NOTES CHAPTER TWO 1. Wilhelm Dilthey, "Versuch einer Analyse des Moralischen Bewuszt­ seins," Gesammelte Schriften. Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1958 - present. 18 vols. Vol. VI, 1-26. 2. Neue Deutsche Biof(raphie, ed. Historischen Kommission bei der Baveri­ schen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Dunker und Humblot, 1957, III, 723-726. 3. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom. History of a Political Tradition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1957, p. 405. 4. Fritz Karl Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community 1890-1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969, pp. 7-52. 5. Ibid., p. 127. 6. See Hans-Joachim Lieber, "Geschichte und GeseIlschaft im Denken Diltheys," in KiRner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, XVII (1965), 703-742. 7. Dilthey is of course referring to the main representatives of "classical" German literature: G.W. Goethe and F. Schiller. 8. Dilthey is referring to Goethe's and Schiller's Zahme Xenien (1796), short two-lined epigrammatical poems critical of writers outside the "classical" circle. 9. Hermann und Dorothea (1797) is one of Goethe's conservative reactions to the French Revolution depicting the wholesomeness of rural existence. 10. Die Braut von Messina (1903) is part of the German escape-literature. It is a serene idealistic tragedy consciously constructed in the tradition of clas­ sical Greek drama. 11. Der junge Dilthey. Ein Lebensbild in Briefen und Tagebiichern. Zusam­ mengestellt von Clara Misch geb. Dilthey. Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner; Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1960, p. 237. 12. Ibid., p. 291. 13. Wilhelm Dilthey, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, 1877-1897. Halle (Saale): Verlag Max Niemeyer, 1923, p. 20. 14. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930. New York: Vintage Books, 1958, pp. 33-67, describes the decade of the 1890s as a time of revolt against positivism. On Dilthey's role, see ibid., pp. 192-200. 15. Frank Miller Turner, Between Science and Religion. The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. See for the development of psychology in Germany, chapter III. NOTES 197 16. John Hermann Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy. From the En­ lightenment to the Age of Darwin. New Yark and London: Columbia University Press, 1970, p. 3. 17. This approach is taken by George Lukacs. Die ZerstorunK der Vern un ft. Irrationalism us und Imperialism us. Darmstadt und Neuwied: Hermann Luchter­ hand Verlag, 1973, pp. 100-123; and by Christopher iock1er, Dilthey und die Hermeneutik. Dilthey's Begrimdung der Hermeneutik als "Praxiswissenschaft" und die Geschichte ihrer Rezeption. 18. See, for example, for a denial of the often cited connection between historicism and conservatism Pietro Rossi, "The Ideological Valences of Twentieth Century Historicism," History and Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. XIV (1975), Beiheft 14, Essays on Historicism, pp. 15-30. 19. I may refer in this context to the work of the Frankfurt School. Scholars such as Herbert Marcuse and Jiirgen Habermas work at a synthesis of the approaches of Marx and Freud. 20. Briefwechsel, p. 3. 21. Ibid., p. 8. 22. Ibid., p. 14. 23. Ibid., pp. 76, 77. 24. Ibid., p. 14. 25. Ibid. 26. As Maurice Mandelbaum has stated, historicism broadly defined is "the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon and an adequate assessment of its value are to be gained through considering in terms of the place which it occupied and the role which it played within a process of development." Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason. A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974, p. 42. See also: Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, "The Meaning of Historicism," American Historical Review, 59 (1954), 568-577; Calvin G. Rand, "Two Meanings of Historicism in the Writings of Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Meinecke," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXV (1964); Rolf Gruner, "His­ toricism: Its Rise and Decline," Clio. An Interdisciplinary Journal ofLiterature, History and the Philosophy of History, 8 (1978), 25-39. In this sense, Karl Marx and Leopold von Ranke were both historicists. In contrast to the above definition of historicism, however, nomological historians like Marx are com­ monly not considered historicists in the proper sense of the word. The histori­ cists proper are the idealist historians who defend the uniqueness of historical phenomena and deny the existence of historical laws. The term historicist was coined in the late nineteenth century to designate historians who fell prey to moral scepticism and the idolatry of history. On the many difinitions of historicism, see Maurice Mandelbaum, "Historicism," Encyclopedia of Philo­ sophy, IV (1972),22-25. An historical survey of historicism is given by Carlo Antoni, I'Historicisme. Traduit de l'italien par Alain Dufour. Geneve: Librairie Droz, 1963. German historicism is described by Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History. The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. 