Diltheyan Varieties of Double Hermeneutics in the Human Sciences

The volume of essays cogently organized by the editors approaches the most important aspects of Dilthey’s historically oriented philosophy of the human sciences. It brings together ten contributions (seven written in English and three in German) by historians of philosophy, historians and philosophers of the human sciences, social and cultural theorists, philosophical anthropologists, scholars of aesthetics, and experts in cultural semiotics. The volume serves to commemorate the centennial of Wilhelm Dilthey’s death. Honoring the idea that Dilthey’s approach was “exemplary in the ways in which it appropriated and gave new life to more traditional concepts” (p. 10), the authors follow the same spirit by recontextualizing Diltheyan concepts such as “productive nexus,” “lived experience,” “life’s expressivity,” “unfathomability (Unergründlichkeit) of life’s articulation,” and most of all, the conceptual correlation of understanding and reflective interpretation to make them instrumental in current research programs. For Dilthey, the human sciences encompass both the historical-philological disciplines and the social sciences. On his criterion, any research program that is engaged in interpreting the cultural embodiments of lived experience belongs to the human sciences. In admitting the validity and specifying in various ways the formulation of this criterion, the authors are eager also to subscribe to the unity of the “sciences of man.”

That all essays dispute the strong dichotomy between the interpretative and the explanatory-nomological-objectifying sciences is no surprise. Many of the authors are well known for their vehement insistence on the impossibility of holding a robust division (on the level of the thematic interests formation and the constitution of objects of inquiry) between the open-ended studies of human life’s cultural manifestations and the scientific research based on mathematically codified explanatory models and theories of human (individual and social) behavior. (Massimo Mezzanzanica’s essay devoted to the essential epistemological similarities between Dilthey and Helmholtz reveals at the same time the historical roots of the author’s aversion to committing to strong dichotomies.) Furthermore, the aforementioned criterion does not contradict the fact that all human sciences involve necessarily empirical and explanatory modes of inquiry. Nevertheless, with one exception, the authors oppose with elaborated arguments any tendency to naturalizing the human sciences. Undoing all forms of epistemological separatism does not amount for them to dissolving the dialogical-reflective specificity of the interpretative research. The authors plead for a unity of science that does not imply reductionist unification.

The exception in this regard is Denis Thouard’s essay, which contains a critical reading of the “philosophical turn” (whose point of departure is the occurrence of Dilthey’s doctrine of “life categories”) in the historical development of traditional hermeneutics. Following the tenets of “hermeneutic intentionalism,” Thouard rejects any relevance of Dilthey-Gadamer’s tradition to the philosophy of the human sciences. According to him, understanding and interpretative articulation that first open individual being to the world and to the other have nothing to do with normatively guided procedural “understanding something” that takes place in the human sciences. It is rather the traditional search for authorial intention in text’s constitution (as reformulated as the “principle of charity”)—so Thouard’s argument goes—that offers the best stimuli in developing a philosophy of interpretative research.

Rudolf Makkreel has good reasons to draw the attention in his introductory essay to Dilthey’s celebrated paper The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Justification (1890). In this paper, one is to find the basic premises for developing a philosophy of the human sciences that does not succumb to representationalist epistemology and metaphysics of presence. The world of lived experience is not theoretically represented as a present reality but is directly disclosed to human beings as embodying values that are pertinent to human beings’ purposes. In contrast to Heidegger-Gadamer’s ontological reformulation of hermeneutics, Dilthey strove for a hermeneutic logic of life’s cultural expressivity (hermeneutische Ausdruckslogik). He denied the search for ontological foundations of the human sciences with the argument that the “dynamics of life” is ontologically inscrutable. The task of rehabilitating under new conditions Dilthey’s hermeneutic project hinges on the authentication of this project’s potentiality to supply the human sciences not only with models of interpretation but also with philosophical grounds for a reflective-normative estimation of life-forms’ historical meaning. In stressing the role of judgment in human-scientific interpretation, Makkreel writes, “Judgment is not merely cognitive in bringing intellectual concepts to bear on the particulars of experience. It is also a mode of knowing that can assent or dissent from what is being claimed. What makes judgment crucial for the human sciences is its power to assess situations” (p. 30).

