The influence of Max Weber on the concept of empathic understanding ( Verstehen ) in the psychopathology of Karl Jaspers

Introduction

Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913) is one of the most important books in the history of psychiatry. His approach, introducing phenomenology ¹ and methodological pluralism (perspectivism) in the clinical field, is still admired and debated, to the point that Jaspers has been recently proposed ‘as the proper iconic figure for modern psychiatry’ (Schwartz, Moskalewicz and Wiggins, 2017: 5). A key concept in Jaspers’ psychopathology is the so-called understanding (Verstehen), which has been considered a major pillar of psychopathological reasoning, even today (Rosini, Di Fabio and Aragona, 2013: 60). Jaspers borrowed this concept from the epistemological dispute on scientific methods taking place at the end of the eighteenth century (the so-called Methodenstreit). There are several studies focusing on the theoretical roots of Jaspers’ Verstehen, suggesting the names of Husserl, Dilthey, Weber, Simmel and Geiger as the most relevant authors (see e.g. Achella, 2004; Aragona, 2015–16, 2016, 2018; Besoli, 2006–7–8; Bormuth, 2006; Kumazaki, 2013a, 2013b; Leoni, 2013; Mishara and Fusar-Poli, 2013; Telles-Correia, Saraiva and Gama Marques, 2018).

There is a wide consensus that Max Weber strongly influenced Jaspers’ methodological and ethical views. For instance, Manasse (1957: 369) states that ‘the communication with Max Weber has been the living spring from which Jaspers’ thinking has taken its origin’, and Kumazaki (2013b) concludes his inquiry by asserting that Weber had the most significant influence on Jaspers’ psychopathology. Jaspers himself recalls that:

Among my contemporaries, the actuality of human greatness, the standard for men historically distant, became embodied for me, in a singular, marvelous fashion, in the person of Max Weber. . . . His thought as well as his nature became as essential for my philosophy, even till today, as no other thinker. . . . Even in those years he had already influenced the draft of my Psychopathologie. (1957: 29)

In particular, in a paper on causal and understandable connections between fate and psychosis in dementia praecox, Jaspers quotes Max Weber several times. At the beginning, Jaspers (1913/1974: 82) writes that, before starting the discussion, it is first necessary to define the methodology and the way concepts are used. Here, a footnote describes Weber’s Roscher und Knies (together with Georg Simmel’s (1905) Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie) as ‘particularly noteworthy’. ² Later, Weber is quoted in two more footnotes. The first is in a section on the evidence of genetic understanding, where Jaspers suggests that meaningful connections are ideally typical connections. For the concept of ideal type, Jaspers (1913/1974: 85) refers the reader to Weber’s Die Objektivität sozial-wissenschaftlicher und sozial politischer Erkenntnis (1904/1949a). The other footnote is in a section on the limits of understanding and the universal application of explaining. It states that ‘These matters are convincingly presented by Max Weber’ and that they are related to the distinction between causal explanation and understanding as ideally totally separable methods with different origin and validity, although they are combined in practice (Jaspers, 1913/1974: 86). Surprisingly, Weber is not cited in a section of Jaspers’ paper on ‘Understanding and value judgement’, although this was a main theme in Weber’s contribution on the objectivity of social sciences.

Weber’s Roscher und Knies and Die Objektivität are both cited in a footnote of the first edition of Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913); this note is in a section where he states that, factual data being scarce, a methodological reflection is necessary if psychopathology needs to be able to reply to methodological objections. In this note, Jaspers stresses that the methodological papers written by psychiatrists are more useful than general philosophical theories, but adds that, for the contiguity of the issues considered, Weber’s scripts are of particular value for psychopathologists (Jaspers, 1913/2004b: 90). As known, Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie has undergone several revisions since 1913. In the last edition it is claimed in a note, similar to one in the 1913 edition, that professional philosophers who generalize have less to offer than papers on methodology written by researchers; Jaspers (1946/1963: 6) quotes Weber as a case in point. Here he cites Weber’s book Gesammelte Beiträge zur Wissenschaftslehre (1922) instead of previous citations. In the same edition, at the beginning of the chapter on ‘Meaningful psychic connections’, Jaspers (1946/1963: 301, n. 1) adds a note with a brief but detailed reconstruction of the authors who had an influence on his concept of Verstehen. Here the work of Weber (although without specific citations) is credited as the one ‘mostly responsible for my deliberate use of understanding as a method which would be in keeping with our great cultural traditions’ (p. 301). Jaspers also quotes Weber twice more in this 1946 edition, first mentioning a publication on the psychophysics of industrial work (p. 206), and second when discussing ideal types (p. 561). In general, the impression is that in later editions of the book Jaspers reviews some quotations but in general does not change the original views expressed in the first edition.

