## 1. Dilthey's Life and Thought


### 1.1 Brief Overview of Dilthey's Philosophical Development



Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1833, two years
after Hegel had died. Dilthey's ambivalent attitude towards
Hegel can provide some initial clues about his own philosophical
approach. He admired Hegel's recognition of the historical
dimension of philosophical thought, but rejected the speculative and
metaphysical ways he developed this relation. Like the Neo-Kantians,
Dilthey proposed a return to the more focused viewpoint of Kant, but
not without also taking account of the higher emancipatory aspirations
and broader perspectives of later thinkers such as Fichte, Herder, and
Hegel.



Dilthey characterized his own expansive view of philosophy as one of
establishing integral relations to all the theoretical disciplines and
historical practices that attempt to make sense of the world. Instead
of demarcating the boundaries that set philosophy apart from other
ways of engaging life, Dilthey conceives its critical task as
articulating the overall structures that define the human spirit in
general. Relatively early in his career, philosophy is defined as
"an experiential science of spiritual phenomena" that
seeks to "cognize the laws governing social, intellectual and
moral phenomena" (1867/GS.V, 27). Philosophy should aim to
preserve the scope that idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
had given it, but it must do so by recapturing the Kantian rigor that
had been lost and by proceeding empirically.



These goals, as formulated in the inaugural lecture that Dilthey gave
in 1867 on assuming his first professorship in Basel, were already
prefigured in his early journals. Thus in 1859 Dilthey wrote that a
new Critique of Reason must proceed on the basis of the psychological
laws and impulses from which art, religion and science all derive. All
intellectual systems are mere crystallizations of more generic
schemata rooted in life (JD, 80).



The early Dilthey conceived his goal as a broadening of the critical
project that would ground the human sciences as Kant had grounded the
natural sciences. His hope then was that the human sciences would be
able to arrive at lawful explanations just like the natural sciences.
Up until at least 1887, when he published his *Poetics*,
Dilthey was confident that inner explanations of human creativity
could be arrived at. He himself formulated three laws of the
imaginative metamorphosis to account for the uplifting effect that
poets can have on us. Dilthey summarizes them as the laws of
exclusion, intensification, and completion. Even in ordinary
experience images are transformed by excluding what is no longer of
interest and intensifying what remains based on our present interests.
But what distinguishes poetic imagery is that it is also completed by
the overall life-concerns of a powerful psyche. 



Through his efforts to work out a kind of *gestaltist*
psychology that could frame this third law of imaginative completion,
Dilthey came to modify some of his basic assumptions. He came to
realize that the overall psychic nexus of an individual was not a
sufficient contextual frame to explain human experience. Our
experience can only be understood by describing it as it as a
continuum that is gradually acquired over time. What he calls the
"acquired psychic nexus" is itself historically embedded
in a social world. This means that our access to history is much more
direct than our access to nature. We feel ourselves as part of history
whereas nature has come to increasingly stand apart from us. Although
Dilthey is still willing to accept that objects of outer experience
are phenomenal, he no longer accepts the Kantian thesis that the
contents of inner experience are phenomenal as well. Inner experience
is reconceived as lived experience *(Erlebnis)* that is real
and the time that relates us to history is not merely the ideal form
that Kant had exposited for nature.

 -


This second phase of Dilthey's thought is characterized by a
stress on the reality of lived experience and on the immediate
understanding of human life that this makes possible. It is in the
"Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology" of 1894
that Dilthey works out his explanation-understanding distinction.
"We explain through purely intellectual processes, but we
understand through the cooperation of all the powers of the mind
activated by apprehension" (1894/SW.II, 147). The human sciences
will henceforth be conceived as primarily concerned with understanding
the meaning of human action and interaction. Also central to this
second phase of Dilthey's thought is the essay "The Origin
of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its
Justification" of 1890. Our initial access to the external world
is not inferential, but is felt as resistance to the will. The world
of lived experience is not merely a theoretical representation, but is
directly present to us as embodying values that are relevant to our
purposes. The stress on feeling and immediacy in this second phase
amounts to a rejection of Hegel's dialectical approach.



If the first phase was characterized by a search for inner
explanations and the second phase by direct understanding, the third
phase can be characterized by the need for interpretation. This final
phase can be said to span the last decade of Dilthey's life
until his death in 1911. It begins with the realization in the essay
"The Rise of Hermeneutics" of 1900 that the inner
intelligibility of lived experience does not yet constitute full
understanding. Self-understanding must also be mediated from without.
The way we express ourselves, whether in communication or in action,
is a crucial intermediary in defining ourselves. Understanding can
only be reliable if it proceeds through the interpretation of human
objectifications. Thus we properly understand ourselves not through
introspection but through historical contextualization. It is in this
last phase of his thought that Dilthey, who now occupied the chair
that Hegel had once held in Berlin, revives his predecessor's
theory of objective spirit as the medium relating us to the past. In
1906 Dilthey published a seminal work on the young Hegel -
*Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels* - that made use of recently
discovered theological and political fragments. These unknown early
fragments disclosed Hegel's historical geniality before it
became constrained by the dialectical systematization that Dilthey had
always objected to. Dilthey's student Herman Nohl was helpful in
deciphering some of these fragments and went on to publish them. Nohl
also edited a volume of Dilthey's writings on the history of
German Idealism going back to Kant, Beck and Fichte and leading up to
such contemporaries of Hegel as Schelling, Schleiermacher,
Schopenhauer and Fries.


### 1.2 The Religious Background of Dilthey's Philosophy



Dilthey followed family tradition by starting his university studies
at Heidelberg in theology. There he was also introduced to the
philosophical systems of the idealists by Kuno Fischer. Because
Fischer was accused of being a pantheist, his right to teach was
withdrawn in 1853. Dilthey then moved to the University of Berlin,
where he came under the influence of two of Friedrich
Schleiermacher's students, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and
August Boeckh. Increasingly, Schleiermacher became the focus of
Dilthey's interests. In 1859 he was asked to complete the
editing of Schleiermacher's letters. That year the
Schleiermacher Society also organized an essay competition.
Dilthey's submission entitled "Schleiermacher's
Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant
Hermeneutics" (1860, SW.IV, 33-227), was awarded the first
prize and led to a second commission, namely, to write
Schleiermacher's biography. The first volume of this biography
was published in 1870. It places Schleiermacher not only in his
theological setting but also in the context of the literary and
philosophical movements astir in Berlin from 1796 to 1807. The work
displays Dilthey's own expanding interests in aesthetical and
philosophical issues. He also wrote his dissertation on
Schleiermacher's ethics.



As a theology student, Dilthey had begun a study of many early
formulations of the Christian worldview, which though never completed,
continued to influence his subsequent writings. In 1860 Dilthey writes
that 



> 
> 
> it is my calling to apprehend the innermost nature of religious life
> in history and to bring this to the attention of our times which are
> moved exclusively by matters of state and science. (JD, 140) 
> 
> 
> 



This means looking for religiosity not so much in its institutional
practices and its theological doctrines as in the recesses of human
experience. In a similar vein, he asserts that it is necessary to
recover the "religious-philosophical worldview that is buried
under the ruins of our theology and philosophy" (JD, 140).



Dilthey conceives religious experience as an extension of
Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence. It is a total
experience that interweaves a feeling of dependence with an awareness
of a capacity to uplift ourselves. Religious experience is regarded as
an enduring background and accompaniment of human intellectual life.
Religion has manifested itself in many forms such as mythical
representations, mystical ideas of revelation and human redemption,
theological doctrines, and metaphysical theories. Because of its
emphasis on meteorological events (1883/ SW I, 450), Dilthey saw myth
as a primitive scientific theory that compromised the genuine
religiosity of mystical feelings.



