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ABSTRACT
The paper examines the role of autobiographical literature in Dilthey’s ‘critique of historical reason.’ The purpose of the essay is (1) to offer an in-depth analysis of Dilthey’s concept of autobiography, (2) to place it into the larger framework of his lifelong epistemological project, and (3) to investigate the influence of Dilthey’s ideas on an early study of autobiography, Georg Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity. The key argument is that Dilthey’s choice of the genre of autobiography to model his theory of understanding was not only a symptom of his misguided epistemological attempts, as many have suggested, but a potential cause of them. The article concludes that the inconsistencies of Dilthey’s argument regarding the value of autobiographical self-reflection for historical knowledge are most pronounced in the work of those who applied Dilthey’s concepts to the interpretation of actual autobiographical material, such as Georg Misch.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Helga Lenart-Cheng completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 2007. Since 2008 she has been on the faculty of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Saint Mary’s College of California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her areas of research include auto/biography, life writing, theories of subjectivity and community, phenomenological hermeneutics, and East European literatures. Lenart-Cheng has published articles in New Literary History, Biography, Cultural Politics, Hungarian Cultural Studies, auto/biography, etc. Her co-authored book on the exiled writer Alexander Lenard (Lénárd Sándor) was published in 2016.
Notes
1. In-text references only containing page numbers are to Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. III. I will refer to the other volumes of Dilthey’s Selected Works as SW, and to the German edition of his Gesammelte Schriften as GS.
2. This is particularly true for Dilthey’s English-language reception, where Dilthey’s philosophy is like an undercurrent to auto/biography criticism: it is rarely referenced openly, and it often moves in a direction different from the surface currents, but its ideals continue to exert a pull on many critics’ work. Dilthey’s direct influence is most palpable in the work of those inspired by the German Verstehen-tradition of hermeneutics, including Georges Gusdorf (Citation1980), Karl Weintraub (Citation1978), James Olney (Citation1972), Daniel T. O’Hara, etc., and in more recent phenomenological studies of the genre. In German literary history, Dilthey has been more openly influential.
3. The German word Geisteswissenschaften covers both, henceforth I will refer to them as the ‘human sciences.’ For placing Dilthey’s views into a larger context, I am indebted to Charles Bambach’s (Citation1995) and Rudolf Makkreel’s (Citation1975) insightful analyses.
4. Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
5. As Charles Bambach observed, Dilthey’s oeuvre ‘serves as a model of the genuine achievement of historicist thinking in the crisis mode’ (Bambach Citation1995, 184). Bambach writes this with sympathetic appreciation, because he believes that, in the end, it was Dilthey’s deepening of the crisis, his relentless questioning of the aporia that prepared the way for Heidegger, who offered a way out of the crisis by redirecting it in an ontological direction.
6. Dilthey’s references to autobiography are scattered all over his drafts, many of them fragmentary. Dilthey was not a systematic philosopher and assembling all his manuscripts and unpublished drafts involved complex editorial decisions (see the Editorial Notes and Introductions in SW). He offered brief readings of various autobiographical texts, including St. Augustine, Rousseau and Goethe. The more extensive, theoretical passages I cite come from vol. III. of SW. See also SW, Vol. V, 254–274. Volume 19 of the German edition (Citation1982), which is not yet available in English, also contains references to autobiography. Recent English-language studies analysing Dilthey’s autobiography-concept include Laura Marcus’s (Citation1994) and Eric Sean Nelson’s (Citation2011). Among the most detailed German-language studies of Dilthey’s views on autobiography, I found Michael Jaeger’s and Joachim Renn’s (Citation1992) most useful.
7. Other terms used by Dilthey include ‘self-reflection’ (Selbstbesinnung) (Citation1970, 247), ‘introspection’ (Introspektion) (Citation1970, 24) and ‘one’s reflection over oneself’ (Besinnung eines Menschen über sich) (Citation1970, 251).
8. The translator broke the German sentence in two, but the adverbs schon, nun (already, now) clearly signal a temporal sequence. All emphases are mine, unless otherwise noted.
9. See Dilthey (Citation2002, 252–260) on meaning and the relation between meaning and structure. Dilthey’s reference to Leibniz in the passage above is actually misleading, for the point of Dilthey’s adaptation of Husserl’s concept of Bedeutung was to undermine a Leibnizian metaphysic of individuality. Still, the sentence is worth citing because it highlights the key role that the concept of Bedeutung played in Dilthey’s monadological understanding of autobiographical self-reflection.