To sum up, Jaspers directly recognized Weber’s influence on several points in his Allgemeine Psychopathologie as well as in some preparatory articles. Therefore, it is clear that Weber was a source of his psychopathological views. However, in Jaspers’ psychopathological work, and particularly in his use of the concept of Verstehen, he borrowed ideas from several other sources, including psychiatrists and experimental psychologists, patients’ self-descriptions, and human scientists (in that period, scientists of the ‘spirit’ were often philosophers, historians and sociologists all at the same time). Thus, the question to be answered in the present paper is not whether Weber influenced Jaspers (which he clearly did), but which parts of Weber’s ideas were effectively used by Jaspers and what differences remained between the two authors despite their mutual influence.

In this study, I will make a thorough comparison between Jaspers’ conceptualization of empathic Verstehen in psychopathology, and Weber’s related ideas in his studies before 1913.

Weber’s method and epistemology

Max Weber was (with Georg Simmel) one of the founding fathers of German sociology. As a reaction against Comte’s positivist sociology at the end of the nineteenth century, German sociologists started an epistemological debate about their proper methods of inquiry, methods that were perceived as different from those of the natural sciences. It was a discussion involving several related disciplines including philosophy, history, sociology, political economy, psychology, etc., with individual scholars often crossing disciplinary boundaries. Weber is in line with this stance, writing papers on several issues including economy, religion, politics, etc. One key feature of his works is the importance of conceptual and methodological clarification. This had a strong influence on Jaspers, who wrote that sociology was just another expression of Weber’s philosophical interests. However, Jaspers claims that Weber did not teach any philosophy, he was a philosophy (Jaspers, 1932). According to Massimilla (2017), Weber’s philosophy was structurally spread within the interweaving of scientific inquiries and political stances. As a consequence, the main philosophical/epistemological and methodological concepts that had a relevant influence on Jaspers’ psychopathology were scattered in long publications, from which we have to select key passages.

Weber’s Roscher und Knies was published in Schmoller’s Jahrbuch in three parts, in 1903, 1905 and 1906. It was planned as a critical examination of historical economics, but de facto it went beyond the boundaries of this subject to become ‘a mature, original, and comprehensive piece of philosophical analysis devoted to the question of the logical status of the socio-cultural sciences’ (Oakes, 1975: 5).

Die Objektivität was published in 1904 to support the idea that the social sciences may have some objectivity based on logical procedures, despite the fact that they are necessarily value laden (Weber, 1904/1949a). This is because the values in question are those at play in selecting the interesting material (depending on the researcher’s purposes) but not absolute values (based on some sort of transcendental a priori) or the evaluation (value judgement) of the valence of the topic from a moral or ethical point of view. Here we find the famous distinction between knowledge and evaluation, that is, between the scientific duty of finding the ‘truth’ of facts, and the practical duty of defending one’s own values.

When Jaspers was planning and writing his Allgemeine Psychopathologie, he may have known of at least one other publication by Weber, although he did not quote it, either in his book or in the preparatory papers. This was Kritische Studien auf dem Gebiet der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Logik, published in 1906 (Weber, 1906/1949b). It is divided into two parts: the first is a polemic against Edward Meyer’s reflections on the theory and method of history; the second is an essay on the concept of cause applied to history. Here, the idea of man’s behaviour as the product of rational evaluation opens the possibility of understanding human actions in relation to objective possibilities. In this view, we have an adequate causation of a historical fact when the fact is in line with what we would have expected in similar circumstances.