Later as he reflected on the nature of worldviews, Dilthey would
occasionally return to the problem of religion. What distinguishes the
religious worldview from artistic and philosophical worldviews is that
it relates the visible to what is invisible, life to our awareness of
death. In a striking late passage, Dilthey writes that when life is
experienced religiously and 



> 
> 
> according to its true nature--full of hardships and a singular
> blend of suffering and happiness throughout--<we are>
> pointed to something strange and unfamiliar, as if it were coming from
> invisible sources, something <pressing in> on life from outside,
> yet coming from its own depths. (ca. 1910/SW.III, 285)
> 
> 
> 



The same non-transcendent perspective on religion is to be found in
Dilthey's last essay, written during the final days of his life
in 1911 while he was on vacation in the Dolomites. This essay on
"The Problem of Religion" points to the fact that the
Enlightenment has made it increasingly difficult to acknowledge the
mystical aspects of religious experience. Enlightenment thinkers
regarded mystical experience as irrational. But according to Dilthey,
Schleiermacher was able to avoid this charge of irrationalism by
relating core aspects of religious experience to the insights of
transcendental philosophy. Instead of interpreting the mystical
feeling of communion as an esoteric union with a transcendent God,
Schleiermacher explicates it as a general awareness that is attuned to
the invisible coherence of things down here (1911/SW.VI,304-05).
He gives a transcendental reading of what is intuited and felt in the
religious mood by transforming it into a creative life-principle.
Whereas traditionally mysticism tended to devalue our life in this
world, Schleiermacher's mysticism is seen as affirming it.


## 2. Dilthey's Main Philosophical Works


### 2.1 The 1880s: Broadening the Critical Framework



Dilthey's first major theoretical work is the *Introduction
to the Human Sciences* of 1883. The human sciences
(*Geisteswissenschaften*) encompass both the humanities and the
social sciences. They range from disciplines like philology, literary
and cultural studies, religion and psychology, to political science
and economics. Dilthey insists that the human sciences be related not
by some logical construct on the order of August Comte or J.S. Mill,
but by means of reflective considerations that take their historical
genesis into account. Dilthey writes that 



> 
> 
> the human sciences as they exist and as they are practiced according
> to the reason of things that were active in their history ...
> contain three classes of assertions. (1883/SW.I, 78) 
> 
> 
> 



These are 1) descriptive and historical statements, 2) theoretical
generalizations about partial contents and 3) evaluative judgments and
practical rules. The human sciences are more obviously normative in
nature than the natural sciences for which formal norms related to
objective inquiry suffice. The fact that the human sciences are forced
to confront substantive normative issues puts a limit on the kind of
theoretical regularities that can be established in the human
sciences. Given the core role that human beings play in the
socio-historical world, the understanding of individuality is as
important in the human sciences as are the explanations to be found
through generalizations.



But the human science of psychology that deals with individual human
beings cannot examine them apart from interactions with society.
"Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction"
(1883/SW.I, 83). This means that psychology can be a foundational
human science only if it is conceived as being primarily descriptive.
Psychological explanations may still be possible, but only by starting
with a non-hypothetical base that describes how our experience
assimilates social and cultural features. Many human character traits
are not purely psychological. Thus when we speak of a person as
thrifty we are combining economic and psychological features.



Individual human beings are important for the understanding of
history, but instead of making them the monadic building blocks of
history, they are to be considered as points of intersection of many
forces. Only a multidisciplinary approach to human history can do it
justice. *Qua* conscious living beings, individuals are the
carriers of history, but they are just as much the products of
history. Individuals are not self-sufficient atoms. But neither are
they to be regarded as swallowed up by encompassing communities like
nations or peoples. Concepts that posit the soul of a people
"are no more usable in history than is the concept of life-force
in physiology" (1883/SW.I, 92). Suspicion of those who posit
overriding self-sufficient entities like nations and peoples led
Dilthey to distance himself from the nationalism of his contemporary
Heinrich von Treitschke and to ally himself with a political reformism
reminiscent of Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt.



Dilthey conceives of most of the human sciences as analyzing human
interactions at a level that can mediate between individual initiative
and communal tradition. These sciences deal with what he calls
"cultural systems" and "external organizations of
society". Cultural systems are associations that individuals
join voluntarily for certain purposes that they can only achieve
through cooperation. These systems are cultural in the widest possible
sense and include all aspects of our social life. They can be
political, economic, artistic, scientific or religious in nature and
are not normally bound by national or other overarching interests.
External organizations of society by contrast are those more
controlling institutional structures like a family and a state that we
are born into. Here "enduring causes bind the wills of many into
a single whole" (1883/SW.I, 94) within which relations of power,
dependence and property can be established. It is important to
cross-reference cultural systems and institutional organizations.
Enlightenment thinkers had focused on cultural systems such as
scientific academies and their potential universal scope while
overlooking how most educational institutions are controlled by local
authorities. Although Dilthey received his training from members of
the Historical School, he recognized that many of them had been
equally one-sided by stressing the distinctive institutional
organizations that separate different peoples while ignoring the role
of generalizations made possible through the analysis of cultural
systems.



Dilthey aims to combine these two approaches to liberalize the
historicist perspective and give it a methodological rigor. To
understand the role of the law in historical life we must consider it
both as a cultural system that frames legal issues in universal terms
and as an external organization of society that examines them in terms
of the positive laws of particular institutions. The Historical School
was wrong to regard individuals as completely subordinate to the bonds
of family and state and to think that the positive laws of
institutions define the full reality of life. The authority of the
state "encompasses only a certain portion ... of the
collective power of the populace" and even when state power
exerts a certain preponderance it can do so only "through the
cooperation of psychological impulses" (1883/SW.I, 132).



In the preface to the *Introduction to the Human Sciences*,
Dilthey refers to his project as a Critique of Historical Reason. We
can now see that this is first of all a critique of the metaphysical
thesis that there can be an overarching "universal explanatory
framework for all historical facts" (1883/SW.I, 141). If
universal explanations are to be possible for history as well as for
nature, then we must recognize that they are only possible for
correlating partial contents of reality. The reason that the natural
sciences have been so successful in discovering causal laws of nature
is that they abstract from the full scope of the external world. 



> 
> 
> *The conditions* sought by the *mechanistic explanation*
> of nature explain only *part of the contents of external
> reality*. This intelligible world of atoms, ether, vibrations, is
> only a calculated and highly artificial abstraction from what is given
> in outer and lived experience. (1883/SW.I, 203) 
> 
> 
> 



The human sciences cannot similarly construct an abstract phenomenal
world that focuses on physical and chemical processes and appeals to
hypothetical atomic or even subatomic elements. It is incumbent on the
human sciences to deal with the more complex networks of the
historical world and the actual givens of human beings. Explanations
that are adequate for the historical world will require an analysis of
the multiple partial contents that are relevant in a particular
context. According to Dilthey the human sciences must replace the
abstract methodology of the natural sciences with an analytic
counterpart. 



> 
> 
> Abstraction is distinguished from analysis in that the former singles
> out *one* fact and disregards the others, whereas the latter
> seeks to apprehend the majority of the facts that make up the factors
> of a complex whole. (ca. 1880-1893/SW.I, 433) 
> 
> 
> 



The more facts that explanations seek to correlate, the more limited
their scope must be. Thus the laws to be discovered in the human
sciences will apply not to history in general, but only to specific
cultural systems or institutional organizations. It may be possible to
arrive at causal laws of economic growth, of scientific progress or of
literary development, but not at overarching historical laws of human
progress.



