Wesleyan University

Structure and Change in Wilhelm Dilthey's Philosophy of History Author(s): Ilse N. Bulhof Reviewed work(s): Source: History and Theory, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Feb., 1976), pp. 21-32 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2504874 . Accessed: 11/04/2012 16:32
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STRUCTURE AND CHANGE IN WILHELM DILTHEY'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

ILSE N. BULHOF

To historians, Wilhelm Dilthey is known for his defense of the autonomy of history against a methodology of the natural sciences by advocating the method of intuitive understanding. In this essay attention will be drawn to some other aspects of Dilthey's thought, namely his conception of the structuredness of human life and history, his view of culture, of historical significance, and of social change. Dilthey's basis for considering these questions was his interest in the total course of history and, more specifically, in the coherence making the happenings of the past a true history instead of a mere succession of events. Dilthey viewed human history as the outer manifestation of a restless movement of an underlying force which he called "life." Life could never remain in the place where it found itself; being alive, it had to move on continuously to embody itself in new forms. To Dilthey, the life creating history was a spontaneous and self-generating creativity not subject to the mechanical laws of nature. As a result of his conception of life, Dilthey had to elaborate an appropriate method by which to investigate the structure of human history. In the Introduction to the Human Studies (1883), Dilthey developed the method of intuitive understanding applicable to historical phenomena such as a work of art, an historical person, or an event. But this method could not contribute much to the insight into the structure of history sought by Dilthey. Most of his thoughts on this latter topic are contained in essays written at the end of his life, such as "The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Studies" (1910).1 In the following pages I shall focus on the Introduction and his later, lesser-known studies. According to Dilthey, the study of the overall structure of history had until that time been the concern of the philosophers of history. The immanent structures they had found made history intelligible either by being providen1. Printed in volume VII of Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (Stuttgart and G6ttingen, 1961-) (henceforth cited as GS). These essays have not been translated into English. The Introduction to the Human Studies (Einleitung in die Geistswissenschaften) had not been translatedeither, except for some fragments collected and translated by H. P. Rickman, Pattern and Meaning in History (London, 1961).

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tial plans, by ideas regulating history, or by supplying formulas explaining the law of historical development. But Dilthey called the explanations of history on the basis of such metaphysical a priori positions "mere suppositions."2 He stressed that the structure of history was too "immensely complicated" to be contained in any single formula. Having rejected'the search for a nonexistent metaphysical principle informing history, Dilthey attempted to find historical coherence in empirical study of the structures that kept the fabric of the historical and social world together by investigating how a series of events, succeeding each other in time, and sets of discrete activities, performed by various individuals at the same time, could form a whole or structure. Dilthey tried first to understand the interconnectedness among events in the course of the life of an individual person. Human life, he felt, is lived consciously. The foremost characteristic of consciousness is self-awareness; and consciousness is not a thing but an activity. Dilthey stressed that what is given in consciousness are totalities or structures rather than particulars. The activity of individual consciousness consists not of step-by-step logical thinking, but of an experiencing of structures. Past and future are related in a series that is transformed by consciousness into a totality: "The course of life consists of parts, of experiences which have an inner relationship to each other. Every discrete experience is related to a self, of which it is a part; it is structurally connected with the other parts to form a totality. In all conscious phenomena we find structures."3 The coherence of life is not the result of our conscious perception of it; it is inherent in life itself, life happens in structures: "We perceive coherence because of the unity of our consciousness. This is a precondition of all our perceptions; but it is clear that the existence of coherence would not result from the mere fact that the unity of consciousness is presented with a variety of experiences. Only because life itself is a structural coherence (Strukturzusammenhang) in which the experience exists in a relationship which can be experienced is the coherence of life given to us." Dilthey explained the structuredness of human life on the basis of man's anticipation of the future in projecting his life toward a goal: "The same person who investigates the coherence of his life in his personal history has already formed a coherence of his life, because what he [in hindsight] experiences as valuable in his life were goals which he had realized after he had projected his life in a certain direction" [Dilthey used the word Lebensplan].4 Consciousness is by definition a presence, and the objects experienced by
2. GS, I, 91ff. 3. GS, VII, 195. 4. Ibid., 200.

