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Wilhelm Dilthey on the Self and History: Some Theoretical Roots of Geistesgeschichte

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Jacques Kornberg
Jacques Kornberg
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Intellectual history has always been a bit embattled in the English-speaking world, especially the sort of intellectual history that deals with cosmic moods and ideas. There always been those who have tried to place the practitioners of this kind of intellectual history on the defensive. However, the great masters of this discipline— a Dilthey or a Burckhardt or a Lovejoy—continue to cast their spell over many of us. Even in this most utilitarian and political of decades, their achievement remains breathtaking. But it is no use pretending that the approach to history that focuses on “Geistesgeschichte” has no “blind spots.” As with any human enterprise, it has its strengths and weaknessess, its keen insights, its narrowness of vision. This paper is an attempt to point to some of the sources of both the abiding greatness and the blind spots of this approach to history, and to explain why this sort of intellectual history still speaks to many of us.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 295 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1972

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References

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8. For the main lines of the critique, see Mannheim, Karl, “Towards the Sociology of the Mind; an Introduction,” Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London, 1956), pp. 25–32.Google Scholar

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13. Ibid., p. 55.

14. VII, 247.

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16. Ibid., pp. 158–68.

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18. Ibid., pp. 213–26, 232–35.

19. Ibid., p. 232.

20. Ibid., p. 220. Nietzsche had a different gloss on this famous remark by Napoleon. “At long last we ought to understand deeply enough Napoleon's surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the ‘German spirit’ for centuries. ‘Voilà un homme!’—that meant: ‘But this is a man! And I had merely expected a German.’“ Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York, 1966), p. 133.Google Scholar

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26. Contemporary psychology, with its rich burgeoning into existential psychiatry, humanistic psychology, and the varieties of personality and developmental theory, has to a large extent moved away from the philosophically shallow attitude that urged the wholesale transfer into its realm of a methodology developed in the physical sciences. From a “value-free” science saturated with implicit mechanistic images of the psyche, psychology has openly embraced normative concerns, and larger questions about human destiny. Some of the more important pioneers in this new path have been Allport, Gordon, Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (New Haven, 1955);Google ScholarMaslow, Abraham, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton, 1962);CrossRefGoogle ScholarErikson, Erik, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1962).Google Scholar

The “Ideen” was the first major systematic critique of the philosophic implications of employing in psychology a methodology borrowed from the physical sciences. See my forthcoming book on Dilthey, History and Personality: The Theories of Wilhelm Dilthey. Some of Allport's and Maslow's conceptualizations on the dynamics of personality development are strikingly similar to Dilthey's. There is evidence of some indirect filiation through E. Spranger—a student of Dilthey's—whose work influenced Allport. For an interesting contemporary discussion of how methodology rules assumptions about psychological realities in the laboratories of the experimental psychologists, see: MacLeod, R. B., “Phenomenology: A Challenge to Experimental Psychology,” in Behaviorism and Phenomenology, ed. Wann, T. W. (Chicago, 1965), pp. 56–60. MacLeod's critique echoes Dilthey's observations 80 years earlier.Google Scholar

27. VII, 259.

28. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel (1956), p. 561Google Scholar. Quoted in May, Rollo, “Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy,” in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, ed. May, Rollo, Angel, Ernest, Ellenberger, Henri F. (New York, 1958), p. 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See May, pp. 39–50, for a brilliant evocative discussion of the dynamics of self-awareness.

29. VII, 247.

30. Ibid., pp. 199, 14, 83.

31. Ibid., p. 247.

32. Ibid., p. 249.

33. Ibid., pp. 71–72.

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36. VII, 80, 277, 323.

37. Mannheim, op. cit., p. 48.

38. “Ideen,” p. 227.

39. For a brilliant discussion of the ramifications of humanistic “inwardness” in nineteenth-century Germany, see: Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York, 1967), ch. 19.Google Scholar

40. The main documents of Dilthey's youth and intellectual development are the diary entries and correspondence gathered by his daughter, Misch, Clara. Der junge Dilthey: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebüchern, 1852–1870 (2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1960).Google Scholar

41. Ibid., pp. 52, 97–99, 117–18, 168.

42. Ibid., pp. 140–41, 79–81.

43. VII, 93–117. In the discussion that follows I have left the German term Geist untranslated. There is no English equivalent for Geist. “Mind” is too intellectualist; “spirit” is too laden with metaphysical overtones, and does not correspond to Dilthey's understanding of Geist. For Dilthey, Geist is a cognitive, conative, and valuing agent—and valuing is rooted in feeling.

44. Dilthey, , Gesammelte Schriften, I: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (5th ed., Stuttgart, 1962), xvi–xviiGoogle Scholar, and “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat,” Gesammelte Schriften, V, 52–53.Google Scholar

45. I, 37.

46. Ibid., p. 51.

47. VII, 154.

48. For a key discussion of cultural systems, see: I, 49–64. For the external organizations of society, see: I, 64–86. For epochs, see: VII, 177–87. For nations, see: VII, 169–77.

49. I, 41; VII, 285.

50. I, 31.

51. VII, 284.

52. VII, 183–87.

53. VII, 280–81; I, 34.

54. I, 49, 74, 82.

55. Dilthey, , “Novalis,” Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (13th ed., Stuttgart, 1957), p. 171.Google Scholar

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57. Dilthey did not deny that these conventional socializing agencies also had a role in molding character, especially where the mass of men were concerned. See: Dilthey, “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften …,” pp. 70–71.

58. VII, 345–47, and Dilthey, , “[Über Vergleichende Psychologie.] Beiträge zum Studium der lndividualität,” Gesammelte Schriften, v, 288.Google Scholar

59. X, 90–93.