To a great extent, this collection of valuable essays sets out to redress the neglect of key problems of the human sciences’ hermeneutic historicity and critical reflexivity in the tradition of Dilthey studies. They pay tribute to the founder of philosophical hermeneutics as a philosopher of science. In the remainder, I focus largely on issues whose discussion lays bare the doubly interpretative nature of the human sciences. All essays deal with the “double hermeneutics” problematic in one or another way. Each of them is designed to convey a certain aspect of the critical interpretation through which the human sciences cope with the complexity of human life’s interpretative phenomena. Another important distinguishing feature is the special emphasis that the authors lay upon the parallel between Dilthey’s explanation-understanding distinction and Kant’s determinant-reflective judgment distinction (as a means to differentiate the scientific from the aesthetic and teleological standpoints). Being devised as a deductive-nomological derivation of explanandum from postulates the process of explanation aims at determinate and verifiable results. By contrast, the interpretative reflection accomplishes an ongoing (and potentially endless) contextualization of the research process. The latter remains constantly projected upon possible further contextualization. By implication, no possible context is codified sufficiently to finalize the research process, thereby fixing determinate results. (Here again Kant’s model of the free play as an activity of schematizing pure concepts without involving empirical concepts seems to be instrumental. Rudolf Makkreel, one of the editors, has explored for many years the relevance of Kant’s “lawfulness without a law” to the hermeneutic philosophy of the human sciences.) Thus, the essays set the agenda by intertwining the interest in the doubly interpretative nature of the human-scientific research process with the interest in applying transcendental arguments in this process. By studying the role of judgment in the hermeneutic methods of scientific research, the authors reveal the place in the interpretative theorizing where these arguments are to be integrated.

According to a core doctrine of Dilthey’s program exposed in his seminal work The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, the human sciences are called into existence in order to elaborate on strategies for cognizing the historical world by interpreting the discursive and symbolic embodiments of historical agents’ lived experience. In the production and expressivity of these embodiments the interpretative reflexivity plays an irreplaceable role. The paramount concept of Wirkungszusammenhang (productive nexus) conveys main aspects of the unavoidable situatedness of lived experience. Reflexivity is the interpretative production of cultural embodiments (in Dilthey’s terms, die Lebensäußerungen, the life’s expressivity) within the productive nexus. Thus, the human sciences achieve an interpretative cognizing of life’s reflexive expressivity. This is the most succinct formula of the human sciences’ double hermeneutics. An important premise (stressed especially in Frithjof Rodi’s essay) of this formulation is the distinction between the “reflexive awareness” (Innewerden) of the life-forms and the “reflective interpretation” within scientific experience. Makkreel makes the case that in Dilthey’s philosophy the reflexive awareness is tantamount to Kant’s “transcendental apperception.” It has a transcendental status that does not presuppose a deeper transcendental ego. Thus, the interrelations between reflexive awareness and reflective interpretation play a crucial role in designing the methodological, epistemological, and ontological aspects of the human sciences’ double hermeneutics. In exploring from various perspectives these interrelations, the authors reconstruct and unfold five main versions of double hermeneutics in Dilthey’s conception of the human sciences.