So far Dilthey has argued for a relative independence of the human
sciences *vis-a-vis* the better established natural
sciences. However, from the transcendental perspective that considers
the conditions our consciousness brings to experience, the human
sciences must claim a reflective priority. The realization that the
human sciences not only ascertain what is--as do the natural
sciences--but also make value judgments, establish goals and
prescribe rules, discloses that they are much more directly related to
the full reality of lived experience. The Kantian I-think that is the
basis of the conceptual cognition (*Erkenntnis*) of the natural
sciences really derives from a direct knowing (*Wissen*) rooted
in Dilthey's more inclusive thinking-feeling-willing of lived
experience (see 1883/SW.I, 228, and ca. 1880-93/SW.I,
263-68). The natural sciences merely construct a phenomenal or
ideal world that abstracts from the real nexus of lived experience.
The world that is formed by the human sciences is the
historical-social reality in which human beings participate. It is a
real world that is directly possessed or present in what Dilthey calls
*Innewerden*. This term has sometimes been translated as
"inner awareness," but is is better to translate it as
"reflexive awareness" to indicate how things are
there-for-us. Reflexive awareness is a pre-reflective, indexical mode
of consciousness that "does not place a content over against the
subject of consciousness (it does not re-present it)" (ca.
1880-93/SW.I, 253). It is the direct know-how that reality is
present-for-me prior to any of the reflective act-content,
inner-outer, or subject-object distinctions that characterize the
representational world of conceptual cognition.



The human sciences must hold on to the original presence of this
directly known reality even as they proceed to use the intellectual
tools of conceptual cognition in their analysis of partial contents.
The way the historical world is represented and analyzed must in some
way still reflect the way history has been lived. The final
understanding (*Verstehen*) aimed at by Dilthey's human
sciences must draw on all our capacities and is to be distinguished
from the mere intellectual and abstract understanding
(*Verstand*) of Kant's natural sciences. 



In attempting to convey the richness and depth of lived experience,
the human sciences must also consider the contribution of the arts.
Aesthetics constitutes an important cultural system in that it can
provide a sense of how the arts can contribute to human understanding
in general. Dilthey's *Poetics* of 1887 represents an
effort to develop certain psychological concepts to explicate the
workings of the poetic imagination. Even in ordinary life, the images
we extract from experience are subject to metamorphosis. With time all
our images are transformed, for "the same image can no more
return than the same leaf can grow back on a tree the following
spring" (1887/SW.V, 102). The first law of metamorphosis
involves the exclusion of those constituents of images that are not
valuable to us. Not every apprehended constituent is worth
remembering. According to Dilthey we do not just passively absorb
every impression that comes our way. We filter out what is not worth
perceiving by a process of apperception. This apperception is guided
by what is called an "acquired nexus of psychic life".
Because this gradually acquired nexus differs for each subject, the
process of exclusion never has the same outcome.



Some of what has not been excluded by the first law of imaginative
metamorphosis can then become the focus of special attention.
According to Dilthey's second law of imaginative metamorphosis
"Images are transformed when they expand or contract, when the
intensity of the sensations of which they are composed is increased or
decreased" (1887/SW.V, 102). Such a change in intensity can
apply to either the reproductive imagination of ordinary memory or the
productive imagination of poets or novelists. In the former case of
memory an increase of intensity tends to be as much a function of a
present practical interest as of acquired experience. In the latter
case of the imagination of poets an increase of intensity is more
likely to be primarily regulated by their overall acquired psychic
nexus. What distinguishes the imagination of great poets according to
Dilthey is their capacity to ignore the constant distractions and
mundane interests of daily life. Only they can unfold imagery in a way
that reflects our overall human values.



The third law of imaginative metamorphosis involves their completion,
by which Dilthey means a process "by which something outer is
enlivened by something inner or something inner is made visible and
intuitable by something outer" (1887/SW.V, 104). In completion
there is an interpenetration between inner feeling and outer
perception so that the very nucleus of an image can symbolize the
overall acquired psychic nexus. Dilthey writes, 



> 
> 
> *Only when the whole acquired psychic nexus becomes active* can
> images be transformed on the basis of it: *innumerable,
> immeasurable, almost imperceptible changes* occur in their
> nucleus. And in this way, the completion of the particular originates
> from the fullness of psychic life. (1887/SW.V, 104)
> 
> 
> 



This last law of imaginative completion applies only to artists and
allows them to articulate the essential meaning of
life-situations--through them we come to see what is typical in
life. These laws of metamorphosis are conceived as explanative to the
extent that they appeal to an overall acquired psychic nexus as their
ultimate context. But a more comprehensive descriptive account shows
these laws to be rather schematic and unable to capture all the
qualitative changes that result for our understanding of the world
more generally. And for that reason Dilthey backs away from pure
psychological explanations after 1887. In the essay "Three
Epochs of Modern Aesthetics" of 1892 he redescribes imaginative
metamorphosis more structurally. A portrait painter is said to order
the structure of what is objectively perceived 



> 
> 
> around one especially noticeable point, which I will call the
> aesthetic point of impression. Every carefully observed face is
> understood on the basis of such a dominant impression .... On the
> basis of this impression and repeated memory, indifferent features are
> excluded, while telling features are stressed and refractory ones
> de-emphasized. The remaining whole is unified ever more decisively.
> (1892/SW.V, 217) 
> 
> 
> 



Now exclusion, intensification and unifying completion are understood
as part of a process of articulating the structure of our experience
of reality.


### 2.2 The 1890s: Understanding as Structural Articulation



This new, more descriptive structural approach is inaugurated in the
essay "The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External
World and Its Justification" of 1890. Here Dilthey writes that
the structure of all psychic life consists of impressions
"evoking purposive reactions in the system of our drives and the
feelings connected with them" (1890a/SW.II, 14). Rather than
basing our initial sense of an external world on theoretical
inferences from effects to causes, he roots it in a felt resistance to
the will. But resistance must be internalized as a restraint of a
volitional intention for it to signify the existence of something
independent. Thus Dilthey is not merely replacing a representational
phenomenalism with a direct perceptual realism. Each perceptual
process has "an inner side" that involves "an energy
and affective tone deriving from inner strivings that connect it to
our own life" (1890a/SW.II, 14). All aspects of our own life are
brought into play as we respond to the world.



In 1894 Dilthey published his "Ideas for a Descriptive and
Analytic Psychology" and established how it differs from
traditional explanative psychologies. He admits that even a
descriptive psychology will seek to explicate the causal relationships
of life, but that it must differ from explanative psychology by not
trying to "derive a comprehensive and transparent cognition of
psychological phenomena from a limited number of univocally determined
elements" (1894/SW.II, 116). Unlike the associationists, Dilthey
will not posit simple, stable impressions that are then combined into
more complex ideas. They introduce unnecessary hypothetical elements
into the foundation of psychology. 



> 
> 
> In psychology it is precisely the connectedness that is originally and
> continually given in lived experience: life presents itself everywhere
> only as a continuum or nexus. (1894/SW.II, 119-20) 
> 
> 
> 



It is the task of a descriptive and analytic psychology to explicate
how different processes converge in the nexus of consciousness. This
nexus is lived and must be distinguished from the overall acquired
psychic nexus discussed earlier. The lived nexus is available to
reflexive awareness and can be described as itself an ongoing process.
Analysis then shows this process to have a rather uniform
cross-sectional structure. Almost every momentary state of
consciousness can be seen "to simultaneously contain some kind
of representing, feeling, and willing" (1894/SW.II, 173).



If we were merely representational beings, the conditions of psychic
life would be merely causal. But we at the same time estimate the
value of what we represent through feeling. 



> 
> 
> Once external conditions evoke a sense of pressure or intensification
> in the sphere of feeling, a striving comes about to either maintain or
> to modify a given state. (1894/SW.II, 177) 
> 
> 
> 



The interest of feeling that attaches to aspects of what is
experienced allows us to value them as either favorable or unfavorable
to our existence and sets the stage for the will to possibly act on
their basis.