Weber would return in more detail to the problem of the logical specificity of causality applied to human sciences. In particular, he analysed the interplay between explaining and understanding in his essay entitled Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie (Weber, 1913/1981). However, in this famous contribution, Weber quotes Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie as a relevant source of his conceptualization, so it cannot count as an influence of Jaspers’ Verstehen.

To sum up, Jaspers quotes directly two essays written by Weber as relevant influences for his Allgemeine Psychopathologie; he might have known of another study although he does not cite it, while another relevant one was published after Jaspers’ book. However, it should be added that in this period Jaspers had frequent opportunities to meet and have discussions with Weber, so it is likely that they shared ideas on common problems, and thus influenced each other – not only through their writings.

In the period we are analysing, Max Weber’s main ideas that might have been important for Jaspers can be summarized as follows. First, in line with the post-Kantian stance characterizing the epistemological debate of the time, reality is manifold and cannot be known by simply copying it. For Weber, like Simmel, history cannot be a reproduction of facts as they really happened. There is always a selection and organization of the material by the historian. Accordingly, it is our interest (theoretical, practical, etc.) that gives value to the significant aspects that are selected from manifold reality; we move:

from the limitless – and therefore insufficiently intelligible – concrete manifold of the perceptually given to a limited and therefore intelligible – although no less concrete – representation of certain elements of the manifold: those placed in relief by the analysis because we see them as significant. (Weber, 1903/1975a: 65, original italics ³ )

A consequence is that sociocultural sciences are value-laden but (contra Rickert) the values in question are not transcendental a priori values, but are relative to the interests and purposes of the researcher (Weber, 1904/1949a). However, this does not push sociocultural sciences outside the scientific discourse. Per se, a lived experience (Erlebnis) is not yet the object of empirical/scientific knowledge but the descriptive basis (the ‘contemplative’ element, the ‘primary’ historical object) for the causal explanation of its configuration and of the ‘secondary’ historical facts, namely the causes to which it is imputed. This ‘imputation’ must have objective value as for any other empirical knowledge; as in the explanation of any concrete natural process, it is only the adequacy of the material that decides whether the causal imputation is valid (Weber, 1906/1949b: 159).

At this point, we can introduce a fundamental concept in Weber’s method: that of ideal type (Idealtypus). It is an ‘ideal limit concept’ which is:

formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent, concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. (Weber, 1904/1949a: 90)

It is the historian’s task to measure, in every single case, the distance between reality and ideal type. Weber uses the concept of ideal type in at least two ways. One usage is as an ideal description (a sort of ideal prototype or essence) that makes possible the comparison of real instances of the same phenomenon. As such, it is an abstraction from the infinite features of a phenomenon to those which characterize it more purely and coherently. Real, concrete cases are examples of the concept illustrated by the pure or ideal type, but usually they are never as clear, coherent and pure as the idealized concept is. For example, ‘sect’ and ‘church’ are sharply different as ideal types, although in real life they are not as pure and have features in common.

The second usage of the concept of ideal type concerns the explanation of the production of a human action. Not only do we select some features of the manifold phenomenon to fix it as effect, but we also select, from infinite elements pertaining to the real process, those causal features that we consider more relevant. Weber asks how it is possible to impute an effect to a cause, considering that there are always infinite causal moments conditioning the effect. His reply is that the historian’s aim is not to reproduce the phenomenon, but exclusively to causally explain those elements that have a ‘general significance’, and hence a historical interest (Weber, 1906/1949b: 170). In doing so, we proceed ideal-typically, that is, ‘In order to penetrate to the real causal interrelationships, we construct unreal ones’ (pp. 185–6). For example, when Weber explores the causal connections between ends and means in rational actions, he adds that ‘rational “evaluation” functions exclusively as a hypothesis or as an ideal-typical construct’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 188). In general, ideal types enjoy:

only a necessarily very relative and problematic validity when they are intended to be regarded as the historical portrayal of empirically existing facts … [while] they are of great value for research and of high systematic value for expository purposes when they are used as conceptual instruments for comparison with and the measurement of reality. (Weber, 1904/1949a: 97)

