Rudolf A. Makkreel
Wilhelm Dilthey’s contributions to hermeneutics go back to 1860 when he wrote a long manuscript entitled “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutical System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics.” It was awarded a prize by the Schleiermacher Society, but Dilthey only published a fragment of it in 1892 as part of a longer essay on the theological and naturalistic background of the human sciences in the seventeenth century. At this stage of his development, Dilthey still considered hermeneutics as a primarily religious discipline for interpreting biblical texts. Yet he does recognize it as a point of entry into a larger discussion of the nature of the human sciences.
The full essay was published posthumously as part of the second volume of Dilthey’s Life of Schleiermacher and has since been translated into English (see Dilthey 1996, 33–227). Although Dilthey admits that there are hermeneutical discussions in the writings of Origen, Augustine, and others, this essay links the genesis of the science of hermeneutics with Protestantism. The Reformation first set exegesis free from the authority of tradition. Schleiermacher completes this process of liberation and, despite the fact that the ethical thought of Kant and Fichte is recognized as an important background influence on Schleiermacher’s project, Dilthey himself would not explicitly formulate the philosophical relevance of hermeneutics until his 1900 essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics.”
Because of the long hold that theology had over hermeneutics as the theory of interpretation, the important theoretical writings that contribute to Dilthey’s life project of a Critique of Historical Reason before 1900 refer less to the problems of interpretation and more to the nature of understanding. Dilthey considered it important to distinguish a reflective understanding (Verstehen) needed for making sense of human life and its historical development from the intellectual understanding (Verstand) of Kant that grounds the natural sciences. His Introduction to the Human Sciences of 1883 argues for the relative independence of the human sciences from the explanative methods of the natural sciences. The human sciences must contribute to the overall understanding of human life and history. One of the primary tasks of the human sciences is to do justice to the full scope of our experience, and in the Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology of 1894 Dilthey claims that we possess an implicit but direct awareness of the overall connectedness of our states of mind. The meaning of this inner experience can then be explicated through description and analysis. Whereas outer experience may be phenomenal in the Kantian sense, exposing us to things that appear to us piecemeal and which can only be unified by means of hypothetical explanations, human beings have a real access to their inner experience that can be directly understood as meaningful. Even other human subjects do not stand apart from us as alien objects, but they express themselves in ways that make it possible to experience a sense of solidarity with them. It is this inner sense of solidarity that can then turn into love, indifference, or hate. Others have the potential to be part of our inner experience.
Verstehen involves an understanding that is holistic and explicates the whole of what is given through description and analysis. Verstand, or intellectual understanding, proceeds discursively from part to part and looks for explanative connections. From now on, the former will be called “understanding” and the latter “explanation.” In Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, Dilthey claims that understanding is more encompassing than explanation: “We explain through purely intellectual processes, but we understand through the cooperation of all the powers of the mind activated by apprehension” (Dilthey 2010, 147). Human sciences such as a descriptive psychology will henceforth be conceived as primarily concerned with the understanding of the overall meaning-structures of human experience and only secondarily with the explanation of details. Late in his life, Husserl spoke of Dilthey’s descriptive psychology as a genial anticipation of phenomenology.
So far we have used the standard opposition of inner and outer experience. But Dilthey prefers the term lived experience (Erlebnis) and increasingly focuses on the capacity of lived experience to encompass both inner and outer sense. In the essay “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification” of 1890, it is argued that our original access to the external world is not inferential, but is reflexively felt from within as resistance to the will. The world of lived experience has a practical meaning that is directly present to us, and only the natural sciences reduce the world to an external representation. Even a perceptual object can have an inner meaning for us if it figures in our lives. Thus, Dilthey once refers to the perceived picture of Goethe in his study as an inner experience because he remembers that it used to hang in his father’s house and was then passed on to him. To the extent that the picture has become part of his subjective life history and has an emotional resonance, the awareness of it counts as a lived experience that has both inner and outer aspects.
Further doubts about the adequacy of the inner–outer distinction can be found in Dilthey’s Contributions to the Study of Individuality of 1895–96, where he considers how we experience events as spiritually meaningful. To make sense of this, he introduces a more reflective kind of experience that is neither inner nor outer. He calls it a “transcendental experience” in that it “integrates images of objects given in outer perception into the nexus of the facts of consciousness” (Dilthey 2010, 216, 217) without linking them to our inner experience (as in the aforementioned case of the Goethe picture). This kind of experience serves to “expand our knowledge of the nexus of psychic life beyond the horizon of inner experience” (Dilthey 2010, 216) and opens us up to the “spiritual-cultural facts” (Dilthey 2010, 217) that make up our historical context. To recognize a picture in a museum as a work of art having aesthetic value apart from my possessing it in my own home involves this kind of transcendental experience. The canvas that outer experience perceives in terms of its spatial qualities comes to be apperceived as being part of my cultural heritage and understood as spiritually meaningful. Whereas Kant appealed to transcendental conditions to ground our experience of nature, Dilthey appeals to transcendental reflection to orient us to the historical cultural world. We will see that he will later supplement this reflective experiential understanding that self-consciously incorporates spiritual meaning with a version of the Hegelian idea that we are immersed in and partake of objective spirit from the start.
