D. Reale, D. Antiseri. Western philosophy from its origins to the present day: From romanticism to the present day. Psylib® a. n. Suvorov. introduction to modern philosophy

Chapter 5. Irrationalistic philosophy of the 19th century.

§ 4. V. Dilthey

Dilthey Wilhelm (1833-1911) - German cultural historian and philosopher. Representative of the philosophy of life, founder of understanding psychology and the school of “history of spirit” (history of ideas) in German cultural history. Since 1882 - professor in Berlin.

Main works: “Descriptive psychology.” M., 1924; “Types of worldview and their detection in metaphysical systems” // Culturology. XX century Anthology. M., 1995; “Sketches for a critique of historical reason” // Questions of Philosophy. 1988. No. 4; “Categories of life” // Questions of philosophy. 1995. No. 10.

“Philosophy of Life” is a direction that developed in the last third of the 19th century. In addition to Dilthey, its representatives were Nietzsche, Simmel, Bergson, Spengler and others. It arose as an opposition to classical rationalism and as a reaction to the crisis of mechanistic natural science. Turned to life as a primary reality, a holistic organic process.

The very concept of life is ambiguous and vague, giving scope for different interpretations. It is understood in biological, cosmological, and cultural-historical terms. Thus, for Nietzsche, the primary reality of life appears in the form of the “will to power.” For Bergson, life is a “cosmic vital impulse”, the essence of which is consciousness or superconsciousness. For Dilthey and Simmel, life appears as a flow of experiences, but culturally and historically conditioned.

However, in all interpretations, life is a holistic process of continuous creative formation, development, opposed to mechanical inorganic formations, everything defined, frozen and “become”. That is why the problem of time as the essence of creativity, development, and formation was also important in the philosophy of life. The theme of history and historical creativity is associated with a heightened sense of time. As Dilthey believed, the “kingdom of life,” understood as the objectification of life in time, as the organization of life in accordance with the relations of time and action, is history.

Is it possible to comprehend life? If possible, then using what means, methods, techniques, etc.? Some representatives of the philosophy of life believe that the phenomena of life are inexpressible in philosophical categories. Others believe that the process of life is not subject to the deadening, disintegrating activity of the mind with its analysis and dismemberment. Reason by its nature is hopelessly divorced from life. In Dilthey, in contrast to the two named approaches, the categories of life are meaning, structure, value, the whole and its elements, development, interconnection, essence and other categories with the help of which one can express the “internal dialectics of life.”

In general, anti-scientism dominates in the philosophy of life, and rational knowledge is declared here to be oriented towards satisfying purely practical interests, acting for reasons of utilitarian expediency. Scientific knowledge and its methods are contrasted with non-intellectual, intuitive, figurative and symbolic ways of comprehending (irrational in their basis) life reality - intuition, understanding, etc. The most adequate way of expressing life is declared to be works of art, poetry, music, feeling, getting used to, and others non-rational ways of exploring the world.

For Dilthey, life is a way of human existence, a cultural and historical reality. Man and history are not something different, but man himself is history, in which the essence of man is considered. Dilthey sharply separated the natural world from the world of history, “life as a way of human existence.” The German thinker highlighted two aspects of the concept of “life”: the interaction of living beings - this applies to nature; the interaction that exists between individuals in certain external conditions, comprehended regardless of changes in place and time - this is applied to the human world. Understanding life (in the unity of these two aspects) underlies the division of sciences into two main classes. Some of them study the life of nature, others (“spiritual sciences”) - the life of people. Dilthey argued for the independence of the subject and method of the humanities in relation to the natural sciences.

According to Dilthey, understanding life based on itself is the main goal of philosophy and other “spiritual sciences”, the subject of study of which is social reality in the fullness of its forms and manifestations. Therefore, the main task of humanitarian knowledge is to comprehend the integrity and development of individual manifestations of life, their value conditionality. At the same time, Dilthey emphasizes: it is impossible to abstract from the fact that man is a conscious being, which means that when analyzing human activity one cannot proceed from the same methodological principles from which an astronomer proceeds when observing the stars.

And from what principles and methods should the “sciences of the spirit” proceed in order to comprehend life? Dilthey believes that this is primarily a method of understanding, i.e. direct comprehension of some spiritual integrity. This is an insight into the spiritual world of the author of the text, inextricably linked with the reconstruction of the cultural context of the latter’s creation. In the natural sciences, the method of explanation is used - revealing the essence of the object under study, its laws on the path of ascent from the particular to the general.

In relation to the culture of the past, understanding acts as a method of interpretation, which he called hermeneutics - the art of understanding the written manifestations of life. He considers hermeneutics as the methodological basis of all humanitarian knowledge. The philosopher distinguishes two types of understanding: understanding of one’s own inner world, achieved through introspection (self-observation); understanding someone else's world - by getting used to it, empathy, feeling (empathy). Dilthey considered the ability to empathize as a condition for the possibility of understanding cultural and historical reality. The most “strong form” of comprehending life, in his opinion, is poetry, because it is “somehow connected with an experienced or understood event.” One of the ways to comprehend life is intuition. Dilthey considers biography and autobiography to be important methods of historical science.

From thinking about life, in his opinion, “life experience” arises. Individual events generated by the collision of our instincts and feelings within us with the environment and fate outside of us are generalized in this experience into knowledge. Just as human nature always remains the same, so the basic features of life experience are something common to all. At the same time, Dilthey notes that scientific thinking can test its reasoning and can accurately formulate and justify its positions. Another thing is our knowledge of life: it cannot be verified, and exact formulas are impossible here.

The German philosopher is convinced that philosophy should seek “the internal connection of its knowledge” not in the world, but in man. The life lived by people is what, in his opinion, modern man wants to understand. At the same time, firstly, one must strive to combine life relationships and the experience based on them “into one harmonious whole.” Secondly, it is necessary to direct your attention to presenting “an image of life itself full of contradictions” (vitality and regularity, reason and arbitrariness, clarity and mystery, etc.). Thirdly, proceed from the fact that the way of life “emerges from the changing data of life experience.”

In connection with these circumstances, Dilthey emphasizes the important role of the idea (principle) of development for comprehending life, its manifestations and historical forms. The philosopher notes that the doctrine of development is necessarily connected with the knowledge of the relativity of any historical form of life. Before the gaze, which embraces the entire globe and everything that has passed, the absolute significance of any individual form of life disappears.

Presenting the general picture of philosophical thought at the beginning of the 20th century, one cannot ignore the concept of history and historical knowledge, which is presented in the works of V. Dilthey. Despite the fact that this concept among historians of philosophy of our time turned out to be relegated to the shadows in comparison, for example, with the neo-Kantian one, its influence among contemporaries was no less, and many of the basic provisions are very close to the attitudes of such an influential philosophical movement today as phenomenology , and this philosopher’s ideas about the cognitive process, formed in a discussion with neo-Kantianism, on the one hand, and with positivism, on the other, find an echo today in the confrontation between supporters of analytical philosophy and hermeneutics.

However, Dilthey’s own philosophical position was formed in disputes - a characteristic situation of that time, when deep ideological changes took place, which we have already spoken about more than once. At first it was a general opposition to the old metaphysics and, above all, Hegelian panlogism, then - discussions with positivists and neo-Kantians on issues of the theory of knowledge. His position has also been criticized; however, among the most serious opponents one should name E. Troeltsch and G. Rickert, who were

already much (three decades) younger. Moreover, this criticism was completely “academic”, worthy both in content and form. He himself did not belong to any of the most famous and competing philosophical schools. So his life proceeded quite calmly: after several years of living as a free writer, in the year of defending his dissertation, in 1864, he received a professorship in Basel, then taught in Kiel and Breslau, and, finally, from 1882 in Berlin. There were also no dramatic conflicts with the publication of his works, although not all of them were published during his lifetime. So, he cannot be considered among the ranks of philosophizing dissidents, “turners of foundations” and destroyers of the fortress of the previous worldview, although many pages in his works, especially of the early period, are also directed against panlogism of the Hegelian type (and, like Schopenhauer, Dilthey directed the edge of criticism against " the law of foundation", interpreted as a universal logical law, which contributed to the formation of panlogistic metaphysics). However, Dilthey paid much more attention to more modern problems - namely, those related to the distinction between the sciences of the spirit and the sciences of nature - so that the overthrow of panlogism turned out to be a preparatory step for the study of the “true spiritual principle”, which replaced the Spirit about which metaphysics taught. We already know that there were many “earthly” contenders for the vacated place of the Logos in the philosophy of the 19th century, so the field of research was very extensive. According to the spirit of the times, a special “positive” science - psychology - was supposed to explore the spirit, but there was no consensus regarding the area of ​​competence, subject and method of this science. It is clear that in place of the previous “logism”, by definition, one should put “psychologism” - which was manifested in attempts at psychological interpretations of logic. We will get acquainted with one of the variants of psychologism in logic when we take up the philosophy of E. Husserl. Here it is enough to say that this psychologism considered logical laws as “habits of thinking” - that is, in any case, as something relative and relating to the activity of human thinking. But what kind - individual or collective, “aggregate”? If individual, then there was a danger of turning logic into a purely personal property, which did not fit in with the existence of science and scientific methods and the practice of jurisprudence, not to mention the undoubted facts of a certain agreement between different people regarding what it means to think correctly (or according to the rules of logic) . But if thinking is social, then what is its “substance”? Who actually thinks - indi-

species or community, that is, something that somehow includes thinking individuals? Most likely, real, “actual” thinking is embodied in linguistic constructions; then logical rules come closer to the rules of language, to grammar and syntax. But such an interpretation of thinking in this period already seemed overly “formal”, since it excluded from the sphere of consciousness emotional factors, as well as personal ones, which were very significant in the real lives of real people, separating from each other - if not opposing - individual and collective thinking. The thought process as a subject of the science of the spirit (or a complex of such sciences) must not only be closer to real, practical life - it must be included in all the diversity of this changing life. This means that thinking is not only thinking relative to the subject (as Mill and his followers argued) - it is also relative to life situations that change over time. So isn’t history the true science of people’s lives, the “science of man,” which, from a certain angle, can tell us about the spirit through the manifestations of this spirit? Is not “objective” history, the real historical process, a demystified “phenomenology of the spirit”? In line with such reasoning, two interrelated and complementary subjects are formed, to which Dilthey devoted himself: history and psychology (and Dilthey interprets the latter very broadly, and from a modern point of view, very freely).

