Dilthey and Our Lived Experience of the Past
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 19 November 2024 is the 191st anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 – 01 October 1911), who was born in Wiesbaden-Biebrich on this date in 1833.
Dilthey has been pervasively influential, but it’s difficult to put my finger on exactly what that influence consists. How do we know that Dilthey has been pervasively influential? He has been widely cited, selections from his writings are included on anthologies on philosophy of history, and his books remain in print and have been mostly translated. Through his correspondence with Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Dilthey became an influence on Heidegger, who has dominated continental thought since the middle of the twentieth century. Near the end of Being and Time, sections 72 to 77, Heidegger discusses history, but I haven’t attempted to produce an episode on Heidegger as he’s not simpatico for me. But in this discussion of history Heidegger references the correspondence of Dilthey and Count Yorck, quoting Yorck in extenso. This was recently brought to my attention by Eliyahu Rotenberg on Substack, so thanks for that. I wouldn’t have known about it otherwise.
Dilthey’s influence should mean that he is widely read, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This isn’t hard to figure out. He’s a difficult philosopher to read. Of course, I’m reading English translations of Dilthey, and a former friend of mine, a translator, once told me that he had never read anything that was clearer in translation than in the original, so it’s entirely possible that Dilthey has suffered in translation. Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences is a ploddingly slow read, but important for understanding Dilthey’s relation to philosophy of history. He specifically devoted four chapters of Introduction to the Human Sciences to a critique of philosophy of history:
Chapter 14, Neither Philosophy of History nor Sociology Is Really a Science,
Chapter 15, The Philosophy of History and Sociology Cannot Fulfill Their Tasks,
Chapter 16, The Methods of the Philosophy of History and of Sociology Are Wrong, and
Chapter 17, Philosophy of History and Sociology Do Not Recognize the Relationship of History as a Science to the Particular Social Sciences.
This isn’t a critique of the mere possibility of philosophy of history, but of how philosophy of history had gotten it wrong so far. Dilthey characterized philosophy of history as follows:
“By philosophy of history I understand a theory which undertakes to discern the system of historical reality through a corresponding system of unified principles. This feature of unity of thought is inseparable from theory, which has its distinctive task precisely in recognizing the system of the whole. And so philosophy of history locates this unity now in a blueprint of historical process, now in a basic concept (an idea), now in a formula or a set of formulas which express the law of development. Sociology (I speak here only of the French school) escalates this clam to knowledge even further inasmuch as it aspires to introduce scientific direction of society by the knowledge it has of this system.”
This is more sophisticated than most critiques of philosophy of history in this vein. There are many philosophers who have criticized any attempt to see history whole, but Dilthey doesn’t merely mirror this problematic holism, he specifically cites the theoretical comprehension of history through a unified system of principles, and since it’s difficult to imagine any study of anything undertaking without a system of unified principles, his critique would apply to any principled study of history. But Dilthey also acknowledges that the theoretical unity of history can take many forms: a blueprint, a basic concept, a formula or set of formulas, so he’s not assuming that a system of unified principles must be monolithic.
As I said earlier, Dilthey’s distancing of himself from philosophy of history is more sophisticated than many of the efforts that I have called non-philosophy of history, as, for example, Descartes, Jacob Burckhardt, Simone Weil, and Karl Löwith. Dilthey, to his credit, also has concrete and constructive suggestions on how philosophy of history ought to be carried out. Here is Dilthey’s own take on the proper way to do philosophy of history:
“The thinker who takes the historical world as his object must be firmly and directly in contact with the unmediated raw material of history and be master of all the historian’s methods. He must subject himself to the same law of struggling with the raw material as the historian. The operation of adding either psychological or metaphysical principles to material that has already been bound into an artistic whole by the eye and work of a historian—this operation will always remain futile. If we speak of a philosophy of history, that can only mean historical research which has a philosophical bent and makes use of philosophical resources.” (Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 141)
This sounds like the familiar appeal to the working historian that I mentioned in my episodes on Morton White and Siegfried Kracauer, but that isn’t the direction that Dilthey pursued. Instead, for Dilthey, being directly in context with the raw unmediated material of history meant familiarity with the lived experience of history.
