Dilthey and the Unfinished Revolution

By the last years of the nineteenth century, concern with history had introduced an array of difficult questions about individuality and totality, purpose and focus, method and the status of historical knowledge. Dilthey sought mightily to address the outstanding issues and to find a rigorous, convincing way of combining the broadly historicist ideas that had resulted from the nineteenth-century encounter with history.

Dilthey took it as axiomatic that the stuff of the human studies was distinctive and thus could not be apprehended through the methods of the natural sciences. However, the human studies had an approach of their own, and historians, though they had to apprehend disparate individualities across a temporal chasm, did come up with something worthy of the term "knowledge." In one sense, historical understanding was but an instance of understanding in general, which always entails surmounting some degree of difference, yet which goes on all the time, requiring no esoteric insight or method.^[26] But Dilthey's determination to face up to the distinctive historicity of the human world meant he could not leave it at that.

Descartes's quest for an indubitable, suprahistorical starting point initiated the modern turn in philosophy; Kant offered a kind of completion by specifying the transcendent categories making knowledge possible. Explicitly in opposition to this whole tradition, Dilthey held that even the presuppositions of our thinking, even the most fundamental concepts and rules, are historical products.

[25] On Ranke's way of invoking God to keep history from collapsing into meaningless chaos, see Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 69, 77, 80.

[26] Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Sciences (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1979), 63-69, 72-79. See also pp. 123-142, on Dilthey's attempt to lay out a "critique of historical reason," specifying how historians like Ranke come up with knowledge. I am partial to Rickman's account, but I have also profited from two other major works on Dilthey that also appeared during the 1970s: Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975; 3d printing with a new afterword, 1992); and Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

And while he hoped to specify, in a Kantian way, the categories involved in understanding the human world, he recognized that any such specification would be incomplete, because the categories could change, or new ones could emerge, with new experience in history.^[27] So rather than appeal to a starting point free of historically specific presuppositions, we must recognize that human beings—and human knowing—are embedded in history. From the dominant perspective, of course, to admit this embeddedness seemed to undermine the possibility of genuine knowledge altogether, but Dilthey sought to turn the tables.

In opposition to Kant and his own neo-Kantian contemporaries, Dilthey held that it is not some participation in transcendental reason that makes understanding possible but the fact that the human inquirer is part of the human world to be understood. In other words, understanding is possible not because we stand above history, but because we do not. Understanding takes place essentially because mind can understand what mind has created, a notion that Dilthey seems to have taken over directly from Vico. To combine embeddedness with a claim to knowledge was to recognize the hermeneutic "circularity" involved in all understanding. The process of understanding moves back and forth, between idea and context, or between myself and the other I seek to understand. As Dilthey saw it, then, hermeneutics was no longer, as for Friedrich Schleiermacher, an approach to the understanding of texts, especially texts that might be misinterpreted, but an approach to the whole human world. And that approach was necessary not simply because the human world was involved with understanding, interpretation, and meaning, but because it was fundamentally historical, and thus never finished or complete, and because any knower was embedded in history, and thus finite.^[28] In conceiving historical understanding as itself historically situated, Dilthey invited a sense of the human world as endlessly growing, on every level, growing precisely as we understand it anew from our present vantage point.

So there can be knowledge of the human world, but for Dilthey, it is never simply a copy but always a construction, a reinterpretation, by a historically specific inquirer with a particular angle of vision. Thus, though historical understanding was ordinary and unproblematic in one sense, the relativistic implications of historicity gave deeper point to the ongoing questions about the status of historical knowledge, its cultural value vis-à-vis scientific knowledge. A concern to head off skepticism affected Dilthey's priorities, leading him to focus on method and to conceive the object of historical inquiry in a particular way.^[29]

Even if the point was not to make the human studies more scientific, Dilthey

[27] Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey , 128–130, 132–136.

[28] Iggers, German Conception of History , 143; Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey , 132, 148–149.