Most of the publications of the mature Dilthey are devoted to issues of historical existence and history as a science: in 1883 - “Introduction to the sciences of the spirit. Experience of the foundations of the study of society and history”; in 1910 - “The structure of the historical world in the sciences of the spirit.” After the death of the philosopher, the following were published: in 1933 - “On German poetry and music. Studies on the history of the German spirit”; in 1949 - "Essay on the General History of Philosophy; in 1960 - a two-volume book "Worldview and Analysis of Man from the Renaissance and the Reformation." (The first volume was published in Russian translation in 2000) The worldview contexts of these studies were developed in other works, most famous of which are “The Life of Schleiermacher” (1870), “The Creative Power of Poetry and Madness” (1886), “The Spiritual World. Introduction to the philosophy of life" (1914), "Experience and poetry. Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin" (1905).

"Critique of Historical Reason": the subject and method of history

So, Dilthey’s most important area of ​​interest is history, as a special science and a specific way of human existence. Need I say that both of these aspects were very relevant in the second half of the century? History as a special science was just being formed, and in an atmosphere of general opposition to Hegelianism. Moreover, in conditions of profound socio-political transformations, historicism became almost a self-evident worldview even during the reign of Hegelian philosophy; What is dialectics if not a universal doctrine of development? What is phenomenology of spirit if not a philosophical concept of development? However, Hegel's concept of history was by no means an independent science separated from philosophy - it was precisely the philosophy of history. And in this capacity - an objective-idealistic concept of historical development as the otherness of the Absolute spirit. Professional historians, like natural scientists of this time, strive to “emancipate” their subject from metaphysics by making an appropriate revaluation of values, that is, proposing to “throw away” the metaphysical Spirit as an unnecessary support of history, turn to the real lives of people and consider precisely the specifics of the historical process, historical facts, as the basis of historical knowledge. It is quite natural that historians gain influence from a position similar to positivism in natural science as a set of positive sciences about nature: the analogue of natural scientific “observational facts” here is historical information about people’s lives - texts that report on specific historical events; the coherent totality of the latter is history.

This turn, on the one hand, is taking place in line with the theory of knowledge, which, as we already know, among philosophers of the second half of the 19th century was a means of eradicating metaphysics, since it was supposed to lead to the real sources (real basis) of knowledge. But if the theoretical-cognitive attitude were strictly observed, then its result could be either positivist empiricism (in the composition of knowledge - including in the composition of the “picture of the world” - there should be nothing but isolated facts), or neo-Kantian transcendental methodologism ( knowledge is a transcendental rational construction that transforms isolated facts into a system). Ontological problems in the sense traditional for previous philosophy in both cases are regarded as a relapse of metaphysics - although, of course,

but, their removal beyond the boundaries of scientific philosophy did not mean their complete devaluation: neo-Kantians discard the “thing-in-itself”, but recognize the “pre-objective” “babble of sensations”; empiriocritics consider sensations to be elements of the world, but recognize the original “flow of experience,” which, one way or another, is something more than subjective sensations.

However, the theme of the specifics of the human way of being in this historical period also took the explicit form of philosophical ontology, which was quite natural, given the origin of these concepts from the Hegelian picture of the world. It acquired this form, for example, in the concept of Feuerbach, in the Marxist materialist understanding of history, in Nietzsche’s “philosophy of life”: in all these cases, the place of the Absolute Spirit in the role of the “substance” of being is occupied by a more “earthly”, but nevertheless spiritual principle - love, interests, “will to power” - which act as genuine ontological entities merged with the actions of people. They find expression in historical events (which are at the same time the result of human actions); then information about these events acts as the basis of positive (not speculative) historical science.

Thus, the problems of the historical process in philosophy of the second half of the 19th century form two levels: ontological (the level of historical existence) and epistemological (the level of historical knowledge). It is not difficult to understand that the first includes, for example, attempts to define man as a social being, as the totality of all social relations, as a political being, as a “practical” being, as well as the interpretation of history as a “true science of man.” (It is also not difficult to understand that no one ordered the historian to study, say, human anatomy.) In any case, that criticism of idealism “from above,” almost generally accepted among post-Hegelian philosophers, which Marx undertook in opposition to the Bauer brothers, Feuerbach, Stirner and other Young Hegelians, was not so much methodological as ideological, and concerned “ontological” problems: it was conducted in general by all those participating in the discussion on the problematic field of ontology as a theory of historical being. True, the idealism they criticized was no longer of the Hegelian type, rather “subjective” than “objective” (since human thought, almost completely reduced to the ideas of outstanding personalities, was considered as the driving force of history). On the other hand, materialism, which Marxists contrasted with idealism in the understanding of history, differed very significantly from materialism in the understanding of nature: in the first case, we were talking about material interests (or about the material basis).

sis of society - relations of production), that is, about a completely different reality than the one that is called “physical reality” in relation to nature (despite the fact that it is precisely this last concept that Marxists use in their general philosophical works as a synonym for the concept of “matter”). In fact, material interest differs from ideal interest in a completely different way than a brick differs from a thought (even if it is a thought about a brick): “material” meant here, first of all, a connection with the “natural”; emphasizing this connection made it possible to overcome the traditional opposition between the spiritual and the natural in previous philosophy.

Dilthey's concept contains both of the above-mentioned "levels", representing both the concept of historical being and the concept of historical knowledge. However, these, in essence, are not at all different sections of his teaching, but rather aspects of the holistic picture of historical reality (or, what is the same thing, historical being, historical reality) that he developed, which Dilthey interprets as integrity, continuity of knowledge and action. (Here we can draw a well-known analogy with the Marxist interpretation of practice, in which the subjective and objective, knowledge and its use, conditions and their transformation, the formulation of goals and their achievement are fused.) Dilthey’s philosophical justification for this thesis is, and this is symbolic, criticism of the Cartesian approach (Dilthey even calls it a “Cartesian myth”), which divided the world into “external” and “internal.” The legacy of Cartesianism was indeed materialism and idealism as varieties of metaphysics. Such a division, in his opinion (at least in relation to specifically human, historical existence), is not suitable: a person’s real life is a stream of experiences, and not at all a collection of some initially independent “things” that a sovereign human subject, an individual as a subject of knowledge, “mediates” with its own perceptions and ideas.

Exploring this topic, Dilthey criticizes the “great myths” of philosophy of the 19th century: the myth of isolated elements of consciousness in the concept of associations, which considers elements of consciousness as an analogue of physical things, and tries to describe the connections of elements of consciousness by the same laws as natural processes; further, the myth of a consciousness closed in itself, the contents of which arise as a result of the action of things external to this consciousness; finally, the myth of psychophysical dualism (which underlies the subject-object cognitive model). Ultimately, all these “myths” go back, according to Dilthey, to the aforementioned Cartesian dualism, which was followed by Kantian rationalistic transcendentalism and Hegelian panlogism (and, we add, philosophical materialism too).

As for Hegel's idealistic panlogism, in Dilthey's time it was generally finished; human activity (let's say - the freedom of a human being - not as a “recognized necessity”, but as creative spontaneity) was practically already generally recognized. Renewed Kantianism was a stage of this “return to man.” But the renewed Kantianism also retained the essential aspects of “dry,” schematized rationalism focused on theoretical thinking - it manifested itself in the neo-Kantian reduction of the problems of the spiritual sciences in general (historical science in particular) to the problems of method, that is, the form of activity of the investigating scientific mind. Therefore, Dilthey undertakes a “critique of historical reason” - that is, a criticism of the rationalist interpretation of historical being, both in the Hegelian and Kantian understandings.

In his opinion, Kant’s criticism of reason was not deep enough, since it, first of all, relates to “pure,” that is, theoretical, reason, and “practical” reason turned out to be separated from this “pure” and was not subjected to critical analysis.

Further, Kant’s criticism of “pure” reason is aimed at the a priori foundations of the sciences - even if natural science is included among these sciences; but she did not touch upon the question of the prerequisites for knowledge, which are outside the sphere of reason itself; the ontological foundations of knowledge, the context of research practice, the specific work of experimental, practical knowledge and its specific achievements - and, as history shows, they can also lead to a revision of a priori cognitive premises.

Finally, Kant believed that all knowledge is objective, that is, it is the result of the rational, objectifying activity of the knowing subject. Dilthey, on the contrary, considers non-objective (pre-objective) experience and corresponding knowledge possible (that is, one to which the division into subject and object is still or is already alien, and therefore one cannot talk about a subject-object relationship here).

To complete this critical analysis, Dilthey also revises Kant's understanding of metaphysics. According to Kant, it was supposed to be a science of universal, necessary and unconditional, eternal principles - therefore it was obliged to present an absolute system of pure reason. However, real reason has a history, it changes - and criticism of theoretical reason in its historically specific forms, embodied in metaphysical systems, acts as philosophical criticism, an essential basis for its change.

niya - and it is at once the reason for the revision of the theoretical thought of historians, and the justification for its updated form. The critique of historical reason is therefore, on the one hand, an examination of man's ability to understand himself and his history, which is the product of his real activity; on the other hand, it is a criticism of that “pure reason”, which has its historical reality in the form of specific metaphysical systems. In other words, Dilthey puts in place of timeless reason, not associated with practical activity, unchangeable and endless, human cognitive activity, the process of real cognition - finite, changeable, associated with the conditions of activity. Therefore, for example, Hegel's “phenomenology of spirit” can be replaced by a “phenomenology of metaphysics,” a presentation and critique of the history of metaphysical systems as historically specific “phenomena of the mind.”

The sciences of the spirit, in his opinion, should be freed from the idea of ​​the epistemological subject as a relapse of previous metaphysics; in the veins of such a subject, as Dilthey writes, flows “not real blood, but the refined juice of the mind as an exclusively mental activity.” The task of the complex of “spiritual sciences” should be to understand the integral life activity, life practice, that “something” that, according to Dilthey, covers all three main moments of consciousness: ideas, feelings and will. These moments are not “component parts” (since, for example, interest, purpose, will are palpable in ideas; here is the “truth of transcendentalism”); the same can be said about each of the other points. In the act of experiencing, consciousness is neither closed in on itself, nor does it relate to the Other as “external” - it is at once both “itself” and “participated” in something other than itself. At this “level” there is no division into the “inner world” and the “external world” - together with the causal relation that was called upon by philosophers in their constructions to connect these “worlds”, and on which the “standard” theory of knowledge is based (the “theory representations"). The place of such a “causal” theory of knowledge in Dilthey’s concept is replaced by the hermeneutic theory of knowledge - more precisely, the theory of the hermeneutic process of progressive experience (which at the same time is both expression and understanding).