> 
> 
> To the extent that the parts [of the experiential nexus] are connected
> structurally so as to link the satisfaction of the drives and
> happiness and to reject suffering, we call this nexus purposive. It is
> solely in psychic structure that the character of purposiveness is
> originally given, and when we attribute this to an organism or to the
> world, this concept is only transferred from inner lived experience.
> Every relation of parts to a whole attains the character of
> purposiveness from the value that is realized in it. This value is
> experienced only in the life of feelings and drives. (1894/SW.II,
> 178)
> 
> 
> 



Psychic life is not constructed synthetically from discrete elements,
but is always already a continuum that is constantly differentiating
itself from within. By describing and analyzing this continuum Dilthey
brings out the breadth and depth of its scope and articulates it as a
structural nexus. And as he considers the temporal development of this
nexus, he further defines its purposiveness. Although the cognitive
and volitional subsystems of mental life may posit external ends, the
affective and overall psychic nexus displays what Kant called a
purposiveness without a determinant purpose. The overall acquired
psychic nexus exhibits a teleology that does not posit any final
*telos* to which all previous stages are to be subsumed. The
purposiveness of mental life is immanent and adaptive rather than
external and predetermined. Each stage of our life can be understood
as an epoch with its distinctive value.



> 
> Nothing can be more erroneous than viewing maturity as the goal of the
> development that constitutes life and thus transforming the early
> years into mere means. How could those years serve as means to a goal
> which in each case is so uncertain? Instead, it is part of the nature
> of life to strive to fill each moment with a richness of value.
> (1894/SW.II, 189)
> 



A further task of Dilthey's descriptive and analytic psychology
is to show how the development of the psychic nexus produces the
individuation of human life. Individuality is not conceived in terms
of unique qualities that we are endowed with, but as something that
each of us acquires historically. It is embodied in what was referred
to earlier as a subject's acquired psychic nexus and is only
gradually articulated. Even when people share the same qualities their
relative intensity will differ. Sometimes qualities are present to
such a small extent as to be, in effect, unnoticeable. Prominent
qualities, however, tend to reinforce certain related qualities and
suppress others. Each individual can thus be understood as a
structural configuration of a set of dominant qualities in tension
with some subordinate qualities. This tension may be unresolved for a
long time until finally some articulation or *Gestalt* is
reached that defines a person's character. Dilthey gives the
example of strong ambition leading someone to gradually overcome
shyness in public. Once a person recognizes that low self-confidence
when speaking in public stands in the way of an important goal being
fulfilled, that person can begin to cultivate the requisite
qualities.



The initial response to Dilthey's descriptive psychology was
mixed. Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote an extended review which claimed that
Dilthey still relies on hypotheses and that the differences between
explanative and descriptive psychologies are minimal. Dilthey defended
his position by showing that he never meant to banish explanative
hypotheses from psychology altogether, merely from its descriptive
foundations. Husserl later expressed his regret that the Ebbinghaus
review deflected him from reading this "genial"
anticipation of phenomenology until much later.



Another kind of criticism came from the Neo-Kantians, most of whom
wanted to completely divorce philosophy from psychology. In 1894 the
Baden School Neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband delivered a lecture in
which he claimed that psychology has no real relevance for the
historical sciences and should be considered a natural science rather
than a human science. Windelband sees psychology as searching for laws
just as the natural sciences do and historical studies as interested
in unique patterns. Thus he proposed that the natural sciences are
nomothetic and the historical or cultural sciences ideographic.
Dilthey in turn rejected Windelband's distinction by showing
that many natural sciences have ideographic elements and many human
sciences such as linguistics and economics have nomothetic aims.
Moreover, Dilthey argued that the description of singular historical
data only becomes meaningful if understood in the framework of
regularities: "What is most characteristic of the systematic
human sciences is *the connection of the general and the
individual* " (1895-6/SW.II, 227). Not only is it the
case that universal considerations are as important as ideographic
specificity, but also the understanding of individuality is not
possible without reference to some broader context.


### 2.3 1900-1911: Historical Understanding and Hermeneutics


#### 2.3.1 Interpreting from the Outside In



The final phase of Dilthey's philosophy can be said to begin at
the turn of the twentieth century with his essay "The Rise of
Hermeneutics". Whereas the early prize-essay on
Schleiermacher's hermeneutics had been more focused on textual
and theological interpretation, the new essay makes hermeneutics a
connecting link between philosophy and history. Dilthey argues that
the study of history can be reliable only if it is possible to raise
the understanding of what is singular to the level of universal
validity. Here he also comes to the realization that 



> 
> 
> the inner experience through which I obtain reflexive awareness of my
> own condition can never by itself bring me to a consciousness of my
> own individuality. I experience the latter only through a comparison
> of myself with others. (1900/SW.IV, 236) 
> 
> 
> 



Others cannot be assumed to be mere extensions of myself. They are
accessible to me only from the outside. It is the task of
understanding to confer "an inside" to what is first given
as "a complex of external sensory signs" (1900/SW.IV,
236).



Whereas up to then the intelligibility of lived experience had been
assumed to provide us an understanding of ourselves, now Dilthey
asserts that we can understand ourselves only by means of our
objectifications. The understanding of self requires me to approach
myself as others do, that is, from the outside to the inside. 



> 
> 
> The process of understanding, insofar as it is determined by common
> conditions and epistemological means, must everywhere have the same
> characteristics. (1900/SW.IV, 237) 
> 
> 
> 



To the extent that rules can guide the understanding of the
objectifications of life they make possible a theory of
interpretation. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation that
relates to all human objectifications--that is, not only speech
and writing, but also visual artistic expressions, more casual
physical gestures as well as observable actions or deeds.



This new hermeneutic perspective that approaches the inside from the
outside also alters Dilthey's conception of psychic structure.
In the first of three "Studies Toward the Foundation of the
Human Sciences" dating from 1904-9, Dilthey considers what
linguistic expressions can teach us about the intentionality of
consciousness. No longer merely explicating the breadth of psychic
life through the interweavings of acts of cognition, feeling and
willing, Dilthey uses expressions such as "I am worried about
something" to disclose the referential structure of a lived
experience. Psychic acts have contents that are related to the objects
of the world by means of what Dilthey calls attitudinal stances. These
judgmental attitudes toward the world are 



> 
> 
> indefinite in number. Asking, believing, presuming, claiming, taking
> pleasure in, approving, liking and its opposite, wishing, desiring,
> and willing are such modifications of the psychic attitude.
> (1904-9/SW.III, 43) 
> 
> 
> 



These attitudinal and judgmental stances are not just cognitive, but
pre-delineate something more encompassing, which can be called
"reflective knowledge" to distinguish it from the direct
knowing of lived experience and reflexive awareness. This judgmental
reflective knowledge (*Wissen*) adds to the conceptual
cognition (*Erkenntnis*) of reality a "positing of
values" and "the determination of purposes and the
establishment of rules." (1904-9/SW.III, 25)



While the kind of epistemology (*Erkenntnistheorie*)
established by Kant and others suffices for the natural sciences, the
human sciences require a more full-blooded theory of knowledge
(*Theorie des Wissens*). Knowledge is to be
"distinguished from a mere representation, presumption,
question, or assumption by the fact that a content appears here with a
sense of objective necessity" (1904-9/SW.III,
27-28). This objective necessity is to be located in the
evidentness that accompanies thinking that is properly executed and
reaches its goal whether through the self-given reality of lived
experience or the "givenness that binds us to an outer
perception" (1904-9/SW.III, 28).