So far, the lived experience that can be described psychologically and the transcendental experience that expands and delimits it reflectively have been seen as the sources of understanding the world as meaningful. But starting with the 1900 essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Dilthey comes to the realization that these starting points for understanding do not provide the criteria for what counts as adequate understanding. The intelligibility of lived experience may be self-evident (selbstverständlich), but it does not necessarily constitute genuine self-understanding (Selbstverständnis). Now Dilthey muses that “even the apprehension of our own states can only be called understanding in a figurative sense” (Dilthey 2010, 236). The way we express ourselves, whether in communication or in action, becomes a crucial intermediary in defining ourselves. Understanding can only be reliable if it proceeds through the interpretation of human objectifications. Thus, we understand ourselves not through introspection, but through social engagement and the capacity to assess ourselves the way we observe and assess others. Understanding is redefined as “the process by which we recognize, behind signs given to our senses, that psychic reality of which they are the expression” (Dilthey 2010, 236). What we learn about ourselves from the inside must be tested and even corrected by reflection on how we express what we feel and think. Understanding is thus inseparable from interpretation. The study of hermeneutics which Dilthey had left behind since his early prize essay on religious hermeneutics is now revived and made philosophically relevant.
Hermeneutic understanding must proceed through human objectification, and it can attain universal validity only in relation to the most testable form of objectification, namely, through the written word. Dilthey concludes “The Rise of Hermeneutics” by asserting that the main purpose of hermeneutics is “to preserve the universal validity of historical interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity …. Seen in relation to epistemology, logic, and the methodology of the human sciences, the theory of interpretation becomes an important connecting link between philosophy and the historical sciences, an essential component in the foundation of the human sciences” (Dilthey 1996, 250).
The consequence of this link between hermeneutics and the foundation of the human sciences in general is that Dilthey will no longer consider any particular human science such as a descriptive psychology to be a founding science. The human sciences are radically pluralistic and methodologically interdependent. Although this first attempt to relate hermeneutics to philosophical reflection about history focuses on epistemology and methodology, it will become clear in Dilthey’s Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences of 1910 that there is more to the relation. In this final articulation of Critique of Historical Reason, epistemology as a Kantian theory of cognition (Erkenntnistheorie) is incorporated into a more encompassing Hegelian theory of knowing (Theorie des Wissens). Before the sciences arrive at discursive cognition of their respective subdomains, we already possess a more direct knowledge of the world in which we find ourselves. Whereas Hegel conceived this world as a universal sphere of objective spirit, Dilthey reassesses it as a more local context of commonalities like the specific language and the regional customs that nurture an individual from birth. The knowledge (Wissen) that is accumulated from the commonalities that one inherits from one’s local past produces a subjective certainty (Gewissheit) that is needed for everyday life. Both the human and natural sciences aim to replace this sphere of provincial knowledge rooted in the sphere of commonalities with conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) that represents the world in universal terms and can be tested for it reliability (Sicherheit). The human sciences like the natural sciences aim at objective cognition, but their capacity to formulate universal claims about human life and history comes at the price of fragmenting the historical world. It is not possible to find cognitive uniformities about history at large, only about particular histories focused on spheres such as economic or political life. Thus, the understanding of human life and history that is the concern of Critique of Historical Reason must go one stage further. It must point “to all classes of knowledge: … to the conceptual cognition of reality, to the positing of values, and to the determination of purposes and establishment of rules” (Dilthey 2002, 25).
This more encompassing sense of knowledge that is required for genuine historical understanding moves from the level of commonalities through that of universal cognitive judgments to that of a more comprehensive assessment that only an individual can make. Dilthey chose to label this third level of understanding a “re-experiencing”—a term that needs clarification. It does not mean a reliving of actual experiences from the past, but involves a re-creative articulation of their nexus in order to makes sense of them. As the highest mode of understanding, re-experiencing should not be conceived psychologically, but as an “appropriation of the world of human spirit” (Dilthey 2002, 235). Re-experiencing has a completing function at the level of spiritual comprehension. It contains all “the classes of knowledge” enumerated in the foregoing citation and could just as well have been called a reflective assessment. From now on, this highest or completing mode of understanding will be called “re-experiencing as reflective assessment.”