The life process, progressive experience, according to Dilthey, is essentially spontaneous; this process is not subject to the law of necessity - be it logical necessity in the style of Hegel or its “negative” - natural necessity, which is spoken of by “positive” natural science. In a certain sense, we can talk here about “self-determination,” a kind of “self-induction” of the life process, in which impulses of “testing” and “action” are constantly exchanged.

vie". The life world of a person is not the "surrounding" world, but the world in which we live ("life world"). In the context of this concept, it makes no sense to talk about self-awareness in contrast to knowledge of the world, since the experienced "things" are immediately “experience of things”; here self-awareness is merged with the awareness of the other. We can say that I am “my world,” and vice versa. Therefore, any attempt to say something about oneself turns out to be a story about relationships to the “other” (including to You, as “another I”). Descartes, and after him Kant, Hegel and even Fichte “intellectualized” the subject (the point of departure was the Cartesian Cogito) - therefore, they faced the problem of either proving the existence of the external world, or constructing this world in as the otherness of the mind in the process of self-reflection. Such a problem does not arise if the content of consciousness and the act of consciousness for consciousness itself do not appear as “external” to each other, that is, they do not turn into poles of the subject-object relationship. In experience they are merged - here we can talk about. the identity of subject and object - of course, not in the style of “absolute self-affirmation of the Self” in Fichte or “absolute reflection of the spirit” in Hegel, but in the sense of a relative statement about experiences and their equally relative reflection in the process of understanding. Thanks to this relativity, the life of the human spirit turns out to be a process of constant self-overcoming, “self-transcendence.” There can be no “absolute” resolution of cognitive problems - because there is no rigid “objective reality” with which consciousness externally correlates. There can be no “conclusion” in hermeneutic knowledge, because it is a process of self-change. According to Dilthey, there is no absolute Kantian a priori that sets the absolute framework of objectivity - the actual conditions of consciousness and its historical prerequisites, “as I understand them,” in their constant “circular” change by each other, represent a vital historical process.

That is why, according to Dilthey, the actual conditions of consciousness should be sought not in the subject opposed to the object, even transcendental, as the neo-Kantians do, but in the entire totality of life connections. And therefore, philosophy cannot be founded on the basis of the self-evidence of the Cogito; this can only be done by studying the “circulation” of the cognitive process included in the process of experience. Therefore, by the way, the “hermeneutic circle” is not at all a specific “quality” of the cognitive process, which theoretical-cognitive research has finally discovered, but a consequence of a permanently changing historical situation, which also includes science and philosophy. Therefore, having discovered the hermenev-

tical circle, one must not abandon attempts at logical analysis and substantiation of knowledge, but, on the contrary, again and again find out to what extent the logical understanding of what is part of what is currently being experienced can be understood using logical means, and to what extent this cash is no longer enough. After all, only such a concrete historical study allows us to answer the question of why and to what extent “parts of experience make knowledge of nature possible” (Der Fortgang ueber Kant (nach 1880), VIII, 178). Actually, this is how a genuine science about the foundations of knowledge, that is, correlated with the context of a specific historical situation, should be created. Of course, this thesis of Dilthey is opposed, first of all, to positivism, with its focus on a simple, artless description of the “given” and with its desire to reduce these “data” to sensations. The science of knowledge must also include taking into account value systems, not to mention the conditions and methods of activity. This is again very similar to the broad Marxist interpretation of social practice, which appears in this concept as both a criterion of truth and the basis of knowledge. But it should be borne in mind that Dilthey’s emphasis is different than in the Marxist theory of knowledge - he is interested in the process of a person’s self-understanding and thereby his “inclusion” in the world, and not in the mechanism of formation of the image of a cognizable object in the consciousness of the knowing subject. We can say that Dilthey’s theory of knowledge is subordinated to something like a general “theory of the naturalization of man”: from attempts at self-understanding one should move on to hermeneutics, which opens the way to understanding the mechanisms of that “connection” with nature, which is, in fact, genuine knowledge.

True, later Dilthey made a certain revision of his approach, placing the focus not on man’s comprehension of nature, but on his comprehension of himself - specifically, that aspect of “humanity”, which consists in the ability to attach meaning, value, set goals (all this determines the work scientist). If in the first case the research is still closely in touch with transcendentalist problematics, where the “center of reality” is the cognizing and acting subject around which his objective world is built, then in the second we find something like “another center of another reality.” The subject of the "historical world" - in contrast to the situation of natural science and metaphysics - is a subject relating to itself. The spiritual world, of course, is the creation of the cognizing subject himself; however, the study of this spiritual world is aimed at obtaining objective knowledge about it. Generally valid judgments regarding history are possible, since the knowing subject here does not need to

to ask the question about the grounds of agreement that exists between the categories of his understanding and an independent object (as, according to Kant, is the case in natural science); after all, the connection of the socio-historical world is given, defined (“objectified”) by the subject himself. This means that initially the objectivity of historical knowledge is based on the fact that the subject himself is, so to speak, by his very essence a historical being, and history is studied by the same one who creates it. Actually, this thesis is not new: we find it already in Vico, and then, in different variations, in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. But Dilthey develops it into a program for creating a theory of the foundations of the mental sciences, which must resolve three main problems: first, determine the universal nature of the connection thanks to which generally valid knowledge arises in this area; further, to explain the “constitution” of the subject matter of these sciences (that is, the “spiritual” or “socio-historical” world); how this subject arises, in the course of joint actions of these sciences, from their very research practice; finally, answer the question about the cognitive value of these actions: what degree of knowledge about the sphere of spirit is possible as a result of the joint work of these sciences.

In its first part, this science represents self-understanding, while simultaneously performing the function of semantic substantiation of knowledge in general (that is, it acts as a theory of knowledge, or as a science). Such a theory of knowledge cannot be limited only to forms of thinking, but must also analyze the “given,” that is, “experiences.” By the way, in place of Mill’s principle of “correlation to consciousness,” Dilthey puts the principle of “relativity to experience.” He believes that this principle is more complete than Mill’s, since, firstly, time is included here, and thus the connection with the integrity of the life process is not lost; secondly, experience is identified with a specific act “in” consciousness - the act of transformation into “internal”; It is also important that this act is isolated from the totality of other acts of consciousness, such as perception, thinking and others, as a subject of special attention - after all, thanks to it, one can conclude that the Cartesian division of the world into “internal” and “external”, the border between which Kant turned into an impassable chasm, thereby plunging subsequent philosophy into the abyss of meaningless difficulties and useless disputes. Experience is not only the original mode of temporary existence of the contents of consciousness as data, but also a mode of consciousness in general: here, for example, there is no difference between the sensory experience of pain and the mathematical relation as consciousness of connection. Dilthey deflects the reproach that in this way he committed “subjectivization” or

“psychologization” of cognition, since experience, in its interpretation, does not contain anything other than a connection with an object or state of affairs, just like a phenomenological description. In both cases, therefore, we are not talking about the personality “in” which this process occurs - “If Hamlet suffers on stage, for the viewer his own self turns out to be muted.” Such a “muting” of one’s own Self in any experience is an important argument against the theses that rational knowledge is supposedly rooted in the “pure Self”, or that it is based on the characteristics of the universal transcendental subject of knowledge; and at the same time it is an argument in favor of “hermeneutic logic”, which never loses sight of the “singularity” of the experience of the knowing subject. It is important to keep in mind that experience as such is never “given” as an object and cannot even be thought of in an objective mode; its original mode is “to be inherent” (Innesein). At the same time, individual experiences are not like beads on a string - nor are they like Bergson’s “stream of experiences” either. They are built, being oriented towards a certain unity, as which any experience exists. The experience itself is always the connection that exists in it between the act and the object. Dilthey designates it with the term “structural unity”: it merges formal, material and functional “principles” (which were opposed to each other in the form of a transcendentalist opposition of “material” and “form”, or “receptivity” and “spontaneity” "). Therefore, without any “resistance” they turn out to be translated into a broader and equally integral system both in action and in utterance. Accordingly, the real cognitive process is not divided into sufficiently well separated stages of sensory and logical (rational) knowledge - they are “structurally” connected with each other; any concept, being the “center” of cognitive experience, “on the periphery” is associated with sensory moments. This can be illustrated at least by the example of the perception of two sheets of the same color, but different shades: the differences in these shades, according to Dilthey, are realized not as a result of a simple, “passive” reflection of the given, but when the color becomes the subject of attention. The situation is similar with assessments, volitional impulses, and desires.

1 Dilthey W. Studien zur Grundlegung der Geist-wissenschaften. Erste Studio. VII, 21.

Dilthey’s general, epistemological justification for all knowledge is followed by a special justification for historical knowledge, and thereby the spiritual sciences in general (since history is the action of the mind).

ha - this is where it differs from nature). Dilthey does not limit himself to defending the thesis of the singularity of historical facts, in opposition to the panlogism of Hegel’s philosophy of history, as was the case with both professional historians (belonging to the historical school) and the neo-Kantians; he goes further, rejecting the reasons that underlay this thesis of both. On the one hand, he would not want to interpret history as a kind of set consisting of something existing “by itself,” like birds in the forest or stars in the sky; on the other hand, he does not consider the singularity of historical fact to be a consequence of the method; the result of historical knowledge should not be a simple reproduction in knowledge of “what happened” - historical knowledge should expand, complement the knowledge of the facts of the past and critically judge these facts when the subject builds a “historical picture of the world” from this material - after all, it should give understanding the past, making it “your” past, which is the sacred task of historical science. This is how knowledge of the “acting connections of history” is achieved; and since it is not “external reality” at all, these connections are, first of all, the interaction of the motives of human behavior and corresponding human actions.

The difference between the spiritual sciences and the natural sciences is, therefore, not that in them we are dealing with the objectification of two different methods, but in the degree of possible objectification. In the case of the spiritual sciences, such objectification is more difficult due to the greater heterogeneity of the material and the greater obviousness of the ways of processing and mastering it. The historian should not at all strive for a simple description of individual events (which, by the way, was not called for by the neo-Kantian adherents of the idiographic method - after all, without “attribution to values” no concepts of historical science could be formed); he strives for a common understanding of events and processes. This is evidenced by such concepts as “medieval society”, “national economy”, “revolutions of modern times”. Even when a historian deals with biographies, then the raw material is events or documents (letters, memoirs, diaries, messages from contemporaries, etc.). For example, a historian would like to understand Bismarck as a great political figure - what influenced him, what was significant to him, what goals he strove for and why exactly; who and why was his ally or adversary, how he used the prevailing conditions or could change them in his own interests; why such conditions developed in Prussia and Europe; what was the significance of the state in this country, and how did it differ from other European countries, etc.

etc. For all this, he, the historian, needs general concepts. Therefore, the task is not to somehow “merge” with Bismarck psychologically, to “identify” oneself with him as a person: a historian who would like to “deal” with Bismarck is obliged to study both the state structure of Prussia and the state of its economy, and the features and traditions of domestic and foreign policy, and the balance of power in Europe and the world, and the constitution of the country, and the features of religion, and much, much more. Understanding a historical figure presupposes the “mediation” of this “general knowledge.”

