Wilhelm Dilthey, Pioneer of the Human Studies.

By H. P. RICKMAN.
Paul Elek, 1979, viii t 197 pp. S7.95.
[U.S.A.: Univ. of California Press]

Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey.

By THEODORE PLANTINGA.
Univ. of Toronto Press, 1980. x + 205 pp. 215.00.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was one of the more important German

philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and his work deserves
to be better known than it is in the Anglo-Saxon world, since his ideas have
influenced a number of contemporary thinkers. Dilthey was Professor of
Philosophy in Berlin from 1882 onwards, occupying the chair Hegel once
held. We are told that he worked at his desk 11-14 hours a day and ruth-
lessly exploited his graduate students in enlisting their help in his extensive
researches, a practice not unknown today. At his death he had, however, only
published three books and some essays, but left a considerable Nachlass.
It is estimated that the new edition of his works will exceed 20 large volumes.
Rickman, who has worked on Dilthey’s ideas for many years, has given us
a well-writ ten introductory text comparatively free from technical jargon and
covering the whole corpus of Dilthey’s writings. He gives a clear picture of
Dilthey’s manifold contributions to philosophical and sociological thought
and his influence on other thinkers. The work contains 11 chapters: they
cover such topics as Dilthey the man, his philosophy of life, understanding,
expressions, meaning, the critique of historical reasoning and the method-
ology of the human sciences.
Philosophically, Rickman tells us, Dilthey was a Kantian, but he was also
a wide-ranging seminal thinker. He was not only a philosopher, but also a
historian, a literary critic and a student of psychology, To give a few ex-
amples, he discussed the historian’s use of letters and diaries, the value of
autobiographies, and offered interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays, Dilthey
also believed in the practical importance of philosophy and its bearing on
political, social, moral and personal issues, something which marks him off
from the more technical philosophers of today.
As a historian of ideas Dilthey accepted the relativity of all knowledge and
was interested in the way in which basic concepts and presuppositions affec-
ted our outlook, and he drew attention to the difficulty of starting from a
presuppositionless point of view. Rickman summarizes Dilthey’s philosophi-
cal position by saying that he emphasizes individual cases, rather than as in
natural science, general laws; as well as the importance of explanation in
terms of parts and wholes within the human sphere; that in humanistic
studies we must start from the level of complexity encountered in our actual
experience; and that man must be considered as both a subject and an object.
The concept of understanding (Verstehen), which has been filtered down
to us through the work of Max Weber, is, as Rickman tells us, crucial to
Dilthey’s work. It is through understanding that we gain access to the human
world, By its means we are enabled to grasp the meaning of what people say,

21 7
write and act, and t o enter people’s minds to share their thoughts and feelings
In his emphasis on non-linguistic meaning, Dilthey seems to owe something
t o Vico, as we come t o understand actions and involuntary gestures just as
much as we do words.
The chief method of enquiry to be used in humanistic studies was for
Dilthey interpretation, or hermeneutics. Hermeneutics as a discipline had
originated in biblical exegesis and in the interpretation of historical docu-
ments. Dilthey widened it so that it became a methodology to be used in the
interpretation of every kind of text. A good deal of what humanistic research-
ers do, he argued, is more like literary and legal interpretation than physics or
chemistry. More recently the hermeneutic method has been further developed
by Heidegger, who acknowledges his debt here to Dilthey. Heidegger extend-
ed it to cover methods which go beyond description of what is manifest in
our experience, enabling us to uncover hidden meanings. A good example of
such an approach is t o be seen in Freud’s interpretation of dreams, where the
analyst goes beyond the manifest content of the dream symbolism to its
underlying latent content.
Dilthey introduced the well-known distinction between Natunvissen-
schaften and Geisteswissenschaften, which is itself based on J.S. Mill’s distinc-
tion between the physical and moral sciences. But Dilthey in his work seems
more concerned to bring out the differences between these two, rather than
to look for similarities between them. One gets the impression that his
conception of the natural sciences is a fairly positivistic one. Someone like
Michael Polanyi would argue that understanding in the sense of personal
knowledge is also a feature of mathematical and scientific enquiry. Further,
in the field of natural science we deal not with brute facts, but with facts
interpreted within the framework of some scientific theory. If this is the
case, hermeneutics cannot be taken as the main defining characteristic of
humanistic studies.
Although Dilthey certainly had some influence on phenomenology and
existentialism, I doubt whether his influence is as extensive as Rickman
assumes. For example, Rickman quotes from a letter from Husserl to Dilthey’s
son-in-law G. Misch, in which Husserl attributes his change of position from
the Logical Investigations to the Ideas t o a few conversations he had with
Dilthey, and goes on to say that the phenomenology of ideas “agrees intim-
ately with Dilthey - though the method is quite different” (p. 167). How-
ever, it seems that it was Dilthey who first became interested in Husserl’s
work. Husserl’s interest in Dilthey seemed to have been of a more secondary
nature, although he greatly admired Dilthey as a historian and as someone
who had seen more clearly than others what was needed to found the
Geisteswissenschaften. “But”, as Herbert Spiegelberg remarks, “this must
not make us overlook the fact that there was a deep-lying difference between
the fundamentally emphatic approach of Dilthey . . . and Husserl’s primary
interest in scientific rigor” (The Phenomenological Movement, p. 123).
Another field in which Rickman sees Dilthey as a pioneer is in the latter’s
account of what might be termed the phenomenology of time-consciousness.
He suggests that Dilthey influenced the existentialist conception of time. This
may perhaps be so, but Dilthey’s view of time, in which emphasis is put on

