Dilthey's Conception of the Life-Nexus

Dilthey's Conception of the Life-Nexus JACOB OWENSBY THE PIVOTALROLEPLAYEDby life in Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy is well-recognized . Max Scheler first grouped Dilthey with Nietzsche and Bergson as life-philosophers? More recently Herbert Schn~idelbach has shown that Dilthey's emphasis upon life places him within a broader life-philosophy movement , dominant in Germany from 1880 to 193o, whose roots lie in German Romanticism and among whose defining characteristics is the rejection of the absolute rationalism of Idealism in favor of life as a totality of which thought is only a part. ~Dilthey's classification as a Lebensphilosoph is accurate insofar as it reflects his position that life is an all-encompassing whole within which and for the sake of which thought occurs. Life is not the totalization of all thought as with Hegel's absolute, nor is it an apodictic foundation upon which the edifice of science can be erected. Life is the fundament of all knowledge because thought emerges as a life-serving process. Since thought arises from life, it can never penetrate beyond life and act as its foundation. Paradoxically, life is that which is at once most familiar and remains most mysterious. Knowing this central tenet of Dilthey's life-philosophy is not, however, tantamount to being fully acquainted with what he meant by the term "life." Heidegger, for instance, criticized Dilthey's conception of life for being too vague to provide an ontological ground. 3 Michael Ermarth goes some way in ' Max Scheler, "Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens. Nietzsche-Dilthey-Bergson,"Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Bern: Francke, 197~). The sectionof this article dealing with Diltheyis reprinted in "Dilthey-Versuch einer Philosophie des Lebens," in Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys, ed, Frithjof Rodi and Hans-Ulrich Lessing(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, a984), 88-94. ' Herbert Schn~delbach, Philosophy in Germany. 183t-x933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984), 139-6o. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row,Publishers, 196~),~53. [557] 558 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 1987 clarifying Dilthey's conception of life in Wilhelm Dilthey: Critique of Historical Reason. Ermarth characterizes life as a set of overlapping contexts whose minimal limit is the empirical reality of the individual's life and whose extent encompasses the socio-historical world as a whole.4 Although in large part accurate, Ermarth's view of life is arrived at by juxtaposing texts from quite different periods in Dihhey's thought. This approach obscures an important shift in Dilthey's view of life which has been made especially clear with the appearance in 198~ of volume nineteen of Dihhey's Gesammelte Schriften. Volume nineteen contains previously unavailable materials which represent Dilthey's attempt to complete the promised but never published second volume of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883). Among these materials the "Breslauer Ausarbeitung," the "Berliner Entwurf," and "Leben und Erkennen" are of particular importance for bringing to the fore two important aspects of Dilthey's pre-twentieth-century conception of life which I shall discuss in this paper. First, they demonstrate that through 1894 Dilthey's work continually returned to the role played by the psychological processes of the individual in ordering the world according to values and purposes. Indeed, Dilthey conceived of this relation between the purposive, psycho-physical individual and the world the individual organizes as an internally related whole which is life itself. Life is, then, a totality, but not a fundamentally rational totality. Thought arises only in the service of the individual's adaptation to the world. For reasons I will explain in the body of this paper, Dilthey found organic metaphors appropriate to this conception of life, but in his last writings, where he placed greater emphasis upon the objective cultural conditions for understanding, he only rarely made use of organic metaphors. Second, Dilthey's earlier conception of life includes a genetic description of the awareness of the self and the world. That is, life is a totality whose parts become distinguished in our awareness only step by step. The lifenexus is at first given as an indeterminate whole within which the acts and contents of...