Thus, Dilthey’s ideas about historical knowledge are very far from the widespread myth that he requires mystical psychological “feeling” from the historian. This myth was put into circulation by its positivist critics, starting with O. Neurath’s book “Empirical Sociology,” published in 1931 in Vienna; then this reproach was repeated by R. Mises in “A Brief Textbook of Positivism” (The Hague, 1939), E. Nagel in “Logic without Metaphysics” (Glencoe/Illinois, 1956), etc., and then it was picked up by Soviet historians and philosophers. Finally, the “late” Dilthey constantly emphasized that one cannot generally draw a sharp line between understanding and explanation, and therefore one should not abandon the search for causal connections, as well as general logical methods: deduction, induction, comparison or analogy.

To make these general statements somewhat more specific, I note that Dilthey spoke of three classes of statements that have a legitimate place in the mental sciences. These are: 1) statements about facts; 2) theorems regarding identical relations of historical reality; 3) value judgments and rules that prescribe the nature of behavior (and the first and last differ significantly from each other: for example, a political judgment that denies the state structure is not true or false, but fair or unfair, depending on the goal and value orientation existing in society ; but a political judgment that speaks about the relationship of one state institution to another can be either true or false).

It is not difficult to see that the basis of all these arguments is indeed a rather extraordinary philosophical picture of the world. Dilthey presented it himself, summing up the main thoughts of his philosophy into several theses. What in this philosophy replaced the previous spirit of metaphysics, Dilthey calls “intelligentsia.” This “intelligentsia” is not a spiritual principle that exists in an individual: it is a process of development of the human race, which is a “subject” possessing the “will to know.” At the same time, “how to act-

"vitality" this principle exists in the life acts of individual people, each of whom has both will and feeling. But it exists precisely "in the totality of human natures." As a result of the historical progress of the joint life of people, people are formed (or, as Dilthey writes, "abstracted" from it) thinking, cognition and knowledge. This integral “intelligentsia” contains both religion and metaphysics - without them it is neither “real” nor “effective”. (private) sciences (from the complex of “spiritual sciences” - such as jurisprudence, ethics, economics) deal with the partial content of this reality, then philosophy offers its general understanding, that is, it talks about the foundations on which they develop, interacting with each other other, all private sciences. And therefore philosophy, unlike both the private sciences of the spirit and art or religion, only analyzes and does not produce. Therefore, its method can be called a descriptive-psychological method; addressed to the material that poetry, religion, metaphysics, history provide, it does not give any meaningful interpretations, taking this material for granted - but then philosophy sees universal connections (for example, the connection that exists between Schelling’s “Nathan”, Spalding’s religious writings and the philosophical ideas of Mendelssohn). This means that philosophy is able to present the way in which God, the universe and man himself were understood in a certain era. Or, from another point of view: relying on knowledge of the poetry of Lessing and other contemporary poets, philosophy is able to understand the ideal of life that was characteristic of that era. But - and this is very important! - it can in no way replace or surpass either poetry, literature, or metaphysics - in all of them there are irrational moments, which are also completely legitimate as moments of life experience and the cognitive process that is part of life experience and life activity.

In conclusion, we can draw a fairly general, but at the same time significant conclusion from the point of view of the history of philosophy: in Dilthey’s philosophical concept one can find many features of those tendencies that found expression and, in a more or less specialized form, were embodied in the concepts of the main competing movements of that era: positivism, neo-Kantianism, “philosophy of life”. In this sense, it is an intermediate stage between classical and modern philosophy. At the same time, it also appears as a prototype of the philosophical synthesis of the 20th century. The situation here is in many ways similar to that which existed in the history of European philosophy with Kantianism: on the one hand, Kantian transcendentalism appears as a

a pioneer - not only historical, but also genetic - of Hegel's philosophical construction: Hegel overcomes the inconsistency of Kantian dualism. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the same position of Kant’s transcendentalism turned out to be in the concepts of neo-Kantians a way to overcome Hegel’s idealistic panlogism: the history of philosophy seemed to turn back! Something similar seems to have happened with Dilthey's concept. This may explain the growing interest in Dilthey's legacy these days. I will try to concretize this general declaration in the future, considering, following the philosophy of Nietzsche, modern phenomenology and its heirs. Having become acquainted with Dilthey's philosophical views, we leave the 19th century and move firmly into the next century. Therefore, like the previous section, we will begin this section with a general overview of the problems and trends of this period, which is the subject of much of this book.

The work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is marked by the desire to create a “critique of historical reason” and to substantiate the value of the spiritual sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). He was an opponent of Hegel's philosophy. Dilthey also disagrees with the positivist reduction of the historical world to nature using a causal-deterministic scheme. He associated the “return to Kant,” declared by the school of neo-criticism, with a turn of problems within the socio-historical sciences, with the interpretation of man as a volitional being, and not just a cognizer. This is why Dilthey set out to create a “critique of historical reason.” Dilthey is the author of such historical works as: "The Life of Schleiermacher"(1867-1870), "Intuition during the Renaissance and Reformation"(1891-1900), "The Story of Young Hegel"(1905-1906), "Life Experience and Poetry"(on romanticism, 1905), "Three eras of modern aesthetics"(1892).

Already in "Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit"(1883), the philosopher distinguishes between the sciences of nature and the sciences of spirit on the subject. The subject of the natural sciences consists of phenomena external to man. The sciences of the spirit are concerned with human relations, the knowledge of which is direct. There is, in addition, an epistemological difference: not the observation of external objects as data from the natural sciences, but internal experience (Erlebnis) interests history as a science of the spirit with its categories of meaning, purpose, value, etc. “We understand social facts from the inside, they are reproducible to a certain extent within us based on introspection and intuition. We color our ideas about the world with love and hate thanks to the play of our affects. Nature, on the contrary, is silent, as if alien... For us, it is something external. Our world is society.”

So, the human world is structured as historical. IN "Ideas about descriptive and analytical psychology"(1894) and in "Contributions to the Study of Personality"(1896) Dilthey considers analytical psychology (different from explanatory psychology) as the basis of other mental sciences, analyzes the problem of uniformity, as well as historical individuation. The sciences of the spirit are called upon to study

Dilthey: the science of spirit 289

Windelband: difference of sciences 291

encyclopedists, Comte); 2) objective idealism, for which all reality is determined by an internal principle (Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel); 3) idealism of freedom, distinguishing spirit from nature (Plato, Cicero, Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran).

Metaphysical systems are illegitimate in their claim to an absolute and all-encompassing explanation of reality, Dilthey believes. Metaphysical constructions are also products of history. The task of the philosopher is to offer a critically understood “philosophy” of philosophy, to explore the possibilities and boundaries of philosophy. Thus, the analysis of historical foundations leads to a “critique of historical reason.” There is no eternal philosophy, just as there is no system of equal value for all nations. “The relativity of any historical phenomenon is associated with the fact of its finitude.”

But it is especially important that “awareness of the finitude of any historical phenomenon, any human and social situation, understanding the relativity of any form of faith is the last step towards the liberation of man. With it, he rises to the level where every experience (Erlebnis) is recognized as having its own content, and this is done boldly and decisively, without the mediation of any philosophical or religious system. Life is liberated from conceptual knowledge, the spirit becomes sovereign, inaccessible to the web of dogmatic thought. Beauty, holiness, sacrificial feat, experienced and comprehended, reveal reality. Likewise, we assign a special place to everything vicious, shameful and ugly, justified by world connections: something about which one cannot be mistaken. In the face of relativity, the value of continuous creative force as an essential historical element is clear... Like the letters of a word, life and history have meaning: both life and history have their syntactic moments, like the comma or the connecting conjunction... We discover that meaning and significance grow in a person and his story. But not in an individual person, but in a historical one. For man is a historical being...”

FIRST ESSAY:

The work was published in the “Report of the meeting of the Prussian Academy of Sciences on March 15, 1905” and is a prepared version of the report read by Dilthey at the general meeting of the Academy on March 2, 1905.

SECOND ESSAY:

STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIP OF KNOWLEDGE

A sketch for a report read by Dilthey at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences on March 23, 1905. As the German publisher notes, the published essays only partially reflect the contents of the reports. Fragments of these were read out at the meetings, while the prepared outlines were subsequently further developed and restructured.

THIRD ESSAY: DELIMITATION OF THE SCIENCES OF THE SPIRIT (Third edition)

Sketches for the first part of the third essay on the principles of the mental sciences, marked in Dilthey's archive as the last version. For the first two editions, see the Appendix.

II. BUILDING A HISTORICAL WORLD

IN THE SCIENCES OF THE SPIRIT

The work was first published in the Proceedings of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Jg. 10, Berlin 1910, S. 1-133).

III. CONTINUATION PLAN TO BUILDING A HISTORICAL WORLD IN THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCES.

SKETCHES FOR A CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL REASON Scattered sketches and dictation notes from Dilthey's archive, compiled by Bernhard Grothuisen. The dating of individual fragments is difficult, and their composition and names are only partly based on the surviving instructions of Dilthey himself. In addition, the reconstruction of the “First Project for the Continuation of the Construction of the Historical World in the Sciences of the Spirit” includes a number of chapters that are included in the content of the work, but do not contain any text.

IV. APPENDIX SUPPLEMENT TO ESSAYS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCES

TO THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Dictation recording, which apparently formed the basis of Dilthey's report to the Academy, read on December 22, 1904.

THIRD ESSAY: DELIMITATION OF THE SCIENCES OF THE SPIRIT

The texts are drafts for reports at the Academy on December 6, 1906 (first edition) and January 7, 1909 (second edition).

The second chapter of the second edition goes back to the outline prepared for Dilthey's last report to the Academy (January 20, 1910). B. Grothuysen in some cases (see above commentary on the first part of the book) considers this fragment as the fourth essay on the foundations of the spiritual sciences.

ADDITIONS TO HISTORICAL WORLD BUILDING

Parts not included in “Construction of the Historical World in the Sciences of the Spirit,” which should have been the basis for the beginning of the third part of the work.

The translation of the first (Essays on the foundations of the spiritual sciences) and fourth parts of the book (Appendix) was carried out by Vitaly Kurenny; the second part of the book (Construction of the historical world in the spiritual sciences) was translated by Alexander Mikhailovsky and Vitaly Kurenny (starting from the second section (Structure of the spiritual sciences) of the third chapter (General provisions on the relationship of the spiritual sciences)); the third part of the book (Continuation plan for the construction of the historical world in the sciences of the spirit. Outlines for the criticism of historical reason) was translated by Alexander Ogurtsov.