10. See also:
The particular events that constitute the life-course as it unfolds in the sensible world have a relationship to something that they mean, like the words of a sentence. Through this relationship, each particular lived experience is gathered together for its meaning on the basis of some whole. (255)
11. To Dilthey, the sense of each individual life ‘consists in a meaning-context in which every remembered present possesses an intrinsic value and, yet, through the nexus of memory, it is also related to the sense of the whole’ (221). According to Habermas, what Dilthey does here is fold the concept of cognition (Erkennen) involved in the interpretation of one’s personal past into the historiographical category of significance (Bedeutung).
12. There is an interesting conflict between Dilthey’s democratic concept of life writing and his elitist favouring of ‘historical personalities.’ On the one hand, he argues that ‘Every life can be described, the insignificant as well as the powerful, the everyday as well as the out of the ordinary. … Theorists of criminal law want to record the life of a thief, psychopathologists the life of an abnormal person. Everything human becomes a document for us that actualises one of the infinite possibilities of our existence’ (266). On the other hand, he assumes that ‘the historical individual whose life has produced lasting effects is worthy in a superior sense to live on in biography as a work of art’ (Citation2002, 266), ‘for they alone have the productive force to become such a central point of intersection’ (269). While these references are to biography, his concept of autobiography is similarly conflicted.
13. Here, too, Dilthey uses the terms ‘autobiography’ and ‘self-reflection’ interchangeably. What allows for these two readings is a certain neutrality in Dilthey’s language. See, for example, the following sentence: ‘The power and scope of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them provide the basis of historical vision’ (222). He uses the word eigene (one’s own) when referring to the act of self-reflection, and the English translation uses the pronoun ‘we’ and ‘our,’ all of which maintain a certain neutrality. See also endnote 17.
14. Many critics value this chapter as one of Dilthey’s most important contributions to hermeneutics. I refer to these two chapters as ‘first chapter’ and ‘second chapter’ for the sake of clarity only. For heuristic reasons, I will also limit the interpretive relations discussed by Dilthey to the case of a historian interpreting a written text written by someone else, and I will refer to the two people involved in the process as the ‘historian’ and the ‘author.’ I want to stress, however, that this is only one possible case, and that Dilthey’s theory of interpretation applies to a much wider range of interpretive situations. ‘Manifestations of life,’ to Dilthey, include both discursive and non-discursive, conscious and non-conscious manifestations, such as concepts, judgements, actions and expressions of lived experience.
15. Dilthey’s seeming hierarchy between elementary and higher forms of understanding does not imply that the higher level is more important than the lower-level. Nevertheless, expressions of lived experience do have ‘the highest significance’ for the human sciences, since, in them, the ‘content is liberated from its creator’ (227–228).
16. The German original of this key sentence reads as follows: ‘Auf der Grundlage des Erlebens und des Verstehens seiner selbst und in beständinger Wechselwirkung beider miteinander, bildet sich das Verstehen fremder Lebensäusserungen und Personen aus’ (GS, 252). The German seiner selbst (meaning ‘one’s own’) is missing from the English translation. Nevertheless, both the German and the English version allow for two different readings: ‘one’s own lived experience and self-understanding’ could refer to both the author and the interpreter. See also endnote 14.
17. Although many have accused Dilthey of psychologising, he clearly makes an effort here to distantiate himself from the romanticist notion of empathy. He insists, for example, that the process of ‘transposition’ is not a backward movement, aimed at re-experiencing the original historical context in which the author created his work, but a forward-moving gesture, liberating the ‘possibilities inherent’ in that other life. Of course, since individuals are to be understood as part of larger systems, the focus on the studied individual’s self-understanding is only a part of the interpreter’s task. Dilthey’s hope is that there is a way to activate both the ‘external principle of individuation,’ whereby the individual is being shaped by outside forces, and the ‘inner principle of individuation, whereby different accentuations of structural moments produce variations’ (234). The task, as Dilthey views its, is to activate the other individual’s own self-understanding in order to ‘discover a vital connectedness in what is given’ (234).
18. Ricoeur accused Dilthey of a ‘double externalization.’ In Dilthey’s argument, charges Ricoeur,
two bridges are constructed towards each other. From the one side, expression crosses the gap between inside and outside; from the other side, the transfer in imagination to an alien life crosses the interval between the self and the non-self. This double externalization allows a private life to be open to an alien life before the most important form of objectivation is grafted to this movement toward the outside, the one that results from the inscription of expression in enduring signs, especially those that come about through writing. (Ricœur Citation1990, 148)
19. Gadamer is perplexed by Dilthey’s return to the false ideality of an objective and ahistorical distancing. He suggests that Dilthey’s ‘overemphasis’ on autobiography was simply due to the fact that his work remained fragmentary, which made the existing parts on the ‘special case’ of autobiography more prominent. Habermas, too, downplays the importance of the case of autobiography, although he does so in defense of Dilthey, to dispel the charge of a biographical view of history (Habermas Citation1972, 190). Habermas praises Dilthey for having come to the conclusion that ‘objectivity of understanding is possible only within the role of the reflected partner in a communication structure’ (Habermas Citation1972, 181), but he remains puzzled by what he sees as a grave ‘inconsistency’ (Habermas Citation1972, 223) in Dilthey’s argument. Regarding Ricoeur’s thoughts on Dilthey and autobiography, see Lenart-Cheng (Citation2016).