For the human sciences, things in the world are not merely cognitively
apprehended as phenomenal objects, but known as real for our
life-concerns (*Lebensbezuge*). Thinking of the unfinished
manuscripts in his office, Dilthey writes in the Second Study Toward
the Foundation of the Human Sciences:



> 
> I am tired from overworking; having reviewed my files, I worry about
> their unfinished contents, whose completion demands incalculably more
> work from me. All this "about", "of", and
> "toward", all these references of what is remembered to
> what is experienced, in short, all these structural inner relations,
> must be apprehended by me, since I now want to apprehend the fullness
> of the lived experience exhaustively. And precisely in order to
> exhaust it, I must regress further in the structural network to the
> memories of other lived experiences. (1904-9/SW.III, 50)
> 



Every attempt to characterize a lived experience leads beyond it to
other structurally related experiences that ground it. This involves
not just an observational process of willful attention, but also an
involuntary "being-pulled-along by the state of affairs
itself" (1904-9/SW.III, 51) to other constituent parts of
the nexus of human knowledge.



Some of these refinements incorporated into Dilthey's
descriptive program were inspired by reading Husserl's
*Logical Investigations* (1900-01). Dilthey specifically
follows Husserl in his account of how language contributes to
"significative apprehension" (1904-9/SW.III, 60). In
reading words we do not represent them as mere sets of letters but
fulfill their meaning by representing their objects. There is a
triadic structural relation between the intuitive content of a
linguistic expression, an act that gives it meaning, and the object
that embodies that meaning as what is expressed. But whereas
Husserl's phenomenology focused in the conceptual structures of
objective apprehension, Dilthey gives equal attention to the felt
structures of what he calls "objective having"
(1904-9/SW.III, 66). In objective apprehension we progress from
attitude to objects, in objective having we regress from objects to
attitude. This regressive turn from the outside to the inside is
brought to bear on how feelings are to be interpreted. " Whether
we feel our own state or some object, it involves only a state of
being as a kind of attitude.... The way this state of being
depends on outer objects or on the state of the subject is obscured
through an inverse attitude that loses itself in the depth of the
subject" (1904-9/SW.III, 69). Instead of regarding
feelings merely as subjective states such as pleasure or displeasure,
they can be interpreted as attitudes that assess what is given in
consciousness as either furthering or diminishing one's state of
being in the world. Feelings can be added to our earlier list of
attitudes.



Feelings as attitudes allow us to evaluate the world. Our values
express adjudicative attitudes based on feeling. Although the setting
of purposes is grounded in the lived experience of values, the life of
feelings has an immanent teleology that does not require it to go over
into the desire to act. The structural nexus of willing is thus
different from that of feeling. There are many feelings that evoke
further feelings rather than the impulse to do something in response
to them. A feeling of suffering can for instance elicit a kind of
self-pity that spreads the suffering and elicits a
"distinctively mellow" (1904-9/SW.III, 76) mood that
immobilizes.



The final general attitude relevant to the structural nexus of
knowledge is that of willing. In the lived experiences of willing
"we possess a reflexive awareness of an intention to realize a
state of affairs" (1904-9/SW.III, 82). If we call this
state of affairs to be realized a "purpose" then what is
expected from this purpose is a satisfaction of some kind.


#### 2.3.2 Reinterpreting Purposiveness and Distinguishing Elementary Understanding and Higher Understanding.



Dilthey's most important work is *The Formation
(*Aufbau*) of the Historical World in the Human Sciences*
of 1910. Here Dilthey applies the same kind of structural analysis
that we saw him develop for lived experience to the understanding of
history. The human sciences give form to the historical world by
analyzing the structural systems in terms of which human beings
participate in history. In the *Introduction to the Human
Sciences* Dilthey had conceived the psychic nexus, cultural
systems and external organizations of society as purposive systems.
Now a more neutral covering concept is used to capture all the ways
the forces of life can converge. This is the concept of the
"productive nexus or system"
(*Wirkungszusammenhang*). Now the efficacy of life and of the
historical world is to be understood in terms of productivity before
any causal or teleological analysis is applied. The carriers of
history, whether they be individuals, cultures, institutions, or
communities, are productive systems capable of producing value,
meaning, and, in some cases, realizing purposes. Each is to be
considered structurally as centered in itself.



Individuals can be studied as psychic productive systems inherently
related to each other as well as to more inclusive productive systems
that are also at work in history. These larger productive systems come
about because of the need for communication, interaction, and
cooperation among individuals. But they can also take on a life of
their own and survive the individuals that formed and shaped them.
Dilthey's category of *Wirkung* or productivity is at the
root of Gadamer's theory of the productive history
(*Wirkungsgeschichte*) of works of art that grants them new
meanings over time that exceed those intended by their creators. In
the *Introduction to the Human Sciences*, Dilthey had been
unwilling to consider purposive social systems as subjects or carriers
of history. In *The Formation of the Historical World in the Human
Sciences*, he qualifies his opposition to the idea of a
transpersonal subject such as the soul of a people by de-reifying it
as the spirit of a people that is to be considered as a logical rather
than a real subject. It is possible to regard cooperative productive
systems as logical subjects that transcend individuals without
positing them as super-empirical real subjects.



Despite this increased importance granted to more encompassing
cultural systems and organizations of society, Dilthey continues to
insist that the individuals participating in them are never completely
submerged by them. This is because any such productive system only
engages some aspects of an individual. Moreover, the individuals
active in a cultural system often put their stamp on its mode of
productivity so that not just the rationally agreed upon function of
the system is achieved. Summing up these two points, Dilthey discerns
a difficulty in conceptualizing the sciences of these cultural systems
in terms of the idea of purposes alone:



> 
> The individuals who cooperate in such a function belong to the
> cultural system only through those processes by which they contribute
> to the realization of the function. Nevertheless, they participate in
> these processes with their whole being, which means that a domain
> based purely on the system's functional purpose can never be
> constructed. Rather, other aspects of human nature are also constantly
> at work in this domain supplementing the energies devoted to the
> system's functions. (1910/SW.III, 208)
> 



Individuals give only part of themselves to these more inclusive
systems, yet they can express their whole being through this part. No
cultural system will embody merely the purposes it was meant to
fulfill. That is why it is crucial to reconceive purposive systems as
productive systems. A productive nexus or system may be purposive in a
general sense without fulfilling a determinate purpose. It is to be
understood more generally as producing objectifications that express
human values as well as purposes--leaving open the extent to
which specific goals are achieved. The important thing is how human
values and purposes are expressed in productive systems and how their
meaning is to be understood.



As in the essay "The Rise of Hermeneutics", understanding
was said to involve a process of referring back from outer sensory
phenomena to a reality that involves inner processes. But now in
*The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences*
Dilthey recognizes that this inner reality need not be psychological
in nature. He uses the example of how the statutes of a state express
the common will of a community. The inner content of the laws on the
books is a legal meaning-formation. The expressions we read in law
books articulate an inner relation among legal imperatives. What is
expressed in these laws is not the mental states of individual
legislators, but a general way of regulating human relations. Dilthey
makes the same claim for individual poetic creations. What is
expressed in a drama is 



> 
> 
> not the inner processes in the poet; it is rather a nexus created in
> them but separable from them. The nexus of a drama consists in a
> distinctive relation of material, poetic mood, motif, plot, and means
> of presentation. (1910/SW.III, 107)
> 
> 
> 



