Dilthey Today: a Critical Appraisal of the Contemporary Relevance of His Work (review)

3~4 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29;2 APRIL 1991 The book's last, and most creative, chapter springs from Wittgenstein's aphorism: "A picture held us captive." Kitching probes the Marxist imagination to provide pictures , the most gripping of which superimposes drawings of the human person, class structure, and social life. It portrays a human figure wedged in an elongated isosceles triangle. This picture, by associating head and feet with ideology and technology, unavoidably suggests that "the material life processsomehow doesnot involve thought" (220). Kitching supplies an innovative account of how Marxists can trade in shallow reductionisms , but why maintain that in evoking such pictures Marx misunderstood his own method and misled others? For Kitching insists that pictorial representations of society are unavoidable, and he grants that Marx's texts, when studied, repudiate reductionistic materialism. In adopting a Wittgensteinian skepticism and abandoning Marxist claims to an "absolutely privileged discourse," Kitchingjoins the many who are endeavoring to land somewhere between subjectivism and objectivism.~Joining Marx's philosophy of praxis with Wittgenstein, Kitching holds that scientific theories are the creative, purposeful products of human beings, that we are "existentially" responsible for them, and that "we" are language communities sharing practical goals. This valuable line of thought deserves further development. Kitching's headway is slowed by wooden dualisms (purpose/evidence, believing/doing), which tend to break down in his hands. Thus, Kitching finds himself backpedaling from this dichotomy: "one could hold all of Marx's ideas to be false and still be committed to his vision of liberation" (229). Purposes--including Marx's aspiration to liberate humanity--live only within networks of empirically and morally contestable assertions. PATRICK MURRAY Creighton University H. P. Rickman. Dilthey Today: a Critical Appraisal of the Contemporary Relevance of His Work. Contributions in Philosophy, No. 35- New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Pp. xvii + 194. $39.95. Professor Rickman has written extensively about Wilhelm Dilthey, his most notable work being perhaps Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies? His latest effort departs from his earlier pattern as sympathetic expositor of Dilthey's work and both argues for Dilthey's current relevance and critically assesses his shortcomings. The book is divided into six chapters and a postscript. The introductory chapter provides a synoptic view of Dihhey's general philosophical approach, a brief but vivid biographical portrait, and an overview of his work. The second chapter then turns to the Diltheyan approach to historical scholarship, arguing for both the liberating charAn alternative to Kitching's viewthat Marx held a typical nineteenth-century conception of science is defended in my Marx's Theoryof ScientificKnowledge(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1988). ' H. P. Rickman, Dilthey:Pioneerof the Human Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). BOOK REVIEWS 325 acter of historical consciousness and the utility of historical judgment for human existence . History, argues Rickman, focuses on individuals and the relations between individual events. Thus, it is only "the disciplined and organized practice of something we are all engaged in when we deal with the human problems of our everyday lives" (41). Rickman's argument for the contemporary usefulness of Diltheyan historiography is based primarily on the complexity of modern life. Chapter 3 moves from history to anthropology and focuses on Dilthey's hermeneutics . Rickman provides a survey of the central features of Diltheyan hermeneutics, namely, understanding, expression, its ideographic character, and the dependence of meaning upon context. Hermeneutics is motivated by the "determination to confront any problem on the level of complexity on which it presents itself" (67) rather than dissolving each problem to its component parts in a Cartesian manner. This chapter does not, however, confront Gadamer's criticism that Dilthey's philosophy is hopelessly torn between scientific objectivism and the radical historicism of life-philosophy. This criticism must be viewed as a serious challenge to the contemporary relevance of Diltheyan hermeneutics, and a convincing defense of Dilthey against it would make Rickman's case much stronger. In Chapter 4, on Dilthey's philosophical anthropology, Rickman reasons that a conception of the human being underlies human scientific work and that a clarification of this fundamental presupposition can go some way in grounding the human sciences. But Rickman...