Vitaly Kurennoy

FOREWORD BY THE GERMAN PUBLISHER

In the first volume of “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit,” published in 1883, Dilthey reported on the preparation of the second volume of this work, which was supposed to contain primarily an epistemological foundation for the sciences of the spirit. At that time he believed that this volume, in its main parts already developed by the time of the publication of the first volume, should soon follow it. The second volume was never completed, but preparatory work for it was carried out over decades. It can be said that almost everything that Dilthey has written since then represents, in essence, preparation for the continuation of the "Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit" and, in the end, almost all the volumes that make up his collected works could have been published under the general title “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit” or “Critique of Historical Reason” - for this is how Dilthey designated his task already when compiling the first volume of the “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit” (see also the publisher’s preface to the fifth volume of the German collected works (S . XIII)).

This circumstance gives internal unity to Dilthey’s work. All of it is permeated with one single interconnection. No matter how fragmentary it may be in its main part, one great basic idea runs through all this creativity, a goal that he tirelessly pursued. At the same time, this allows us to better understand the special nature of the works and articles written by Dilthey after the publication of the first volume of Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit. We are talking about preparatory work, and not about something final. Only the second volume that these various works were to produce would contain an unambiguous formulation of the ideas expressed in them.

In the late period of his work, Dilthey intended to publish the second volume of “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit” and thereby bring his work to a finished form. First in 1895 (see the publisher's preface to the fifth volume of the German collected works (S. LXVI)), then in 1907. It was then that Dilthey invited me, as a publisher, to jointly prepare and publish the second volume of the Introduction. Pecha-

The articles and fragments contained in this edition were created for the most part during this time (1907-1910). From the numerous conversations and discussions that were the result of many years of joint work, only what could serve to understand his plan as a whole is reproduced below.

In his search for a positive foundation of the mental sciences, Dilthey was primarily guided by the idea that such a thing could be discovered in exact scientific psychology. At the same time, he had to face the question of how much he could simply rely on the already achieved results of psychological research and to what extent this kind of psychology had yet to be created in its basic features. He tried both ways. At first it seemed to him that it was enough, in essence, to generalize the results already existing in psychology, and from here extract what could be useful for the foundation of the spiritual sciences. Sometimes it seemed to him that his own task consisted not so much in following some new and independent cognitive approaches, but in general encyclopedic ordering and justification, which was still absent in the spiritual sciences (as opposed to the natural sciences). However, the wider the field of psychological research unfolded, the more he doubted whether it was even possible to give such an outline of psychology that would serve as a reliable and self-sufficient foundation of the mental sciences, as well as whether psychology in that form was suitable for such a foundation. as it existed at that time. Finally, he came to the conclusion that it was necessary to develop, in its basic outlines and from a new point of view, a psychology that could form the basis for the sciences of the spirit. The solution to this problem did not seem to him, however, possible within the framework of a simple introduction to the sciences of the spirit. At first it was a completely independent task. However, then another difficulty arose: should we start at all from any specific science, which is sufficiently reliably founded in itself to serve as the basis for other sciences about the spirit?

Dilthey assumed that a scientist working in the field of the spiritual sciences could find in psychology a reliable basis for his work. Mental life contains reality; here we are given something immediately reliable, beyond doubt. However, what about the comprehension of psychic facts? Does the immediate authenticity inherent in the experience still remain? According to Dilthey, this is not the case when I explain...

general psychology (see GS V1). However, does descriptive and disjunctive psychology satisfy this condition? Should a scientist who systematically and historically studies the sciences of the spirit possess this kind of psychological knowledge at all? In this area, does the reliability of a scientific construction depend on the description and dissection of the psychological facts underlying it? Should such a scientist theoretically know what it means to feel, will, and so on, in order to make statements about the mental life of a certain person, people or era in a specific case? Wouldn't, on the contrary, any introduction of a conceptual definition of a mental process instead of a simple expression of experiences deprive his statements of their immediate reliability? But even if it were really possible to achieve this kind of reliable conceptual definitions in oneself, then what would this give for understanding the whole variety of historical phenomena?

These are some of the questions that interested Dilthey in the last years of his life. From these we can distinguish other problems, the origin of which is connected with the concept of understanding and the internal structure of the mental sciences. In the spiritual sciences we are not talking about methodological knowledge of mental processes, but about repeated experience and understanding of these processes. In this sense, hermeneutics would be the true foundation of the spiritual sciences. However, hermeneutics does not have any independent subject, the knowledge of which could serve as the basis for knowledge and making judgments about other subjects that depend on it. The basic concepts of hermeneutics can only be expounded in the spiritual sciences themselves; they already presuppose the existence of a total spiritual world. Thus, the integrity of life itself is the starting point for these concepts, while, on the other hand, they lead to an understanding of this integrity. Consequently, we are no longer talking, so to speak, about a construction from below, about a fundamental principle that proceeds from certain facts that are subject to division and description in this certainty, but from a move that from the very beginning is oriented towards the entire totality of the sciences about the spirit and is aimed at , in order to elevate these approaches to methodological self-understanding, which precisely constitutes this cumulative relationship.

To some extent the mental sciences can be presented as an autonomous whole, and then the task would be to set out their internal structure. This leads to certain relationships of dependence that are inherent in the very structure of the spiritual sciences. Fundamental is the relationship of experience, expression and understanding. The scientist working in the field of spiritual sciences is within this relationship. He does not go beyond its limits to look for the justification of his results in some facts as such, which could be established by abstracting from this overall relationship. His attitude is entirely hermeneutic; it does not leave the realm of understanding. He understands life in the variety of ways it manifests itself, but life itself never becomes an object of knowledge for him. As Dilthey once put it: “Life comprehends life here,” and one can never go beyond the limits set by the essence of understanding re-experience.

Both points of view, which for simplicity I would like to call psychological and hermeneutic, receive their form in the articles and fragments of this volume. Both of the first “Essays”, which we preface “The Construction of the Historical World in the Mental Sciences,” make a significant contribution to Dilthey’s psychology. This also includes discussions of structural psychology, which are borrowed from parts of “Construction” that were excluded when this work was published. They are entitled "Logical Relationships in the Mental Sciences" and are printed here in the appendix. The “Third Essay” (in its third edition) is also extremely indicative of the hermeneutical direction of Dilthey’s work. Noteworthy is the difference between the attitude presented in this essay and the one presented in the first two. However, we should compare the first two editions of this third essay published in the appendix in order to discover their kind of transitional character. The third edition of the third essay is important in another way. It represents a variant of the original plan, which, although it was significantly modified in the published article (“Construction of the historical world in the spiritual sciences”), was again picked up and developed in the manuscripts we have united under the general title “Plan for continuation of construction.”

As for the “Construction of the Historical World” itself, two perspectives are of utmost importance in it - from the point of view of the objective spirit and from the point of view of a complex of influences. These perspectives are something new compared to the psychological point of view. At the same time, they differ from hermeneutic

the scheme as it is set out in the already mentioned third essay and, above all, in terms of the continuation of the “Construction”. “Construction of the historical world in the spiritual sciences” comes from the contemplation of history itself. Here Dilthey, in a more direct manner than is usually characteristic of his philosophical reflections on the spiritual sciences, relies on the results of his extensive historical studies. Dilthey postpones a deeper development of many approaches to the methodological and systematic substantiation of his position until the second volume of “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit,” which, in accordance with the new order, should include “Construction of the Historical World.” These approaches, however, are presented in the sketches that we place immediately following the "Building". As for these manuscripts, in the first part of the “Continuation Plan for the Construction of the Historical World in the Spiritual Sciences” we place two articles and several additions collected under the general title “Experience, Expression and Understanding”, which give an idea, however, only in preliminary form, about Dilthey’s hermeneutic approach to the substantiation of the spiritual sciences. Crucial here is the concept of meaning. Already in his work “Elements of Poetics” (GS Bd. VI) Dilthey realizes the full value of this concept. Here this category reveals its fundamental character for the sciences of the spirit. It appears as a fundamental concept of all hermeneutics, and thereby of the spiritual sciences in general. It is then joined by other “categories of life”, in which an understanding of every interconnection of life is realized.

First of all, these categories must find application in relation to the life of an individual. Thus, biography would be the starting point of any historical narrative. The biography, Dilthey writes already in the first volume of the Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit, sets out “the fundamental historical fact in all its purity, completeness and immediate reality.”2 The significant individual represents “not only the basic element of history, but also, in a certain sense, its highest reality”; here we experience “reality in the full sense, seen from the inside, and not even seen, but experienced.” Now, on the basis of what is experienced in human life, it is possible to create the idea of ​​a science that will elucidate

2 Dilthey V. Collected works: In 6 volumes. T. I. Introduction to the sciences of the spirit. M.: House of Intellectual Books, 2000. P. 310 (Hereinafter: Diltei. Collected works. Vol. I.) - Note, ed.

expresses this experience in a generalized and reflected form - the idea of ​​anthropology, as Dilthey calls it. According to his plan, the outline of this discipline completes the first part of the foundations of the sciences of the spirit (cf. also the analysis of man in the second volume of the collected works and the considerations devoted to anthropology in the first volume of the Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit). The plan for the continuation of The Construction of the Historical World, as it appears from this perspective, provides for a direct transition from biography to universal history. “Man, as a fact preceding history and society, is a fiction of genetic explanation,” writes Dilthey already in the first volume of “Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit.” "Spirit is a historical essence." “An individual always lives, thinks and acts in the sphere of community,” a sphere that is historically conditioned. In this sense, history for Dilthey is not something “separated from life, separated from the present due to its temporal remoteness.” There is something universally historical in each of us, and therefore it is necessary to learn to understand the unity that connects the historical dimension and the form of human life.

Thus, looking at the life of an individual leads us to history. It forms the subject of the second part of the continuation of “Constructing the Historical World,” which has two editions. We are talking here only about scattered sketches, a constantly renewed undertaking. However, despite the fact that these sketches do not seem to be something holistic in their external form, they are nevertheless permeated with a single relationship, and the titles with which almost all of them are provided indicate the place intended for them in the general plan of work . Therefore, the completely fragmentary nature of these last records still leaves us with the impression of a broadly conceived work, which was clearly presented to Dilthey in its main features and, according to his general plan, was supposed to subject the results of his universal historical knowledge to methodological and philosophical self-reflection.

Berlin, summer 1926 Bernhard Grothuysen

SECTION ONE

ESSAYS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE SPIRITUAL SCIENCES

FIRST ESSAY

MENTAL STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIP

The sciences of the spirit form the interconnection of knowledge, which strives to achieve objective and objective knowledge of the cohesion of human experiences in the human historical-social world. The history of the spiritual sciences demonstrates a continuous struggle with difficulties that stand in its way. Gradually they are overcome within some limits, and research, albeit from afar, approaches the goal that is constantly seen by every true scientist. The study of the possibility of this objective and objective knowledge forms the basis of the sciences of the spirit. Below I offer some thoughts on this kind of reasoning.

