Dilthey maintains that his analysis allows for a middle path between overestimating the particularity of individual ideas, and defending an overly idealist account of history. When Dilthey was at university, he had a close relationship with Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (WPDH, chs. 1–2; GHT, p. 343). While they were influenced by Herbartian psychology, Lazarus and Steinthal object that Herbart neglects the historical, linguistic, and cultural dimensions of human existence and action. For an account of these, they turned to Humboldt and to Hegel, though in a critical spirit. Steinthal wrote a substantial monograph, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Linguistics and the Hegelian Philosophy (1848), which compares Humboldt to Hegel, and finds a middle path. In 1863, Lazarus gave a Rektoratsrede, “On Ideas in History,” in which he also argues against accepting wholesale either Hegel’s dialectic or Humboldt’s humanism.18 Lazarus argues that Hegel’s thought removes the ideas too strictly from the material conditions of society, and thus it is unclear how we are to have access to them. Humboldt, on the other hand, argues that ideas have impact through the agency of individuals, who bring those ideas to fruition. But, Lazarus objects, individuals do not control the impact of their ideas on society, because they do not control material conditions, nor other individuals. Lazarus locates the contribution of reason to history in the influence of ideas on thoughts and actions, as these are made manifest in cultural artifacts and historical phenomena. Lazarus concludes that the only way to study ideas in history is to achieve a comprehensive perspective on an individual’s thoughts and actions as they are revealed in history, so that one can reason from the cultural artifact to the idea behind it.
In this context, Dilthey also appeals to the hermeneutic tradition, especially to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).19 In his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784–91), Herder defends the thesis that thought depends on language. Language is an indication of thought; but thought is made possible by language in the first place. Herder faces the larger question of how to interpret a text as a whole, as an expression of a given content, where this content may or may not be read as determined by authorial intention. Herder and Schleiermacher appeal to the notion of feeling or divination (Einfühlung), which Gjesdal parses as “attentiveness to the individuality of symbolic expression as it lends voice to a larger cultural context.”20 While Herder and Schleiermacher appeal to a notion of “divination” in their hermeneutic methods, they do not argue that the methods of the human sciences are distinct from those of the natural sciences. As Beiser observes, Herder explicitly argues that the “laws that govern history are one and the same as those that govern nature” (GHT, p. 100). Herder’s or Schleiermacher’s interpreter uses Einfühlung as a way to investigate a text as evidence.
Dilthey’s relationship with Lazarus and Steinthal may explain Dilthey’s similar commitment to a distinct path between Humboldtian individualism and Hegelian idealism.21 Dilthey also followed Lazarus, Steinthal, Herder, and Schleiermacher in locating the study of the individual, not in conceptual analysis or in empirical psychology alone, but in a holistic study of history, culture, language, and psychology. For Dilthey, the methodology for the human sciences is found in the entirety of human experience and culture:
I compare every element of current abstract scientific thinking with the whole of human nature presented by experience, the study of language, and the study of history, and I look for their interrelationship (IHS, p. 73).
Dilthey’s strongest argument for the independence of the human sciences is based on this holism. Dilthey does give individual arguments that specific results in the human sciences are based on introspection or on hermeneutic methods. But he shies away from arguing that psychology or the analysis of introspective evidence yields a foundation for the human sciences (see also GHT, p. 339ff.).
The holistic method rules out the approaches of earlier philosophers of experience. In my view, this is the right context in which to read Dilthey’s famous remark that “There is no real blood flowing in the veins of the knowing subject fabricated by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but only the diluted juice of reason as mere mental activity” (GHT, p. 339ff.). For Dilthey, the human sciences aim, not at an analysis of consciousness or of history alone, but at a holistic understanding of the “totality of human nature,” through study of the material and ideal facts of history and of culture (GHT, p. 339ff.).
In founding the human sciences on a holist methodology, Dilthey returns to the earlier ideal of Wissenschaft as a cooperative endeavor. This ideal is distinct from the Kantian and neo-Kantian position, according to which the empirical and “historical” sciences are strictly separate from those sciences with an a priori foundation. Kant carefully distinguishes the two, for instance, in his essay “On the Conflict of the Faculties.” Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), a key member of the Southwest School, defended the autonomy of philosophy, especially, from the methods of empirical science. He did so in part in response to a well-known lecture of 1867 by Eduard Zeller, “On the Meaning and Task of Philosophy,” in which Zeller argued that philosophy should adopt the methods of the empirical sciences (see GHT, p. 375ff.).