27. Hans Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology. Selected and with an Introduction and Commentary by Hans Meyerhoff. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1959, p. 27. 28. In his book Natural Right and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 6-8, Leo Strauss warns against the dangers of historicism: he argues that it leads inevitably to a loss of values, causing people to be uncritical toward the events of their time. The belief in natural law, on the other hand, 198 NOTES provides a critical standard by which to evaluate the present. Often people have felt so threatened by historicism's negative aspects - its seemingly unavoidable descent into moral scepticism, and into an uncritical acceptance of the existing world - that they have felt forced to deny the historicity of human life, and to reconstruct eternal principles and laws, such as a "law of nature," which would provide a standard by which to live and evaluate human life in past and present. But Strauss is forced to acknowledge that in our age the assertion of the actual existence of natural laws is gratuitous: natural law made sense in the teleologically ordered finite world of the Ancients. In the world as modern science has discovered it to be, it does not. The dangers of historicism are real, but I agree with Strauss that to return from fear only to an untenable concept of a hidden transcendental static reality makes no sense. 29. Der junge Dilthey, p. 80. For the genesis of Dilthey's thought, see also Christofer Zockler, op. cit., pp. 19-53, and Helmut Johach, Handlpnder Mensch und objecktiver Geist. Zur Theorie der Geisteswissenschaften bei Wilhelm Dilthey. Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1974, pp. 1042. Johach, ibid., p. 4, is not correct in stating that especially in his later years Dilthey was aware of living in a time of crisis. From the very beginning of his philosophizing the collapse of the traditional belief-systems and the resulting uncertainty about the proper conduct of life provided the impulse to his thought. 30. Ibid., p. 81. Dilthey's rejection of philosophy in favor of history is a major example of the more general process in which history in the nineteenth century ousted philosophy as the queen of sciences. See Andrew Lees, Rev­ olution and Reflection. Intellectual Change in Germany during the 50's. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, p. 33. 31. Der junge Dilthey, p. 80. 32. Ibid., p. 93. 33. Ibid., pp. 93,94. 34. Ibid., p. 120. 35. Ibid., p. 140. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.andp.142. 38. Ibid., p. 146. Dilthey may have been influenced by Schleiermacher in this regard. In his 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers (translated by John Oman. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958, p. 213), Schleiermacher wrote that "multiplicity is necessary for the complete mani­ festation of religion; and that religion is "an endlessly progressive work of the Spirit that reveals Himself in all human history" (p. 214). Religion as a whole can be present only "when all different views of every relation [to God] are actually given," which is not possible except "in an endless number of different forms" (p. 218). Each person understands his relation to God in a different way (p. 217), and a religion arises by a selection of "some one of the great relations of mankind in the world to the Highest Being," and by making it "religion's center, and by referring all the other [relations] to it" (p. 223). The form of a religion thus "depends entirely on what relation develops in a person as fundamental feeling and middlepoint of all religions" (p. 224). The nature and variety of religious truths are partial disclosures of religion (p.229). In Schleiermacher, Dilthey found also the transfer of God away from Heaven and into the soul of the individual, which made it possible for him to make the human mind the focus of his interest. Schleiermacher wrote that he often wondered "whether you would not be led to religion simply by giving heed NOTES 199 to the ... way in which the Deity builds up, from all that has otherwise been developed in man, that part of the soul in which He specially swells, manifests His immediate operation, and mirrors himself, and thus makes his sanctuary ... (ibid.). 39. Der junge Di/they, p. 120. 40. Ibid., p. 141. 41. See, for instance, GS, vol. Y, 152. On Dilthey's faith in science, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzuge einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik.