The German Genius

reasoned than other activities. The history of philosophy, he thought, was a succession of ideas, none of which has proved wholly triumphant, and we should use this fact, this failure, as our guide. Worldviews or systems that have stood the test of time must contain some elements of truth, but each is limited “because the human mind is limited and conditioned by circumstances.” 4 When worldviews or philosophical systems make exclusive claims, their credibility is dented.
    This led Dilthey to deny metaphysics. For him, the rich and varied multifariousness of reality can never be adequately captured by any one conceptual approach. He was convinced that there is nothing to discover behind those experiences which, taken together, we call life. “Thought cannot go behind life,” he insisted. Political decision making, for example, could never be explained by the elementary processes of formal psychology, such as reflex action. Instead, we can only analyze, in this example, the products of political thought. “Unmutilated experience” was for him the basic ingredient of human studies.
    He insisted too that man’s basic position in an evolved universe must be linked to his morality, but he also thought it important to say that man’s nature is not fixed, that it too developed in the course of history and that, therefore, moralities also change and cannot be fixed either. This was another ingredient in human studies, a reorientation of disciplines that must be counted as Dilthey’s most distinctive achievement. 5
    As part of this, he asked himself what difference man’s possession of a mind had made to the world and arrived at a set of phenomena that, he said, have no equivalent elsewhere in nature. One is purposiveness. Man struggled with this notion, to free himself of the religious mantra that the whole of nature is purposive. Since Galileo, this project had largely succeeded, culminating in Baruch Spinoza. But Dilthey wasn’t sure that man was any happier, or understood the universe any better, because of this. A second phenomenon was value. Man shares with other creatures an ability to respond to the environment around him, but only man makes judgments in the abstract as to what is good and what is not. Third, there are norms and rules and principles in human life, everything from high moral principles to traffic regulations that, importantly, differ from the laws of science. Human laws are conventions and therefore changeable. Finally, human life is aware of itself as historical. Nature itself is mindless: planets cool, glaciers melt, sea levels rise and fall, producing change that affects humans. Only because of consciousness and memory does the cumulative effect of successive events become important. 6
    All this led Dilthey to conclude, simply enough, that the world of the mind cannot be directly observed. Purposes, values, and norms cannot be seen, nor can history, since it exists only in the past. It follows that our knowledge of the mind can come from just two sources—inner experience, which tells us about purposes, values, and norms, and reflects on the past by means of memory; and communication, “without which the individual’s knowledge would be minimal.” It is through these phenomena, these ingredients, that meaning emerges, a meaning that cannot be observed.
    None of this was radical, but its clarity—to repeat—was cleansing and made Dilthey’s coining of the phrase “human studies” seem common-sensical. He split human studies into two, into historical and systematic disciplines. The historical disciplines included political history, economic history, intellectual history, and the history of science. By “systematic disciplines,” he meant those activities—economics, sociology, psychology—that seek to explain phenomena by means of general laws. 7
    Dilthey also introduced, or reintroduced, the concept of understanding ( Verstehen ). He followed Kant in agreeing that we have evolved so as to understand the world. For him, there is a fundamental difference between sheer facts and true understanding. 8 Understanding is for him a specific capacity of the human intellect and should be regarded as such. This is shown in the failings, or fallings short, of specific systems, such as behaviorism. Such systems may tell us something about human behavior, human experience, but it is inevitably limited and can never approach total understanding. However many opinion polls were carried out,