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Overcoming Naturalism from Within: Dilthey, Nature Eric S. Nelson Overcoming Naturalism from Within: Dilthey,Nature,and the HumanSciences Abstract: Dilthey’smiddle works offer alternative strategies for interpreting the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism.These works traced the limits of natural scientific methods in the face of the felt reflexivity of the subject, the singular nexus of the individual’slife, and the epistemic inability to compre- hend life as auniversallyvalid whole. Dilthey naturalisticallycritiques claims appealingtoanuninterpreted immediate givenness and the direct self-access and self-evidence of uninterpreted “inner experience,” while minimalistically confronting naturalism with the reflexively felt,interpretively processed,and re- flectively conceptualized and mediated character of the given. Lived-experiences are complex relational wholes,involving purposiveness, which cannot be re- duced to discrete “natural” elements abstracted from the life-nexus.Naturalism is the primary orientation of modern science; yetthe contents of life and the ob- jects themselvescall us to methodologicaldifferentiation and the articulation of reality in more complex and multifaceted ways. IIntroduction Wilhelm Dilthey’sepistemic project is to acertain extent “naturalizing,” as his Neo-Kantian, phenomenological, and later hermeneutical critics have noted. At the sametime, it is “anti-naturalistic” accordingtothe positivistic and scien- tistic reception of his works.Itisironic that aholistic thinker of the self-gener- ative interconnected “life-nexus” [Lebenszusamenhang]has been identifiedin this reception with adualistically(mis‐)construed reification of the distinction between nature [Natur]and spirit [Geist], and explanation [Erklärung]and under- standing [Verstehen]. In this essay, Isuggest amore complex and nuanced approach to Dilthey’s thinking of nature and spirit that reveals his current relevance to ongoingde- bates between proponents of naturalism and anti-naturalism by reconsidering the mediated nexus of nature and history articulatedinDilthey’sworks,partic- ularlythe writingsofthe 1890s that are closer to anaturalistic and positivistic perspective without embracing it.Iarguethat Dilthey’sproject is more coherent than his naturalistic and anti-naturalistic critics have proposed. Such areconsid- eration of Dilthey’sproject offers asignificant alternative strategy for responding https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110528374-005 Copyright © 2017. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved. Gruyter GmbH. All © 2017. Walter de Copyright Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, edited by Babette Babich, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hkust-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5157002. Created from hkust-ebooks on 2021-06-07 07:40:31. 90 Eric S. Nelson to the opposition between naturalism and anti-naturalism that continues to in- form contemporaryphilosophy. Beginning with the naturalistic perspective presupposed by and established in the modern natural sciences, the “fact of science” thatisthe point of depar- ture for Neo-Kantianism and positivism, Dilthey immanentlyunfolds its scope, possibilities, and limits in relation to the psychological, historical, and ethical life-contexts of concrete embodied individuals.Hedoes so without relying on es- sentialist religious or metaphysical conceptions of being,ideal validity,oranun- changingself. Dilthey not onlyaccepted the validityofthe modern natural sci- ences,hesoughttoclarify and justify them by historicallyand anthropologically contextualizing them. Nature and history do not necessarilyindicate the elimina- tion of knowledge and truth in relativism and skepticism, as Husserlfeared in his polemical “PhilosophyasRigorous Science”;they are its contexts and conditions as Husserl later emphasized in aline of thinking that culminated in TheCrisis of European Sciencesand Transcendental Phenomenology.¹ Without these life-proc- esses, and the emergenceofthe cognitivefrom the non-cognitive,and rationality from the life-nexus,there would be no science as asocially constituted practice of knowing or as the human enactment of truth. II The Promiseand Crisis of Naturalism Dilthey’sattentiontonatural science and writingsabout the historical formation of the modern natural sciences and the naturalistic life-comportment are under- emphasized.² In these writings, such as his account interpreting the constitutive role of Stoicism in the formation of earlymodern naturalphilosophy, Dilthey helped pioneer the history of science as aphilosophical enterprise.