Wilhelm Dilthey
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 190th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833–01 October 1911), who was born in Wiesbaden-Biebrich on this date in 1833.
Dilthey has been one of the most influential philosophers of history, but he is not an easy read, and it is difficult to identify him with any familiar position in the philosophy, i.e., he is a difficult thinker to place in any box. Robert C. Scharff has called Dilthey’s work “non-analytical, unspeculative philosophy of History,” which distances him from the familiar distinction between analytical and speculative philosophies of history:
“…because Critical reflection refuses to take any past or present methodological ideals so seriously as to stop asking about the ’being’ of life as we directly live through it, it obviously cannot be called ’analytical’. But because it also refuses to take itself so seriously as to promote the dream of a final categorial vision, it cannot be called ’speculative’ either. On the other hand, because this reflection sees Historical Life as the projection of but one of the diverse interests all growing out of the total inheritance it ’comprehensively’ monitors, it might finally be regarded as a non-analytical and unspeculative sort of contemporary philosophizing in general. It may then still be called ’philosophy of history’ — but only if this is taken to mean primarily that no aspect of our ’total experiential possession’ escapes its continuous reappraisal and only secondarily that one (perhaps especially problematic) aspect of that possession which needs reappraisal is the possibility of ’interpreting’ the ‘human past’.”
Collingwood in his The Idea of History finds Dilthey to be a bit easier to pigeonhole, but only at the expense of reading Collingwood’s view on history into Dilthey:
“Dilthey… argues that to be myself is one thing, namely immediate experience: to understand myself is another, namely psychological science. He assumes that the self-knowledge of mind is identical with psychology. But on his own showing history has a good claim to share that title. I may now be experiencing an immediate feeling of discomfort, and I may ask myself why I have this feeling. I may answer that question by reflecting that this morning I received a letter criticizing my conduct in what seems to me a valid and unanswerable manner. Here I am not making psychological generalizations; I am recognizing in its detail a certain individual event or series of events, which are already present to my consciousness as a feeling of discomfort or dissatisfaction with myself. To understand that feeling is to recognize it as the outcome of a certain historical process. Here the self-understanding of my mind is nothing else than historical knowledge. Push the case a step farther. When, as an historian, I relive in my own mind a certain experience of Julius Caesar, I am not simply being Julius Caesar; on the contrary, I am myself, and know that I am myself; the way in which I incorporate Julius Caesar’s experience in my own personality is not by confusing myself with him, but by distinguishing myself from him and at the same time making his experience my own. The living past of history lives in the present; but it lives not in the immediate experience of the present, but only in the self-knowledge of the present. This Dilthey has overlooked; he thinks it lives in the present’s immediate experience of itself; but that immediate experience is not historical thought.”
For Collingwood, Dilthey, if advanced a step further, converges on Collingwood’s conception of history as the reliving past thoughts and thus making the past one’s own. In this passage Collingwood twice mentions “immediate experience” in Dilthey, and here I assume he is referring to Dilthey’s conception of lived experience. I have mentioned elsewhere that, despite the difficulty of Dilthey’s thought, he has the rare philosophical distinction of having one of his concepts — lived experience — pass into popular usage (like Kuhn’s “paradigm shift”). As much as the concept has been misused in popular application, it remains a useful idea, though Collingwood here seems skeptical. Collingwood could have claimed that the reliving of past thoughts is the lived experience of the past, but he avoided this obvious inference, for whatever reason.
Like many philosophers who opined on history, Dilthey denied the very possibility of a philosophy of history — distancing himself from it:
“By philosophy of history I understand a theory which undertakes to discern the system of historical reality through a corresponding system of unified principles. This feature of unity of thought is inseparable from theory, which has its distinctive task precisely in recognizing the system of the whole. And so philosophy of history locates this unity now in a blueprint of historical process, now in a basic concept (an idea), now in a formula or a set of formulas which express the law of development. Sociology (I speak here only of the French school) escalates this clam to knowledge even further inasmuch as it aspires to introduce scientific direction of society by the knowledge it has of this system.”
Of a system of unified principles of history, Dilthey argues that the ultimate methodology of history would be to employ the full battery of the special sciences to the facts of the world, which would in effect give us an exhaustive account of the world in terms of scientific principle, which would be, he says, “the finishing touch to this totality of the human sciences.” However, even this will not give us what a philosophy of history ought to provide for us:
“Such a procedure cannot, of course, trace the course of history back to the unity of a formula or a principle, any more than physiology can do so with life. By analyzing and manipulating most of the grounds of explanation, science can only approach the discovery of simple explanatory principles. Hence philosophy of history would have to give up its claims if it wished to use the procedure with which absolutely all real knowledge of the historical process is bound up. As it is now, it is simply wearing itself out trying to square the circle. And so its trickery is apparent enough to the logician as well. If I keep to the phenomenon of a system of reality, I can link together characteristics which present themselves to my observation in an abstraction which binds them together, one which contains the developmental law of this structure as in a kind of universal idea. No matter how shaky and confused it may be, some kind of universal idea of historical reality surfaces in everyone who has preoccupied himself with it and has then unified this system of reality in an intellectual picture. Abstractions of this kind anticipate the work of analysis in all areas. An entity of this sort was the mysteriously spherical motion which ancient astronomy made its basis, or the living force in which biology of bygone days expressed the cause of the leading characteristics of organic life. And every formula which Hegel, Schleiermächer, or Comte have set up to express the law of history belongs to this natural thinking which always precedes analysis and is nothing other than — metaphysics. These pretentious general concepts of philosophy of history are nothing but the notiones universales which Spinoza has depicted so masterfully in their natural origin and their fateful effect on scientific thought.”