In his 1894 Rektoratsrede in Strasbourg, Windelband responds by upholding Kant’s distinction between the methods of the rational and the empirical sciences. The rational sciences are the a priori sciences, mathematics and philosophy; while the empirical sciences are those based on experience, such as biology and chemistry. Philosophy follows the critical method, which establishes the quid juris in Kant’s sense, that is, the “reasons for knowledge, the evidence for its validity”; whereas history follows the genetic method, which establishes the quid facti, that is, the “causes of knowledge, how it originates from experience and the innate activity of the mind” (GHT, p. 376). Windelband reiterates Kant’s view that the empirical sciences require “the verification of facts on the basis of observation,” and the rational sciences “are never based on single observations or collections of observations” (p. 173).22
What is new with Windelband is the division of the methods of the empirical sciences into idiographic and nomothetic:
the empirical sciences either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with the unique, immanently defined content of the real event. […] scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and idiographic in the latter case (GN, p. 175).
Nomothetic sciences aim to find general laws, while idiographic sciences focus on individual phenomena that may not be law-governed or exhibit regularities. Windelband defines idiographic sciences as those which seek “the particular in the form of the historically defined structure.” On Windelband’s account, then, history appears to be essentially idiographic; and Dilthey’s method of understanding is as well.
Windelband begins his lecture by criticizing two nineteenth-century tendencies: on the one hand, to argue that philosophy is no longer a living discipline and is now only the history of philosophy; or, on the other hand, to place psychology at the foundation of the philosophical method (GN, p. 170). He is concerned to preserve the independence of the philosophical method from the methods of history and of psychology (GN, pp. 170–1). He continues by rejecting the division between the natural and the human sciences, observing that psychology itself is a problem case—it must be considered a “Geisteswissenschaft” or human science, since its subject is the human Geist, but its “methods are those of the natural sciences” (GN, p. 174). For these reasons, Windelband also criticizes Dilthey’s theory of the human sciences, especially of history. Windelband argues that, while psychology may be as much a nomothetic science as is physics, history is a paradigmatically idiographic science. “Historically defined structures” are constituted by their particularity and individuality.
On several significant points, Windel
band and Dilthey were talking past each other. Windelband’s aim in his Rektoratsrede is to make the true distinctions between sciences, and he argues that the division of sciences into Geistes- and Naturwissenschaften is incorrect. He goes on to say that the Geisteswissenschaften rely on a kind of “inner perception” or self-observation, described by Locke and by Descartes, that can no longer be relied upon as a foundation for scientific inquiry (GN, p. 173). However, Dilthey’s approach does not necessarily rely on “inner perception.” Rather, Dilthey employed a comparative approach, in which he brought the methods of history, of psychology, and of language together. Those methods could be entirely external and based on the analysis of empirical evidence through hypotheses, as are the hermeneutic methods of Herder and Schleiermacher.
One way to read at least some of Dilthey’s work is to observe that he was not necessarily defending an essential division between types of science. Instead, he was defending his version of the Humboldtian ideal of Wissenschaft, as a collective endeavor to investigate not only knowledge, but also human experience and the meaning of human action in history. The method of understanding, and the application of hermeneutic and psychological methods in history and in the analysis of language, could solve questions about “the unity of life in the person, the outer world, individuals apart from us, their life in time, and their influence on each other,” which are:
things we can explain from this totality of human nature […] It is not the assumption of a rigid a priori of our cognitive capacity, but only the history of development alone […] which can answer the questions we all have to address to philosophy (IHS, p. 73).
While Windelband focuses on classifying the sciences methodologically, Dilthey focuses on conceiving how researchers and intellectual pursuits can cooperate.
30.4 HISTORY AND METHODS
Dilthey and Windelband are both opposed to materialism and positivism. But their responses are revealing about their antecedent philosophical commitments, and, perhaps more significantly, about their views on the relationships between disciplines and research programs. From Windelband’s perspective, materialism as an exhaustive account of the sciences threatens the independent validity and normative force of the a priori sciences. But Windelband does not see history itself as a true, nomothetic science; again, for Windelband, history is idiographic.
This view of history was not shared universally in the nineteenth century. Hegel, of course, was opposed to it; in his Philosophy of History, he distinguishes first-hand reports from reflective and philosophical history as distinct levels of historical reasoning. While Marx argues against Hegel that the norms of history are natural laws, not ideal relationships, arguably, both Hegel and Marx would disagree with Windelband and argue that history can be nomothetic.23
Windelband can agree that reasoning about historical relationships contributes to our understanding. But, in a Kantian spirit, he contends that such reasoning is not truly scientific. Instead, reasoning about the evolution of a concept or about the Zeitgeist, for instance, constitutes subjective reflections on our experience, which allow us to understand our experience more fully. But such subjective forms of interpretation have no objective validity, that is, they ought not be applied to objects and to events as though they allow for judgments about objective reality.