The first version, which most of the authors are committed to, is oriented toward the formation (which by no means is equivalent with construction) of historical types. In Jared Millson’s essay, the emphasis is placed on the methodology of creating historical types in the context of Dilthey’s distinction between elementary and higher forms of understanding. Dilthey’s concept of types as open-ended formations differs essentially from Max Weber’s neo-Kantian concept of ideal types. The latter are the outcome of “interpretative explanations”—that is, procedures aiming at objectifying finalization of the interpretative process. For Dilthey, the employment of a transcendental reflection in the open-ended formation of types becomes inevitable. Millson argues that for Dilthey the forms of higher understanding (including that of the human sciences) much like Kant’s reflective judgment select and compare particulars to systematize typical wholes by means of which individual expressions may be seen as representations of the general. Spelling out such representations is, in particular, the way to arrive at a provisional understanding of the cultural whole (as expressed in its symptomatic manifestations) of an historical epoch. As an extension of Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, the formation of typical wholes (being irreducible to teleological or causal explanation) generates meanings that exceed the sum of original elements. Interesting motifs of linking Dilthey’s holistic methodology to Kant’s third critique are also to be found in Frithjof Rodi’s essay, where at stake is the genesis of the categories of the philosophy of life. The search for an intuitive grasp of a cultural epoch, a comprehensive artistic style, or an ethos of enduring practices is a prerequisite for devising the initial hermeneutic circle of interpretative inquiry. Rodi shows convincingly how Dilthey’s efforts in that regard hinge not only on Kant’s assumption of an “intuitive reason”—that by accomplishing the grasp of the whole may proceed from the synthetic totality to particulars—but of Goethe’s doctrine on the “intuitive faculty of judgment” (as providing foundations of the morphological approach) as well. Rodi’s essay is the pivotal one for clarifying Dilthey’s transformation of transcendental philosophy.

The second version of double hermeneutics is developed from the perspective of the complementary understanding-interpretation relationship. Symptomatic for this version is the attempt to figure out a Diltheyan alternative to the inferential theory of meaning. For Millson, because understanding and interpretation ascribed to producer and recipient of meaning are “immersed in a common world of materialized interests, values, purposes, the mental movement from life-expression to meaning is strictly non-inferential” (p. 96). Eric Sean Nelson’s essay offers the most detailed analysis of the double hermeneutics’ epistemological aspects. He addresses the issue of how the practitioners of the human sciences manage to gain the epistemic distance from their thematic objects by standardizing the transitions from reflexive awareness to reflective interpretation. Thus, they define standards and norms for making the reflexive prescientific life-nexus (Dilthey’s Lebenszusammenhang) and its elementary and higher forms of understanding thematic objects without destroying the continuity between reflexive awareness and human-scientific reflective interpretation.

To what extent can the view of life-forms’ reflexive awareness suggest an alternative to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity? A preliminary answer to that question gives Maja Soboleva’s essay. She takes into account in this regard Georg Misch’s logical reformulation of Dilthey’s philosophy. (Misch is the most significant pupil of Dilthey and the first critic of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. The exchange between Misch and Heidegger from the late 1920s documents the competition of two hermeneutic projects.) By weakening Heidegger’s sharp opposition between ontic and ontological knowledge from the viewpoint of Dilthey’s inscrutability (die Unhintergehbarkeit) of life, Misch provides methodological principles for a hermeneutic logic. There is no room for an incompatibility between the ontic cognizing of the human sciences and the ontological approach of hermeneutic philosophy in this logical program that aims at an “extension of predicate logic.” Massimo Mezzanzanica traces the roots of Dilthey’s idea of “logic of life” (Lebenslogik) that prepares Misch’s program back to the criticism of phenomenalism inspired by the reception (positive and critical at once) of Helmholtz’s work. This should be not the logic of the subject that represents the world cognitively but that of the “concrete self” that constitutes the world meaningfully. Dilthey-Misch’s hermeneutic logic plays at the same time the role of the logic of human-scientific double hermeneutics.