In Dilthey’s last essay on hermeneutics entitled “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life,” he reiterates these three levels of understanding: the elementary understanding that derives from the commonalities that nurture us from birth, the higher conceptual understanding contributed by the sciences, and, finally, re-experiencing as reflective assessment. Elementary understanding is at the level of what is shared locally and could be called a direct kind of common knowledge. Higher understanding is cognitive and has universal import and provides a bridge to the individuated assessment that completes the process of understanding and produces reflective knowledge. The interpretive task of hermeneutics is to mediate between these three levels of understanding and make sure that the respective insights of each level are not lost. Even if we no longer accept the standpoint of common sense and elementary understanding at face value, higher understanding must be able to account for why it made sense and explicate what its role was. Moreover, some version of elementary understanding will continue to provide a broader perspective on things than the specialized cognition of the sciences, and it is part of the task of what has been called “re-experiencing as reflective assessment” to acknowledge this tension. This interpretive tension must be added as a feature of the hermeneutical circle that proceeds from an anticipatory overall understanding of things to more explicit but partial understandings that can in turn contribute to a more definitive or comprehensive understanding. The fact that the discourses characteristic of these three levels of understanding are discrete and do not naturally merge gives the hermeneutical circle a certain jaggedness that requires judgmental assessment to be smoothed out. The task of interpretation is to negotiate such discursive differences. These are some of the hermeneutical problems that Dilthey opened up but still have not been adequately addressed.
The maturing of Dilthey’s views on hermeneutics required him to move beyond the assumptions that lived experience already amounts to self-understanding and that the understanding of others is merely a kind of extrapolation from the self. However, he never equated understanding with the kind of empathy that analytic philosophers such as Ernest Nagel and Theodore Abel reduced it to, and he gradually overcame the psychologism that he has been accused of by Gadamer and Ricoeur, among others. Increasingly, Dilthey comes to focus on the objectifications of human life as essential to historical understanding. While the human sciences examine how we are formed by historical events, state institutions, and social customs, they also demonstrate how human beings can objectively shape the world through their productive activities. Such objective achievements, Dilthey writes, “always contain, like man himself, a reference back from an outer sensory aspect to one that is withdrawn from the senses and therefore inner” (Dilthey 2002, 106). He then goes on to warn that it is a common error to resort to psychic life to account for what this inner aspect is (an error that still lingered in the “The Rise of Hermeneutics”). Thus, to understand the inner meaning of the laws of a state at a particular time, one need not go back to the mental states of the legislators who voted for them. Historians must study the relevant legal documents of an age, the available records of court procedures, the behavior of judges, plaintiffs, and defendants as the expressions of the rules and norms that govern a system of jurisprudence. Understanding the inner core of Roman law requires, not a reliving of the intentions of individual legislators or judges, but “a regress to a spiritual formation that has its own structure and lawfulness” (Dilthey 2002, 107) and represents a common will.
This also applies to the understanding of individual human creations such as the work of a dramatic poet. What is to be understood “at first” in such a work “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 representation” (Dilthey 2002, 107). The task is to grasp the inner structural meaning that holds these moments together in the work. The qualification “at first” noted earlier indicates that in some cases the psychic processes of the author may become relevant if there is something about the structural nexus of the work that seems unusual or even incoherent. Then peculiarities about the author’s acquired psychic nexus may become relevant. But for most historical objectifications, the hermeneutic regress locates a meaning nexus that is publically accessible. This is because from infancy our consciousness is nurtured by the local social and cultural context in which we find ourselves. The content of subjective spirit is inseparable from the contextual medium of what Hegel called “objective spirit” and therefore cannot be understood without it.
The inseparability of the subjective and objective, the inner and the outer, is most subtly indicated in a brief section on musical understanding. Dilthey indicates that the feelings composers express in their music are not first found through introspection and then translated into sounds. The feelings are musical from the start and are generated in a tonal sphere. Expression is not to be conceived as the externalization of psychological states of mind. There is no musical work, he declares “that does not speak of what has been experienced, and yet everything is more than expression. For this musical world with its infinite possibilities of tonal beauties and of meaning is always there … in history, capable of endless development. And it is in this world that the musician lives, not in his feelings” (Dilthey 2002, 242).
If hermeneutics is to be understood as the search for the inner meaning of the phenomena that experience offers as a mere outside, then “inner” is not some isolable core but rather the inherent interwovenness of those phenomena with the world at large.