The interpretation of history must deal with all manifestations of
life, not merely expressions that are intended to communicate a state
of mind. In the section entitled "The Understanding of Other
Persons and Their Manifestations of Life", Dilthey distinguishes
three classes of life-manifestations. The first class consists of
concepts, judgments and larger thought-formations. They are intended
to communicate states of affairs, not states of mind. Thus the
proposition "two plus two equals four" means the same in
all contexts and says nothing about the person uttering it. Actions
form a second class of manifestations of life. Actions as such are not
meant to communicate anything, but they often do reveal something
about the intentions of the actor. Thus if someone picks up a hammer
nearby some nails and wooden boards, it is legitimate to assume that
he or she wants to assemble the boards into some artifact. If this
occurs in a large workshop, it is also plausible to think the person
is a carpenter. This might also tell us something about the
person's livelihood, but not much more. There is a third class
of life-manifestations that Dilthey calls "expressions of lived
experience" and which disclose more about the individual
uttering them. Expressions of lived experience can range from
emotional exclamations and gestures to personal self-descriptions and
reflections to works of art. Often these expressions are more
revealing than was intended:



> 
> An expression of lived experience can contain more of the nexus of
> psychic life than any introspection can catch sight of. It draws from
> depths not illuminated by consciousness. But at the same time, it is
> characteristic of an expression of lived experience that its relation
> to the spiritual or human content expressed in it can only be made
> available to understanding within limits. Such expressions are not to
> be judged as true or false but as truthful or untruthful. (ca.
> 1910/SW.III, 227)
> 



A work of art is often more disclosive of human life in general than
of the specific life of the artist. It may disclose something about
the state of mind or the attitude of the artist, but a work of art
will only be great if its "spiritual content is liberated from
its creator" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 228).



After having analyzed these three kinds of manifestations of life,
which can be called theoretical, practical and disclosive
respectively, Dilthey proceeds to distinguish various modes of
understanding them. Elementary understanding goes back to the
associative relation that normally exists between an expression and
what is expressed in it. It assimilates the meanings that are commonly
attached to expressions in the community that we grow up in. Dilthey
adapts Hegel's idea of "objective spirit" to account
for this commonality of meaning. Now objective spirit logically
encompasses "the manifold forms in which a commonality existing
among individuals has objectified itself in the world of the
senses", allowing the past to become "a continuously
enduring present for us" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 229). Whereas Hegel
restricted objective spirit to the legal, economic and political
aspects of historical life, Dilthey expands the concept to include not
only the sciences, but also the triad of art, religion and philosophy
that Hegel had assigned to absolute spirit. But most of all, objective
spirit embodies the everyday, mundane aspects of life that we grow up
with.



> 
> From earliest childhood, the self is nurtured by this world of
> objective spirit. It is also the medium in which the understanding of
> other persons and their life-manifestations takes place. For
> everything in which spirit has objectified itself contains something
> that is common to the I and the Thou. Every square planted with trees,
> every room in which chairs are arranged, is understandable to us from
> childhood because human tendencies to set goals, produce order, and
> define values in common have assigned a place to every square and
> every object in the room. (ca. 1910/SW.III, 229)
> 



This common background suffices for the elementary understanding of
everyday life. But whenever the common meaning of life-manifestations
is called into question for some reason, higher understanding becomes
necessary. This can occur because of an apparent inconsistency among
various claims being made, or because an ambiguity that needs to be
resolved. In each case we discern an unexpected complexity that
requires us to shift our frame of reference. Higher understanding
cannot continue to rely on the common meanings of an expression that
derive from a shared local background between speaker and listener,
writer and reader. Higher understanding must replace the sphere of
commonality, where inference by analogy suffices, with that of
universality, where inductive inference must take over. Here the human
sciences become relevant by offering the appropriate universal
disciplinary contexts that can help to deal with uncertainties of
interpretation. These universal systematic contexts can be social or
political, economic or cultural, secular or religious. When
expressions can be determined to be functioning in a specific
disciplinary context then ambiguities tend to disappear. Literary
scholars may be able to clarify a puzzling poetic passage by showing
it to contain a literary allusion to a classical work with a foreign
vocabulary. Or they can perhaps clarify it by seeing it as a way of
accommodating certain technical demands of the genre as such. These
cases of higher understanding establish a larger context of
reference.



However, higher understanding can also focus on more specific contexts
related to a work or its author. The consideration of such contexts
should come only at the conclusion of the interpretive process and
represents a shift from exploring the relation "of expression to
what is expressed" toward the relation "of what has been
produced to productivity" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 233). Here we move
from meaning relationships to something like a productive relationship
to which knowledge about the authors becomes relevant. But the first
recourse here is to consult more of the products of the author. How
does a sentence fit into a paragraph, a chapter, a whole work, or a
corpus as a whole? Only if these contexts fail to resolve the problem
may we consider psychological claims about the author. The
understanding of the individuality of an author should only bring in
psychological factors as a last resort. Dilthey writes 



> 
> 
> we understand individuals by means of their affinities, their
> commonalities. This process presupposes the connection between the
> universally human and individuation. On the basis of what is
> universal, we can see individuation extended to the manifoldness of
> human existence. (ca. 1910/SW.III, 233)
> 
> 
> 



However, the highest form of understanding is not the reconstruction
of the individuality of the author. It involves something that has
been confused with reconstruction, but is distinct. What Dilthey
points to is a process of re-creation or re-experiencing, which he
contrasts with understanding as such: 



> 
> 
> Understanding as such is an operation running inverse to the course of
> production. But a fully sympathetic reliving requires that
> understanding go forward with the line of the events themselves. (ca.
> 1910/SW.III, 235)
> 
> 
> 



Re-experiencing develops understanding by completing the hermeneutical
circle. If understanding goes "back" to the overall
context, re-experiencing goes "forward" by following out
the parts that give focus to the whole. A re-experiencing is not an
actual re-construction but produces a better understanding that
refines the original. This is made clear by the following example:




> 
> 
> A lyrical poem makes possible, through the sequence of its verses, the
> re-experiencing of a nexus of lived experience--not the real one
> that stimulated the poet, but the one that, on its basis, the poet
> places in the mouth of an ideal person. (ca. 1910/SW.III, 235)
> 
> 
> 



Whereas the arts can expand the horizon of our lived experience by
means of the ideal and imaginary means of fiction, history must do so
by a process of structural articulation. The task of the human
sciences is to analyze the productive nexus of history as it exhibits
itself in stable formations or systematic structures. The productive
nexus of history differs from the causal nexus of nature in producing
values and arriving at purposes.



> 
> The carriers of this constant creation of values and goods in the
> world of human spirit are individuals, communities, and the cultural
> systems in which individuals cooperate. This cooperation is determined
> by the fact that, in order to realize values, individuals subject
> themselves to rules and set themselves purposes. All these modes of
> cooperation manifest a life-concern connected to the human essence
> that links individuals with each other--a core, as it were, that
> cannot be grasped psychologically but is revealed in every such system
> of relations among human beings. (1910/SW.III, 175-76)
> 



Each such socio-cultural system can be regarded as being centered
within itself on the basis of some function, whether it be economic,
scientific, political, artistic or religious. The structures to be
analyzed here provide various cross-sections of what takes place in
history. But there are also more composite and enduring
socio-historical contexts that we can delineate such as nation-states
and historical periods.



A nation-state is a composite institutional organization that contains
and shapes many socio-cultural productive systems which then generate
certain commonalities. When socio-cultural systems transcending the
scope of a nation come into contact with local productive systems,
they also begin to assume commonalities distinctive of that nation. In
the individual members of a nation-state these commonalities can
produce a sense of solidarity. But Dilthey also warns of excesses in
that regard when he notes that many Germans are "placing the
highest value ... not in the serene world-view of the Greeks, not in
the intellectually delimited consideration of purpose of the Romans,
but in the raw exertion of power without any limit"
(1910/SW.III, 196).