Accordingly, in its conceptual purity, the ideal type cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality; it is utopia. ⁴

It could be argued that the validity of ideal types is too weak to be used as scientific instruments, but Weber replies that if the researcher:

rejects an attempt to construct such ideal types as a ‘theoretical construction,’ i.e., as useless or dispensable for his concrete heuristic purposes, the inevitable consequence is either that he consciously or unconsciously uses other similar concepts without formulating them verbally and elaborating them logically or that he remains stuck in the realm of the vaguely ‘felt.’ Nothing, however, is more dangerous than the confusion of theory and history stemming from naturalistic prejudices. (Weber, 1904/1949a: 94)

‘Verstehen’ in Weber’s papers before 1913

Having described Weber’s general methodology and epistemological stance, we can now focus on the relationship between natural and sociocultural sciences, their respective methods, and in particular the role of the understanding (Verstehen) in its interrelation with causal explanation and interpretation.

In Weber’s time, the logical space for the distinction between natural and sociocultural sciences was circumscribed between two possible extremes. On one side, there was Dilthey’s distinction between Naturwissenschaften (focused on natural phenomena and having deterministic causal explanation as the main method of research) and Geisteswissenschaften (focused on the manifestation of mind, with understanding as the main methodological instrument). In this distinction, the different content (nature vs. mind) was considered essential. On the other side, there was Windelband’s distinction between nomothetic and idiographic sciences, the former using scientific laws addressing general truths and the latter being focused on individual, unique and unrepeatable phenomena. In this distinction the emphasis was on the way phenomena are approached. ⁵

Weber is somewhere in the middle. His distinction between natural and sociocultural sciences is not related to a different content, and he states that there is neither an ontological nor an epistemological sharp division between the domain of nature and that of the ‘mental’:

Empirical knowledge in the domain of the ‘mental’ and in the domain of ‘external’ ‘nature,’ knowledge of processes ‘within’ us and of those ‘without’ us, is invariably tied to the instrument of ‘concept formation.’ From a logical point of view, the nature of a ‘concept’ in these two substantive ‘domains’ is the same. (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 185)

Moreover, he claims that historical explanation is logically similar to the explanation of individual natural events. The concept of causality is the same (p. 186), and the ‘historical “interpretive” inquiry into motive is causal explanation in absolutely the same logical sense as the causal interpretation of any concrete natural process’ (p. 194). As an example, Weber imagines a storm that strikes a boulder from a cliff and splinters it into several fragments. This natural event is in accordance with the physical laws; nevertheless, the number and shape of the fragments in the concrete case is unpredictable, although ‘the established facts are not “inexplicable.” I.e., they entail no consequences which are inconsistent with our “nomological knowledge”’ (p. 122). Similarly, it is not in principle but in practice that historical action cannot be deduced from nomological laws, because an individual event ‘includes an intensively infinite multiplicity of properties’ (p. 124) that make the computation too hard. Accordingly, where the individuality of a phenomenon is concerned, ‘the question of causality is not a question of laws but of concrete causal relationships’ (Weber, 1904/1949a: 78).

