Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

4. Anthropological reflection on life and types of worldview

Dilthey’s aesthetic writings play a central role in his philosophy. They not only contribute to his conception of interpretation as it functions in the theory of the human sciences, but they also explicate the way in which we reflect about the meaning of life in everyday existence. There are many levels at which we try to understand what happens in life. Both prescientific anthropological reflection and scientific psychological description contribute to the understanding of order in our lives. Similarly, the categories whereby we establish order in the world are by no means purely scientific, but can in some cases be traced back to the ‘syntactical articulation of language’. Sometimes the same category (for example, Aristotle’s acting and suffering) can receive varying formulations as it functions at the level of ordinary experience (for example, efficacy), of the human sciences (for example, influence), and of the natural sciences (for example, causality). Other categories such as value, purpose and meaning are distinctive of the human sciences. The peculiar fascination of the arts, especially the literary arts, is that they can somehow relate all these levels in the search for order, without, however, producing a conceptual system. Like philosophers and religious thinkers, certain great poets have the capacity to articulate a comprehensive worldview.

One of Dilthey’s last essays was Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen (Types of Worldview and their Development in Metaphysical Systems) (1911). Whereas the kinds of worldview found in art and religion are quite diverse, worldviews in Western philosophy have received a more conceptual, metaphysical formulation that allows them to be distinguished into three main types: naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism. Naturalism as found in Democritus, Hobbes and others, reduces everything to what can be perceived or determinately cognized and is pluralistic in structure; the idealism of freedom as found in Plato, Kant and others insists on the irreducibility of the will and is dualistic; objective idealism as found in Heraclitus, Leibniz and Hegel affirms reality as the embodiment of a harmonious set of values and is monistic. Each of these metaphysical types of worldview is a perspectival interpretation of reality respectively emphasizing either our cognitive or representational capacities, our volitional ends, or what is felt to be valuable. Despite being totalistic, these types of worldview cannot attain absolute knowledge, according to Dilthey.

Because Dilthey analyses three incommensurable types of worldview that recur, he is often considered a relativist. In his essay ‘Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft’ (‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’), Husserl quotes some passages from this essay that also seem to lead Dilthey down the path of historicism. In one of them, Dilthey uses ‘the development of the historical consciousness’ to question the universal validity of any metaphysical worldview that claims to comprehend conceptually how everything in the world is interconnected. By appealing to historical consciousness, Dilthey is not, as Husserl thinks, making a mere factual claim about the inability of past metaphysical speculative systems to gain universal acceptance. Historical consciousness is for Dilthey a broadening perspective that takes claims out of their actual local contexts and locates them in the sphere of universal history. It is a product of the Enlightenment and could even be considered the counterpart of the transcendental point of view. Indeed, Dilthey’s stance here is analogous to Kant’s in rejecting metaphysical speculation and is no more relativistic or historicist than Kant’s standpoint.

Dilthey’s historical consciousness makes possible a critical analysis of worldviews, and it is this kind of analysis that shows that metaphysical worldviews cannot be scientifically adjudicated. Any effort to provide a comprehensive scientific account of reality would have to synthesize the results of the natural sciences and the human sciences. But ultimately the approaches of these two kinds of science are so different that they cannot in principle be synthesized. Dilthey’s appeal to historical consciousness is thus not at all a challenge to the objective validity of science. It is instead an attempt to preserve the objectivity of scientific Erkenntnis. Worldviews, in turn, have their main value for Dilthey as reflective articulations of the meaning of our own life-nexus as given in prescientific Wissen.