Natality and Finitude

3. Generating Life, Generating Meaning: Dilthey

three 5 Generating Life, Generating Meaning: Dilthey I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world. —E. M. Cioran ThemostobviousreasonforturningtotheworkofWilhelmDiltheyafter a discussion of Heidegger, particularly Being and Time, is the problem of historicity.Dilthey’s great project was a Critique of Historical Reason, and it is when Heidegger attempts to elucidate Dasein’s historical being that he makes explicit reference to Dilthey. Yet part of the work of the last chapter was to show that the natal question—“Why was I born?”— is a question about the meaning of life, and Dilthey is a thinker who is concerned throughout his opus with meaning—the relation of parts to a whole—and with life—the set of experiences we live through but that remains enigmatic to us precisely as a whole. For the most part, these concerns fit into his lifelong project of providing a philosophy for the human sciences, the project in epistemology and philosophy of science that motivated his major published works: Introduction to the Human Sciences, Weltanschauungslehre,The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Even the apparently less theoretical work, including his monumental biography of Schleiermacher and the essays on Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, and Hölderlin published in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung [Poetry and Experience],are part of an effort to figure OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 46 7/28/10 2:39:23 PM Generating Life, Generating Meaning s  out what history as a rigorous,scientific,and yet human science would look like. At the same time, and more importantly for an investigation of natal finitude, Dilthey’s work rarely leaves behind the struggle to work out what a life is and what counts as meaning for, or in, a life. After all, for Dilthey life is the unsurpassable ground not just of knowing but also—though this is not an uncontroversial claim—of our being.1 This is his great insight and one that I will take up here in an adapted but nonetheless Diltheyian version: life is the natal, finite ground of our being.2 In epistemological terms, Dilthey is committed to the thought that access to a whole is essential if we are to uncover meaning in any particular instance, and this finds its echo in Heidegger’s ontological pursuit of our being as a whole.Yet we have already seen how natality consistently disrupts attempts at reaching completeness,ensuring that Heidegger repeatedly restarts his project yet never does manage to have Dasein show itself in its entirety. As we will see, it also ensures that Dilthey will be unable to grasp life as a complete, coherent unity that will grant meaning to our various particular experiences. Life’s natal character marks it as shot through with newness and contingency. If it makes up a whole, it cannot be a whole in the mode of a static totality and it cannot guarantee a set of fixed meanings that will yield consistency and correct understanding. Rather, as Eric Nelson has argued, Dilthey’s thought of life—excessive, enigmatic life—provides a model for truth that stands as an alternative to the dominant models that privilege correctness and universality in reductive, monistic ways.3 Dilthey never abandons the thought of meaning as the relation to a whole, but by approaching this element of his work anachronistically as another turn on the hermeneutic circle around which we have seen Heidegger travel in Being and Time and the Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, we find a thought of natal wholeness as well as room for a great deal of the lively detail that was missing from Heidegger’s analysis . Dilthey complained that the natural sciences were incapable of showing either “the whole man,” the “real blood flowing in the veins of the subject,” or his inner mental life (GS I xviii). The same complaint can be made against Heidegger’s ontological project—albeit for radically different reasons—and Dilthey’s work should be read, OBYRNE_final_pages.indd 47 7/28/10 2:39:23 PM  s Natality and Finitude despite Heidegger’s protestations in Being and Time, as urging the self-overturning of that project in a turn to life. By attending to life in flesh-and-blood terms, Dilthey insists that philosophy encounter the material world and that it...