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consciousness are perceived in their presence to it. The relationships connecting the objects of experience have as a result a synchronical or structural character. When, as Dilthey tended to do, phenomena are considered from the perspective of consciousness, the elements that exist in the present will be stressed, while past and future elements tend to be ignored. Where form and structure are stressed, linear temporal developments tend to be seen as irrelevant. This explains why Dilthey conceived of a self as a structure or form dependent on a "planning present" or a "consciousness of values" connecting its past and future with its living present. Consequently, he did not view the self as constituted as a diachronic series ordered from the last member onward, but as a synchronic structure "centered around a middle to which everything exterior is related as to an interior."5 The totality of a person's life is not the sum of the discrete experiences or moments in which life was lived in time, but rather "a unity constructed on the basis of the interrelationships existing among all parts."6 The unity of life does not exist for a person's consciousness; his consciousness exists as this experienced unity of past and present experiences. After having asserted the structural unity of the life of a single person, Dilthey used the unified life of a person as the model for the coherence of history. The human person is, he believed, the smallest structural unit, the "Urzelle,"7 of history. Dilthey pointed out that similar structures exist in the collective life of society. Empirical observation shows that each individual is part of larger structures (Zusammenhange) which he called "structural systems." Examples of such structural systems were scientific, economic, and religious organizations as well as nations and periods. Dilthey defined them as social entities in which goal, function, and structure are united to form a whole. Because cultural structures are created by man to fulfill a need, they belong to the realm of consciousness rather than to that of nature. Having been created to serve a purpose, these structures have a teleological character.8 Dilthey called them "ideal unities," and he characterized them as the "ideal" or "logical" subjects of history.9 Dilthey emphasized that such structures were not imposed afterward on history by the observer: they were part of history itself. Just as personal life, collective or historical life, happens, and is accordingly lived or experienced, in structures, so communities, too, have a "life history" (Lebensgeschichte), and historiography is the reflection
5. 6. 7. 8. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 246. GS, I, 49-65. H. N. Tuttle, Wilhelnm Dilthey's Philosophy

of Historical

Under-

standing. A Critical Analysis (Leiden, 1966) has pointed out the importance of the notion of systems in Dilthey's historical thought. 9. GS, VII, 134ff. See also ibid., 283.

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on their "course of life."'0 An historical epoch was likewise a structurally unified whole comparable to the course of the life of an individual. Having identified history with life, life with consciousness, and consciousness with the experience of structures, Dilthey had come to see history as a system of interlocking cultural structures instead of a succession of events. The conception of the structural unity of a period led Dilthey to a conception of culture similar to that used in twentieth-century cultural anthropology. As an historian, Dilthey had a keen eye for the limiting effects of the existing structural system of a period on the development of its individual participants. He explained that a given period prescribed certain thoughts, feelings, and goals for its members, while excluding others, thus creating a "horizon" for its members that could not be transcended." The people of the Middle Ages or Antiquity, for instance, had their own way of perceiving the world, their own type of emotions, and their own characteristic goals. As each period has its own horizon, each is "concentrated in itself" having "its center in itself." In Dilthey's words: ". . . the various epochs have their unity of reference (Massstab) concerning their way of operations in a common entity [in themselves]. The various structures of the society are organized along the same lines, evidencing similarities. The relationships in perception, for example, evidence inner affinity. The ways of feeling, the life of the soul, and the impulses that emerge in this way are similar to each other. Consequently, the will chooses [in one period] similar goals, strives for similar goods, and finds itself bound by similar rules."12Consequently, the individual human person, however creative, is never completely free: he cannot escape the climate of opinion, the "Geist der Zeit." The common attitude toward life shapes the mental or cultural unity of the period, and, because this attitude is expressed in the institutions and other social structures of the time, shapes its sociological unity as well. Because of his studies of the relationships connecting the different aspects of a period, Dilthey can be considered as a precursor of functionalism in cultural anthropology. Historical periods as he saw them are cultures as later understood in cultural anthropology: functionally integrated wholes, oriented toward the achievement of a goal or the realization of a value. They are based on a consensus of its participants and result in a patterned way of life. Dilthey indicated also that the participants were mostly unconscious of the way in which their behavior was regulated and determined by the interlocking cultural systems of a period.13 In the English-speaking world, Franz Boas was one of the first cultural anthropologists to use the
10. 11. 12. 13. Ibid., 264. Ibid., 177. Idem. Ibid., 209.

