Dilthey is also important because of his "philosophy of life". Life is not just the biological fact that we share with other animals, but human life is more complex than this. It is the collection of innumerable individual human lives, which constitutes the social and historical life of mankind. Everything about us is part of that life.
| Central Question for Dilthey How can the philosopher who is confronted with the diversity of life without any absolute norms, perceive any meaning or pattern in it? |
ANSWER: Life is not a series of disconnected facts, but it is encountered everywhere as already organized, interpreted, and therefore meaningful. The philosopher starts from the meanings humans have given to the world.
| Geisteswissenschaften: Science of humans Naturwissenschaften: Science of nature |
These two are different because the subject matter is different. In the first, we ourselves are part of the study, while in the second we are studying something apart from us. A true philosophy of life is based on the science of humans.
1. All human manifestations are part of a historical process and should be explained in historical terms. The state, the family, even man himself cannot be adequately defined abstractly because they have different characteristics in different ages.
2. Different ages and differing individuals can only be understood by entering imaginatively into their specific point of view; what the age or the individual thought relevant must be taken into account by the historian.
3. The historian himself is bound by the horizons of his own age. How the past presents itself to him in the perspectives of his own concerns becomes a legitimate aspect of the meaning of that past.
Verstehen: the comprehension of some mental content -- an idea, intention, feeling -- manifested in empirically given expressions such as words or gestures.
There are a number of conditions that make Verstehen possible:
1. We must be familiar with the mental processes through which meaning is experienced and conveyed. If we did not know what it was to love or hate something, to express something, or whatever, we could not begin to understand anything. Understanding is connected to the possibility of expression.
2. We also have to have knowledge of the particular concrete context in which an expression occurs. To understand anything, we must understand its historical context.
3. We must also understand the social and cultural systems that determine the nature of most expressions. This is what Wittgenstein would say is the most important thing.
This process of understanding is a circular motion. It is the hermeneutical circle -- to understand a word we must understand a language, and to understand a language we must understand words. This circle of understanding, along with the fact that understanding is a complex process, gives us our best entry point to understanding humans.
How do we get to Verstehen? 3 steps:
a. Experience: (Erlebnis) The experience of a painting may have several temporal occasions, but it is all one Erlebnis. An experience of romantic love may be based on many encounters over time, but it is one experience (Erlebnis).
We do not have Erlebnis, we are Erlebnis. It is the way we live. We can reflect on this experience, but then we have lost the experience itself in the reflection. It is not distinct from perceiving -- it is immediate lived experience.
b. Expression (Ausdruck): Dilthey does not mean here something like expressing a feeling, but an expression of life. A better translation than "expression" might be "objectification" of the mind. The problem with Erlebnis is that it is so interior. It cannot form the basis for the human sciences.
Examples of expressions: laws, languages, or social principles. Art is an interesting case. Art doesn't point to author, but to life itself. Thus it is understood in that shared sphere. It gives the best opening to lived experience.
c. Understanding (Verstehen): This is reserved for the situation in which the mind "grasps" the mind of another person.
So, it is also more than explanation: "We explain nature; man we must understand." It is the process by which we comprehend our lived human experience, which has been expressed in some way.
So, how is this science? Dilthey thinks it still is.
Obviously, in science one will have to generalize. Verstehen does this. However, these generalizations are not based on more generalizations about the human individual, but on the individual's life-experience itself. How can this be done?
One possible answer: A Theory Of Types, or Worldviews. We see the world as wholes, not as bits of data. A person is experienced as a person, not as a construction of various physical and psychological parts. This is part of our concrete experience, not a later rationalization.
Human science refines these everyday types. These are very similar to metaphors.
The result of the human sciences is that we create a world-view (Weltanschauung). Life engenders an attitude toward life which in turn conditions our further conduct of life. This world-view is a sense of the whole which is both synthesized and directive of experience. Whereas science "explains" the world analytically, the world-view "understands" the world synthetically.
Dilthey thought were three basic types of world-views: naturalism (or positivism); subjective idealism (or the idealism of freedom); and objective idealism.
a. Naturalism begins with the physical world given in sense-perception. Its canon of understanding is the lawfulness of physical reality. Mind and spirit is derivative and subsidiary. It tends to deny the spontaneity of mind, free will, and the reality of values. It can tend toward materialism, although it can also end up as positivism. In this category: Epicurus, Democritus, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Condillac, Comte, Feuerbach, Mill, Spencer, Haeckel.
b. Subjective Idealism was the creation of the Athenian spirit and reformulated in Christianity. Free consciousness is primary; mind or spirit is seen as superior to natural reality. Spirit is an originary force, capable of creation apart from physical causality. It presupposes the priority of the ideal over the real. It appears as personal theism; also as transcendentalism and voluntarism. In this category: Plato, Aristotle, Bayle, Voltaire, Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche, Bergson, William James.
c. Objective Idealism is based on a universal apprehension of mind and reality as an integral whole. This is the major portion of traditional metaphysics. There is an intuition of the whole. The universe is a work of art to be appreciated. It tends to be monistic. It is opposed to analytic differentiation. In religion it is pantheism and panentheism. In this group: Nicholas of Cusa, Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and probably Dilthey's own notion of Verstehen.
These types never appear as pure forms, but as organizing centres.
Dilthey opens the door to consider the possibility that we can scientifically understand humans as humans, not as the effects of some external cause or as constructions of simpler parts.