As far as I have been able to discover, Dilthey is the source and origin of the idea of lived experience, so that is at least one definite and influential idea that we can pin on Dilthey. Every so often a term from the kind of philosophy that is generally not read by the wider public, and which is therefore sometimes called “technical” or “professional,” finds its way into the wild, as it were, and begins to appear in non-philosophical contexts. This happened with Thomas Kuhn’s use of “paradigm shift” and with Derrida’s use of “deconstruction.” To a lesser extent, it’s also true of “phenomenology” since Husserl’s popularization of the term. Dilthey’s “lived experience” (Erlebnis gegeben) is another such technical philosophical term that has come into general currency. Today we find the idea of lived experience and variants invoked in all kinds of contexts, both technical and popular. One variation on the theme of “lived experience,” is “felt experience,” which I found in Barry Mazur’s 2008 paper “Mathematical Platonism and its Opposites,” in which the author refers to, “…the passionate felt experience that makes it so wonderful to think mathematics.”
I noticed that “lived experience” is used in the title of a non-philosophical book, Nubia in the New Kingdom: Lived Experience, Pharaonic Control and Indigenous Traditions, edited by N. Spencer, A. Stevens, and M. Binder. A description of the book on the publisher’s website says that the approach of the volume provides, “…a more nuanced understanding of what it was like to live in colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC.” In the book we find, “the study of present-day Nubia can inform models for past lived experiences.” And:
“Through the integration of modern scientific methods of analysis — drawn from fields such as physics, chemistry, geology and biology — a more thorough understanding of the environment of Nubia and its impact on lived experience during the New Kingdom is emerging.”
Statements like this point to the takeaway of “lived experience” for non-philosophers—that of “what it was like to live” in some particular social milieu or historical context. I could easily imagine, “what it was really like to live” becoming a slogan on a par with Leopold von Ranke’s, “to show what actually happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen”). There’s enough ambiguity in Ranke’s formulation that we could construe it has meaning that same as what I am attributing to Dilthey, but in the present context it’s more useful to contrast my reading of Dilthey with Ranke interpreted as being concerned with what actually happened. That way we have a nice, clear distinction between the two. Both could be taken as historiographical principles, and each could be held to be derivable from the other. Arguably, one can’t know what it was like to live in a given era without knowing what actually happened during that era, and, again arguably, one can’t show what actually happened in an era without knowing what it was like to live during that era. I think that the two are distinguishable, at least in the abstract, but I only wanted to make the point of how closely related these ideas are.
Whether or not Dilthey originated the philosophical use of “lived experience,” he did write extensively about it earlier than most other philosophers who took up the term, especially his Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Despite Husserl’s public criticism of Dilthey in his paper “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in which Husserl discussed Dilthey in the section “Historicism and Weltanschauung Philosophy,” the two found common ground in their correspondence in the largely neo-Kantian idiom of German philosophy, even though both were also reacting against that tradition. Both Dilthey and Husserl were centrally concerned with the experience of time, which in Dilthey is crucially implicated in his conception of lived experience. Of Husserl’s efforts Dilthey wrote, “A true Plato, who first of all fixes in concept the things that become and flow, then puts beside the concept of the fixed a concept of flowing.” (cited by Quentin Lauer in The Triumph of Subjectivity from Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, p. cxii)
Dilthey’s own exposition of time consciousness can be found in Vol. III of the selected works in English, Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason, section 2, “Reflexive Awareness, Reality: Time” (pp. 214-218), where it is integral with his exposition of lived experience. Of time and lived experience Dilthey wrote:
“Temporality is contained in life as its first categorical determination and the one that is fundamental for all others… Thus the lived experience of time determines the content of our lives in all directions.” (Wilhem Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 214-215.)
I suspect that Husserl would have agreed with this, as for Husserl time consciousness was the foundation of the constituting consciousness. Dilthey also writes: “That which forms a unity of presence in the flow of time because it has a unitary meaning is the smallest unit definable as a lived experience.” And, “A lived experience is a temporal sequence in which every state is a flux before it can become a distinct object.” And, “The course of life consists of parts, of lived experiences that are inwardly connected with each other. Each lived experience relates to a self of which it is a part.” (Op. cit., pp. 216-217) Those are a few representative quotes I’ve plucked out a Dilthey on lived experience. This may give a flavor of his exposition, but I certainly don’t maintain that this is a fair way of coming to grips with Dilthey’s conception of lived experience. I’m not going to attempt an exhaustive exposition today, as I only wanted to give you an impression of Dilthey’s conception of lived experience.
