Pattern and Meaning in History (RLE Social Theory)

by Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans Peter Rickman (Editor)

'One may state Dilthey's significance in most general fashion by characterizing his work as the first thorough-going and sophisticated confrontation of history with positivism and natural science. Dilthey's sweep was universal: he strove to reduce to order the multifarious realms of knowledge, the conflicting traditions of cultural study, that he had embraced. Thus Dilthey laid out a program that no mortal - and certainly no one whose mind had been formed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century - could hope to bring to completion. Yet despite its inconclusiveness, Dilthey's work exerted enormous influence. The distinction he had drawn between natural and cultural science became standard for historians and, to a lesser extent, for social scientists also. After Dilthey historians no longer needed to apologize for the "unscientific" character of their discipline: they understood why its methods could never be quite the same as those of natural science. And the contemporary tradition of intellectual history grew naturally out of Dilthey's teaching.' - H. Stuart Hughes

Genres: Philosophy, History, Sociology, Nonfiction

172 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Wilhelm Dilthey (German: [ˈdɪltaɪ]) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.

Reviews

[Abdullah Başaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good edition of Dilthey's fragments concerning history and meaning.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SELECTION OF DILTHEY'S WRITINGS ABOUT HISTORY

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist and philosopher, who held Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin.

Editor H.P. Rickman notes in his Introduction, "Dilthey not only deserves justice as one of the great originators of our modern ways of thinking but should also be heard as one who has still a fruitful contribution to make to the current discussions on the nature and methods of history. For this reason I have selected and arranged passages from his maturest writings on the subject to make as continuous a text as possible. To these I have added an introduction which provides a brief account of Dilthey's life and writings and a sketch of the broad outlines of his theory of history. Technical discussions... which might be of interest to professional philosophers have been avoided..." (Pg. 12)

He adds, "his very virtues involved him in serious flaws of composition. Because of the range of his interests most of his works are fragments. His recoil from any form of dogmatism made him avoid any neat rounding off of theories. His sense of the complexity of problems and his great flexibility of mind drove him into ever new attempts to tackle problems from a new angle." (Pg. 19)

Dilthey said in his 'The Possibility of Objective Knowledge in the Human Studies,' "Historical life is part of the whole of life which is given in experience and understanding. Life in this sense, therefore, extends over the whole range of objective mind accessible to experience. Life is the fundamental fact which must form the starting piont for philosophy. It is that which is known from within, that behind which we cannot go. Life cannot be brought before the judgement seat of reason. Life seen as a temporal succession of events which affect each other is historical life. It is only possible to grasp it through the reconstruction of the course of events in a memory which reproduces not the particular event but the system of connections and the stages of its development. What memory accomplishes when it surveys the course of a life is achieved in history by linking together the expressions of life which have become part of the objective mind, according to their temporal and dynamic relationships. This is history..." (Pg. 73)

This well-edited and well-introduced book is an excellent introduction to Dilthey's ideas about history.

[Tyler Correia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dilthey is such an interesting thinker of the sort of "living force" that permeates and motivates history. At once, he is also so much more grounded than the quasi-spiritual and religious discourses of Hegel and others--because of his emphasis on how inner life is translated through (my term) the objects they create, as well as their actions and relations. This primes a historical analysis of institutions, one that has to be backward glancing to allow these creations, actions, relations to crystallize into meanings.

My problem was that Rickman presents much of Dilthey's insights as fragmentary; another reviewer even refers to the book as a selection of fragments. He, Rickman, reorganizes them to give a sort of "flow" to his own thematic chapters. See, for example his presentation of "The Understanding of Others" which begins with an excerpt from page 220 of an unnamed text, then immediately jumps to a much longer excerpt from pp. 205-210, maybe of the same text? It's a little too heavy handed, and the actual reading of the book can be a sort of staccato of diverging claims. There is also little sense for a reader to use this as a primer for further study of Dilthey. there isn't enough bibliographical info to build from.

[Ankh156 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I'll read it again.