Autor: Melchin, R. Kenneth

Buch: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Titel: History, Ethics and Emegent Probability

Stichwort: Geschichte: Wilhelm Dilthey - Lonergan

Kurzinhalt: ... what is relevant here is that Lonergan, like Dilthey, asks whether there can be any foundation for a single 'upper blade' for history in general. ... that a general historiography would need to take its upper blade from something like a ...

Textausschnitt: 6.2 Wilhelm Dilthey

21/6 According to Michael Ermarth,1 Wilhelm Dilthey's life was devoted to finding grounds for reconciling an appropriate knowledge of humanity and a belief in the foundations for human living with a newer form of knowledge of natural processes which was emerging with remarkable success from the application of the methods of the Naturwissenschaflen. Dilthey had seen a marked shift occur in nineteenth century Germany. The first half of the century had been dominated by German Idealism with its emphasis upon the creative, originating, transformative power of mind. Human reality was conceived as decisively constituted by the operations of mind. And so the human sciences, with their sweeping generalizations which sought to bring all of reality under a single systematic viewpoint, were considered the sole adequate means for gaining access to this human reality. After 1850, however, a new, positivist approach began to gain dominance, an approach which emphasized the particular details of human life that could be discovered by applying the methods of the natural sciences. And here, mind and consciousness were not conceived as originating but as derivative of the external, natural world. Dilthey was convinced that the human sciences could still yield some knowledge of reality and that the successes of the natural sciences need not demand a reductionist view of mind. He wondered whether there was a route somewhere between the sweeping generalizations of the idealists and the concrete, reductionist explanations of the positivists. And so he sought to secure a methodological foundation for a newly conceived science of man, which would provide access to a comprehensive understanding of human history while still remaining a legitimate, grounded knowing.2 (172; Fs)

22/6 Dilthey's approach, according to Michael Ermarth, was to recognize the natural sciences as a legitimate way of knowing, but to demand a restriction in the field of knowledge to which the methods of the natural sciences would apply. Taking his clue from the great idealist philosophers, Dilthey asked whether the realm of human history, human value, human meaning was constituted differently from the realm of natural processes. And he found an answer in his distinction between inner lived experience of human conscious life and the outer sensory experience which provides access to the natural world. The human sciences have as their proper object of study the reality which is given directly to the mind as a coherent texture of relations and meanings.3 And this inner lived experience is given directly to the mind as a coherent unity precisely because it is a product of mind itself. Dilthey seized upon an insight which had been formulated first by Giovanni Battista Vico, early in the eighteenth century. The mind can know directly what the mind has created. And so understanding in the human sciences is the reconstruction of mental life.4 Consequently the methodology of the human sciences will have its foundations rooted in an adequate account of the workings of the human mind.5 The 'Fundamental Science,' the foundations for a science of man, society and history, will be at once a psychology and an epistemology. For an empirical study of the laws that rule the human mind in its social, intellectual, and moral activity, will explain both the workings of mind and the nature of its products, human conscious historical life.6 (173; Fs)

23/6 Dilthey's turn was towards an empirical account of human knowing to ground a systematic method of knowing in the human sciences. Human knowing is spontaneously operative in its natural attitude of historical life experience.7 And as such the activity of mind is constitutive of historical reality. Human understanding includes its objectification in language and gesture. And history is the manifold of relations that are constituted by such understanding. History is the process of objectification of Verstehen.8 Thus Dilthey's 'Fundamental Science' set the foundations for an account of the structure and dynamism of history, precisely because it is mind itself which is the author of historical process.9 (173; Fs)

24/6 There is certainly a great deal more than can be said about the work of Dilthey. And Michael Ermarth's book is a marvellous introduction to the many facets of Dilthey's life and his thought. But for the present purposes what is significant is that Dilthey understood the methodological implications for the study of history when history is conceived in terms of the mediating and constitutive acts of human meaning and human freedom. Acts of intelligence are not simply employed to understand human historical processes. Rather, they are, in some way, the significantly constitutive elements of those processes as decisively human. And so to work out a historiographical method will require a more basic explanation of the operation of mind in its mediation and its constitution of historical process. For it is this act of mind, operating in its myriad of concrete times and places, which the study of history seeks to explain.10 There will be two 'modes' of the operation of mind. In the spontaneous 'natural attitude' mind understands and exteriorizes itself, thus constituting its object, historical life. And in the more refined attitude of inquiry in the human sciences understanding grasps the nature of its objectified operation in the natural attitude.11 But the empirical study of the psychology of mind (a further refinement of this second mode of operation) will yield an understanding of the structure of mind's operation in both modes. (173f; Fs)