However, Weber is not consistent in this apparent claim that causality is the same, independently from the content (nature vs. mind), and depends only on the level of analysis (general vs. singular events). In fact, both physical and psychical reality are historical insofar as they can mean something to us (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 195). The consequence is that even natural objects, when considered from the point of view of cultural sciences, become different explananda because they are meaningful (e.g. artefacts). Accordingly, meaningful phenomena require interpretation: ‘in the interpretation of human “action,” we are not satisfied by merely establishing a relationship between the action and a purely empirical generalization … We require the interpretation of the “meaning” of the action’ (p. 128). Our causal understanding has to be causally adequate in the sense that it must not contradict nomological laws, but nomological laws in the sciences of nature are different from those in the sociocultural disciplines. The latter are not real mechanistic chains of causes and effects, but empirical generalizations: ‘we are concerned here not with “laws” in the narrower exact natural science sense, but with adequate causal relationships expressed in rules and with the application of the category of “objective possibility”’ (Weber, 1904/1949a: 80). In other words, in the sociocultural disciplines, nomological knowledge derives from the generalization of first-person and empathic experience of regularities observed in ‘normal’/‘rational’ usual reactions. It is a ‘knowledge of certain known empirical rules, particularly those relating to the ways in which human beings are prone to react under given situations … derived from our own experience and our knowledge of the conduct of others’ (Weber, 1906/1949b: 174). In this changed context, causality itself becomes something different: ‘The form in which the category of causality is employed by the various disciplines is quite different. And … this produces changes in the content of the category itself’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 195).

To sum up, Weber asserts that from a logical point of view there is no difference between causal explanation in the natural and the sociocultural sciences, but in a closer analysis a difference exists. It is not the orientation towards individual happenings that characterizes human disciplines (because this is in common with the explanation of individual natural events), but a peculiar orientation of the researcher, namely the quest for meaning. This makes both nomological laws (as seen above) and causal explanation rather different in the respective fields. We will now focus on the interplay between explanation and understanding in sociocultural disciplines. This was explored in depth by Weber (1913/1981) – the paper mentioned above, which was published after Jaspers’ psychopathology. However, it was substantially anticipated in previous writings already available to Jaspers before 1913.

Weber’s project was as follows:

The type of social science in which we are interested is an empirical science of concrete reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Our aim is the understanding of the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move. We wish to understand on the one hand the relationships and the cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise. (Weber, 1904/1949a: 72)

Understanding is based on inner, imaginative reproduction of the meaning of a human action (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 129). Thus, it has to do with empathic transposal of oneself into the other’s intentions. However, this should not be confused with simple direct intuition, because if there is ‘certainly a sense in which the play of human “passions” can be “intuited” and “reproduced in inner experience,” a sense in which this cannot be said about processes of “nature”’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 174), nevertheless this is just the basic material that needs to be ‘then verified by the use of “observational experience”’ (p. 197).

Weber admits that we can share subjective experiences and judgements, and that this mutual understanding would be impossible unless ‘the “essential” aspects of the content … were “understood” in the same way’ (p. 183). Nevertheless, it is ‘impossible to establish unambiguously that someone else sees the “red” in a certain carpet in “just the same way” as I see it, and that it has the same “emotional tones” for him that it has for me’ (p. 183). Contra Lipps, he adds that whoever empathizes with the acrobat experiences ‘neither what the acrobat “experiences” on the tightrope, nor what he would “experience” if he were on the tightrope. … the object of “historical” knowledge would be the experience of the acrobat, not the experience of the empathizing historian’ (pp. 165–6).

In sum, Weber admits a role for empathic intuition, but (contra Münsterberg and Croce) this is simply the first material, in other words, understanding is not just ‘an act of intuition but becomes the formalization of interpretive hypotheses that wait to be empirically verified’ (Rossi, 1997: 22). It is because of this interplay between intuition and interpretation that Weber uses interchangeably the terms understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation (Deutung).

Being interested more in the historical reconstruction of meaningful events than in the direct capture of the other’s intentions hic et nunc, it is not surprising that Weber’s understanding is mainly conceived as an explanation of meaningful actions. Here, understanding is defined as ‘the causal interpretation of a third person’s action’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 184), with a mixture of explaining (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen) which needs to be analysed.

Weber uses as a model what happens in a trial, where a judge and jury have to consider the facts presented by the parties. There, the problem is not that of deducing the behaviour of the accused from nomological laws, but a ‘question of imputation’: ‘the causal knowledge of the historians consists of the imputation of concrete effects to concrete causes’ (Weber, 1904/1949a: 79). It has to do ‘not with “laws” in the narrower exact natural science sense, but with adequate causal relationships expressed in rules and with the application of the category of “objective possibility”.’ (p. 80).