In the form in which the human historical world manifests itself in the sciences of the spirit, it does not seem to be a copy of some reality located outside it. Knowledge is not capable of creating such a copy: it was and remains tied to its means of contemplation, understanding and conceptual thinking. The mental sciences also do not aim to create this kind of copy. What happened and is happening, unique, random and instantaneous, is elevated in them to a relationship filled with value and meaning - it is into this that advancing knowledge strives to penetrate deeper and deeper, it becomes more and more objective in comprehending this relationship, being, however, not able to ever get rid of the basic feature of his being: what is, he can experience only through subsequent intuition and construction, by connecting and separating, in abstract relationships, in the connection of concepts. It will also be discovered that the historical presentation of past events can approach an objective comprehension of its subject only on the basis of analytical sciences about individual target relationships and only within the boundaries outlined by the means of understanding and thinking comprehension.

This kind of knowledge of the processes in which the sciences of the spirit take shape is at the same time a condition for understanding their history. On this basis, the relation of the particular sciences of the spirit to the coexistence and sequence of experience on which these sciences are based is known. In this cognition we see an interaction that aims to understand the integrity of the fulfilled value and meaning of the relationship that underlies such coexistence and sequence of experience, and then - based on this relationship - to comprehend the singular. At the same time, these theoretical foundations allow us, in turn, to understand how the position of consciousness and the horizon of time each time form the prerequisite for the fact that the historical world is seen by a given era in a certain certain way: the different eras of the sciences of the spirit seem to be permeated with the possibilities that provide perspectives of historical ointment. Yes, this is understandable. The development of the spiritual sciences must be accompanied by their logical theoretical-cognitive self-understanding, that is, philosophical awareness of the way in which the contemplative-conceptual interconnection of the human historical-social world is formed from the experience of what happened. To understand this and other processes in the history of the mental sciences, the following considerations, I hope, will be useful.

I. TASK, METHOD AND PROCEDURE OF FOUNDATION

In establishing the foundations of the spiritual sciences, it goes without saying that an approach different from that which should be used in establishing the foundations of knowledge is impossible. If there were a generally accepted theory of knowledge, then we would only be talking about its application to the spiritual sciences. However, this theory is one of the youngest among scientific disciplines. Kant was the first to grasp the problem of the theory of knowledge in all its universality; Fichte's attempt to combine Kant's solutions into a complete theory was premature; today, the opposition to efforts in this area is as irreconcilable as in the field of metaphysics. Therefore, it remains only to single out from the entire field of philosophical fundamentals the interconnection of provisions that satisfy the task of substantiating the sciences of the spirit. The danger of one-sidedness at this stage of development of the theory of knowledge awaits any attempt. And yet the chosen approach will be the less susceptible to it, the more universal the

Thus, the task of this theory will be understood and the more fully all means will be used to solve it.

This is precisely what the special nature of the spiritual sciences requires. Their fundamental principles must be consistent with everything and classes of knowledge. It must extend to the area of ​​cognition of reality and the establishment of values, as well as the determination of goals and the establishment of rules. Particular sciences about the spirit consist of knowledge about facts, about significant universal truths, about values, goals and rules. And human historical-social life in itself constantly moves forward from comprehension of reality to the determination of value, and from it to goal-setting and the establishment of rules.

If history sets out the course of historical events, then this always happens by selecting what is conveyed in the sources, while the latter is always determined by the value-based selection of facts.

This attitude is even more clearly manifested in sciences that have individual cultural systems as their subject. The life of society is divided into target relationships, and each target relationship is always realized in actions bound by rules. Moreover, these systematic sciences of the spirit are not only theories in which goods, goals and rules appear as facts of social reality. The theory arises from reflection and doubt regarding the properties of this reality, regarding the assessment of life, regarding the highest good, regarding the rights and obligations perceived by tradition, but at the same time, this theory itself is an intermediate point on the path to establishing goals and norms for regulating life. The logical basis of political economy is the doctrine of value. Jurisprudence must ascend from individual provisions of positive law to the general legal rules and legal concepts contained in them, moving, ultimately, to the consideration of problems that affect the relationship of assessment, establishment of rules and knowledge of reality in this area. Should we look to the coercive power of the state as the exclusive basis of legal order? And if generally valid principles should occupy some place in law, then what are they justified by: the rule of obligatory nature of this will immanent to the will, or the endowment of value, or reason? The same questions are repeated in the field of morality, and, of course, the concept of an unconditionally significant obligation of the will, which we call ought, constitutes the truly fundamental question of this science.

The fundamental principles of the spiritual sciences must, therefore, extend to all classes of knowledge in the same way as is required by universal philosophy.

logical justification. For this latter must extend to every field in which the admiration of authority is abandoned and where, through the prism of reflection and doubt, one strives to achieve meaningful knowledge. The philosophical foundation must first of all provide a legal basis for knowledge in the field of subject comprehension. To the extent that scientific knowledge goes beyond the boundaries of naive consciousness of objective reality and its properties, it strives to establish an objective order regulated by laws in the sphere of sensory data. And, finally, here the problem arises of providing evidence of the objective necessity of methods of cognition of reality and their results. But our knowledge of values ​​also requires such a foundation. For the values ​​of life, revealed in feeling, are subject to scientific reflection, which here also poses the task of obtaining objectively necessary knowledge. His ideal would be achieved if the theory, guided by a firm measure, would indicate the rank of the values ​​of life - this is an ancient, often discussed question, which at first appears as a question of the highest good. Finally, in the area of ​​goal-setting and rule-setting, a philosophical foundation of this kind is no less necessary than in the other two areas. After all, both those goals that the will sets for itself, and those rules by which it turns out to be bound in the form in which they initially come to a person from custom, religion and positive law transmitted by tradition - all this is decomposed by reflection, and the spirit must also extract here of itself is the most significant knowledge. Everywhere life leads to reflection on what life reveals in itself, reflection, in turn, leads to doubt, and if life must assert itself in opposition to this doubt, then thinking can only end in meaningful knowledge.

The influence of thinking in every action of life rests on this. Constantly holding back the onslaught of living feeling and brilliant intuition, thinking victoriously asserts its influence. It arises from the inner need to find something solid in the restless change of sensory perceptions, passions and feelings - to find something that makes a constant and unified way of life possible.

This work is carried out in the form of scientific reflection. But the ultimate function of philosophy is to, by unifying, generalizing and justifying, complete this scientific understanding of life. Thinking, therefore, performs its specific function in relation to life. Life in its calm flow constantly reveals different kinds of realities. She brings many different things to our shores

tiny "me". The same change in our lives of feelings and drives can be satisfied by values ​​of all kinds - sensual values ​​of life, religious values, artistic values. And in the changing relationships between needs and means of satisfaction, a process of goal setting arises, and goal relationships are formed that permeate the entire society, encompassing and defining each of its members. Laws, decrees, religious regulations act as coercive forces and determine each individual. So the task of thinking always remains the same: to comprehend the relations that exist in consciousness between these realities of life, and from the singular, the accidental and the pre-found, realized as clearly and distinctly as possible, to move forward to the necessary and universal interconnection contained in it. Thinking can only increase the energy of consciousness in relation to the realities of life. It is tied to what is experienced and given by internal compulsion. And philosophy, being the consciousness of all consciousness and the knowledge of all knowledge, is only the highest energy of awareness. So, finally, she raises the question of the attachment of thinking to forms and rules and, on the other hand, of the internal compulsion that connects thinking with what is given. This is the last and highest level of philosophical self-understanding.

If we outline the problem of knowledge in this volume, then its solution in the theory of knowledge can be called philosophical self-understanding. And this is precisely the main task of the fundamental part of philosophy; From this fundamental principle grow an encyclopedia of sciences and teachings about views of the world, which complete the work of philosophical self-understanding.

2. The task of the theory of knowledge

Thus, philosophy solves this problem primarily as a fundamental principle or, in other words, as a theory of knowledge. Given for it are all thought processes that are determined by the goal of discovering meaningful knowledge. Ultimately, its task is to answer the question of whether and to what extent knowledge is possible.

If I realize what I mean by knowledge, then the latter is distinguished from mere idea, supposition, questioning or assumption by the consciousness that accompanies a certain content: the most universal character of knowledge lies in the objective necessity which this consciousness contains.

This concept of objective necessity contains two points that constitute the starting point of the theory of knowledge. One of them is the evidence that accompanies a correctly carried out thought process, and the other is the nature of the awareness of reality in experience or the nature of the givenness that connects us with external perception.

3. The principle method used here

The method for solving this problem is to return from the target relationship, which is aimed at generating objectively necessary knowledge in various areas of it, to the conditions on which the achievement of this goal depends.

Such an analysis of the target relationship in which knowledge is to be identified differs from the analysis performed in psychology. The psychologist examines the mental relationship on the basis of which judgments arise, something is said about reality, and truths that have universal significance are expressed. He seeks to establish what this relationship is. During the dissection of thought processes by a psychologist, the emergence of a delusion is just as possible as the elimination of it; the process of cognition without such a mediating link of error and its elimination could, of course, be neither described nor clarified in its occurrence. The point of view of the psychologist is, therefore, in certain respects the same as the point of view of the natural scientist. Both want to see only what is and do not want to deal with what should be. However, there is a significant difference between a natural scientist and a psychologist, which is determined by the properties of the given reality with which they deal. The mental structural relationship has a subjective-immanent teleological character. By this I mean the fact that in the structural relationship, the concept of which we are about to discuss in detail, lies goal aspiration. Thus, however, nothing has yet been said about objective expediency. Such a subjectively immanent teleological character of what is happening is alien to external nature as such. Immanent objective teleology, both in the organic and in the physical world, is only a method of comprehension derived from mental experience. On the contrary, the subjective and immanently teleological character of various types of mental actions, as well as the structural relations between these

by our actions, is given within the limits of mental interconnection. It is contained in the connection between the processes themselves. Within the framework of objective comprehension as a fundamental mental action, this character of mental life, which determines the inclusion of goal aspiration in its structure*, manifests itself in two main forms of comprehension - comprehension of experiences and external objects - as well as in a sequence of forms of representation. The forms of representation, as stages of this sequence, are linked into a target relationship due to the fact that in them the objective receives an increasingly complete, increasingly conscious representation, which increasingly meets the requirements of comprehending what is grasped objectively, and increasingly makes it possible to include individual objects into a primarily given aggregate relationship. Thus, every experience of our objective grasping contains a tendency to comprehend the world, rooted in the total interconnection of mental life. At the same time, in mental life there is already a principle of selection, according to which certain representations are preferred or rejected. It is precisely in accordance with this that they submit to the tendency to comprehend an object in its relationship with the world in the form in which it is primarily given in the sensory horizon of apprehension. Thus, a teleological relationship aimed at comprehending the objective is already rooted in the mental structure. And it then rises to clear awareness in the theory of knowledge. However, the theory of knowledge is not content with this. She asks whether those types of action that are contained in consciousness actually achieve their goal. The criteria it uses in this regard are the highest principles, abstractly expressing the action with which thinking is associated if it really must achieve its goal.