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word culture in the plural.14 It seems possible that Boas, who could have read the Introduction to the Human Studies while still in Germany and who had attended Dilthey's lectures at the University of Berlin, was influenced by Dilthey's conception of cultural systems.15 Dilthey's insight into the structural relationships connecting the various aspects of social life caused him to define the task of the historian in an interesting way: instead of reporting events, the historian should analyze the cultural systems of the past "to discover in the concrete goals, values, and ways of thinking the similarity of a common entity that reigns over the
epoch."'6

In Dilthey's approach to history, the culture-concept not only served to shield the past from present-minded judgments; cultural systems also were seen as norms which enable the historian to evaluate the actions of the actors of the past. Dilthey wrote that in evaluating particular phenomena the historian first had to establish what the person had done and then judge how his actions were related to the historical context, evaluating whether they fitted in the context of the time or whether they showed signs of transcending the actual situation and pointing toward the future. Such a judgment was possible because the culture or the total historical context of the period (das Ganze der Epoche oder des Zeitalters) furnished the standard by which to evaluate the appropriateness, propriety, prematurity, or creativity of a specific action.17 Because he was interested in the diachronical coherence of history, Dilthey paid much attention to how the historical climate of a period could actually shape human behavior, values, and institutions over a certain span of time. His answer was that history can condition human behavior because man lives in an objectively existing, interpersonal cultural world, into which each person is born. Human life, he felt, is not only conscious and experienced life, but also expressed life. Some expressions - such as gestures, facial expressions, and words - vanish after having been performed. Other expressions, however, are committed to enduring material: manuscripts, books, works of art, states, churches, scientific institutions, and others. He perceived such expressions
14. G. W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York and London, 1968), 203. He mentions, however, that Boas' use of the term culture was not consistent (p. 231), that the term "cultures" was regularly used only by his students (p. 203). 15. It is interesting to note in this respect that Ruth Benedict refers to Dilthey's conception of cultures as integrated wholes in her book Patterns of Cuiltutre (New York, 1953), 47. 16. GS, VII, 155. 17. Idem.

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of human life as having an "objective," that is to say, a visible, interpersonal, and enduring existence in material objects and social structures that can be perceived by others.18 In such phenomena, human life had "objectified" or "externalized" itself. The objects in which human life and mind had embodied themselves formed together what Dilthey called "the external realm of the mind"; he called the life that embodied or externalized itself in this way the "objective mind."19Dilthey defined the objective mind - or, as we would say, culture - as "the manifold forms in which the commonality existing between individuals has objectified itself in the world of senses."20 Individuals become historically conditioned in their actions and thinking because they are born into an objectively existing culture that outlasts the lifetimes of the individuals of which it is composed. But to Dilthey, a cultural system does more than give a structure to social life. It also serves as the medium that makes communication possible between the members of a community. In everyday life people have to understand each other's behavior and intentions; they have to be able to interpret the various expressions (Lebensausserungen) of other people, such as facial expressions and forms of greeting, but also such cultural expressions as the arrangement of trees in a park or of chairs in a room. Because every human being has the capacity to experience life consciously and to express himself, man understands immediately that the cultural manifestations surrounding him are not merely things the way natural objects are things, but signs that are a form of language: "Everything in which the mind has objectified itself has something that is common to the I and the you. Every square planted with trees, every room with chairs is understandable to us, because the human planning, ordering, and evaluating which we have in common (ein Gemeinsames) have given every square and every chair in a room its place."21 To become acculturated and socialized means to learn to comprehend the signs of one's culture: "A child grows up in an order and is surrounded by the family customs which are shared with others, and the education given by the mother is understood in connection with these customs. Before he learns to speak, he [the child] is already submerged in a shared environment
(Gemeinsamkeiten).
. .

