Abstract
Philosophy remains ensnared between reifying the isolated individual subject and reducing it to the structuring forces of nature and society. Neither strategy appears suitable to the first-person participant perspective of the lived-experience of being a finite, conditional self within the world. This self is experienced as embodied, social, and other-dependent, and as environmentally and perspectivally “my own” such that it potentially resists, rather than reproducing, structural forces. In this chapter, I reconsider Dilthey’s alternative to the reductive poles of this dialectic. Dilthey is primarily known in subsequent hermeneutics and social theory as a philosopher of reflexive self-awareness (Innewerden), self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung), and structural methodological individualism. In his works, his critics perceive the specter of the idealist subject and romantic individualism. They thereby miss his radicality. The self is an intersection of natural and social processes, as explained in the third-person, impersonal perspective of the natural and structural social sciences. Yet, the self is formed in historically situated autobiographical and reflective individuation, self-awareness, and self-formation. This hermeneutical situation calls for interpretive understanding in everyday self-other relations, life contexts, and forms of inquiry that interpret historical life from out of itself in relation to its own lived participant perspective. Dilthey’s felt and reflexive self-awareness entails, through resistance and relationality, the differentiation of self and others, things, environment, and world; the formation of an autobiographical sense of self through life’s continuities and discontinuities; and the interpretive, social, and material activities through which individuals not only manifest social systems but immanently appropriate, resist, and transform them.
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Notes
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- 2.
- 3.
Cf. Gadamer (2016, 73–122).
- 4.
Note that there is some confusion over the definition of historicism. It is defined either as (1) the diversity of historical individuals and periods (as in nineteenth-century German thought and Dilthey), or, confusingly, as the opposite as (2) structurally reductive explanations of the diversity of historical phenomena to a hegemonic philosophy of history (as in Popper [1957]). It is used in the first sense in the present discussion.
- 5.
Cf. Gadamer (2016, 215). Revealingly, Gadamer mentions the weaknesses of Dilthey’s “cultural liberalism” without addressing his reformist political liberalism. He also treats Humboldt as an advocate of aesthetic individualism, ignoring the ethical-political individualism of works such as his 1792 Ideas for an attempt to determine the limits of the effectiveness of the state (known in English as The Limits of the State) in which freedom and diversity are the mutually reinforcing conditions and results of self-formation.
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- 7.
On human divergence in Dilthey, also note Marom (2014, 1–13). The intercultural implications of this pluralistic model of forms of life and philosophy thematized by Dilthey and – more specifically, in relation to interculturality by his student Georg Misch – are examined in chap. 5 of Nelson (2017).
- 8.
Compare Troeltsch (1922, 280–282) and the discussion in Kornberg (1981, 16–30). Dilthey (GS 1:41 and GS 6:43) critiqued organic and totalizing models of ethnic and national spirit. As collective systems are based in relations between particulars, for example, he rejected national psychology’s identification of national spirit with the soul and the state with the body of a people (GS 22:3).
- 9.
For instance, as seen in Gadamer (2016, 215) and throughout Lukács (1955). Both interpreters depoliticalize Dilthey’s philosophy while condemning it for its liberalism, leaving no space for the individual judgment that is key to ethical-political autonomy from Kant and Dilthey to Arendt. For a more appreciative approach of Dilthey, specifically in respect to Hegel, see Marcuse (1932). On Dilthey and Hegel, also cf. Rockmore (2003, 477–494).
- 10.
- 11.
Concerning I-you relations in Dilthey, see Dilthey (GS 19:355, 7:208). Interestingly, Dilthey was a teacher of and source for the young Martin Buber.
- 12.
On this dispute, see chap. 3 of Beiser (2014).
- 13.
- 14.
I would like to thank Saulius Geniusas, Ronny Miron, and Nevia Dolcini for the opportunity to present earlier versions of this paper and to receive valuable questions and comments.
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Nelson, E.S. (2023). Individuation and Self-Awareness in Wilhelm Dilthey. In: Geniusas, S. (eds) Varieties of Self-Awareness. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0_8
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