The debate between Windelband and Dilthey is reflected in at least two later discussions of philosophy, in its relationship to the sciences. The first is raised by Windelband: the extent to which the search for law-governed relationships is not only central to, but definitive of, the methods of the natural sciences. Carl Hempel has defended perhaps the strongest position that the hypothetico-deductive method is characteristic of explanation in the natural sciences, which can be seen as an iteration of Windelband’s view that nomothetic explanations are characteristic of natural science.24 However, distinguishing the hypothetico-deductive method from the inductive method requires making a clear distinction between theoretical and observation statements. Rudolf Carnap, perhaps the strongest defender of such a distinction in his earlier work, comes to a much more conventionalist view by mid-twentieth century, when he writes “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.” In general, the debates between Carnap and Quine over the relationship of language to scientific inference, over semantics versus syntax in evaluating scientific theories and linguistic frameworks, and especially over the use of inductive versus deductive methods in constructing scientific theories, can be read as a further development of debates over the proper methods of theory construction and evaluation in the natural sciences. Hempel’s view on nomothetic explanation further is put to the test by recent work on the importance of scientific understanding, which addresses the question of how to carve theories into elements that contribute to explanation versus understanding of the phenomena in question.25
Moreover, dividing the natural from the human sciences may make it appear that natural science makes no attempt to give an interpretation, not just a phenomenal description, of nature. But it is a vexed question now, as it was in the nineteenth century, what relationship there is between the mathematical or more purely theoretical statements, even of physical theories, and their interpretation. Can theories, like nature, be carved at the joints, to show which elements are justificatory, which explanatory, and which contribute to understanding?
A second, less often addressed, question is raised by Dilthey’s work. The question concerns the interrelationship between scientific theories and pursuits, where history, psychology, and theory of language are taken to be scientific. In the sciences themselves, the scope of contemporary research projects, in which no one person can complete a given project, and scientists of various kinds of training and background must cooperate, has provoked discussion of how this fact affects the practice and the epistemology of science. A clearly conceived ideal of a common methodology, or at least of common aims and practices, might resolve problems encountered by cooperative intellectual enterprises. Dilthey’s own work probably does not succeed in articulating such an ideal, but should be valued for its appreciation of the importance of cooperation in the methods of the sciences.
Moreover, Dilthey’s notion of the Geisteswissenschaften reflects the earlier concept of Wissenschaft as a shared, cooperative research program. The development of a separate discipline of the history and philosophy of science in the twentieth century provokes the question of how the methods of history are used in philosophy by philosophers, of how historians and philosophers of science might work together, and of what common aims the two “faculties” might have. Thomas Kuhn, who had much in common with Dilthey, was trained as a physicist, and engaged in the history of science without historical training. While his work has had a seminal influence on philosophy of science and, especially, history and philosophy of science, it does not contain very many more general recommendations about how to blend the two methodologies. Not enough work has been done to explain the foundations and methods proper to a philosophical history, or a historical philosophy, of science. Dilthey’s account, especially in chapter 3 of IHS, gives a number of recommendations and insights that are worth considering in taking on such a project.26
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beiser, Frederick. The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012). Abbreviated GHT.
de Regt, Henk, Leonelli, Sabina, and Eigner, Kai. Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
Dierig, Sven. Wissenschaft in der Maschinenstadt (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006).
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Introduction to the Human Sciences, volume 1, trans. Ramon Betanzos. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988 [1883]). Abbreviated IHS.
Feest, Uljana (ed.). Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).
Forster, Michael. N. “Hermeneutics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Michael Rosen and Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
.
Forster, Michael. “Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation.” Review of Metaphysics 56 (2), 2002.
Frost-Arnold, Greg. “The Large-Scale Structure of Logical Empiricism.” Philosophy of Science 72 (5), 2005.
Gjesdal, Kristin. “Aesthetic and Political Humanism.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (3), 2007.
Hatfield, Gary. The Natural and the Normative (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
Hempel, Carl. “Aspects of Scientific Explanation,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965).
Herbart, Johann. “Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics in Psychology,” trans. H. Haanel. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11, 1877.
Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. (Berlin 1900ff.).
Kluback, William. Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1956). Abbreviated WDPH.
Köhnke, Klaus. The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Lazarus, Moritz. Über die Ideen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1865).
Locke, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in The Works of John Locke, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854 [1690]).
Makkreel, Rudolf. “Wilhelm Dilthey,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta (available at
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 111