Accordingly, historical understanding of meaningful actions goes as follows: first, we select from the complex of facts those that are significant for our own historical interest. Second, we look for a causal explanation linking the selected events to the possible motives from which they would have derived. Third, this concrete explanation takes the form of an imputation: because the person wanted to do A, he did A. Hence, motives have to be seen as in a tribunal court, that is, as the specific reasons that moved the accused to commit that specific crime. Fourth, as in a trial, this is a hypothesis that needs to be confirmed by objective evidence supporting the proofs. Fifth, the explanation is causally adequate when it is objectively possible, that is, when it does not contradict what was expected to happen in similar circumstances.

We can derive from this description some features that are relevant for our discussion. First, this model describes human actions as rational ones:

Suppose we ‘understand’ human action as determined by clearly conscious and intended ‘ends’ and a clear knowledge of the ‘means’ required for these ‘ends.’ It is incontestable that the degree of ‘self-evidence’ attained by this sort of understanding is unique. Suppose we consider what this degree of ‘self-evidence’ is based upon. It is obviously the following circumstance: the relation between ‘means’ and ‘ends’ is intrinsically accessible to a rational causal account which provides generalizations, generalizations that have the property of ‘nomological regularity.’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 186)

Second, human actions being rational, they are more predictable than individual natural events (e.g. the previously discussed example of the fragments of the boulder). Third, the motivational chain we have thus understood is only hypothetical, motives being ‘in principle always subject to verification on the grounds of observational experience’ (p. 198). Fourth, such a verification cannot be based on a mere recollection of facts, because it:

is rather always altogether a matter of our isolating, by abstraction, a part of the ‘conditions’ which are embedded in ‘the raw materials’ of the events and of making them into objects of judgments of possibility. This is done for the purpose of gaining insight, on the basis of empirical rules, into the causal ‘significance’ of individual components of the events. In order to penetrate to the real causal interrelationships, we construct unreal ones. (Weber, 1906/1949b: 185–6)

Fifth, this means that we proceed ideal-typically and that the recollection of evidences has to be complemented by a sort of mental experiment:

Rather, does the attribution of effects to causes take place through a process of thought which includes a series of abstractions. The first and decisive one occurs when we conceive of one or a few of the actual causal components as modified in a certain direction and then ask ourselves whether under the conditions which have been thus changed, the same effect (the same, i.e., in ‘essential’ points) or some other effect ‘would be expected.’ (p. 171)

Now, the problem is: if in Weber causal understanding is so strictly related to human rationality, what happens when humans behave not so rationally? The reply is that ‘Human action manifests the same degree of irrationality found in natural processes only when we encounter a directly pathological reaction …; that is, only when we encounter a reaction of immoderation and meaninglessness of which excludes the possibility of interpretation’ (Weber, 1905–6/1975b: 127). As a consequence, ‘hysterical, hypnotical, or paranoically conditioned processes … fall into the domain of “nature” because they cannot be interpreted’ (n. 99). In this case, meaningful understanding/interpretation does not apply, that is, they must be explained causally on the basis of ‘nomological knowledge of psychopathology or related sciences’ (p. 125).

Finally, a few words on the scholar (the historian, in this case). As seen, causal imputation of motives requires subjectivity in order to (a) select the relevant material, (b) hypothesize an ideal-typical relationship between motives and actions (through ideal re-experiencing of what may have happened), and (c) conceive variations of causal explanation in order to test whether the hypothesis holds and in which conditions it does so. Nevertheless, the objectivity of this knowledge is guaranteed by the empirical validation and the aid of complementary nomological knowledge. As a result, it depends on the single case:

The extent to which the historian (in the widest sense of the word) can perform this imputation in a reasonably certain manner with his imagination sharpened by personal experience and trained in analytic methods and the extent to which he must have recourse to the aid of special disciplines which make it possible. (Weber, 1904/1949a: 79)

The Verstehen in Jaspers’ psychopathology

Jaspers uses Verstehen as a methodological device to capture psychopathological subjective experiences (Erlebnisse) and their interrelation in motivational chains. He probably chooses this term because it has a long tradition in hermeneutics and was widely used in the late nineteenth-century methodological debate on the appropriate methods to study humanities.

