Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The Distinction of the Geisteswissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften

Wilhelm Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians: The Distinction of the Geisteswissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften RUDOLF A. MAKKREEL WmI-mLMDILTHEY'S conception of the Geisteswissenschaften ("human studies") encompasses what we would now call the humanities and the social sciences. He formulated his concept of the Geisteswissenschaften mainly with the theoretical problems of the historian in mind. Dilthey was himself a working historian who felt that German historicists like Ranke had made great strides in freeing history from metaphysical speculation,x But Dilthey also realized that unless historicism were to obtain a new philosophical grounding, it would be exposed to the dangers of relativism. Although he considered the effort to relate historical events to their national context commendable, he looked with some distaste on the narrow political concerns of the Prussian historians who felt it their main task to justify a strong constitutional Prussian monarchy. Dilthey found Burckhardt's emphasis on culture a healthy antidote, yet criticized his method for being too vague. Dilthey was concerned about the inability of historians to utilize the results of the social sciences of their day and pointed out the need for new, more germane categories. That among these a reflective concept of experienced time should be central relates Dilthey's theory of the Geisteswissenschaften to the work on time by Bergson and the phenomenologists. Heidegger's hermeneutics of the historicity of human existence is openly indebted to Dilthey. In this essay I will attempt to delineate Dilthey's theory of the Geistes. wissenschaften by contrasting it to the theory of the Kulturwissenscha]ten ("cultural sciences") which the Neo-Kantians offered as an alternative. It should become clear that the difference between the two alternatives is not just terminological but conceptual. The Neo-Kantians basically approved of the kind of history that Burckhardt wrote and were content with the current social sciences. They Dilthey is oftenlabeled a historicist.Historicismas used here has nothing in common with Karl Popper's polemicaluse of the term. Cf. his The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). Dilthey, for instance, does not establish any historical tendencies in a lawlike fashion. [423] 424 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY only wanted to arrive at a better conceptual analysis of them by means of their concept of culture. They rejected Dilthey's concept of the Geisteswissenscha]ten as based on a mere distinction of subject matter, thereby ignoring the fundamental methodological innovations of Dilthey's work. The word Geisteswissenschalten does not have a satisfactory English equiva. lent. Most translators have settled for the ambiguous expression "human studies." It is ironic that the German word probably originated as the translation of J. S. Mill's term "moral sciences." Erich Rothacker writes: "Perhaps the term Geisteswissenschaften first appeared in 1849 in Schiel's translation of Mill's System of Logic.'" 2 This claim is doubly surprising. Not only is the concept of the moral sciences inadequate to characterize Geisteswissenscha#en as it has come to be used, but also one would have expected earlier instances of the word, given its common usage today and the long history of th~ words Geist and Wissenschaft in the German philosophical tradition. Rothacker does cite a few isolated cases before 1849 when contemporaries or followers of Hegel employed the related expressions Wissen. schaft des Geistes and Geistwissenschaft. However, it is significant that these are in the singular. These terms can be rendered as "science of spirit" in the metaphysical sense. Karl Chr. Ft. Kranse, for example, used "science of reason" as a synonym) Geistwissenschaft means the philosophy of spirit. There can thus be only one philosophical science of spirit. Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften of 1883 is considered to have provided the classical formulation of the concept Geisteswissenschalten--a formnlation which is radically pluralistic. In this work Dilthey reveals his break with the idealistic concept of science by the attention he devotes to the rigors of empiricism. Discontented with the way that metaphysical systems distort and ignore facts, Dilthey stresses that science must not sacrifice its responsibility to be empirical in its haste to create a unified order. In France, Comte had already denounced the idea of one grand science. In its stead he established a hierarchical system...