Dilthey, empathy and verstehen a contemporary reappraisal

(2001) - A Harrington

Journal: European Journal of Social Theory
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Abstract

Notes

• Dilthey's writings on hermeneutics amount to a highly sophisticated defence of the role of psychological feeling in understanding that should still be of interest to contemporary social theorists

• Most people confuse the term Einfühlung. Interpreters who try to understand life-contexts by 'feeling themselves into them' (sich einfulen) want to extinguish their own subjectivity; but in doing so they lose all consciousness of self, and consequently forego all consciousness of what it is that distinguishes their world from that of the others. The self-extinction culminates only in self-projection.

• Historical thought before this time remained locked behind in an inexorable logic of alteration between positivism and romanticism, objectivism and intuitionism

• According to Habermas, Dilthey's earlier writings betray 'a clear danger of psychologism'- even though he later recognised this error of grounding human sciences on psychology (1973)

• Frank (1977) pointed out that Gadamer misleadingly concentrates on Schleiermacher's 'psychological doctrine of understanding' at the expense of the other part of his treatise called 'grammatical interpretation', which was concerned less with the divination of authors' intentions than with comparative analysis of discursive structures

• Dilthey, Weber, and the Neo-Kantians

• Psychology in the view of neo-Kantians Windleband and Rickert belonged only with the natural sciences and could never capture the intrinsic normative validity (Geltung) of cultural forms

  • They rejected Dilthey's concept of Geisteswissenschaften in favour of the term Kulturwissenschaft, seeing Geist little more than the subjective organ of thought, not the objective 'thought-content' of cultural productions

• Preferring Rickert's 'methodological' to Dilthey's 'ontological' criterion, Weber as is well-known, defended a more rationalistic approach to Verstehen based on a standard of intelligibility derived from the ideal-type of purposive-rational action, confining feeling and psychological understanding to the status of auxiliaries

• History, Psychology and Hermeneutics

• Dilthey increasingly notes how these materially objectified 'life-expressions' mediate between the twin processes of Erleben and Verstehen and embody the objective independence of symbolic meanings from the passing experiences of their authors and interpreters. He now describes not psychology but hermeneutics as the foundational discipline of human sciences.

• Habermas (1973) sees these lines as marking a complete volte-face in which Dilthey recognised the 'error' of his earlier 'naïve empathy theory' and adopted an alternative quasi-Hegelian 'philosophy of reflexion'

• Dilthey no longer spoke of psychology as the 'first and most fundamental of the particular human sciences' but he by no means abandoned his concept of the psyhcic nexus. Dilthey's aim throughout was rather to show how psychology stands in need of historical reference at the same time as historical and sociological explanation

• Dilthey defines Verstehen as ''that process by which we know something inferior from signs given outwardly to the senses''; and then more precisely ''that process by which from signs given to the senses we recognise something psychic, of which the signs are the expression'' (1924b)

• Dilthey and contemporary social theory

• Dilthey has not been guilty of '' naïve empathy theory of understanding'' and that it is therefore mistaken to see his philosophy as founded on some misguidedly ''aestheticing'' ideal of immediate contemporary with historical subjects

• Dilthey's early writings indicate that no conception of Verstehen that espouses controlled empathetic understanding of social action in historical context need necessarily degenerate inot the kind of romantic intuitionism and simultaneous objectivism of levied feeling and fixed intended meanings that both Gadamer and Habermas and, in different way, Weber and the neo-Kantians all impute to him

• Joas (1985) has pointed out the centrality of Dilthey's thought to the subsequent development of Mead's pragmatist social psychology and through Mead, to the symbolic interactionalist movement

• Should not be forgotten that Dilthey also defended a notion of the ''objective spirit'' of particular cultural communities and historical periods. In Dilthey's understanding of this originally Hegelian term, objective spriirt denotes the tissue of affinities between particular dimensions of social action that go to make up the cultural identity of particular groups, or 'the manifold forms in which the communality which exists between individuals has objectified itself in the sensible world' (Dilthey 1981)

• Dilthey's concept of 'cultural system' and of the 'complex of interactions' between individuals shares much in common with Simmel's theory of 'forms of sociation' that generate personal identities through the crystallisations of social roles nad professions and through the confrontations and exchanges between these roles and professions that result from the social division of labour

• For Dilthey, the term 'Geist' denotes not some reified mental substance but a complex or relationships between practices, experience and signifying activities

  • The concept of Geist for all its Idealist heritage, does not have to be seen in terms of some deterministic supra-individual force that sweeps through history and cultural life like a wind above the heads of embodied agents

• Two aspects of Dilthey's significance. First concerns Dilthey's relation to Durkheim and the ideas of 'rules of sociological method', and the second the controversy over the 'dualistic' implications of Verstehen/Erklaren or Geist/Natur dichotomy

  • Like Durkheim ''Dilthey exerted himself to recover and enhance the visibility of earlier participants in the transgenerational dialogue that prefigured modern social science'' (Levine 1995)

    • Dilthey's position is that there can be no 'rules of sociological method' insofar as these rules attempt to legislate correct ways of deifying symbolic objects

  • Lastly it has been argued that the nineteenth-century antithesis of the Geistewissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften contains 'metaphysical' and 'dualistic' implications and consequently can no longer be upheld today after the challenges to inductive empiricism in the natural sciences posed by Popper, Quine, and Kuhn

    • The language of spirit and nature may seem incongruently romantic to us today, it may be argued that a basic difference of subject matter still remains between the sciences that his concepts rightly address