), a unification which satisfies ‘the will within us that aims at stability’ (PE 24), abhors becoming the plaything of stimuli of the moment. As Goethe observes, growing up (at least in modern times) is typically a testing of different worldviews. There is a kind of Darwinian struggle within the developing mind until, with maturity, one settles on the one that ‘lead[s] on to more useful goals of life’ (PE 28). The settled worldview of the mature individual does not, however, become rigid: subtle refinements continue in accordance with one’s experience of life (EP 39–40). This acquiring and refining of one’s own worldview, clearly, is Dilthey’s account of Bildung, of that ‘character building’ (EP 67) that was the raison d’être of nineteenth-century German education.

The ‘essence’ of philosophy

How does philosophy come into the discussion of worldviews? What is the relation between philosophy and worldviews? What indeed is philosophy, what is its ‘essence’?

Borrowing Hegel’s classification of the main phases of Western civilisation, Dilthey identifies art (‘poetry’), religion, and philosophy (or ‘metaphysics’) as the media in which worldviews come to expression. Like Hegel, he suggests that art and religion are embryonic forms of philosophy—of philosophy, at least, according to its traditional conception. They have, that is, a natural tendency to grow into philosophy. With respect to religion, this is an historical fact: the paradoxes of religious belief (which Dilthey regards as actually insoluble) were what generated the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages (EP 50). Something similar is true with respect to poetry: the pre-Socratic poet-philosophers were the precursors of Greek philosophy proper (EP 59), Schiller expressed the poetic impulse that gave rise to German idealism (PE 66).

What, then, does metaphysics add to poetry and religion? In a word—one of Dilthey’s favourite words—‘system’: ‘systematic form’ is, he says, the ‘highest function’ of philosophy (SW VI 164, 168). By ‘system’, Dilthey means something that mimics the methodological rigour of a natural science: a hierarchically organised structure of propositions whose terms are all clearly defined and for whose fundamental propositions there is evidence so compelling as to allow them to make a legitimate claim to ‘universally valid truth’. The principal difference between philosophy on the one hand and poetry and religion on the other is that whereas philosophy offers proof, poetry and religion rely on ‘persuasion’. In this, they are ‘akin to the Sophists whom Plato banished so sternly from the realm of philosophy’. It is Nietzsche’s hostility to system (famously, he called the ‘will to system’ a ‘lack of integrity’) that in Dilthey’s mind, categorises him as a ‘writer’ rather than philosopher, a writer who has ‘broken every bond with philosophy as science’ (EP 31). (The fact that Nietzsche turned his back on the life of a professor and that his stellar light cast Dilthey into the shade might have something to do with Dilthey’s hostility towards his near contemporary.)

The difference, then, between philosophy, on the one hand, and art and religion, on the other, is, in a word, the difference between ‘knowledge in its strictest form as science’ and non-science which might be referred to as ‘wisdom’ (EP 9). Hence, as Husserl puts Dilthey’s point, as traditionally conceived, philosophy claims to combine two things: worldviews and science.⁵ Husserl is sharply critical of Dilthey because he believes that they cannot be combined. What he fails to realise, however, as we are about to see, is that this is Dilthey’s final position too.

The problem of relativism

Religious worldviews (monotheistic ones, at least) claim ‘universal validity’—claim to be the one and only true religion. Literary worldviews on the other hand, suggests Dilthey, ‘relax’ the claim to universal validity, giving expression merely to one particular life-experience (EP 31). There is, Dilthey is suggesting, a tacit element of autobiography in the literary expression of worldviews. Thomas Hardy presents us with lowering skies and tragic fates, but accompanies his portrait of rural Wessex with an implicit ‘This is my experience of life; perhaps it is yours, too—though perhaps not’. But when such a worldview is presented as ‘metaphysics’ (by, for instance, Schopenhauer) per force, it claims to be universally valid: to be the one and only correct account of the fundamental nature of the world and of the correct manner of living within it. Purporting to be ‘science’, it claims to be an account of things which, as rational beings, we must accept. Here, however, we confront the (for Kant, ‘scandalous’) fact that the history of philosophy records, not a steady march towards universally agreed truth as in the natural sciences, but rather an ‘anarchy or philosophical systems’ (PE 17), a cacophony of incommensurable metaphysical systems clamouring for our allegiance.

How are we to explain this anarchy? The answer is clear. Metaphysics is the presentation of a worldview in scientific clothing. But

every worldview is historically conditioned, hence limited, hence [unlike the universal validity of genuine science] relative. A horrendous anarchy of thought seems to follow from this.

(SW VI 167)

‘Historically conditioned’ is an abbreviation for all sorts of conditioning to which worldviews are subject. It is not only differences in historical epoch that determine different worldviews but also differences in climate, race, and nationality, as well as differences in individual life-experience and temperament (PE 27–8). That worldviews should be so conditioned is a product of their essentially practical nature: since they are practical—‘technical’, Dilthey sometimes says (EP 67)—since they are tools for coping with life, and since the conditions of life vary from locale to locale and from individual to individual, so do worldviews. As philosophy, worldviews are all Lebensphilosophie, ‘philosophy of [and for] life’ (EP 13). (Pierre Hadot points out that during the Hellenistic period, philosophies were explicitly considered to be tools for living. They were offered as ‘spiritual exercises’ for coping with life, so while Stoicism might be considered the ‘right’ philosophy for one kind of individual, Cynicism, Scepticism, or Epicureanism might be ‘right’ for others.)⁶

* * *

‘Character’ (PE 44), individual temperament, is particularly important in accounting for what Dilthey regards as the three broad kinds of metaphysical systems that have dominated the history of philosophy: ‘naturalism’, ‘objective idealism’, and ‘subjective idealism’ or the ‘idealism of freedom’, a triad corresponding to the three mental faculties, the cognitive, affective, and conative. Naturalism, he says, is likely to be adopted by someone in whom the perceptual faculty is dominant, subjective idealism by someone in whom volition is dominant, and objective idealism by someone in whom the affects are dominant.

Naturalism, the view that ‘nothing exists outside nature’ (PE 53), is a worldview that runs from Democritus via Hobbes to modern positivism. It is the product of ‘sensuous man’, of one who, like Epicurus, wishes to enjoy a life of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Wilhelm Dilthey: Explanation and understanding
• 2 Karl Jaspers: The first existentialist
• 3 Edith Stein: Empathy, community, and Catholicism
• 4 Paul Tillich: Religious existentialism
• 5 Martin Buber: I and thou
• 6 Hans Jonas: Responsibility for the planet
• 7 Erich Fromm: Humanistic psychology
• 8 Axel Honneth: The struggle for recognition
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index