. In this way the individual orients himself in the

world of the objective mind."22 Dilthey conceived of man's cultural environment as language. Its separate elements are like words. The individual person learns the language of culture
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. GS, VII, 80. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 208. Idem. Ibid., 209.

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but is unaware of its underlying rules23- an anticipation of the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Dilthey's conception of culture had implications for the problem of historical significance. Significance was commonly attributed, by an objective judgment, to those phenomena of history that had influenced later events. As most events do not effect later history, the number of historically significant events was of course relatively small. While agreeing that some events were more significant than others, Dilthey added to this theory of objective historical significance the notion that an event had first to be subjectively experienced as significant by the community before it could have an objective effect on later history. Viewed from this perspective, an historically significant event is neither momentous in itself, nor is its significance a matter of an historical interpretation made through hindsight. The culture of a period determines what will be accepted as historically significant and what will be forgotten. This view of historical significance is an extreme form of idealism as it accepts as real and meaningful only what has been consciously accepted as such by the actors of the past themselves. One can think of many things that went almost unnoticed in their time, but that had nevertheless enormous consequence in later history, such as the invention of the plow or the introduction of a new type of fireplace in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless the hypothesis of an analogy between the psychic structure of an individual and the collective mind of a culture has something to recommend it. The self-image of a nation may be conceived as a regulative device that decides which events at a certain moment of the nation's existence are considered to be impossible and are, for that reason, ignored. Thomas Kuhn's paradigms, for example, function in this way in the history of science. Claude Levi-Strauss, to mention vet another proponent of this type of thinking, suggests that myths and rites can counteract "objectively" important events and cause them to be eventually dropped from memory and robbed of historical influence.2' It seems equally possible that myths and rites can fulfill
23. Idem. 24. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1970), 66-74. It may be interesting to quote Levi-Strauss on the influence of myths and rites on social systems. LeviStrauss writes that demographic evolution can shatter the social structure but that "if the structural orientation survives the shock it has, after each upheaval, several means of reestablishing a system, which may not be identical with the earlier one but is at least formally of the same type." The structural orientation will continue through the myths and rites, "so as to maintain new structural solutions along approximately the same lines as the previous structure," as if the structure were a motor with a feedback device. The result will be "a compromise between the old state of affairs and the confusion brought in from outside." Levi-Strauss mentions as a possible example of such

