Psychotherapy as a Human Science

Psychology as a Human Science: Dilthey and Husserl

80 Psychology as a Human Science Dilthey and Husserl The year 1900 was a major turning point in the history of the human sciences: Nietzsche died, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Wilhelm Dilthey published a paper entitled “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” Given the obscurity into which Dilthey has fallen in the intervening period, it is important to remember that in 1900 Freud was a somewhat obscure (if increasingly controversial) figure, while Dilthey was a prominent and widely respected thinker, even if Freud studiously ignored him. The son of a Lutheran theologian, born in 1833, Dilthey studied theology at Heidelberg, then Berlin, where he shifted his attention to history and philosophy and attended the lectures of Leopold von Ranke, Jacob Grimm, Theodor Mommsen, and other famous scholars . He devoted much of his time to studying the life and work of Martin Luther, the Historical School of Law, and the Romantic hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). These early efforts culminated in a two-volume biography of Schleiermacher, published in 1861 and 1863, and a voluminous study of the Renaissance and Reformation worldviews, published in 1914, three years after his death. Schleiermacher was an important influence on Dilthey and emphasized the importance of achieving a deep psychological understanding of his subjects. But Schleiermacher applied hermeneutics to the elucidation of texts such as legal codes, treaties, encyclicals, newspaper editorials , business contracts, plays, novels, letters, and so on. Dilthey argued that hermeneutics is an interpretive discipline that can be applied in a more encompassing way to “Life.” And “Life,” as Dilthey explained, is first and foremost Erlebnis — an untranslatable German word that is usually rendered as “experience.” However, Erlebnis does not merely refer to my individual experience, for a life — any life — always unfolds in historical time, in a particular cultural setting. Thus, my world is always to some extent a shared world, shaped by the prevailing cultural understandings of the world (Makreel 1975). Contrast this (quasi-Hegelian) way of approaching experience with those we encountered in the previous chapter. As indicated earlier, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s perspectives were predicated on the sharp categorical distinction between the individual and “the crowd” or “the mob.” Indeed, in Kierkegaard’s estimation, only individuals are actually, ontologically, real. Human collectivities, even the idea of the species as a whole, are illusions invoked to evade authenticity and responsibility for oneself. For Nietzsche, by contrast, human collectives are frighteningly real because they are inflected, indeed infected, with slave morality. Whereas Kierkegaard and Nietzsche construed the relation between the individual and society in bleak, adversarial terms, Dilthey cherished a more balanced and finely nuanced idea of the relationship between the individual and society. Whether they know it or not, the most reclusive or aggressive individualists are still bearers of certain social relations that are embedded in the fabric of their lives. Indeed, the patterns of an individual’s life are invariably reflected in the contours and content of his or her thought; on close inspection, the two form a seamless continuum, and you cannot fully understand the one without the other. (The term “situated subjectivity,” so popular nowadays, is actually Diltheyan in spirit, if not in derivation). Another difference between Dilthey, one the one hand, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the other, concerns style and method. Deep indignation, devastating wit, irony, loneliness, and shattering epiphanies punctuated Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s work. By contrast, this confessional, deeply personal mode of address never intrudes on Dilthey’s writings, where lively calm prevails. Moreover, as Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Dilthey and Husserl 81 82 Psychology as a Human Science Analytical Psychology (1884), and many unpublished papers attest, Dilthey never produced a finished “system,” but was deeply committed to conveying his methodological stance to readers in lucid, intelligible prose, without exhorting readers to make an extraordinary “leap of faith” or join in a Dionysian dance. However, there are also significant areas of agreement among Dilthey, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Dilthey thought that the will, and not reason, is the faculty chiefly responsible for the emergence of individual self-consciousness. As Rudolph Makreel points out, Dilthey starts from the totality of psychic life and articulates the cognitive , emotional and volitional functions operative in it. . . . This is the background for understanding Dilthey’s remark . . . that ‘no real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by...