Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

2. Descriptive psychology

Dilthey’s ‘Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie’ (‘Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology’) (1894) aims to wean psychology away from naturalistic models and redefine it as a human science. This new psychology would be ‘first’ within the system of the human sciences in the sense that it provides neutral descriptions of experience. It must suspend the general hypotheses of traditional psychology as much as possible, whether they be psychophysical or associationist. Such hypotheses strive to explain all psychic processes as different constructions from certain basic mental elements, such as representations. However, these elements cannot be well-determined or measured, with the result that hypotheses relating them have remained largely untestable.

Most psychological hypotheses about the association of representations are dispensable because inner experience is already interconnected. Whereas outer experience presents us with many unconnected phenomena which can only be related through the hypotheses of the natural sciences, psychology must consult the data of inner experience which are given as parts of a real continuum. This means that connectedness in psychic life does not need to be explained hypothetically, but can be experienced directly.

However, Dilthey does not altogether rule out hypotheses from his descriptive psychology. They are merely prevented from assuming the fundamental role they play in the natural sciences. It is clearly necessary to construct particular hypotheses when the continuity that normally exists among psychic processes is broken or interrupted. Also in cases where we were not fully attentive, questions of detail may remain problematic and thus require hypotheses to clarify what might have happened. Whereas explanative psychology qua natural science begins with general hypotheses, descriptive psychology may end with particular explanative hypotheses.

So far psychology has been considered mainly in relation to the description of inner experience. It should be pointed out that for Dilthey inner experience is not purely inwardly directed or introspective. Inner experience is often about external objects, but focuses on our attitude towards them. It is therefore in some way more encompassing than outer experience, which excludes subjective attitudes. To move beyond this paradox Dilthey developed a new conception of experience that replaces the Kantian term Erfahrung with Erlebnis (lived experience). Lived experience is experience in its most inclusive sense and ‘contains a relation of inner and outer’.

Because lived experience discloses the original continuum of psychic life, it becomes necessary to reformulate the traditional conception of understanding which had been oriented primarily to our discrete outer experiences of natural phenomena. According to Kant, our experience of nature involves a discursive faculty of understanding (Verstand) that proceeds synthetically from partial representations to construct objective wholes (see Kant, I. §§6–7). Dilthey’s attack on faculty psychology undermines Kant’s pure intellectual conception of Verstand, which constructs the world in terms of fixed, abstract categories. When Dilthey speaks of understanding he means a very different process of Verstehen, which is concrete and develops historically. In so far as the Verstehen (understanding) of psychic life is based on lived experience it can be intuitive and proceed from the whole to the parts.

Kant’s Verstand as intellectual faculty was really geared to the scientific explanation of natural events. It allows us to relate the phenomena of nature, but provides no insight into their underlying reality. Dilthey accepts this limit for our knowledge of nature, but not for the understanding of ourselves and others. We cannot really understand nature, because it is not of our own making. Dilthey aligns himself with Vico by claiming that we can only truly know what we have ourselves made or contributed to (see Vico, G. §6). We thus have an access to psychological, social and historical reality – a recognition of ourselves in others, so to speak – which is impossible in relation to nature. Understanding constitutes the main goal of the human sciences in the way that explanation defines the natural sciences.

The fact that Dilthey points to the limits of scientific explanation has given some the mistaken impression that understanding is irrational. While explanation may be conceived as a purely intellectual process, understanding should not be characterized antithetically as a product of mere feeling or empathy. Lived experience does provide an immediate sense of the whole, but understanding, in appealing to all the powers of the psyche, does not overlook the intellectual processes. Sometimes understanding and explanation converge. Since understanding is contextual, it may need to bring external factors to bear which will then play a subordinate explanative role. Similarly, the description of lived experience must go over into analysis to bring out implicit structural relations more clearly.

There is an interdependence between the cognitive, emotive and volitional aspects of our consciousness which is at once structural and dynamic. While Dilthey begins with a discussion of representations, they are not considered as the underlying elements, with feelings and acts of will reduced to mere functions of representations. In some cases, representations may produce certain feelings which lead to a disposition to act. But in turn, representations themselves receive retroactive influences from our feelings and volitions. Clearly no aspect of psychic life can be understood in isolation or as most basic.

Dilthey regards development as a process of articulation whereby an indeterminate psychic continuum is differentiated into more distinctly related parts of a structural whole. The psychological concept especially formulated to define this formation of the self is that of the ‘acquired nexus of psychic life’ (erworbener Zusammenhang des Seelenlebens). This acquired psychic nexus embodies the history of the development of an individual and reveals the structural ordering of past experience. Encompassing knowledge of the world, evaluations and dispositions to act, it orients all present and future experience.

The individuality of the self is defined in terms of the structural articulation of the acquired psychic nexus. No qualitative uniqueness need be posited to explain individuality. What serves to distinguish individuals from one another is that the commonly held traits are manifested with differing forcefulness. In a given person, some qualities may be so faintly exhibited as to be, in effect, unobservable, others with such strength that we tend to notice them alone.

Dilthey’s discussion of individuality reflects one of the most pervasive themes of his philosophy – the understanding of human individuality as an essential goal of history and the human sciences. Dilthey meant to further such understanding with a comparative psychology, but he never completed it as he went through a transition in which he reconsidered some of his assumptions about the role of psychology and began to develop his later hermeneutic approach to the human sciences.