11. May Karol Smierc Judasza
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interpretation. We may refer to the position previously discussed as
construction by objectification, the one to be examined here as
construction by composition.
THE MEANINGFULNESS OF ACTION ACCORDING
TO WILHELM DILTHEY
The doctrine that human action displays a distinct type of
meaningfulness was pivotal to the writings of Wilhelm Dilthey and
other seminal figures of nineteenth-century German thought. In its
historical context this ontological doctrine was primarily advanced to
buttress a specific methodological stance. Dilthey and kindred
thinkers were concerned to demonstrate that the
Geisteswissenschaften the sciences of man and culture should not
be modelled on the natural sciences. In pressing this position, these
authors put themselves in opposition to the prevailing tendency to see
the sciences of man as susceptible of the same approach as that
characteristic of the natural sciences; this methodological assumption
had been imported into German thinking from abroad, through the
writings of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill.
Comte and Mill sought to institute a science of man capable of
producing general laws of human action and explaining individual
actions by subsuming them under such laws. By contrast, Dilthey
insisted that the Geisteswissenschaften have a method uniquely their
own, a claim encapsulated in his celebrated dictum, We explain
nature, but we understand mental life (Dilthey 1894:144). This is not
to say that Dilthey rejected the possibility or usefulness of general
truths and causal explanation in the moral sciences , but merely that
he insisted that these disciplines employ other and more specialised
techniques as well.
The distinction between two ways of grasping an object
introduced by Dilthey in the dictum cited above is familiar from our
everyday ways of thinking. We understand what people are about
when, on a baking hot day, they go to the beach and plunge
headlong into the sea; but we cannot understand, in the same sense,
what propels a raindrop when it trickles down a rock, merges with
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The Phenomenological Argument
others to form a stream, ultimately to flow into the sea. In the first
case, we appeal to wishes, desires and motives, whereas in the latter
case, we can only cite the law of gravitation: water will tend to
move towards the centre of gravity of the system of which it is a
part, unless obstructed. Not since the Middle Ages have we
attributed to water any desire to move to the centre of gravity, and
even less to plunge into the sea.
This familiar everyday contrast, however, is recast in highly
theoretical terms in the context of Dilthey s philosophy, where it
becomes clear how, in his view, it builds upon an ontological
foundation. Underlying our everyday practices of explaining events
and actions, and underlying, too, their sophisticated counterparts in
the projected Science of Man, is the triad of Experience,
Expression and Understanding.1 Experience is the ground and
source of human action. It constitutes the subjective, mental life of
man from which his actions flow as its manifestations. The critical
thrust of the doctrine of experience was targeted at two widely
divergent, contemporaneous conceptions of man which nonetheless
share a strongly rationalist or intellectualist bias. One is the model
of man that emerged in eighteenth century empiricist and
enlightenment thought, and that lived on in the methodological
writings of John Stuart Mill. This conception views human action
as springing from two neatly separated mental sources, viz. beliefs
and desires, while a third element, reason, serves to compute the
proper way for these two to issue in action. The paradigm example
of this kind of model is the economists homo economicus. The
other conception finds expression in Hegel s view of history,
which does not attribute reason primarily to individual human
beings but instead ascribes it to a hidden agent of world history,
Reason writ large. This quasiagent cunningly steers individual
action towards the goal of world history.
As against this, Dilthey s notions of experience has a distinctive
romantic tinge to it: experience is the undivided source of action in
which thought, desire and will are indissolubly fused, not neatly
segregated as the empiricist conception holds. Dilthey often refers to
this holistic unity simply as life . This conception is also intended to
mark a contrast to Hegel s Reason, life being a more empirical and
contingent, less metaphysical, source of human history. History and
society are formed through the aggregation of countless anonymous
individual lives, not by the guiding power of a transcendent entity
directing human action towards world-historical goals.
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The Narrow Arguments
Experience, in short, is man s subjectivity through which his
ordinary, unreflectively lived existence is realised and mediated. It is
in the nature of experience never to remain merely subjective,
however, but to exteriorise itself in actions and in the permanent
artefacts that actions leave behind: buildings, monuments, works of
art, and written documents. In such artefacts, human experience is
crystallised, perhaps to be extracted at a later point through the
activities of the third member of Dilthey s triad of basic concepts,
understanding.
In characterising understanding, Dilthey uses such terms as
reexperiencing , recreating , and empathising . Understanding is
seen as somehow replicating the state of experience that the agent
was in when he performed the act, produced the work of art or built
the monument. This is not to say, however, that Dilthey considered
understanding to be a simple, intuitive act. On the contrary, the
interpretative enterprise will often expand into a general discursive
process where the object of understanding, for instance, an
individual human action, is situated in a larger context of
comparable actions, either those performed by the agent in the
course of a lifetime, or more broadly, those actions figuring in the
context of an entire epoch or society. This is often apt when we
seek to understand a historical figure as a child of his times , as it
is often put. Understanding proceeds through a tacking back and
forth between the individual act and its wider setting, gradually
reaching to deeper levels through so doing; this is the celebrated
hermeneutical circle. Nonetheless, the unit operation in this entire
process of interpretation remains the simple experiential state of
empathy.
Such, then, were the ideas that Dilthey bequeathed to his
successors: in the first place, a strict division between the
methodological procedures used in the two realms of natural
science and the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of man.
Secondly, this division is represented as reflecting an ontological
difference: natural phenomena are ontologically monistic, whereas
phenomena involving man have a composite nature. They have an
outside , which may actually be made the object of naturalistic
investigation, but also an inside , consisting of that primordial
stratum of human existence, experience . For Dilthey and his
followers, this doctrine was seen primarily as an argument in
favour of a specific methodology, a move in the Methodenstreit
between positivists and anti-positivists in German social science
106
The Phenomenological Argument
around the turn of the century. But the doctrine in question can be
put to immediate effect with respect to the themes that concern us
here, viz., as an argument in support of a viable version of social [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