25/6 Lonergan would have some critical reservations about the way in which Dilthey set about working out his Fundamental Science. And Matthew Lamb has written a book on the similarities and the differences in the two approaches of Lonergan and Dilthey.12 But what is relevant here is that Lonergan, like Dilthey, asks whether there can be any foundation for a single 'upper blade' for history in general. In his 1960 Thomas More lecture, Lonergan notes than [sic, eg: then?] when it comes to writing a history in a particular field, say the history of mathematics, or the history of physics, there can be some agreement on historical explanations of the developments in the particular fields precisely because there is some agreement on how the operations of mathematics and physics currently are carried out. The data that is available on the various moments and advancements in the science constitute isolated points in the chronology, but the historian can fill in the spaces because he or she knows the current science and what is significant to its contemporary operation in its relevant fields of research and application.13 The upper blade of a history of mathematics or a history of physics comes from the methods and procedures operating in present day mathematics and physics. And while philosophers of science still seem to be unable to agree upon a complete explanation of scientific knowing there remains, at the level of scientific practice, substantial agreement in many areas, on what procedures constitute appropriate experimental method and an appropriate foundation upon which to pronounce a hypothesis v-probably verified. What the historian of mathematics or science anticipates as a complete historical account or explanation of the particular field is the genesis of a set of procedures whose performance the historian must understand intimately before he or she sets about the historical task. (174; Fs)

Fußnote 12:
Matthew Lamb summarizes Dilthey's contributions in four points. First, Dilthey understood that what constitutes history is human acts of meaning, the operations of human subjects who are present to themselves as acting subjects. Second, human cognitional acts are 'openly and dynamically patterned in structurally recurrent and related functions or operations.' Third, the world of history is the interaction among many instances of human interiority and so 'any historical objectification is the expression of that interiority, and as such is understandable.' Fourth, there therefore stands a possibility of integrating all systems and contexts of human activity in terms of a growing and ever-refining account of the structures and operations of acts of interiority. See Lamb, History, Method and Theology, p. 352. But Lamb also sees some serious problems in Dilthey's work. Dilthey's cognitional theory was based, finally on the work of Kant. And just as Kant severed the correspondence relationship between the content of acts of cognition and the objects intended by such acts in the natural sciences, so too with Dilthey, historical knowledge was never self-transcending, never oriented towards an object that might not be the work of another's mind. All historical knowledge had to be understood in terms of worldviews and the ongoing march of worldviews finally collapsed into historicism, see ibid., pp. 353-356.


26/6 It would follow, then, that a general historiography would need to take its upper blade from something like a contemporary science of man and culture.14 And here Lonergan is in agreement with Dilthey. Furthermore like Dilthey, Lonergan argues that what is essentially constitutive of human culture and history as human are the operations of human intelligence. There is an existential memory, that is constitutive of the people qua people, just as there is an existential memory constitutive of the personality qua personality. Again, the history of a people is an account, an interpretation of what the people were; but what the people were was their own self-interpretation. A man is not just a thing. It's what he does. What he says, what he works for, is all function of his experience, his accumulated experience, understanding, judgment, his mentality, his way of thinking, what he approves of, and disapproves of, what he wants and doesn't want. His mental activities are the main determinants of all his actions and his mental activities include an interpretation, an idea of what he himself is and what he is for, - his nature and destiny. And as this is true of the individual so also it is true of the group.15 (174f; Fs)

27/6 Lonergan agrees that at the basis of a critical and a speculative philosophy of history will lie a science of man whose foundation is rooted in an account of what is distinctively human about life, acts of meaning.16 (175; Fs)