If Dilthey is a philosopher of history, then, he is a reluctant and unwilling philosopher of history, which may explain why he did not take the additional step that Collingwood felt would have resulted in Dilthey’s approach converging upon his own approach to history. The step that Dilthey did take, instead of taking Collingwood’s step, was to argue that scientific method is not the method of history, and that history requires a distinct methodology of its own. It is this step that put Dilthey into the same school of thought as Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Thus, for Dilthey, Hegel, Schleiermächer, and Comte are too “scientific” — a charge that no one would make today, but we can easily see how this attitude appears in a different form in Popper’s critique of the very idea of a theoretical history and his denial of the possibility of a predictive theory of history — this would indeed be a philosophy of history like unto science, if only it were possible, which both Dilthey and Popper emphatically deny.
Ilse Bulhof in “Structure and Change in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History” says the following on Dilthey’s conception of history:
“Dilthey tried first to understand the interconnectedness among events in the course of the life of an individual person. Human life, he felt, is lived consciously. The foremost characteristic of consciousness is self-awareness; and consciousness is not a thing but an activity. Dilthey stressed that what is given in consciousness are totalities or structures rather than particulars. The activity of individual consciousness consists not of step-by-step logical thinking, but of an experiencing of structures. Past and future are related in a series that is transformed by consciousness into a totality: ‘The course of life consists of parts, of experiences which have an inner relationship to each other. Every discrete experience is related to a self, of which it is a part; it is structurally connected with the other parts to form a totality. In all conscious phenomena we find structures.’ The coherence of life is not the result of our conscious perception of it; it is inherent in life itself, life happens in structures: ‘We perceive coherence because of the unity of our consciousness. This is a precondition of all our perceptions; but it is clear that the existence of coherence would not result from the mere fact that the unity of consciousness is presented with a variety of experiences. Only because life itself is a structural coherence in which the experience exists in a relationship which can be experienced is the coherence of life given to us.’ Dilthey explained the structuredness of human life on the basis of man’s anticipation of the future in projecting his life toward a goal: ‘The same person who investigates the coherence of his life in his personal history has already formed a coherence of his life, because what he [in hindsight] experiences as valuable in his life were goals which he had realized after he had projected his life in a certain direction’.”
Ilse Bulhof also notes that Ruth Benedict, “refers to Dilthey’s conception of cultures as integrated wholes.” Here is the passage in question from Benedict’s Patterns of Culture:
“In the social sciences the importance of integration and configuration was stressed in the last generation by Wilhelm Dilthey. His primary interest was in the great philosophies and interpretations of life. Especially in Die Typen der Weltanschauung he analyzes part of the history of thought to show the relativity of philosophical systems. He sees them as great expressions of the variety of life, moods, ubensstimmungen, integrated attitudes the fundamental categories of which cannot be resolved one into another. He argues vigorously against the assumption that any one of them can be final. He does not formulate as cultural the different attitudes he discusses, but because he takes for discussion great philosophical configurations, and historical periods like that of Frederick the Great, his work has led naturally to more and more conscious recognition of the role of culture.”
One can readily see how Benedict’s historical particularism, taken over from her mentor Boaz, plays into the idea of cultures as integrated wholes, as this means that each culture is utterly unique, and cannot be analyzed into fungible parts, as this would be to deny their integral nature. We take history whole if we take it at all, just as we take the person whole, if we take him at all, and that means taking the individual’s “lived experience” into the bargain.
There seems to me to be an opportunity implicit Bulhof’s interpretation of Dilthey, who wrote in the passage above, “Past and future are related in a series that is transformed by consciousness into a totality.” This sounds like Augustine’s treatment of time in Book XI of his Confessions. Augustine is among those rare philosophers who have written both on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history, but he doesn’t bring the two together; Dilthey presents us a way of bringing the two together, and I believe that this would be fully consonant with Dilthey’s conception of lived experience and the idea of history and historical periods as totalities. What Dilthey would have thought of this, I cannot say.
Further Resources
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Bulhof, I. N. (1976). Structure and Change in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History. History and Theory, 15(1), 21. doi:10.2307/2504874
Scharff, R. C. (1976). Non-Analytical, Unspeculative Philosophy of History: the Legacy of Wilhelm Dilthey. Cultural Hermeneutics, 3(3), 295–330. doi:10.1177/019145377600300305
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019145377600300305