4. Starting point: description of the processes in which knowledge arises

Thus, it turns out that the task of scientific teaching can be resolved only on the basis of contemplation of the psychological relationship in which the processes with which the generation of knowledge is associated empirically interact.

In accordance with this, the following relationship arises between psychological description and theory of knowledge. Abstractions of the theory of sign-

*See my work on descriptive psychology, S. 69 ff. .

knowledge are correlated with experiences in which knowledge arises in a dual form, passing through various stages. They presuppose an understanding of the process during which, on the basis of perception, names are given, concepts and judgments are formed, and as thinking gradually moves from the individual, random, subjective, relative (and therefore mixed with errors) to the objectively significant. Consequently, it must be established, in particular, what experience took place and was designated with the help of a concept when we talk about the process of perception, about the objectivity, naming and meaning of verbal signs, about the meaning of a judgment and its evidence, as well as about the meaning of the relationship of scientific statements . In this sense, in the first edition of the work devoted to the mental sciences* and in the work on descriptive psychology** I emphasized that the theory of knowledge requires correlation with the experiences of the process of knowledge in which this knowledge arises***, and that for the formation of these preliminary psychological concepts require only descriptions and divisions of what is contained in the experienced processes of cognition****. Therefore, in this kind of descriptive-dismembering presentation of the processes in which knowledge arises, I saw the immediate task preceding the construction of a theory of knowledge*****. From a related point of view, excellent studies of Husserl have now been undertaken, which, acting as a "phenomenology of knowledge", carried out a "strictly descriptive foundation" of the theory of knowledge, thereby initiating a new philosophical discipline.

In addition, I argued that the requirement for the strict validity of a theory of knowledge is not canceled by virtue of its conjugation with such descriptions and divisions. After all, the description expresses only what is contained in the process of generating knowledge. Just as theory, which in any case is an abstraction isolated from these experiences and their relations to each other, cannot in any way be understood without this connection, so the question of the possibility of knowledge also arises.

* XVII, XVIII.

**S. 8 . ***S. 10 . ****S. 10 . ***** Same place.

posits a solution to another question: how perception, names, concepts, judgments are associated with the task of comprehending an object. Thus, the ideal of such a foundational description now consists in actually speaking only about the state of affairs and giving it a firm verbal name. Approaching this ideal is possible because only the facts and relations of those contained in the developed mental life of a historical person, which the psychologist engaged in description discovers in himself, are comprehended and dissected. It is all the more necessary to constantly move forward along the path of eliminating concepts about the functions of mental life, which are especially dangerous here. Work on solving this problem as a whole is just beginning. Only gradually can we approach precise expressions that describe the states, processes and relationships in question. Already here, however, it is revealed that the task of establishing the foundations of the spiritual sciences still cannot be resolved in such a way that this solution would be considered convincing by all those who work in this field.

We can fulfill at least one condition for resolving this problem now. The description of the processes that generate knowledge depends, not least of all, on the fact that all areas of knowledge are covered. But this is also the condition with which the achievement of a theory of knowledge is connected. So, the following attempt aims to look at the various relationships of knowledge in the same way. But this is possible only if the special structure of extensive interrelations determined by various types of action of mental life is investigated. A comparative approach in the theory of knowledge can then be based on this. This comparative approach allows us to bring the analysis of logical forms and laws of thinking up to the point at which the appearance of subordination of the matter of experience to the forms and laws of thinking completely disappears. This is achieved by the following method. Processes of thinking that are carried out in experience and contemplation (and are not associated with any signs) can be presented in the form of elementary operations, such as comparison, linking, division, conjugation; in relation to their cognitive value, they can be considered as perceptions to a higher degree. According to their legal foundations, the forms and laws of discursive thinking can now be decomposed into processes of elementary operations, into the experienced function of signs and into the content of the experiences of contemplation, feeling, volition - the content on which comprehension is based.

the definition of reality, the establishment of value, the definition of purpose and the establishment of rules both in relation to what they have in common and in relation to their formal and categorical features. Such an approach can be realized in a pure manner in the field of the spiritual sciences, and therefore, according to this method, the objective validity of knowledge in this field can be justified.

It follows that description must go beyond the boundaries of the experiences of objective comprehension. For if the following theory strives to equally cover knowledge in the field of cognition of reality, assessments, goal setting and the establishment of rules, then it also needs a return to the relationship in which all these different mental processes are connected with each other. In addition, in the course of cognition of reality, the consciousness of norms that are associated with achieving the goal of cognition arises and is associated in a unique structure with the processes of cognition. But at the same time, the connection with volitional actions cannot be eliminated from the nature of the given nature of external objects - hence, on the other hand, the dependence of the abstract development of the theory of science on the interconnection of mental life as a whole arises. The same follows from the dissection of the processes that enable us to understand other individuals and their creations; These processes are fundamental to the sciences of the spirit, and they themselves are rooted in the integrity of our mental life*. From this point of view, I have previously constantly emphasized the need to consider abstract scientific thinking in its connections with mental integrity**.

5. The place of this description in the relationship of the foundation

This kind of description and dissection of the processes found in the target relationship of the generation of significant knowledge moves entirely within the framework of the premises of empirical consciousness. The latter presupposes the reality of external objects and other persons, and it contains the idea that the empirical subject determines

*See my article on hermeneutics in the 1900 volume on Siegwart. ** Geisteswiss. XVII, XVIII.

is influenced by the environment in which he lives and, in turn, inversely affects this environment. When the description describes and dissects these relations as facts of consciousness contained in experiences, then, of course, nothing is said about the reality of the external world and other persons or about the objectivity of the relations of action and suffering: theories built on the basis of the description must, of course, first try to make a decision regarding the validity of the premises contained in the empirical consciousness.

It also goes without saying that the described experiences and the revealed interrelationship between them can be considered here only from the point of view prescribed by scientific teaching. The main interest is directed to the relationships connecting these processes, to the relationships of their dependence on the conditions of consciousness and on given data, and also, finally, to those relationships that connect this relationship with the individual processes determined by it that arise during the generation of knowledge. For the subjective and immanently teleological nature of the mental relationship, by virtue of which the processes operating in it lead to certain results, which allows us to speak here of purposefulness, is, of course, the basis for selecting from the stream of thoughts significant knowledge about reality, values ​​or goals.

Let us summarize what has been said about the place of description within the framework of the principle. It lays the foundation of a theory, and this theory is inversely related to it. Whether in this case to connect the description of cognitive processes and the theory of knowledge in separate parts of the theory with each other or to presuppose an interrelated description of the theory is a question of expediency. The theory itself adopts from the description of knowledge both features with which the significance of the latter is associated. Any knowledge is subject to the norms of thinking. At the same time, following these norms of thinking, it is interfaced with what is experienced and what is given, and the interface of knowledge with what is given is, more precisely, a relationship of dependence on it. The results of the description indicate that all knowledge is subject to the highest rule: following the norms of thinking, be based on what is experienced or given through perception. Accordingly, two main problems of the spiritual sciences are separated3. From their discussion in these essays on the foundations of the spiritual sciences, a theory of knowledge will emerge, since these problems are of decisive importance for justifying the possibility of objective knowledge. Their more precise definition can be obtained only on the basis of description.

P. PRELIMINARY DESCRIPTIVE CONCEPTS* 1. Mental structure

The empirical course of mental life consists of individual processes: after all, any of our states has its beginning in time and, after going through a series of changes, disappears again in it. Moreover, this course of life represents development, because the interaction of mental impulses is such that they generate a tendency aimed at achieving an increasingly definite mental relationship consistent with the conditions of life - at achieving, so to speak, a completed form of this relationship. And the relationship that arises in this case acts in every mental process: it determines the awakening and direction of attention, apperceptions depend on it and the reproduction of ideas is determined by it. Likewise, the awakening of feelings or desires or the adoption of some kind of volitional decision depends on this relationship. Psychological description deals only with what is actually already present in these processes; she doesn't do physical exercises

* This descriptive part of the study represents a further elaboration of the point of view presented in my earlier works. Their goal was to substantiate the possibility of objective knowledge of reality, and within this, in particular, objective comprehension of mental reality. At the same time, in contrast to the idealistic doctrine of reason, I returned not to the a priori of theoretical understanding or practical reason, which supposedly has its basis in the pure “I,” but to the structural relations contained in the psychic interconnection that can be identified. This structural relationship “forms the foundation of the process of cognition” (Beschr. Psychologie S. 13). I discovered the first form of this structure in “the internal relationship of the different sides of one action” (S. 66). The second form of structure is an internal relation that connects experiences external to each other within a single action, such as perceptions, memory-delivered representations, and language-related thought processes (ibid.). The third form lies in the internal relationship of the varieties of action to each other within the limits of mental interconnection (S. 67). In developing now my fundamental theory of knowledge, which has an objective realist and critical orientation, I must emphatically point out how much I owe to Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900, 1901), which opened a new era in the use of description for the theory of knowledge.

a logical or psychological explanation for the emergence or composition of this kind of emerging mental relationship*.

A separate mental life, which has an individual structure, in its development constitutes the material of psychological research, the immediate goal of which is to establish what is common in this mental life of individuals.

Now we will make one distinction. In mental life there are patterns that determine the sequence of processes. These patterns are the difference that should be considered here. The type of relationship between processes or moments of the same process is in one case a characteristic moment of the experience itself (thus, in a mental relationship, impressions of belonging and vitality arise), while other patterns in the sequence of mental processes are not characterized by the fact that the way their connection can be experienced . In this case, the connecting moment cannot be found in the experience itself. This is where conditioning comes into play. We behave here, therefore, in the same way as in relation to external nature. Hence the nature of the non-vital and external in these relationships. The laws of this latter type are established by science by isolating individual processes from the interconnection of these latter and by inductive inference to their laws. These processes are association, reproduction, apperception. The pattern that they allow us to establish is uniformity, corresponding to the laws of change in the sphere of external nature.

Moreover, various kinds of factors in current states of consciousness determine the subsequent state of consciousness also when they are located on top of each other without any interconnection, like layers in the mental composition (status conscientiae). An impression that puts pressure on the actual mental state from the outside completely changes it as something completely alien to it. Chance, coincidence, layering on each other - such relationships constantly declare themselves in the state of consciousness of a given moment and when mental changes occur. And processes such as reproduction and apperception can be determined by all these moments of the state of consciousness.

*Beschr. Psych. S. 39 ff. .