Jaspers’ major point is that, while in the sciences of nature we objectively observe, make inductions and elaborate explanatory theories, psychopathology cannot be reduced only to naturalistic methods (although they have a relevant place in it). Psychologically, we also need to capture subjective experiences and to figure out their meaningful connections, namely the motivations of human experiences and actions. Verstehen is the methodological tool to perform both steps of this scientific task, that is, the direct capture, here and now, of what the patient in front of us is experiencing, and the retrospective reconstruction of the psychological origins of his/her mental symptoms. Consequently, Jaspers makes a differentiation between static and genetic Verstehen. The former is the intuition of the other’s psychic experience obtained ‘from within’, that is, by internal transposition (Hineinversetzen) and re-experiencing (Nacherleben) of the other’s lived experience (Achella, 2004). Jaspers conceives static Verstehen as an empathic intuition, allowing the psychopathologist to grasp from within (through his human sensibility) the other’s experience. In other words, the subjective experience is captured through an act of putting oneself into the other’s shoes, of the identification of oneself with the other, of sharing experiences (Jaspers, 1913/2004b: 105).

Once mental phenomena are captured through static Verstehen, the next question is how they are connected; that is, are they causally linked or is there a meaningful connection? It depends on the point of view and the scientific interest of the psychopathologist. Although any phenomenon can be the object of a study aimed at discovering its causal explanation,

in psychology our bent for knowledge is satisfied with the comprehension of quite a different sort of connection. Psychic events ‘emerge’ out of each other in a way which we understand. The person who is attacked becomes angry and springs to the defence, the one who is cheated grows suspicious, etc. This derivation of the psychic from the psychic we understand genetically. (Jaspers, 1913/2004b: 116–17) ⁶

The main characteristics of Jaspers’ Verstehen have been summarized in two articles to which the reader is referred for details (Aragona, 2013; Villareal and Aragona, 2014). In short, Jaspers’ Verstehen is:

Among the epistemological points that we should include in our discussion, the following must also be noted:

Discussion

Having explored the way Weber and Jaspers conceive the technical act of understanding, it is now possible to make a comparison between them to show similarities and differences.

Conclusions

This paper has explored the concept of understanding (Verstehen) in the works of Max Weber before the publication of Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913). The main result is that Weber’s use of understanding is part of a complex approach that tries to complement the specificities of humanistic disciplines with a need for a rigorous scientific approach. We find the same in Jaspers, who tries to ground psychopathology on methodological clarity. Our study confirms previous ones claiming that during the preparation of his book Jaspers followed Weber’s ideas, that is, they are the major philosophical and methodological roots of Jaspers’ psychopathology. However, we also found several interesting differences in the two approaches – differences that were not noticed in previous studies – and their importance needs to be highlighted. On the whole, it seems that Jaspers followed Weber: in the general methodological approach and in the extensive use of key Weberian concepts like that of Idealtypus; in the distinction between knowledge and judgement; and in the interpretive nature of understanding. However, he did not follow Weber in some specificities of his verstehende approach. Above all, Jaspers did not try to mix explanation and understanding according to a legal metaphor; on this point he remained closer to Dilthey, holding a sharp division between the explanatory method of natural sciences and the method of understanding as it is specifically used in the humanistic sciences. Finally, Jaspers’ understanding is more anchored to the empathic intuition of the other’s Erlebnis, while Weber’s approach is more rationalistic.

Before concluding, it should be recalled that in 1913 Weber wrote that his ideas on this issue were influenced by the reading of Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie, thus attesting a mutual influence. Further studies will explore in detail the specificities of Weber’s concept of understanding in his development after 1913, because it may show a possible alternative way to deal with the challenges and limitations encountered by the extensive use of Jaspers’ method in the psychopathological context.