[29] Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey , 48–50, 141–142, 155.

found it essential to specify the method whereby inquiry in the human studies could be sufficiently objective to yield genuine knowledge. Properly understood, hermeneutics was itself the method of the autonomous human-historical studies. By specifying the correct form of hermeneutic interaction between the inquirer and the object of study, Dilthey hoped to show how understanding in the human studies could be objective—even subject to testing and verification. Max Weber would pick up on this side of Dilthey, seeking a more rigorous, social scientific way of meshing the understanding that Dilthey posited with causal explanation. But even Dilthey, for all his emphasis on the distinctiveness of the human studies, respected science in its sphere and hoped that dialogue between the scientific and hermeneutic approaches could reunify the culture.^[30]

Moreover, Dilthey's preoccupation with relativism led him to insist that it was possible in principle to distinguish instances of the human that had been historically conditioned from those that, stemming from a common human nature, could be universally valid in some sense. On the basis of evidence from historical experience itself, it would be possible to develop a cautiously systematic anthropology.^[31] And, in important measure, that was the fundamental purpose of historical inquiry.

Dilthey assumed, more generally, that on some level there is still a solid, stable, suprahistorical reality, which remains our ultimate interest. We cannot get at it directly, both because it only manifests itself historically and because we inquirers are historically specific and finite, but we might glimpse this still-metaphysical realm precisely by examining the diverse instances of history. In "The Dream," a lecture on his seventieth birthday in 1903, Dilthey spoke of the anxiety he had come to feel as he recognized that we can only approach human being in different, even conflicting ways, each one-sided, yet each with a measure of validity: "To contemplate all the aspects in their totality is denied to us. We see the pure light of truth only in various broken rays." Dilthey assumed that there is "a single truth," but it is hidden from us, above all by the differentiation that the fact of history itself entails. But the historical consciousness that seemed to shatter any unified conception of the world proves Janus-faced; it "saves the unity of man's soul" at the same time. By looking through our historically specific worldviews, we may still "glimpse into a final harmony."^[32]

History, then, was more important than ever as a basis for human self-understanding and orientation in the world. In crucial respects, in fact, it was more important than philosophy or science, for "man does not discover what he is through speculation about himself or through psychological experiments but

[30] Ibid., 154–155, 157–158, 173.

[31] Ibid., 139–142.

[32] Wilhelm Dilthey, "The Dream," in The Philosophy of History in Our Time , ed. Hans Meyerhoff (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1959), 40–43.

through history." In the same way, "what man is and what he strives for he only discovers in the development of his nature through the millennia; it is never spelled out in universally valid concepts, only in vital experiences which spring from the depths of his whole being."^[33] In positing essences and a suprahistorical order, Dilthey wanted to be reassuring. There are still stable foundations, he was saying—but they seemed suspiciously like quicksand. As H. P. Rickman has put it, "We know there are firm foundations, but we never can be absolutely sure that we are standing on them. . . . While retaining the ideal of objective truth [we] must accept its elusiveness and live with the difficulty of disentangling the core of truth from the temporal guise imposed by the fact that the human nature on which [we] rely is itself historically moulded."^[34]

So even as Dilthey embraced the insights about individuality and historicity that had resulted from the nineteenth-century confrontation with history, he was preoccupied with the need to head off, or at least to balance, what seemed their threateningly relativistic implications. Thus he ended up emphasizing method, the scope for systematic inquiry, and the possibility of glimpsing some whole or universal.

One recent authority, citing Dilthey's accent on the scope for the theoretical, systematic, and general, concludes that Dilthey "might properly be considered as one of the first architects of the program 'historical science beyond historicism.'"^[35] To others, however, Dilthey was simply giving in to historicism.^[36] Still others have found some of Dilthey's preoccupations unnecessary and have accented the incompleteness of his embrace of the historical. Critique of Dilthey was pivotal to, most notably, Gadamer as he sought to accept historicity and to recast hermeneutics in a more radical way.^[37]

As a result of the uncertainties surrounding Dilthey's position, especially the growing preoccupation with relativism, historicism seemed to be in crisis by the early twentieth century. As usually conceived, the "crisis of historicism" culminated after World War I in Ernst Troeltsch's noble but rather tortured efforts and Friedrich Meinecke's nostalgia for the serenity of Ranke.^[38] With these thinkers, the ambiguous tradition of historicism seemed to have reached a culmination of sorts. But to many, it seemed a dead end.

