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Wilhelm Dilthey and Historical Consciousness

International Conference

November 2nd-3rd, 2023

 

If you would like to register for the conference, please send an email to aaron.turner@rhul.ac.uk. The Zoom link for the conference will be sent out closer to the time. 

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Programme

(all times are UK time)

 

Day One

12:50-13:00 – Introduction (Aaron Turner)

 

13:00-14:00 – Laurence Hemming (Lancaster University) – ‘Dilthey . . . restrained himself from a systematic conclusion until the end’ (Martin Heidegger) - Should We Concur?

 

14:00-15:00 – Natalie Nenadic (University of Kentucky) – Thinking with Robert Scharff about Dilthey, Historical Consciousness, and Knowing

 

15:00-15:30 – Break

 

15:30-16:30 – Ronny Miron (Bar-Ilan University) – Historical Consciousness between Immanence and Transcendence

 

16:30-17:30 – Eric S. Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) – Dilthey, the Historical School, and the Theory and Practice of History

 

17:30-18:00 – Break

 

18:00-19:00 –David Carr (Emory University) – “History sets us free”: Dilthey and the Paradoxes of Historical Consciousness

 

Day Two

13:00-14:00 – Matthias J. Tögel (Philipps-Universität Marburg) – How does Historical Consciousness become productive?

 

14:00-15:00 – Henriikka Hannula (University of Vienna) – Walls of Facticity: Dilthey on Volitions and Anthropological Universalisms

 

15:00-15:30 – Break

 

15:30-16:30 – Christopher Myers (Fordham University) – Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of the Living and the Dead: Rereading Dilthey on “Historical Consciousness” and “Religious Experience”

 

16:30-17:30 – Aaron Turner (Royal Holloway, University of London) – The Last Consequences of Historical Consciousness

 

17:30-18:00 – Break

 

18:00-19:00 – Robert C. Scharff (University of New Hampshire) – Interpreting Life-Experience in Its Own Terms: Dilthey to Heidegger

 

Conference Theme

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This conference aims at unfolding the fundamental relation of the development of Wilhelm Dilthey’s epistemology of the human sciences and his engagement and eventual confrontation with the rise of historical consciousness. The concept of modernity is grounded in the awakening of historical consciousness, which occurred during the Enlightenment and became crystallised in 19th Century German historicism. Through historical consciousness, the notion of progress underlying humanity’s development toward the ideal—toward freedom – was realised for the first time. Under the guidance of Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, von Humboldt, and Schelling, the human sciences gained a prominent place within the German university system and this notion of progress became a central theme of the human sciences. Dilthey acknowledged his own task as the development of an “epistemological foundation for the human sciences” in order,

to determine the interconnections among the particular human sciences, the limits within which knowledge is possible in these sciences, and the relation of their truths to one another. The accomplishment of these tasks could be designated the Critique of Historical Reason, i.e., a critique of the capacity of the human being to know himself and the society and history which he has produced (Introduction to the Human Sciences, p.165).

For Dilthey, the human sciences, especially the Historical School, succeeded in pitching themselves against the axioms and methods of the natural sciences but failed to find for themselves a philosophical foundation on which the secure knowledge of the facticity of human life could be built.

 

According to Dilthey, the “formation of historical consciousness” (die Ausbildung des geschichtlichen Bewußtseins) gradually leads to the destruction of the possibility of an absolute philosophy (GS 8: pp.77-78). As such, historicism, in Dilthey and more generally, was often beaten with the stick of relativism. As Husserl argued,

Historicism takes its position in the factual sphere of the empirical life of the spirit. To the extent that it posits the latter absolutely, without exactly naturalising it…there arises a relativism that has a close affinity to naturalistic psychologism and runs into similar sceptical difficulties (Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p.122).

Against Husserl’s view that his own historicism inevitably led to relativism and scepticism, Dilthey protested:

This point of view, if I understand your definition of historicism, can hardly be called historicism. And if, according to the general practice of the sceptics, the possibility of knowledge is generally denied, then I cannot possibly be addressed as a sceptic or even brought into any relationship to scepticism (“Briefwechsel Husserl-Dilthey”, p.434).

Despite his protestations, the charge of relativism is one that has often been levied at Dilthey.

 

In Dilthey’s view, though, relativism is precisely the catastrophic destiny of the historical consciousness that emerges out of the Enlightenment. In 1903, he wrote,

An apparently irreconcilable antithesis arises when historical consciousness is followed to its last consequences. The finitude of every historical phenomenon—be it a religion or an ideal or a philosophical system—accordingly, the relativity of every kind of human apprehension of the totality of things is the last word of the historical worldview. Everything passes away in the process; nothing remains. And over against this both the demand of thought and the striving of philosophy for universally valid knowledge assert themselves. The historical worldview liberates the human spirit from the last chains that natural science and philosophy have not yet broken. But where are the means to overcome the anarchy of opinions that then threatens to befall us? To the solution of the long series of problems that are connected with this, I have devoted my whole life. I see the goal. If I fall short along the way, then I hope my young traveling companions, my students, will follow it to the end (“Reminiscences on Historical Studies at the University of Berlin”, p.389).

In 1883, Dilthey’s ambition to cultivate a philosophical ground for the knowledge of the facticity of human life aimed squarely at emancipating the human being from the transcendental subjectivity of German idealism. He states,

No real blood flows through the veins of the knowing subject, which Locke, Hume and Kant constructed, but the diluted juice of reason as mere thought activity (Introduction to the Human Sciences, p.50).

In a later essay, Dilthey similarly warned against the “dark pride and pessimism” of Byron, Leopardi, and Nietzsche, which has as its prerequisite “the rule of the scientific spirit over the Earth”. Whereby, he continues,

at the same time the emptiness of consciousness asserts itself in them, since all standards have been abolished, everything fixed has become unstable, a boundless freedom of assumptions, the game with limitless possibilities letting the mind enjoy its sovereignty and at the same time giving it the pain of its lack of content (GS 8: 194).

For Dilthey, the absolute subjectivity of the transcendental subject inevitably generates an understanding of the ground of the facticity of life within the purely Nietzschean will to power. It is against this “emptiness of consciousness” (die Leere des Bewußtseins), against both the absolutism of the scientific spirit and the relativism of the rise of historical consciousness that Dilthey takes his stand.

 

Dilthey’s legacy, particularly in the Anglophone tradition, is the epistemological problem of the relationship between ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) and ‘explaining’ (Erklären), of which Dilthey is often identified as a pioneer. His ominous presentiment of the “rule of the scientific spirit over the Earth”, though, has received little attention. How might Dilthey address ‘the game of limitless possibilities’ that grounds Blumenberg’s ‘legitimisation’ of modernity, which makes possible “the immanent self-assertion of reason through the mastery and alteration of reality”, giving way to a “new concept of freedom”? Or the ‘anarchy of opinions’ that the “end of History” produces according to Fukuyama’s (via Hegel and Kojéve) notion of liberalism? What, if anything, does Dilthey still offer to the belief of historical consciousness as knowing?

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