20. Dilthey offered several other, short definitions of autobiography, similar to the one cited above. [‘Autobiography is an understanding of oneself. Its object is life as the life-course of an individual’ (267); ‘The literary expression of an individual’s reflection of his life-course is autobiography’ (266), etc.]. In most of these definitions, the emphasis on ‘writing’ is more prominent in the original German (schriftstellerischer Ausdruck) than in the English translation (‘literary expression’). Schriftstellerischer Ausdruck (GS, 247) literally means ‘writerly expression,’ which highlights not only the ‘literary’ nature of the act (as the English translation ‘literary expression’ suggests), but also the role of writing. Despite this use of terminology, Dilthey did not concern himself with the distinct role of textualization. His terminology is, in fact, confusing, for he alternates his references to written and spoken autobiographical expressions. For example, in the sentence where he explains how ‘the same person has already produced a life-nexus … [which] must now be articulated as a life-history’ (221), he uses the word ausgesprochen (‘articulate’), which in German means to ‘orally pronounce.’
21. For example, in an early piece from before 1880, Dilthey notes the unreliability of autobiographical reminiscences as objective sources. He explains how difficult it is for an individual to recognise the motives of his own actions, not to mention the psychological value of his individual experiences. He adds: ‘All this is even more true in the case of the literary summary of the individual’s experience: the autobiography or the confession. Who would want to ignore the autobiographies of Goethe, Rousseau, St. Augustin, Moritz, Heynes, etc.? At the same time, who would think of them as objective?’ (GS, vol. 19, 27). In another passage, analysing ‘the scientific character of biography’ (265–270), Dilthey only mentions autobiography to highlight the differences between autobiography and biography, and fully ignores the question of the scientific validity of autobiography.
22. See, among others, Glagau, Mahrholz (Citation1919), Klaiber (Citation1921), Gruhle (Citation1923).
23. A History of Autobiography is Misch’s magnum opus. The publication history of the multi-volume work spans more than half a century, and only parts of it are available in English. Misch was the son-in-law and a student of Dilthey’s in Berlin. He is mostly known for his comparative studies of philosophy and for his study of the history of autobiography. Misch also edited several volumes of Dilthey’s works, and was instrumental in popularising his mentor’s views. Misch was appreciative of Dilthey’s commitment to overcome the epistemological crisis paralysing contemporary philosophy and history, and worked tirelessly to defend Dilthey against one-sided accusations. The most direct commentary by Misch on Dilthey is found in the collection of essays entitled Vom Lebens- und Gedankenkreis Wilhelm Diltheys. I will only focus here on one particular aspect of Misch’s study, namely, his interpretation of the representative function of autobiographical texts.
24. ‘Hence autobiographies are not to be regarded as objective narratives. To regard them as merely sources of special historical information is usually to misconceive the character of this genre’ (Misch 11).
25. Misch tells the millennial story of individual consciousness freeing itself from various forms of religious and philosophical abstractions. He presents this story as a process of secularisation, culminating in Goethe’s balanced autobiographical self-reflection.
26. ‘its basic relations being those of the individual as a being aware of himself, a ‘person’ to other persons and to his natural and spiritual surroundings or to the ‘world’ he lives in’ (Misch 14).
27. The German original reads as follows: ‘die Aufgabe einer Entwicklungsgeschichte des Ich- und Selbstbewusstseins’ (GS vol. 19. 168). To conclude, I will add an interesting biographical detail to the case. Based on a brief remark Misch made in a footnote, we know that it was actually Misch who first drew Dilthey’s attention to autobiography. Misch explains: ‘in his systematic and historically basic work, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883), Dilthey gave a classification of human studies in which at first he proceeded from biography as the basic form of historiography, without taking account of autobiography. He took account of it and accorded it primacy on the strength of the results of the prize offered by the Prussian Academy … ’ (Misch 339, note 2). What Misch neglects to mention here is the fact that he himself wrote that study for the prize competition by the Prussian Academy, the results of which made Dilthey ‘accord primacy’ to autobiography. The possibility that Dilthey’s interest in autobiography was born as a result of a historical study of the literary genre of autobiography raises further questions regarding the role of this ‘model case’ in Dilthey’s philosophy.