Nation-states are regionally defined historical wholes, but we can
also delineate temporal composite wholes such as historical phases.
What characterizes a generation according to Dilthey is the
crystallization of a movement sparked by the maturation of a certain
age group. An epoch is more impersonal and large-scale. It marks a
pervasive "permeating tendency" (1910/SW.III, 198). Each
epoch defines a life-horizon by which people orient their life.
"Such a horizon places life, life-concerns, life-experience, and
thought-formation in a certain proportion" (1910/SW.III, 198),
which tends to restrain the way individuals can modify their outlooks.
But an epoch is only an overall tendency that encompasses opposing
forces. In fact, a new epoch will often be sparked by the
dissatisfactions produced by any force that becomes too dominant and
complacent.



The structural analysis of history in terms of cultural systems and
the external organizations of society can be guided by the various
human sciences. But a reflective mode of judgment is needed when
historians try to make sense of the more composite structures of
nation-states and epochs. History is both a judgmental art concerned
with meaning and a science concerned with objective truth. Only
historical reflection can create the right balance that will transform
the conceptual cognition of the human sciences into adequate
historical knowledge.


#### 2.3.3 The Categories of Historical Knowledge.



This shift to historical knowledge is the main theme of the notes (ca.
1910) for a second volume of *The Formation of the Historical World
in the Human Sciences* (1910) which were published posthumously in
1927 as *Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason*. Here
Dilthey analyzes the categories of life that are relevant to
historical knowledge. He distinguishes between formal and real
categories. Formal categories stem from elementary logical operations
that are at work in all apprehension: they include the processes of
comparing, noting sameness, differentiating and relating. Although
such elementary operations are prediscursive, they provide the basis
for discursive thought. The prediscursive noting of sameness prepares
the way for the unifying concepts of discursive thought and the
process of relating provides the basis for synthetic procedures. These
prediscursive and discursive modes of thought account for the formal
categories of unity, plurality, identity, difference, degree and
relation that are shared by the natural and human sciences.



But the real categories are not the same in the natural and human
sciences. Whereas time is an ideal abstract form for the natural
sciences, for the human sciences it has a qualitative content. It is
experienced as advancing into the future and "always contains
the memory of what has just been present" (ca. 1910/SW.III,
216). The relation between the past and the present becomes the source
for the category of meaning which is Dilthey's main historical
category. The present never merely *is* in the sense of being
observable and it can be understood meaningfully only to the extent
that the past asserts its *presence* in it. When the present is
lived, "the positive or negative value of the realities that
fill it are experienced through feeling. And when we face the future,
the category of purpose arises through a projective attitude"
(ca. 1910/SW.III, 222). Meaning, value, and purpose are the three
central categories of the human sciences and each relates to time in
its own way. What is valued by feeling focuses on the momentary
present, but for the will everything in the present tends to be
subordinated to some future purpose. Only the category of meaning can
expand the present into a presence that includes the past and
overcomes the mere juxtaposition or subordination of the various
aspects of life to each other. The understanding of meaning involves
the encompassing sense of reflective knowledge that attempts to relate
cognition to evaluation and the setting of goals.



Dilthey's distinction between the natural and human sciences is
not a metaphysical distinction. For that reason he does not create a
dualism between nature as the domain of causality and history as the
domain of freedom. There are many determining forces at work in
history because it cannot be divorced from natural conditions. But to
understand how individuals participate in history we must replace the
purely external relation of cause and effect with the integral
relation of "agency and suffering, of action and reaction"
(ca. 1910/SW.III, 219).



The doing and undergoing that characterizes human involvement in
history can be brought home most forcefully in autobiography. 



> 
> 
> Here a life-course stands as an external phenomenon from which
> understanding seeks to discover what produced it within a particular
> environment. The person who understands it is the same as the one who
> created it. This results in a special intimacy of understanding. (ca.
> 1910/SW.III, 221) 
> 
> 
> 



Autobiography begins with what memory has selected as significant
life-moments, which reflection then gives a certain coherence. Thereby
the initial tasks of "explicating a historical nexus are already
half solved by life itself" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 221).



But the fact that history derives a special intimacy through the
capacity for autobiography does not mean that we should be content to
understand history through individuals alone. This also becomes
evident in relation to Dilthey's own work as a biographer of
Schleiermacher. It became ever more clear to Dilthey that his
biography could not solve its task of understanding the life of
Schleiermacher without considering the intellectual life of Berlin in
which he participated. A biography is likely to bring more contextual
determining factors into play than an autobiography, but the
biographer must remain open to the interplay of these influences and
individual initiative. Dilthey writes that an individual 



> 
> 
> does not face a limitless play of forces in the historical world: he
> dwells in the sphere of the state, religion, or science--in
> brief, in a distinctive life-system or in a constellation of them. The
> inner structure of such a constellation draws the individual into it,
> shapes him, and determines the direction of his productivity.
> Historical achievements stem from the possibilities inherent in the
> inner structure of a historical moment. (ca. 1910/SW.III,
> 266-67) 
> 
> 
> 



Individuals worthy of a biography are those who have seized those
momentary possibilities.



When turning to the nexus of universal history, we move further beyond
the individual life-courses focused on by autobiography and biography.
Although universal-historical understanding cannot ignore the results
of autobiography and biography, it will focus more on the history of
nations, cultural systems, and the external organizations of society.




> 
> 
> Each of these histories has its own center to which the processes are
> related and consequently the values, purposes, and significance that
> result from this relationship. (ca. 1910/SW.III, 291)
> 
> 
> 



Anthropological reflection expects history to teach what life is and
yet history is dependent on life as lived. There is a hermeneutical
circularity here that could be escaped "if unconditioned norms,
purposes, or values [could] set the standard for contemplating an
apprehending history" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 281). Unlike his
Neo-Kantian contemporaries such as Hermann Cohen and Heinrich Rickert,
Dilthey is not willing to accept unconditional values that transcend
life. The spiritual nexus of history "is that of life itself
insofar as life produces connectedness under the conditions of its
natural environment" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 280). Life is the
ultimate context behind which we cannot go. It is the horizon of
productivity which encompasses the organic and the mental, but cannot
be defined by either. Since "life is intimately related to
temporal fulfillment" (ca. 1910/SW.III, 249), historicity is
part of its essence. Consequently, the objective validity that is to
be attached to any value cannot be separated from our temporal
engagement with life. Values are not simply given or imposed from on
high, but are produced as part of the human process of explicating the
meaning of history. In light of Dilthey's skepticism about
transcendent unconditional values, it may seem surprising that he
presented an ethical system that expects human beings to make
unconditional commitments that are self-binding.


## 3. Dilthey's Reflections on Ethics and Worldviews and His Doubts about Metaphysics



In 1890 Dilthey offered a lecture course at the University of Berlin
that was posthumously published with the title *System of
Ethics* (1890b). Here Dilthey sets himself the task of developing
a "psycho-ethical" approach that is rooted in
"anthropological-historical analysis" (1890b/SW.VI,104).
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 anthropological analysis of our inner 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 emotive and
volitional. The feelings that measure the effect the world has on us
are not just the subjective aspect of our representations of the
world. These feelings are rooted in certain drives among which a sense
of group solidarity is central (1890b/SW.VI,104).



This solidarity encompasses a fellow-feeling
(*Mitgefuhl*)(1890b/SW.VI,104-05) that goes deeper
than the sympathy of the British moralists. Dilthey regards sympathy
as a feeling "transferred from one living being to
another" (1890b/SW.VI,89). Sympathy, compassion, and pity are
modes of "suffering with" (*Mitleid*) that are
derivative because they affect us from the outside. They involve an
external "conjoint movement" (*Mitbewegung*) with
others (1890b/SW.VI,89). Dilthey considers these psychological forms
of sympathy or empathy (*Mitempfindung*) to be superficial
compared to the more basic anthropological fellow-feeling of
solidarity that produces an "inner relationship"
(1890b/SW.VI,104)- with others.