Another type of patterns differs from this uniformity. I call it mental structure. By psychic structure I mean the order according to which, in developed mental life, psychic facts of various kinds are naturally connected with each other through an internally experienced relationship*. This relationship can connect with each other parts of one state of consciousness, as well as experiences that are distant from each other in time, or different types of action contained in these experiences**. These patterns, therefore, differ from those uniformities that can be established when considering changes in mental life. Uniformities are rules that can be revealed in changes, therefore any change is a separate case, which is in a relation of subordination to uniformity. Structure, on the contrary, is the order in which mental facts are related to each other through internal relations. Each fact connected in this way with others is part of a structural relationship; The pattern here, therefore, lies in the relation of parts within a certain whole. There we are talking about a genetic relationship in which mental changes depend on each other, here, on the contrary, we are talking about internal relationships that can be comprehended in developed mental life. Structure is a set of relationships by which individual parts of a mental relationship are connected to each other among changes in processes, among the randomness of the proximity of mental elements and the sequence of mental experiences.

What should be understood by these definitions will become clearer if we point out what mental facts reveal this kind of internal relations. The elements of sensory objectivity, which is represented in mental life, are constantly changing under the influence of the external world, and it is on them that the diversity given to an individual mental life depends. The relations that arise between them are, for example, relations of compatibility, separateness, difference, similarity, equality, whole and part. In mental experience, on the contrary, an internal relationship is revealed that connects this kind of content with objective comprehension, or with feelings, or with some kind of aspiration. Obviously this is an internal relationship in each case

*Beschr. Psych. S. 66.

**Beschr. Psych. S. 66 ff., 68 ff. .

special. The relationship of perception to an object, grief about something, the desire for some good - these experiences contain internal relations that are clearly different from each other. Each type of relationship in its field, in addition, constitutes regular relationships between experiences spaced apart in time. And, finally, there are also natural relationships between the types of relationships themselves, thanks to which they form a single mental relationship. I call these relations internal because they are rooted in mental action as such; the type of attitude and the type of action correspond to each other. One of these internal relations is one that, in the case of objective comprehension, connects the action with what is given in the content. Or one that, in the case of goal setting, connects the action with what is given in the content, as with the representation of the object of goal setting. And the internal relations between experiences within a certain type of action represent either the relation of the represented to the representing, or the justifying to the justified - in the case of objective comprehension, or goals and means, decisions and obligations - in the case of such a type of action as will. This fact of internal relationship, like the unity of the diverse that subordinates it, is inherent exclusively in mental life. It can only be experienced and revealed, but not defined.

Structure theory deals with these internal relationships. And only with them, and not with attempts to classify mental life according to functions, or powers, or abilities. She neither claims nor disputes that there is such a thing. It also does not prejudge the answer to the question of whether mental life develops in humanity or in an individual from something simple, achieving a richness of structural relationships. Problems of this kind are completely outside her area.

Mental processes are connected by these relationships into a structural relationship, and, as will be shown, due to this structural feature of the mental relationship, the processes of experience give rise to a certain cumulative effect. Although the structural relationship is not inherent in expediency in the objective sense, there is a targeted action aimed at achieving certain states of consciousness.

These are concepts that allow us to preliminarily determine what should be understood by mental structure.

The doctrine of structure seems to me to be the main part of descriptive psychology. It could be developed as a special, comprehensive

total whole. It is this that constitutes the basis of the sciences of the spirit. For the internal relations that are to be revealed in it, constituting experiences, then the relations that exist between the members of a series of experiences within a certain type of action, relations that ultimately form a structural interconnection of mental life, as well as a connection that leads here to the linking of individual processes into subjective the teleological relationship, and finally the relation of reality, values ​​and goals, as well as structure, to this revelation - all this is fundamental to the construction of the mental sciences as a whole. They are equally fundamental to the concept of the mental sciences and to their distinction from the natural sciences. For the doctrine of structure already shows that the sciences of the spirit deal with the given, which is in no way represented in the sciences of nature. Elements of sensory objectivity, being associated with mental interconnection, are included in the field of study of mental life; sensory contents, in their conjunction with external objects, on the contrary, constitute the physical world. These contents do not form the physical world, but they are the object with which we associate sensory contents in a perceiving action. However, our intuitions and concepts about the physical world express only the state of affairs that is given in these contents as properties of an object. The natural sciences are not concerned with the activity of objective comprehension within the framework of which they arise. Internal relations that can connect contents in mental experience - act, action, structural interconnection - all this is exclusively the subject of the sciences of the spirit. This is their domain. This structure, as well as the way of experiencing the psychic relationship in ourselves and the way of understanding it in others - these moments alone are enough to justify the special nature of the logical approach in the sciences of the spirit. It remains to add: the subject and nature of the given decides the question of a logical approach. What means do we have at our disposal to arrive at an undeniable comprehension of structural relations?

2. Comprehension of mental structure

With knowledge of structural relationships the situation is special. In language, in the understanding of other people, in literature, in the statements of poets or historians - everywhere we encounter knowledge of the natural internal relationships that are being discussed here. I'm worried about something

I wonder, I rejoice at something, I do something, I wish for the occurrence of some event - these and hundreds of similar turns of language contain this kind of internal relationships. In these words I unconsciously express a certain internal state. There is always an inner attitude expressed in these words. In the same way, I understand when someone addresses me in this way, I immediately understand what is happening to him. Poems by poets and stories by historiographers about bygone times are already filled with similar expressions even before any psychological reflection. I ask now on what this knowledge is based. It cannot be based on objectivity, since it consists of sensory contents, on simultaneity or sequence in the field of objectivity, as well as on logical relationships between these contents. This same knowledge, finally, must in some way be based on an experience that contains this kind of action - joy about something, a need for something. Knowledge - this is it, in addition to any comprehension, it is connected with experience, and no other source and basis of this knowledge can be found except experience. And we are talking specifically about the reverse conclusion from expressions to experiences, and not about the interpretation given to them. The necessity of the relationship between a certain experience and the corresponding expression of the psyche is experienced directly. The difficult task facing structural psychology is to make judgments that adequately (from the point of view of consciousness) reflect structural experiences or, in other words, coincide with certain experiences. As an immediate basis for this, it serves the forms of mental expression developed and refined over thousands of years, which it continues to develop and generalize, re-verifying the adequacy of these forms of expression on the experiences themselves. Let's take a look at the expressions that life's communication gives us, and literary statements in their entirety. Let us recall the art of interpretation, which is intended to interpret these expressions and sayings. And it immediately becomes clear: what the hermeneutics of any existing spiritual communication is based on is those solid structural relationships that are naturally found in any manifestations of life*.

*See my article on hermeneutics in the 1900 volume on Siegwart.

However, just as it is certain that our knowledge of these structural relations goes back to our experience, and also, on the other hand, that this makes possible our interpretation of all mental processes, it is equally difficult to establish a connection between this knowledge and experience. Only under very limited conditions does the experience remain unchanged during the process of internal observation. In very different ways we bring experience to a distinctly ascertaining consciousness. This succeeds sometimes in relation to one, sometimes in relation to another essential feature. We differentiate by referring to memories. In comparison, we identify internal regular relationships. We resort to fantasy as a kind of psychic experiment. In the direct expressions of experience found by virtuosos in this field - great poets and religious leaders - we are able to exhaust the entire inner content of experience. How poor and wretched our psychological knowledge of feelings would be if there were no great poets who were able to express all the diversity of feelings and reveal with amazing accuracy the structural relationships present in the sensory universe! And for this kind of description, in turn, the connection of Goethe’s book of poems with me as a subject or with the personality of Goethe himself is completely indifferent: the description deals only with experience and is in no way connected with the person to whom these experiences belong.

If we continue to trace these problems further, then for the psychologist it is always a matter of carefully distinguishing what should be understood by experience, self-observation and reflection of experiences and what is given in these different types of structural relationships. What needs to be added beyond this to what has been said about the foundation of knowledge can only be explained by considering individual varieties of action.

3. Structural unity

Each experience has its own content.

By content we do not mean some parts contained in an encompassing whole that can be isolated by thinking from this whole. In such an understanding, the content would be the totality of what is discernible in experience, while the latter would embrace it all like a vessel. On the contrary, of all that can be discerned in experience, only a part can be called content.

There are experiences in which nothing beyond the mental state can be noticed. In the psychic experience of pain, a localized burn or prick can be distinguished from a feeling, but in the experience itself they are indistinguishable, so there is no internal relationship between them. To consider a feeling here as displeasure caused by something gnawing or painful means to commit violence against this state of affairs. Likewise, in the complex of drives, states are found where no representation of an object is associated with the drive, which means that this state of affairs contains nothing of the internal relationship between the act and the object. Therefore, it is perhaps impossible to exclude the possibility of the existence of such experiences where there would be no relation of sensory content to the act in which it is present for us, or to an object, as well as experiences in which a feeling or desire would not be associated with this object*. This can now be explained in any way you like. We can say that these experiences form the lower boundaries of our mental life, and above them are built those experiences in which action in relation to some content with which it is associated is contained as something distinguishable in perception, or feeling, or an act of will. To ascertain the structural unity in experiences - and it is precisely this that is the subject of our consideration here - there is a sufficiently extensive composition of internal relations encountered in experiences between the act (we take this word in a broad sense) and content. And there can be no doubt that a large number of such relationships exist. An object in the experience of external perception is associated with the sensory content through which it is given to me. What makes me feel displeasure is associated with the feeling of displeasure itself. The representation of an object in goal-setting is associated with a volitional action, which is aimed at translating the image of the object into reality. We call a visual image, a harmonious combination of sounds or rustling content

Dilthey, criticizing associative psychology, psychological materialism, the concepts of Herbart, Spencer, Taine, accuses representatives of these points of view on man of establishing a system of causal connection of the mental world of man in exactly the same way as experimental physics and chemistry. On the other hand, Dilthey strives to distance himself from explanatory “metaphysical” psychology, which explained the phenomenon of human life as a direct experience.

Dilthey justifies the need for “descriptive psychology” in the following way. On the one hand, the old explanatory psychology, writes Dilthey, has a large number of assumptions that are not always justified: all mental reality is explained as a fact of internal experience, and the causal relationship of mental processes is considered as a set of associations. Thus, mental processes will be replaced by a hypothetical construction. Explanatory psychology, which grew up on the opposition of perception and memory, does not cover all mental processes and does not analyze “the entirety of human nature.” Psychology, previously in a “dismembered” state, must become “psychological taxonomy.” That's why subject of descriptive psychology is "the whole value of mental life", both in terms of form and content. . On the other hand, the sciences of the spirit need a well-founded and reliable psychology, which will analyze the spiritual connection of individuals in all social and historical reality - economy, law, religion, art. The analysis of an integral mental connection should not be crippled by one-sidedness, should not be divided into unnatural components. It is precisely this kind of analysis that Dilthey proposes to carry out in his descriptive psychology.

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