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the opposite function and confer meaning on an event that considered "objectively" would not be that important; the classic example is the reception in the New World of the Spaniards, who were seen by the Indians as gods whose coming had been prophesied. Because of his interest in social structures, Dilthey occupies an important place in the transformation of history into a social science,25 but he remained nevertheless primarily an historian. What distinguishes history from the other social sciences is its concern for process, change, and time: history is, indeed, "the discipline working under the sovereign aegis of time."26 In spite of the fact that Dilthey was struck by the structuredness of cultural phenomena of the past, the structures he discerned and the periods he analyzed were to him always part of the ongoing stream of life; his cultural systems were, as a result, always in the process of changing. And, as stated before, the life of history followed no simple rules of reason in its movement: the progression of life was spontaneous and free. This made it difficult for Dilthey to account for the diachronic coherence of history. How could the transition from one period to the other be conceptualized? Could the course of history be completely irrational and haphazard? Dilthey did not think so. In order to understand social change, Dilthey took again as a model the psyche of a person. Dilthey stressed that no law prescribes a developmental pattern of mental growth, climax, and decline like those governing the human body and other natural objects. Man is free to stop his psychological development early or to continue to grow till death. Nor is human freedom compatible with teleological notions of an inborn character: Dilthey stated that "all theories about a progressive development in stages should be rejected."27 What distinguishes Dilthey's view of individual and historical development from others' - such as that of Oswald Spengler, who was equally interested in discovering patterns of historical development - was the fact that Dilthey saw the development of an individual person or of an historical phenomenon as a process of interaction between external and internal elements. Biological developments are closed systems, following predetermined patterns. Historical developments, on the other hand, have often been described by humanistic historians as series of mere contingencies among which the nonpredictable responses of man to his situation occupy an important
a structural adjustment of the historical process the legends of the Osage Indians (pp. 68-69).
25. See Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology. The Transition in German His-

torical Thought, transl. Hayden V. White (Detroit, 1959). 26. Leonard Krieger, "The Horizons of History," American Historical Review 63
(1957), 71.

27. GS, VII, 244.

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place. Dilthey steered a middle course between these extremes. First, I shall analyze his view of individual development. Dilthey described the formation of a character as the formation of a "soul-structure" that both endures and changes during the course of a person's life: "[A person's] life and the course of life are a structure. By the continuous acquisition of new experiences, what I call an 'acquired soulstructure' (Seelenzusamnmenhang) is built on the foundation of previous experiences. The result of this process is the duration and continuity of the structure in the midst of changes."28 This structure receives influences from the outside, but it is at the same time increasingly determined by the developing soul-structure: "as we pursue the line of memories from the little figure of childhood, living in the moment, to the man who asserts himself vis-A-vis the world, firmly rooted in his inner-oriented interiority, we relate the course of influences and reactions to something that forms itself (sich gestaltet) and thus develops itself as something formed from the inside. The external events influencing this self have an effective result (Wirkungswert) on it."29 To Dilthey, the self was a psychic structure that has come about as the result of the interplay between an increasingly internally realized personal pattern and its environment. Thus after a certain point in time, the psychological development of an individual acquires a more or less steady direction, but that direction does not stem from an inborn character: initially, it was formed by circumstances. But once discernible, however, the characterstructure remains an important factor in the self's further development. Dilthey explained that the acquired character-structurelimits a person's freedom of development. A young individual might change his opinion frequently, but as he becomes older he will increasingly stand by opinions and value-judgments that are part of the way in which his self had become organized in the course of time. As an adult his steady character traits express his outlook on life, the core of his personality or self. To illustrate his conception of the relationship between freedom and necessity in human life, Dilthey pointed to the example of instrumental music. Such music had "a direction, an activity that reaches out toward its realization, a progression of psychic activity itself, a determination by what has already passed but still a self-containment of various possibilities, a process of explication which at the same time is a creation."30 To sum up: Dilthey conceived of a self as a psychological structure provided with a potential for development, limited, first, by the possibilities offered by external circumstances or history, and, second, by the internal structure of the person's own developing self.
28. Idem. 29. Ibid., 237. 30. Ibid., 231.