[33] Both passages are quoted in Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey , 139.

[34] Ibid., 142.

[35] Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey , 351-353.

[36] See, for example, Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger , 121–122. Gillespie cites contemporaries and later critics—and ends up endorsing the charge himself. His argument leads from this point into the explicitly antihistoricist efforts of Edmund Husserl.

[37] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975; orig. German ed. 1960), 192–214. In his Dilthey , 414–419, Makkreel defends Dilthey from the most damaging of Gadamer's charges. I return to this issue in chapter 7, below.

[38] Especially symptomatic is Friedrich Meinecke's "Deutung eines Rankeswortes," in Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte , 2d ed., enlarged (Stuttgart: K. F. Koehler, 1952), 119–129. See also the noted study by Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932).

In their different ways, the major pioneers from Vico to Dilthey had departed from the long-standing metaphysical assumption that there can be direct access to a realm where things are what they are, a realm transcending the capricious change and differentiation of history. It came to seem that to apprehend "what man is," or any comparable suprahistorical structure of reality, we cannot climb directly beyond the chaotic particulars of history by relying on rational deduction, natural law, some invariable standard or procedure, or the scientific analysis of mind or brain. Rather, we must focus on history, because those suprahistorical essences are not simply given at any one time, in any particular instance. Perhaps something along those lines will ultimately be revealed completely in history, as for Hegel, or perhaps we mundane, finite creatures can aspire only to glimpses of what there really is. In either case, only study of history, the particular manifestations in time, affords access to the permanent, suprahistorical grounding or generator that had always been at issue in the metaphysical tradition.

But Vico, Hegel, and Dilthey all assumed that such a stable, suprahistorical realm still exists—and remains the ultimate focus of interest. As a result, there were tensions in the thinking of each, and even taken together they left an array of questions about the relationships between the universal and the historical, between individuality and totality, and between past and present.

At first, severing history from the totalizing of Hegel had seemed liberating because it invited treating individual cultural phenomena as worthy in themselves and not merely as instruments in an overarching world-historical process. But was that to leave a mere sequence of disembodied individualities, with no link to anything universal? Rather than liberating, the historical treatment might prove critical and corrosive, exposing as merely historical what had seemed suprahistorical and metaphysically grounded. History seemed to dissolve the world, cutting the culture off from the universal, by disembedding the particular instance from the totality in which it had seemed to have a meaningful place. This was a tendency, even as the culture tried various ways of linking the particulars of history to something higher—the universal laws of science, the universal God of Ranke, or the universal progressive process crucial to the array of developmentalists from Hegel to Comte and Spencer. By the end of the nineteenth century, there sometimes seemed no refuge from this critical historizing impulse; the internal criticism of positivism suggested that even the scientific world-picture was but a human construct, elaborated over time, and thus but another merely relative cultural individuality or historical product.^[39]

Because the first broadly historicist revolution, from Vico to Dilthey, was

[39] On the place of critical positivism in nineteenth-century thought, see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 13–20, 304–310, 359–362.

central to the waning of metaphysics, it has often been assumed that with it we made the break from metaphysics into history, developing what, in simpler times, we called "modern historical consciousness." But because this revolution remained under the shadow of the old metaphysics, there remained the possibility of a second step, a deeper embrace of history, eluding even that shadow. Although in retrospect we can see openings for this more radical step along the way from Vico to Dilthey, enough of the old framework survived to make it unnecessary, even inconceivable, for the thinkers we have discussed. However, tensions remained even as their efforts reached a provisional culmination in Dilthey's thinking. At about the same time, other thinkers took precisely this second step, seeking to overcome, or sidestep, those tensions.