Symphony of Life: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was a German philosopher who is best remembered for his contributions to the theory of the human sciences and hermeneutics. Criticizing the pervasive influence of the natural sciences, he deemed the natural-scientific methods unsuitable for adequately understanding the human world. In response, he developed a rich ontology of life that recognized man not only as a thinking but also as a feeling and willing being. His philosophy was also a response to wide-reaching cultural anxieties of his time. It was motivated by many of the same questions and problems as that of his more famous contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche. Themes of the finitude of human life and understanding, as well as the historicity of human existence, were central to their thought. Both were sons of protestant pastors, who started their academic careers by studying theology but then rejected all religious dogmas. Instead of looking for answers beyond human experience, they turned to life itself as an object of study. Both of them fully embraced and celebrated life, despite its tragic undertones, and elevated it to the center of their thinking.
Dilthey’s generation of thinkers wrestled with the question of the role and significance of philosophy in modernity. The development of the natural sciences had suddenly created a growing sphere of objective knowledge that had eclipsed the importance of metaphysics. Likewise, history had been developed into an independent academic subject, a science of its own. Dilthey was not only a philosopher of the human studies, but also a well-respected historian in his own right. When history was examined objectively, carefully, and empirically, it revealed to him a frightening anarchy of worldviews. It unveiled the relativity of every metaphysical and religious doctrine and confronted philosophical thinking with its historicity. This too revealed the insufficiency of the speculative idealist theorizing that had been the pinnacle of German philosophy less than a century before. As beautiful as the metaphysical systems of thinkers like Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling had been, they could not compete with the empirical sciences when it came to explaining the world accurately. Philosophy had suddenly lost its crown as the queen of all sciences, a status it had held since ancient and medieval times. What then should philosophy become in order to stay relevant in the modern world? And how should it relate to the empirical sciences?
In an essay entitled Die Kultur der Gegenwart und Die Philosophie (Present-day Culture and Philosophy) from 1898, Dilthey reflects on the role of philosophy as it is about to enter the twentieth century. He begins with a passage from Goethe's Faust:
The earthly sphere I know sufficiently,
But into the beyond we cannot see;
A fool, that squints and tries to pierce those shrouds,
And would invent his like above the clouds!
Let him survey this life, be resolute,
For to the able this world is not mute.
The sarcastic agnosticism and resolute this-worldliness of Faust's retort to Mephistopheles was for Dilthey the defining characteristic of his contemporary zeitgeist. He accepted that the this-worldly is all we have, and, like Faust, into the beyond we cannot see. However, while he rejected metaphysical speculation, as a romantic idealist he continued to yearn for it. Naturalism’s "harsh denial of all mysteries of life" troubled him.
Pieter Brueghel The Four Seasons, Spring
Dilthey found solace in the idea that life, despite its unfulfilled longings and finitude, is also a creative force. It can manifest itself in an infinite number of ways, creating a world that is rich and endlessly fascinating. For Dilthey, the concept of life primarily refers to the life of the human mind. By contrast, the natural world, the object of the natural sciences, is strictly governed by mechanical laws of nature and causal relations. There is no mystery there. The human world, in turn, is the realm of freedom and creativity. Human behavior is characterized by purposiveness. Reasons, motives, emotions, and passions drive our behavior. Individual and collective aspirations and strivings are objectified in culture and society as art, institutions, customs, and shared ideas. This creativity of the human spirit is both enabled and restricted by an individual's historical situatedness. Historical context creates the conditions and raw material for life to manifest itself. And, although indeed relative, any attempt to give life meaning—whether artistic, religious or philosophical—expresses some aspect of a universal shared human experience. As such, there is truth and beauty in all of them.
This is where Dilthey and Nietzsche diverge. In the 1898 essay, Dilthey examines Nietzsche’s thought in considerable detail, mostly in a critical tone. In his view, the main difference between them lies in their different conceptions of history and the individual's place in it. Nietzsche advocated for a radical break with the past and the overcoming of the old value systems, which, for Dilthey, was nothing but philosophical arrogance. Human beings are essentially constituted by their historicity, by their belonging to a tradition, a certain generation, and a culture. If one's strivings are cut off from the surrounding culture, they are thereby emptied of their content. Nietzsche's idea of a sovereign philosopher creating new values falls short of the mark, because it does not appreciate the fundamentality of the social and historical dimensions of human existence. We are what we are because the past has created us and the world in which we live. Instead of fighting against it, modern man should follow the Delphic maxim “Know thyself.” The totality of human nature exists in history, and only in history—which is why we should study it well.
Dilthey's vision for philosophy in the coming century was to reconceive it as a painstakingly detailed but essentially heuristic analysis of life itself, a way to understand and interpret the historically, socially, and culturally contingent human world and the human experience within it. A traditional hermeneutic way of interpreting the world would be to conceive of it as a text. But perhaps an even better metaphor—at least when it comes to Dilthey, an avid music lover—would be not to understand history as a text, but a never-ending symphony. If history is broken down into individual moments, fragments or notes, it appears as a nonsensical cacophony. An anarchy of voices. But put together, the various notes form a harmonious whole, a unified melody.
Dilthey's historical writings certainly have a symphonic quality to them, as he describes individual people, artworks, music, institutions and crisscrossing intellectual currents, masterfully weaving them together into a unified picture of the past leading to the present. One of his most ambitious projects was to write the history of the formation of “the German Spirit.” It is a story of a melange of seemingly contradictory forces—Pietism and Enlightenment, Kant’s rationalism and Goethe’s romanticism—coming together and forming an integrated spiritual nexus. However, it should be noted that those developments and patterns are fully immanent to history and life itself. There is no reason or direction in history, no meta-narrative. History is not a dramatic opera proceeding towards a pre-determined resolution, but a stream of interconnected melodies and themes. Just as one hears melodic themes in a symphony, one can also observe developments and patterns in history. These patterns all stem from the same source, life and the creativity of the human mind.
Dilthey ends the essay on a positive note. By observing the patterns in history and finding the hidden unity behind them, we can formulate ideals and new futures based on a better understanding of what humanity is. We can "extract concrete ideals for a more free and beautiful future." This kind of boldness is, however, uncharacteristic of Dilthey. In his other writings, he is careful not to proclaim victory over our historicity. In a famous quote at the end of his Poetics (1892), he laments that "every generation of poets and thinkers attempts to make sense of the enigmatic, unfathomable face of life, with its laughing mouth and mournful eyes. This will remain an unending task." Understanding that we too will end up as just parts of history, as individual notes in a symphony, should humble us. Future generations will continue trying to answer life’s riddles. Yet, there is something comforting in Dilthey's hermeneutics of life: the past in all its richness is not forgotten, but retains its validity and so can touch our lives existentially. As he notes, "the melody of our life is conditioned by accompanying voices from the past."
Henriikka Hannula is a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests are history of philosophy, late 19th century German philosophy, philosophy of history, philosophy of the social sciences, and hermeneutics
