Defining human sciences: Theodor Waitz’s influence on Dilthey

ABSTRACT

The work of Theodor Waitz is an important but hitherto unnoticed source of Dilthey’s concept of ‘human sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften). Waitz (1821–64) was an outstanding philosopher and psychologist who, in the late 1850s, devoted himself wholeheartedly to empirical anthropology. In this field Waitz distinguished himself for his defence of the unity of humankind against mainstream polygenic and racial doctrines. Waitz inspired Dilthey’s articulation of psychology into two branches: the ‘descriptive’ one and the ‘explanative’ one. Even more remarkably, in a work reviewed by Dilthey in warmly favourable terms, Waitz explicitly mentioned and defined the ‘sciences which treat of the spirit (Geist)’. Some of Dilthey's most interesting ideas are thus prefigured in Waitz’s long underrated work.

KEYWORDS:

• Theodor Waitz
• Wilhelm Dilthey
• human sciences
• anthropology

ORCID

Riccardo Martinelli http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9876-0697

Notes

1 Theodor Waitz is not to be confused with the historian Georg Waitz (1813–86), Ranke’s pupil, occasionally mentioned by Dilthey.

2 Dilthey quotes Waitz twice in the preparatory materials for the planned second volume. See Dilthey, Grundlegung, 133 f., 141; the latter reference is included in the English translation: Dilthey, Introduction, 318. Partly due to academic reasons, these materials remained unpublished. See the editors’ preface to Dilthey, Grundlegung, x–xi.

3 A closer investigation of Dilthey’s sources is in line with a recent plea for a ‘new look’ at Dilthey’s work: Makkreel, Introduction, 20.

4 Concerning Dilthey’s debt to Trendelenburg, and via Trendelenburg to Aristotle, see Hartung, Theorie der Wissenschaften, 305 and passim. Another important source of Dilthey’s rebuttal of positivism was Lotze: see Woodward, Hermann Lotze, 280.

5 Darwin (The Descent of Man, 226) writes: ‘[T]he most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed’. And in the footnote: ‘See a good discussion on this subject in Waitz, ‘Introduction to Anthropology’, Engl. trans. 1862 [1863], 198–208, 227’. Several other references to Waitz occur in the book.

6 For biographical data see Zeller, Theodor Waitz; Gerland, Waitz; in English, Mark, Anthropology.

7 On the relationship between Völkerpsychologie and Dilthey, see Lessing, Dilthey und Lazarus; Feest, Hypotheses, 51–2.

8 ‘Philosophiam vidimus nostra aetate in tantum discrimen adductam, ut ipsum Aristotelem clamantem audire videremur “ne quid detrimenti caperet respublica”: non defuerunt enim qui in philosophia excolenda ita versati sint, ut somniis delectati non solum homines, sed etiam ipsam veritatem spe inani eludere non erubescerent. Quare pro bono habendum est omine, quod nostro tempore Aristotelis studium instaurari coepit’. The sentence in double inverted commas stems from the decree of the Roman Senate issued to allow dictatorship in the imminence of fatal dangers for the State. That was, for instance, the case of Catalina’s conspiracy, famously foiled by Cicero.

9 Waitz’s estrangement from Herbart and Drobisch on metaphysics was already noted by Stout, The Psychological Work, 354; 363.

10 Waitz, Naturphilosophische Psychologie, 874: emphasis added. The original reads ‘Kenntnis und Erkenntnis’ and ‘Beschreibung und Erklärung’.

11 Dilthey, Ideas, 130; quoting from Waitz, Naturphilosophische Psychologie, 874.

12 See also Gingrich (The German-Speaking Countries, 80–1), who shows how Waitz shaped a non-racial paradigm in cultural anthropology and influenced Bastian, Virchow, and even Franz Boas.

13 Waitz, Introduction, 5–6: italicized words added. Cf. the German original (Waitz, Anthropologie, 4): ‘[…] wir meinen die Anatomie, Physiologie und Psychologie des Menschen auf der einen, die Culturgeschichte mit allen sich ihr anschließenden Wissenschaften auf der anderen Seite’.

14 In his review, Dilthey touches exclusively upon the themes of Waitz’s first volume. He also announces (Dilthey, Die Anthropologie von Waitz, 375) a forthcoming discussion of the second and third volumes (the second part of which was then still to be published at the time), which never followed.

15 ‘Allgemeine grundlegende Wissenschaft des Geistes’: Dilthey, Grundriß der Logik, 26. For a contextual analysis, see Lessing, Von der Realpsychologie zur Strukturtheorie, 70.

16 A partial German translation appeared in 1849 with a different title (Mill, Die induktive Logik), yet it did not include the sixth book on ‘moral sciences’, and therefore has no relevance here. The 1849 abridged translation had been reportedly approved by J.S. Mill himself (Schiel, Vorwort, xiv).

17 See Mill, System der Logik, 446–7 and Dilthey, Introduction, 157–8. Interestingly, Dilthey associates here Mill and Buckle, whose methodology is elsewhere explicitly opposed to Waitz’s (Dilthey, Einleitungen zu Untersuchungen, 51).

18 See Dilthey, Contributions. On the development of Dilthey’s idea of psychology after 1894, see Makkreel, Dilthey, 250–4, 341–5.