218
the anticipated future as the key temporal dimension as opposed to that of
the causal past in the scientific account of time, is similar to that put forward
by the early Hegel in his Jena Logik. If anyone is to have priority in this
matter, surely it should be Hegel.
Rickman’s book gives us a useful insight into Dilthey the man, his work
and his influence on later thought. It can be read with profit by philosophy
students as well as by students in the social sciences. The book also contains
an adequate bibliography, an index to quotations from Dilthey and a general
index.
Plantinga’s book in a sense complements that of Rckman. Whereas Rick-
man gives us an introduction to Dilthey’s thought in general, Plantinga studies
what he considers to be the central preoccupation of Dilthey’s later work -
namely, the nature of historical understanding. His book is clearly written,
scholarly and also informative about Dilthey’s ideas. Plantinga is particularly
concerned with reinterpreting Dilthey’s theory of understanding (Versrehen)
and historical knowledge. He notes that Dilthey’s concept of understanding
only developed after 1900, in the final phase of his career - when he was
approaching 70 - although he had been concerned with problems relating to
the nature of historical understanding for most of his academic life.
Plantinga introduces his discussion by first examining Dilthey’s early work,
which formed a background for his later writings: he there attempted to
develop a psychology which would serve as a foundation for the Geisteswis-
senschaften. According to Plantinga the basic shift in Dilthey’s thought
which came after 1900, is that he now looked beyond psychology to our
common culture as a basis for historical understanding. He looked to our
understanding of expressions as they occur in the outer public world - an
understanding which we can share with others. “Understanding” for Dilthey,
on Plantinga’s interpretation, is not so much to be found in what lies beyond
expressions in the minds of particular individuals, but in their public meaning,
the implications of which the individual may not fully grasp himself.
There can be according to Dilthey, Plantinga points out, various degrees of
understanding of such expressions, and a hermeneutic or interpretative
enquiry will consist in making their meaning clearer in terms of the cultural
context in which they occur. It is this sort of enquiry which Dilthey considers
to form the essence of historical understanding, and not the study of these
expressions in terms of their origin or genesis. It will be seen that Dilthey’s
doctrine of the dependency of the meaning of expressions on a wider context
resembles certain of the later Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist arguments.
Plantinga throws some interesting light on Dilthey’s Kantianism. Although
Dilthey accepted a Kantian position in his early days, he moved away from it
and came to reject the view that there was a formal a priori element in know-
ledge. Plantinga contends that Dilthey might even be regarded as the Bacon of
the Geisteswissenschaften, rather than a second Kant trying to produce a
critique of historical reason. Plantinga also argues, I think correctly, that the
resemblances between Dilthey and Husserl were always superficial. What they
had in common, however, he tells us, is that they were both swimming against
the contemporary philosophical tide.
All in all Plantinga, who has delved deeply into Dilthey’s extensive carpus

219
of writings, gives us a thoroughly perceptive and useful account of Dilthey’s
concept of historical knowledge. The book contains notes to each of its eight
chapters, an excellent bibliography and an index.
MANCHESTER POLYTECHNIC WOLFE MAYS
INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES

Studies in Language and Reason.

By ILHAM DILMAN.
Macmillan, 1981. x t 218 pp. S17.50.
[U.S.A.: Barnes & Noble]

The contents page of this book indicates its somewhat unusual composition.
There are three chapters on Plato’s Phaedo, two on Hume, two on Wisdom,
two on Wittgenstein/Bambrough and one on Rush Rhees. The title does not,
I think, give a correct impression of the contents; to do so it should contain a
reference to morality or religion. Two editorial features make the reading less
enjoyable than it might be. One is the use of references like ‘Wittgenstein
1969a’, where one has to turn to the Bibliography (tucked between Notes
and Index) t o discover that this means The Blue and Brown Books. The other
is the arrangement of the notes. For example, a reader of page 23, eager to
follow up note 5, will first have to locate the “Notes” section at the end of
the book, then go back to page 13 to find out the number of the relevant
chapter, and finally his reward will be to read: “This idea raises difficulties
which I shall not consider now.”
Reading through the book, my response varied between admiration and
frustration. There are, for example, excellent discussions of Plato and Witt-
genstein, with illuminating comparisons. Here the author is lucid and convinc-
ing. But in other passages, where he tries t o paint a certain picture of the
good life, I found weak arguments and dubious claims. Here the impression
was one of preaching to the converted.
In his discussion of the theory of Forms, Dr Dilman shows how this is not
merely about the “problem of universals”, as exemplified for example by the
word ‘red’. To understand Socrates’s discussion of “equals”, “what we have
to turn to is not the problem of universals, but rather the relation between . ..
propositions of pure mathematics and descriptions of sensible things” ( 2 1).
According to Dilman, Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein can all be seen as reject-
ing the empiricist reliance on “sensible things” and holding that “there are
concepts or ideas that are presupposed by forms of human thought and
language” (7-9).
Moral ideals too are not to be found in the world of the senses; but in this
case it is a matter of sensual behaviour rather than sensual learning. Thus
“moral ideals cannot be realised in a life of the senses” (27). Dilman shows
how this aspect of the theory of Forms is tied up with Platonic ideals of
truth, beauty, etc.; and from this he develops a conception of the good man.
This theme is maintained, on and off, through the book, with the help of
quotations from such thinkers as Simone Weil, Kierkegaard and Tolstoy.
Although the author’s picture of the good man will appeal to many (and

220