Jan 29, 2022 08:57 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 29, 2022 09:33 PM by C C.)
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/blog/exclusive-...lm-dilthey
INTRO: Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1833, two years after Hegel had died. Dilthey’s ambivalent attitude towards Hegel can provide some initial clues about his own philosophical approach. He admires Hegel’s recognition of the historical dimension of philosophical thought, but rejects the speculative and metaphysical ways he developed this relation. Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey proposes a return to the more focused viewpoint of Kant, but not without also taking account of the higher emancipatory aspirations and broader perspectives of later thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel.
(EXCERPT) 3:16: What made you become a philosopher?
Wilhelm Dilthey: Kant. Following Kant’s critical path, I want to establish an empirical science of the human mind in collaboration with researches from other disciplines; it is now time to know the laws that govern social, intellectual and moral phenomena.
3:16: Ambitious. How did you propose to do this?
WD: Provide an epistemological foundation for the sciences of the mind with a critique of historical reason. I see philosophy as an experiential science of spiritual phenomena out to cognize the laws governing social, intellectual and moral phenomena
3:16: So you are the Kant of history, as Droysen called you!
WD: Well, not really. In the veins of that knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant there runs no real blood but merely the thinnest vapour of reason.
3:16: So Kant’s got too intellectualist a version of reason for your liking?
WD: Too right he has. The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.
3:16: You also think he removed forms of thought and perception from history and this was a mistake?
WD: Right. Not the assumption of a rigid a priori of our faculty of knowledge, but only its historical development can answer the questions that we have to direct towards philosophy. Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction.
3:16: So metaphysics is always based on worldly realities?
WD: That’s the point. For example, ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.
3:16: I notice that Carnap liked you approach to metaphysics – he replaces your ‘facts of consciousness’ with ‘elementary experiences’ but it closely resembles your approach.
WD: Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’, as does he I think.
3:16: So you’re out to run a historical critique of reason – and you’re self-consciously doing this before Nietzsche?
WD: Indeed.
3:16: You’re a Christian too aren’t you, and did theology as a student – does your philosophical outlook define what you’re interested in when it comes to religion?
WD: Yes, it is my calling to apprehend the innermost nature of religious life in history and to bring this to the attention of our times which are moved exclusively by matters of state and science. Life experienced religiously is experienced according to its true nature—full of hardships and a singular blend of suffering and happiness throughout— we are pointed to something strange and unfamiliar, as if it were coming from invisible sources, something pressing in on life from outside, yet coming from its own depths.
3:16: Could your human sciences stand independently of metaphysical (Idealist) and natural science foundations? Could they be autonomous in this sense?
WD: What gives scientific status to human science is its purely empirical manner of investigation, its loving absorption in the particularities of an historical event, a universal spirit of historical investigation that determines the worth of every set of facts from its context of development. Historical science is the new scientific revolution Richard. The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology are now validated in light of new and better methods.
3:16: What’s the difference between natural and human sciences then?
WD: Facts of consciousness. The analysis of these facts is the centre of the humanities or, as Mill might call them, the moral sciences. I prefer moral-political sciences, or sciences of the practical world. The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation. Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point. If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.
3:16: How do you conceive of the success of natural sciences?
WD: The conditions sought by the mechanistic explanation of nature explain only part of the contents of external reality. This intelligible world of atoms, ether, vibrations, is only a calculated and highly artificial abstraction from what is given in outer and lived experience.
3:16: What changes must a human science make to the approach of the natural sciences then?
WD: Replace the abstraction of the natural sciences with analysis. Abstraction is distinguished from analysis in that the former singles out one fact and disregards the others, whereas the latter seeks to apprehend the majority of the facts that make up the factors of a complex whole... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED (3:-16am): A postmortal interview with Karl Marx
INTRO: Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich on the Rhine in 1833, two years after Hegel had died. Dilthey’s ambivalent attitude towards Hegel can provide some initial clues about his own philosophical approach. He admires Hegel’s recognition of the historical dimension of philosophical thought, but rejects the speculative and metaphysical ways he developed this relation. Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey proposes a return to the more focused viewpoint of Kant, but not without also taking account of the higher emancipatory aspirations and broader perspectives of later thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel.
(EXCERPT) 3:16: What made you become a philosopher?
Wilhelm Dilthey: Kant. Following Kant’s critical path, I want to establish an empirical science of the human mind in collaboration with researches from other disciplines; it is now time to know the laws that govern social, intellectual and moral phenomena.
3:16: Ambitious. How did you propose to do this?
WD: Provide an epistemological foundation for the sciences of the mind with a critique of historical reason. I see philosophy as an experiential science of spiritual phenomena out to cognize the laws governing social, intellectual and moral phenomena
3:16: So you are the Kant of history, as Droysen called you!
WD: Well, not really. In the veins of that knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant there runs no real blood but merely the thinnest vapour of reason.
3:16: So Kant’s got too intellectualist a version of reason for your liking?
WD: Too right he has. The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.
3:16: You also think he removed forms of thought and perception from history and this was a mistake?
WD: Right. Not the assumption of a rigid a priori of our faculty of knowledge, but only its historical development can answer the questions that we have to direct towards philosophy. Man as a fact prior to history and society is a fiction.
3:16: So metaphysics is always based on worldly realities?
WD: That’s the point. For example, ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.
3:16: I notice that Carnap liked you approach to metaphysics – he replaces your ‘facts of consciousness’ with ‘elementary experiences’ but it closely resembles your approach.
WD: Well, I see metaphysics as ‘lifestyle’, as does he I think.
3:16: So you’re out to run a historical critique of reason – and you’re self-consciously doing this before Nietzsche?
WD: Indeed.
3:16: You’re a Christian too aren’t you, and did theology as a student – does your philosophical outlook define what you’re interested in when it comes to religion?
WD: Yes, it is my calling to apprehend the innermost nature of religious life in history and to bring this to the attention of our times which are moved exclusively by matters of state and science. Life experienced religiously is experienced according to its true nature—full of hardships and a singular blend of suffering and happiness throughout— we are pointed to something strange and unfamiliar, as if it were coming from invisible sources, something pressing in on life from outside, yet coming from its own depths.
3:16: Could your human sciences stand independently of metaphysical (Idealist) and natural science foundations? Could they be autonomous in this sense?
WD: What gives scientific status to human science is its purely empirical manner of investigation, its loving absorption in the particularities of an historical event, a universal spirit of historical investigation that determines the worth of every set of facts from its context of development. Historical science is the new scientific revolution Richard. The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology are now validated in light of new and better methods.
3:16: What’s the difference between natural and human sciences then?
WD: Facts of consciousness. The analysis of these facts is the centre of the humanities or, as Mill might call them, the moral sciences. I prefer moral-political sciences, or sciences of the practical world. The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation. Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point. If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.
3:16: How do you conceive of the success of natural sciences?
WD: The conditions sought by the mechanistic explanation of nature explain only part of the contents of external reality. This intelligible world of atoms, ether, vibrations, is only a calculated and highly artificial abstraction from what is given in outer and lived experience.
3:16: What changes must a human science make to the approach of the natural sciences then?
WD: Replace the abstraction of the natural sciences with analysis. Abstraction is distinguished from analysis in that the former singles out one fact and disregards the others, whereas the latter seeks to apprehend the majority of the facts that make up the factors of a complex whole... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED (3:-16am): A postmortal interview with Karl Marx
