The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present

VI. The "Crisis of Historicism" I: THE PHILOSOPHIC CRITIQUE: COHEN, DILTHEY, WINDELBAND, RICKERT, WEBER

[ C H A P T E R v i ] The "Crisis of Historicism" I THE PHILOSOPHIC CRITIQUE! COHEN, DILTHEY, WINDELBAND, RICKERT, WEBER 1. N recent years. intellectual historians, in increasing numbers, have diagnosed a profound crisis in European social thought in the quarter of a century which preceded the outbreak of World War I. Writers such as Stuart Hughes, Gerhard Masur, and Arnold Brecht1 have seen the core of this crisis in the growing awareness on the part of social philosophers, social scientists, historians, and men of letters of the limitations of human knowledge and the subjective character of all cognition in regard to human behavior and social processes. Positivism , in the course of the nineteenth century, had progressively destroyed the traditional religious and metaphysical image of the world. But the positivists still assumed that the universe is an integrated system governed by mathematical laws, that the methods of the natural sciences would reveal the lawful structure of physical and social reality alike. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the positivistic picture of man and the universe itself came under attack from many corners. The new psychologists (Freud and Jung), the philosophers (Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson), the poets and novelists (Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Proust), all revealed the basically irrational character of man. The historians and social scientists increasingly forsook their occupation with the problem of what constituted society or history; instead, they asked how a science of history or society was possible. They tended to regard all knowledge, 124 I THE "CRISIS OF HISTORICISM"! I 125 which went beyond constructions based upon empirical data, as colored by human subjectivity. The solution of any ultimate problems became impossible; the gulf between the world of Being and the world of Meaning apparently was complete.2 The collapse of the Newtonian picture of the physical universe, at the turn of the century , and the construction of non-Euclidean systems of geometries further seemed to stress the limitations of human knowledge. Any interpretation of reality, other than one based upon strict induction, was doomed as poetry or imagination. The reliance upon empirical data alone, it was felt, would reveal a universe basically without meaning. In a sense, the attack upon positivism carried positivism to its own logical conclusions by destroying its remaining metaphysical assumptions. This crisis in modern scientific and philosophic thought, brought about by the self-examination of consciousness, essentially marked the end of philosophy in the traditional sense. With the collapse of the metaphysical framework, only three tasks remained logically open for philosophic thought, none of them concerned with the search of truth or value in any ultimate way. The philosopher could turn to history and trace the changes in philosophical opinions over the ages or represent the dominant ideas of an age, a people, a tradition. Going beyond the mere historical description of ideas, he could still preserve something of the universal concern of the philosopher , as Dilthey had done. On the basis of comparative studies, he could classify the perennial issues and types of philosophic solutions of the life-riddle which have dominated the history of human thought. Again, philosophy could become pure logic and epistemology dealing with the conditions of human knowledge. Ernst Troeltsch observed that philosophy of history in the material sense, which discusses human history as a meaningful process, had given completely way to philosophy of history in a purely formal sense as the logic and epistemology of historical thought.3 This recognition of the limitations of human rationality, when carried to its logical conclusions, should have involved a radically relativistic position in regard to knowledge. Nevertheless, men such as Dilthey and Freud, who saw thought as an expression of life functions rather than as a rational process, were unwilling to draw the conclusion that objective knowledge of the physical or, for that matter, of the social and cultural world was impossible. Indeed, the 126 THE GERMAN CONCEPTION OF HISTORY attack against positivism at the turn of the century included in its vanguard Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud who shared the positivist regard for the empirical fact. In the spirit of positivism, they wished to free modern thought from its last remaining speculative assumptions. Even the revolutionary reformulations in physical theory, in the early 1900's, did not undermine the faith in science as a means of gaining knowledge of the world of Being. A serious crisis occurred in the realm...