Closely related to the discussion of understanding-interpretation complementarity is the discussion of the concept of the social that is pertinent to the human sciences. This is the starting point of the third version that Nelson tries to develop by demonstrating Dilthey’s way of overcoming the opposition between holism and individualism in social philosophy. The alternative to both horns of the dilemma is the hermeneutic circularity between the formation of individuality and the articulation of reflexive transsubjectivity. According to Dilthey, there is no individuality without transsubjective context. The human sciences thematize the social by reflecting on the circularity in question. On the methodological level, reflecting on the circularity undermines both the reification of theoretical-explanatory approaches to social-historical world and all kinds of “methodological essentialism.” But it prevents also the atomization of individuality. In this case, double hermeneutics ought to construct data models relevant to open-ended theories of the transsubjective contextualizing of individuality. Dilthey’s hermeneutic treatment of the interrelations between individuality and transsubjectivity anticipates important aspects of Giddens’s structuration theory in which human agency and social system’s structural rules are conceived of as mutually constitutive. For Dilthey, structures as productive nexuses are not considered (á la Durkheim) as “social facts” but as a medium (of individual and collective expressivity) in a state of ongoing structuration. Dilthey avoids conflationism of transsubjective structure and subjective individuality by ascertaining the conditions of irreducibility of their hermeneutic circularity to causal and/or functional interaction. By applying different arguments, Rodi, Nelson, and Makkreel show that one is always able to distinguish between social structure and socialized individuality in this version of double hermeneutics without the need to attribute sui generis causal properties to one or both of them. The dividing line that forecloses conflationism is drawn in accordance with the way in which a moral order gets established in the mutual constitution of structural rules and subjective individuality.

All essays explore Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences as an alternative hermeneutic project to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. The historical background of this approach is the deep and sustained dialogue with Dilthey which Heidegger carried out when developing his own ontological project. This background requires a special study, which is accomplished in Theodore Kisiel’s excellent essay. Kisiel shows succinctly how Heidegger’s early notion of “self-world” that illuminates the original experience of “factic life” and leads to the program of “hermeneutics of facticity” has been influenced by Dilthey’s considerations concerning the form of life’s self-mediating expressivity in autobiography. Both hermeneutic projects—the Diltheyan one and the Heideggerian one—take into account the ineliminable interpretative impregnation of all empirical data of culturally designed human life and existence. Scrutinizing these projects enables one to figure out approaches to such “empirical theorizing” in the human sciences, which appropriates (via integrating transcendental reflection) models of constitution of meaning. This is another specification of the thesis that the research process in the human sciences involves necessarily such a reflection.

The next version of double hermeneutics relates it to the post-Diltheyan concept of “eccentric positionality.” Annette Hilt’s essay offers an exciting reading of Dilthey’s critique of historical reason as an anthropology avant la lettre that provides the layout of Plessner’s enterprise. In her essay she tries to uncover the complexity of the relationship between Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and the methodology of double hermeneutics. In a Fichtean fashion Plessner links the life-forms’ self-reflection to the eccentricity (“eccentric positionality”) of human beings’ existence. Eccentricity is the hallmark of cultural existence’s instability (i.e., the existence of homo absconditus). Reflexivity generates eccentricity that leads to the life-forms’ instability. Accordingly, what gets rationalized (and constituted as a diversity of thematic objects of inquiry) in the human sciences is the eccentricity of life-forms’ cultural expressions. Reflexive experience (as source of eccentricity) is inherent in these expressions. Although reflexive experience resists being petrified in scientific explanation, its generative forces that bring forth life-forms are always contextually interpretable.

The final version of double hermeneutics concentrates on the tenets of hermeneutic rationality. On the reading suggested in Benjamin Crowe’s essay, the distinguishing feature of hermeneutic rationality is the involvement of judgment in the transition from reflexive awareness to reflective interpretation. An important implication is that the epistemic activity of interpreting is indispensably tied to processes like feeling, affect, and volition such that it is impossible to make sense of the former without reference to the latter. Coming to grips with the concept of rationality involved in the methodology of double hermeneutics as a way of producing self-reflective knowledge about life-forms’ reflexivity allows one to understand the importance of Dilthey’s ideas for Habermas’s knowledge-guiding interests epistemology and the theory of communicative action.

It is an ambition of the editors to organize a new international yearbook devoted to the interface of philosophy and the human sciences as a sequel of the Dilthey Yearbook for Philosophy and History of the Human Sciences, which was edited by Firthjof Rodi from 1983 until 2000. The present volume should serve as a prelude for accomplishing this task.