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Dilthey conceived of historical change in terms similar to those of the development of a self. Thus he wrote, for instance, that the structure of a given historical phenomenon precluded some changes while making others probable. Dilthey suggested that historical events should be explained by indicating how they were part of a pattern of diachronic structural change. "Historical events become meaningful when seen as part of a structure, for as such they help to realize together with other parts the values and goals of the totality."31 Historical phenomena, in other words, should be understood not only as a function of the synchronic structural context; they should also be seen as moments of diachronic patterns of development. One of the interesting aspects of Dilthey's "structuralism"is the fact that in his approach to history the category of events occupies an important place. Consistent with his model of the development of a self, Dilthey stated furthermore that the changes in historical phenomena occur at each moment in the direction of one of a finite set of possibilities. Although the exact direction of an historical development of a structure could not be predicted, its changes are not an altogether arbitrary development. The structure of an historical phenomenon shapes to a certain extent its future. It also circumscribes the extent to which past events can influence the situation of the present: the cultural structure of a period assimilates previous events.32 Thus the cultural structure of a period not only delimits future developments, but operates retrospectively as well. Dilthey believed actions of individuals and historical events should be viewed as articulations of changing cultural patterns, or as members of "systems of changes" (Veriinderungssystemen),33 as he wrote in connection with revolutions, instead of as discrete entities adding up to historical sequences. Seen thus, history does not come about as the result of the actions of individuals, but as the result of the changing patterns of its logical subjects, the cultural systems of history. History is the continuous transformation of its interlocking cultural structures. Such systems are, as we have seen, not mental constructs fabricated by philosophers but empirically verifiable constituents of social life. With his model Dilthey described historical change in a way that avoided the Scylla of historical naturalism and the Charybdis of historical accidentalism. Dilthey had hoped that his structural approach to the history of a period could explain also the coherence of universal history: "although in the concrete course of history no law of development can be found, its analysis into separate structures opens the eye for the succession of stages."34Further31.LIbid., 168. 32. Idem. 33. Ibid., 270. 34. Ibid., 169.

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more, the succession of historical structures follows the order of time, "for they go through a series of changes, determined by their nature, of which each change is possible only on the basis of the previous one."35 The series of changes was not only continuous and irreversible, but also progressive, for the successive historical entities evidence an increasing movement toward more complex forms: "these successive situations presuppose each other so that on the lower level a higher one is, as it were, elevated, while a progression toward increasing differentiation and structuredness takes place."36 It was, however, difficult to harmonize the self-centeredness of periods with the notion of coherent, universal history. To solve this problem, Dilthey suggested the Darwinian model of evolutionary biology. This model, he felt, reconciled both the requirements of a unitary history and the necessity of allowing each period its intrinsic validity.37 The Darwinian model also illustrated the relative value of historical forms: "the theory of evolution . . . is necessarily linked with the recognition of the relativity of every historical form of life."38 Concerned particularly with the confusing variety of philosophical systems, Dilthey wrote that the theory of evolution explained that no such system could claim absolute validity, and that consequently the traditional normative concept of a "typical" man was untenable. The variety of forms of philosophies and of human life in general were, in Dilthey's words, "connected with ongoing life: it is one of its most important and instructive creations."39The fact that Dilthey used the model of Darwinian evolution to indicate the nature of the development of human history expresses his view that life does not follow a specific direction, nor tend to any goal. Historical life will, however, never come to an end. And the hypothesis of a super-soul or a collective consciousness of mankind does not make sense, because mankind does not function in history as a logical subject. Whatever the merits of Dilthey's model of historical change, it fails when applied to universal history. Dilthey, however, never acknowledged this. He continued to believe in the ontic reality of mankind and its life in history.40 Dilthey's approach has nevertheless much to offer to the contemporary historian. After all, the problem of the seeming antagonism between process and structure has not yet been satisfactorily resolved in historiography. Robert R. Berkhofer in A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969) points out that structurally-oriented historians still do not know
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. Idem. Idem. GS, VIII, 77ff. Idem. Idem. GS, VII, 197; comp. also ibid., 131.

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how to approach historical change. In Dilthey's model of historical change, on the other hand, a structural approach is aptly combined with concern for contingent events. Dilthey would also seem to provide a resolution for the dispute between historical objectivists and subjectivists in the area of historical knowledge. He makes it clear that the significance of an historical event is neither a matter of subjective evaluation made through hindsight by the historian, nor a matter of objective observation, but that historical significance is a function of the cultural system in which the events studied occurred. University of Texas at Austin