Both Dilthey’s and Husserl’s discussions of time consciousness and lived experience are opaque at best. We can hope, with time and further development, that the idea of lived experience can be made more useful to us. For this reason, I think it would be worth the effort to take back “lived experience” from the vulgar. The idea in an important one and it has a philosophical function to serve, but there’s a tendency to abandon technical terms once they’ve found their way into popular culture.
I said earlier that Dilthey’s conception of time is tangled up with this conception of lived experience. A variation on the theme of lived experience is that of lived time. French philosopher Eugene Minkowski, not to be confused with relativity theorist Hermann Minkowski, wrote a book about Lived Time. Lived time provides us with a useful perspective that can resolve some of the ambiguities of lived experience. The relativistic time of Einstein and Hermann Minkowski is emphatically not the lived time of Dilthey and Eugene Minkowski. Time as it enters into physics and relativity theory is a mathematical abstraction that describes the universe, but it does not describe human experience. Someday, if we have the technology to enact in actuality the twins thought experiment, where one stays on Earth while the other travels at relativistic velocities, returning much younger than the twin who stayed on Earth, then we will have lived experience of relativity, but that’s not yet a part of human experience.
In my episode on Husserl I focused on his philosophy of history expressed in his final book, The Crisis of European Sciences, but Husserl also wrote a great deal on time consciousness. Husserl’s manuscripts on time consciousness run to hundreds of pages (cf. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917)). Interestingly, the first published collection of Husserl manuscripts on time consciousness was edited by Heidegger. Since I have talked about the need to integrate philosophy of time with philosophy of history, there is a lot that could be said about the relevance of Husserl’s work on time consciousness for philosophy of history. This holds for Dilthey as well.
Lived time and lived experience are central to Dilthey’s conception of history, but the idea of lived experience has been too vague for us to use it as the tool we need to understand history. I want to try to highlight the idea of lived experience by appealing to what philosophers sometimes call the “knowledge argument.” This argument is often presented in the form of the “Mary’s room” thought experiment. Here is the locus classicus of the thought experiment from Frank Jackson’s 1982 paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia”:
“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red,’ ‘blue,’ and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue.’ […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”
Recurring to the earlier distinction I made between Dilthey’s conception of lived experience as what it was like to live during a given era, and Ranke’s conception of what actually happened, here we can see a clear historical application of the knowledge argument. The historical parallel of the Mary’s room argument would be to ask, if Mary had exhaustively studied life in colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC, i.e., she knew what actually happened during the era, and then Mary was later enabled to actually go back and live in colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC, and then possessed lived experience of the era, would Mary learn anything by the latter method that she did not already know from the first method? If we answer that Mary learns nothing from living in Kush that she did not already know by exhaustively studying Kush, then we can assert the equivalence of what it was like to live and what actually happened. If, on the other hand, we answer that Mary does indeed learn something from living in Kush that she did not learn by exhaustively studying Kush, then we ought to deny the equivalence of what it was like to live and what actually happened. While this exact thought experiment cannot be performed, there is a more mundane parallel that anyone can test: exhaustively educate yourself about somewhere you have never visited, and then go to see the place for yourself. Do you learn anything when you visit that you did not know from your prior exhaustive study? In other words, does the lived experience of the place add to the knowledge you had gained without lived experience?
There are important qualifications we need to make to the historical variant of the Mary’s room thought experiment. Our knowledge of colonial Kush during the later second millennium BC is highly imperfect, so that even if a scholar studied every known instance of knowledge about this place and time, this knowledge would still be incomplete, so that it’s inevitable that anyone, having studied second millennium BC Kush in this way would learn many things as a result of getting into a time machine and being sent there.
I could further argue that there is a sense in which knowledge of an historical milieu is potentially infinitistic. There are always further perspectives that might be obtained, like that of a time-traveling scholar who visits, and who, in visiting, sees and notices things that no one has previously seen or noticed. Therefore, even under ideal conditions of the preservation of the historical record, no finite record could be complete, and any “lived experience” of a given place and time may reveal new aspects of that place and time. Therefore, lived experience will never be reducible to that which actually happened (the “wie es eigentlich gewesen” of Leopold von Ranke).