³ Dilthey’s this-worldlyand historical justification of the sciences,and corresponding trans- formationofthe modern project of epistemology,critically traced the extent and limits of scientificknowledge in the life-nexus and context. Husserl 1981;Husserl 1970. In additiontoworks on the emergenceofmodern science, Dilthey discussed contemporary natural scientific developments in review essays published in DGS volumes 15–17.References to Wilhelm Dilthey’sworks areto: Gesammelte Schriften,28vols. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &Ru- precht,1914–2011 (cited as DGS); English translations arefromWilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, ed. R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985– (cited as SW). See the essays in DGS 2; on Dilthey’saccountofthe transition to modern scienceand mod- ernity,see Frohman1995. Copyright © 2017. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved. Gruyter GmbH. All © 2017. Walter de Copyright Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, edited by Babette Babich, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hkust-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5157002. Created from hkust-ebooks on 2021-06-07 07:40:31. Overcoming NaturalismfromWithin: Dilthey,Nature, and the Human Sciences 91 Dilthey’srethinkingofthe epistemologyofthe sciences required theirsocial- historical contextualization; the sciences are rethought in relation to their psy- chological, anthropological, and natural conditions thatare embedded and enacted in historicallymediated forms of life yetirreducible to pure historicity. In the context of the natural-historicalfinitude of human life, Dilthey contested reified visionsofhuman reason with the felt self-relational reflexivity [Innewer- den]ofthe self, the singular individuation of natural and historical life in an in- dividual life, and the inability of humans to fathom and comprehend the whole of life as an integrated universallyvalid metaphysical system. Dilthey’scritique of historical reason revealed the conditional on-going proc- ess character of knowledge and the one-sidedness of the claims of the natural- istic worldview.The idea of truth in the naturalistic worldview that orients nat- ural scientific inquiry has no theoretical limits in the continuingpractice of the natural sciences.The natural standpoint enters into crisis and aporia when it is illegitimatelyextended beyond its experiential life-contexts and reified as amet- aphysical world-system independent of its life-nexus.⁴ Dilthey’sdouble strategy naturalisticallycontextualized epistemic claims in- volving an appeal to what transcends experience and the categories of life enact- ed through experience, while hermeneuticallyresituating claims about nature and naturalness. He rejected the naïveempiricism and intuitionism that entail appeals to anon-interpreted immediate givenness. ForDilthey,thereisnoaccess to experience independent of the mediationofexpression and understanding; the direct self-access and transparent self-evidence of an uninterpreted intuition- ist “inner experience” or an unmediated empiricist “sensuous experience” prove to be illusory.Incontrast to vulgarlife-philosophyand growingirrationalist ap- peals to apure stream of life without the mediation of words and concepts, which Dilthey would challengewith ascientific conception of life-philosophy for the sake of life that cannot live without knowledge,Dilthey noted how con- cepts and intuitions are inappropriatelyseparated from their life-contexts. Through the overextension and abuse of bothreason and intuition, lived-expe- riences are fixated and dynamic life-perspectivesbecome reified metaphysical world-pictures. Dilthey’scritical defense of naturalism is alimited and conditional one in- sofar as he resituated naturalistic claims vis-à-vis the subjectinthe experience. Dilthey’sepistemic subject is asituated, experiential, and embodied one within the life-nexus.Insofar as it involves more than beinganimpersonal product of natural and social forces, this experiential subject requires a “weak transcenden- On Dilthey’shermeneutical empiricism,see Nelson 2007. Copyright © 2017. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved. Gruyter GmbH. All © 2017. Walter de Copyright Hermeneutic Philosophies of Social Science, edited by Babette Babich, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hkust-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5157002. Created from hkust-ebooks on 2021-06-07 07:40:31. 92 Eric S. Nelson tal” argument.Dilthey liberalizesthe naturalisticthesis through this completely conditional yetstill significant and meaning-creating self. Due to Dilthey’smod- erate nominalism and experientialism, Dilthey minimalisticallyreinterpreted Kantian apriori transcendental categories as conditionallyenacted and contex- tuallyembodied life-categories [Lebenskategorien]. Dilthey confronted natural- ism, as the exteriority of worldlycausal relations,with the reflexively felt and in- terpretivelymediated character
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