The extent to which we are motivated by a sense of solidarity is a
function of the sphere of commonality of objective spirit that we grow
up in. Our anthropological sense of solidarity and its fellow-feeling
provides a more positive incentive for sociability than Hume's
sympathy and Schopenhauer's compassion. But even the fellowship
of solidarity is a mere natural incentive which does not become
ethical until it is transformed into a more active or participatory
incentive of benevolence (1890b/GS.X, 70).



As he develops his anthropologically based approach to ethics, Dilthey
leads up to three main ethical incentives. One of them is the
benevolence (*Wohlwollen*) that we just related to human
solidarity. The other two incentives are to strive for what is right
(*Rechtschaffenheit*) and to perfect oneself in a socially
legitimate manner (*Vollkommenheit*). These three ethical
incentives had already been predelineated as moral principles in
Dilthey's *Habilitationsschrift* of 1864 entitled
"Versuch einer Analyse des moralischen Bewusstseins"
(see 1864/GS.VI, 26-27). In fact, the concluding section THREE
12 of the *System of Ethics* is taken almost exclusively from
this earlier work, where the ethical incentives were formulated as
three moral oughts. This raises the question how it is possible to
move from anthropologically derived ethical incentives that are *a
posteriori* to ultimately arrive at moral oughts that are *a
priori*. There is a crucial subsection THREE 9.3 that prepares us
for this transition. It is entitled "*The Feeling of Duty and
Justice, the Consciousness of the Commitment that Inheres in the Duty
to Do What is Right or Just*  ." Here Dilthey is quite
explicit that the commitment to do what is right demands a
consciousness that cannot be conceived as a mere instinctive inner
bond with others rooted in our sense of solidarity. The commitment to
do what is right must now come from within on the basis of
"respect for others as ends in themselves" (1890b/SW.VI,
128). The mere life-value of group solidarity is elevated to the
spiritual value of respect for all others as individual
ends-in-themselves. Having replaced Humean sympathy with benevolence,
Dilthey now engages Kantian duty as part of his analysis of moral
self-reflection. But instead of appealing to respect for the law to
justify doing what is right, Dilthey derives moral duty from a
commitment that is based on both a "fidelity to oneself and
respect for the self-worth of other persons" (1890b/SW.VI,128).
The sense of obligation (*Verbindlichkeit*) that comes with
this commitment (*Bindung*) involves a recognition of a
reciprocal human connectedness rather than a one-sided dependence on a
higher law.



Formally Dilthey moves even closer to Kant at the end of the lectures
by acknowledging that ultimately we must make "moral
judgments" that are "unconditional" and
"synthetic *a priori*" (1890b/GS.X, 108). Although
Dilthey had rejected the possibility of synthetic *a priori*
theoretical judgments for outer experience, he is now willing to speak
of synthetic *a priori* practical judgments for inner
experience. Had Dilthey published his 1890 lectures himself he would
probably have tempered the language that was imported from his early
essay. But he clearly still thinks that morality requires judgmental
assent to oughts that are unconditionally self-binding.



The normative implications of anthropological reflection about life
and history also led Dilthey to address the value of worldviews. Just
as the nature of universal history forces us to conceive of history as
more than a human science, so worldviews are more broadly based
attempts at acquiring a unified perspective on life. The sciences are
by their nature partial and cannot provide a comprehensive worldview.
A worldview attempts to provide not only a cognitive picture of the
world, but also an estimation of what in life is valuable and worth
preserving, and finally how we can strive to improve reality.
Worldviews have been developed in literary, religious and
philosophical works. Philosophers have produced metaphysical
formulations of worldviews that attempt to give them a universal
conceptual determinacy. Dilthey analyzes three recurrent types of such
metaphysical formulations: naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and
objective idealism. The naturalism of Democritus, Hobbes and others
derives everything from what can be cognized and is pluralistic in
structure; idealism of freedom as found in Plato, Kant, and others
insists on the sovereignty of the will and is dualistic; objective
idealism as found in Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hegel affirms reality as
the embodiment of a harmonious set of values and can be considered
monistic. The three types of metaphysical worldviews are
incommensurable in that each sets its priorities differently. Dilthey
finds naturalism too reductive; his ethical views incline him toward
the idealism of freedom; aesthetically he felt attracted towards
objective idealism. No metaphysical formulation can have more than
relative validity because it attempts to arrive at a totalization that
transcends experience. Literary and poetic expressions of worldviews
tend to be more successful because they do not claim to be totalizing.
All that is humanly possible is to probe reality on the basis of
life-experience and to settle for more limited philosophical insights
informed by historical understanding. Ultimately, our reflective
understanding of life and history must remain
determinate-indeterminate.



We can see certain parallels with Dilthey's attempt to replace
metaphysical systems with more informal life-based
"meta-physical reflection" or worldviews in the young
Rudolf Carnap, who studied in Jena with Dilthey's student Herman
Nohl before moving to Vienna. Carnap's paper "The
Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language"
refers to Dilthey and his students as positive counterexamples to
varieties of meaningless metaphysical systems as found in Fichte,
Hegel and Heidegger. Another essay by Carnap entitled
"Metaphysics as Expression of an Attitude to Life"
acknowledges the importance of Dilthey's notion of
"*Lebensgefuehl*." Carnap's analogue for
Dilthey's "*Weltanschauung*" is
"*Weltauffassung*." Carnap also incorporated a more
or less Diltheyan conception of the human sciences in his *Der
logische Aufbau der Welt* of 1928. Carnap refers to
Dilthey's *Introduction to the Human Sciences*, but
replaces its language of "facts of consciousness" with
that of "elementary experiences." He does not refer to
Dilthey's last main work *Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt
in den Geisteswissenschaften*, but he did read Hans Freyer's
*Theorie des objektiven Geistes*, a work heavily influenced by
Dilthey's *Aufbau* and its reinterpretation of objective
spirit as the medium of intersubjective communication. Carnap writes
in his own *Aufbau*: 



> 
> 
> only the more recent history of philosophy (since Dilthey) has called
> attention to the methodological and object-theoretical distinctness of
> the domain of the human sciences (*Geisteswissenschaften*).
> (Carnap 1928: 23) 
> 
> 
> 



Carnap acknowledges the independent nature of spiritual
(*geistigen*) or intersubjective objects such as political
states and social customs. They differ from psychical and physical
objects in that they can "survive" even as the original
subjects that generated them "perish and other subjects take
their place" (Carnap 1928: 23). It is not clear why
Dilthey's reflective analysis of the distinctive methods of the
various sciences and his empirical approach to lived experience did
not earn him more serious consideration by the Vienna Circle as a
whole and other analytically oriented philosophers. But what is
evident is that his theory of understanding (*Verstehen*) came
to be widely misinterpreted as a kind of empathy. Although Dilthey had
sharply differentiated between understanding as a judgmental process
and empathy as a mere feeling, Carnap suggested that the understanding
of others is an intuitive act that involves a measure of empathy, but
which can be cognitively vetted in part through the analysis of
objective manifestations ranging from gestures, linguistic expressions
to practical actions (Carnap 1928: 55, 143). This suggestion by Carnap
may have negatively influenced subsequent discussions of
Dilthey's theory of *Verstehen* by analytic philosophers,
leading Theodor Abel, Ernest Nagel, and Arthur Danto to go even
further by reducing it to "empathic identification." Later
Danto recognized that this is not the case and acknowledged that
"*Verstehen* is a very brilliant notion, utterly
misconceived heretofore by crass philosophical critics, myself
included" (Danto 1970: 215). *Verstehen* is not some
immediate projection of ourselves into others, but stands for a
deliberate process that finds the proper context to relate others and
their objectifications to what is already familiar to us. It is a
reflective mode of inquiry that provides the framework for more
specific explanations, whether causal or rational.