This argument is clearly related to Arthur Danto’s argument that narrative sentences are logically distinct from a pure chronicle, because a chronicle is exhausted in the moment, but a narrative can only be constructed after the fact by narrating earlier events in the light of what happened later. Just as with the case of our not being able to enact the twins experiment demonstrating relativistic time dilation, we can’t perform the thought experiment of sending Mary back to second millennium BC Kush, so it must remain for us a thought experiment and not an actual experiment. Still, the thought experiment can help us to sharpen out conception of lived experience and how it differs from other forms of knowledge. As I said, it is clear to us how lived time differs from abstract representations of time, and hopefully thought experiments can make it equally clear how lived experience differs from representations of experience.
Given that the history itself usually consists of an account of what happened, without benefit of lived experience of what happened, history would seem to be a paradigm case of an abstract representation. Dilthey has a clear-eyed awareness of these problems of historical knowledge:
“…philosophy of history would have to give up its claims if it wished to use the procedure with which absolutely all real knowledge of the historical process is bound up. As it is now, it is simply wearing itself out trying to square the circle. And so its trickery is apparent enough to the logician as well. If I keep to the phenomenon of a system of reality, I can link together characteristics which present themselves to my observation in an abstraction which binds them together, one which contains the developmental law of this structure as in a kind of universal idea. No matter how shaky and confused it may be, some kind of universal idea of historical reality surfaces in everyone who has preoccupied himself with it and has then unified this system of reality in an intellectual picture. Abstractions of this kind anticipate the work of analysis in all areas. An entity of this sort was the mysteriously spherical motion which ancient astronomy made its basis, or the living force in which biology of bygone days expressed the cause of the leading characteristics of organic life. And every formula which Hegel, Schleiermächer, or Comte have set up to express the law of history belongs to this natural thinking which always precedes analysis and is nothing other than—metaphysics.”
From this we can see that if Dilthey is a philosopher of history, then, he is a reluctant and unwilling philosopher of history. For Dilthey, Hegel, Schleiermächer, and Comte are too “scientific.” This is a charge that no one would make today, but we can easily see how this attitude appears in a different form in Popper’s critique of the very idea of a theoretical history and his denial of the possibility of a predictive theory of history. This would indeed be a philosophy of history like unto science, if only it were possible, which both Dilthey and Popper emphatically deny. At least Dilthey and Popper, each in his own way, recognized that Hegelian philosophy of history is a nomothetic account, which is something I mentioned being rarely recognized in my immediately previous episode on Hans Zinsser.
Also in my episode on Hans Zinsser I discussed what Freud said about Weltanschauungen, or what we would called “world views” in English. Here Dilthey’s contribution is important, as he saw each era as being constituted by a distinct Weltanschauung, and he even wrote a book on the types of worldviews. We can get a hint of what Dilthey was getting at in his balanced assessment of Enlightenment historiography:
“The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which is reproached for being unhistorical, produced a new conception of history, which was conveyed in the brilliant historical masterpieces of Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. In these works, the view of the human race’s solidarity and progress spread its light over all peoples and ages. Now for the first time, universal history acquired a nexus drawn from empirical observation itself. This nexus was rational in that it connected all events in terms of ground and consequent, and critically superior in its rejection of any transcendence of given reality through otherworldly ideas. It was based on a completely unbiased application of historical criticism, which did not spare even the most sacred shrines of the past, and on a method of comparison that spanned all the stages of mankind.” (“The Eighteenth Century and the Historical World,” 1901, in Selected Works Volume IV, Hermeneutics and the Study of History)
Dilthey here recognizes the unhistorical character of the Enlightenment, but he does not fault Enlightenment historiography of this account; he doesn’t condemn it, as many subsequent historians have done. For Dilthey, the Enlightenment unhistorical treatment of history was a major milestone, and its willingness to “not spare even the most sacred shrines of the past” made it unbiased and universal. One could even call this a Copernican re-contextualization of history. But it’s not final. The great virtue of the unhistorical character of Enlightenment historiography was its rejection of a transcendent perspective or the imposition of otherworldly ideas. In this sense, Dilthey is the anti-providential philosopher of history par excellence, but this criticism could be applied to any unitary method applied to the whole of history, whether that of providentialism, or the Enlightenment, or that of Hegel.
Video Presentation
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Wilhelm_Dilthey:d
https://rumble.com/v5qwue8-dilthey-and-our-lived-experience-of-the-past.html
Podcast Edition
https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/uAaEtGUqEOb