PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000 Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS?

Objectivism in Hermeneutics?
Gadamer, Habermas, Dilthey
AUSTIN HARRINGTON
University of Leeds
Gadamer and Habermas both argue that some earlier theorists of interpretation
in the human sciences, despite recognizing the meaningful character of social
reality, still succumb to objectivism because they fail to conceive the relation of
interpreters to their subjects in terms of cross-cultural normative dialogue. In
particular, Gadamer and Habermas claim that the most prominent nineteenth-
century philosopher of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, fell prey to a
misleading Cartesian outlook which sought to ground the objectivity of
interpretation on complete transcendence of the interpreters present cultural
and historical situation. This article challenges Gadamers andHabermass claim
by arguing that new research on nineteenth-century hermeneutic thought
reveals Dilthey to be much more aware of the reflexive, present-centered nature
of historical research than they maintain and further that their own dialogical
model of interpretation suffers from notable obscurities which Diltheys work
itself helps expose.
For all their differences over issues of ideology, tradition, and en-
lightenment, Gadamer (1975) and Habermas (1984, 132ff.; 1988,
143ff.) are united in their advocacy of dialogue between cultures as
a model for interpretive practice in the human sciences. Both argue
that to avoid objectifying social agents and treating human actions
solely on the model of physical objects, interpreters should engage in
imaginary dialogue with their subjects across historical distance with
a viewto coming to an understanding (sich verstndigen) with them
over definitions of social reality. Historians and sociologists should
not attempt to suspendtheir cultural preconceptions andvalue orien-
tations prior to the act of research and disinterestedly project them-
selves into the participants world. If they are truly to escape objec-
tivism, they should consciously bring their cultural assumptions into
playas springboards tofurther inquirythat canthenbe correcteddur-
ing the ongoing process of research, in a similar manner to the way
491
Received 19 July 1999
Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 30 No. 4, December 2000 491-507
2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
twopartners toa conversationgraduallycome toanunderstandingof
each other through continued communication and reciprocal self-
questioning.
Gadamers and Habermass critique of objectifying attitudes in
cultural analysis has not been limited to positivist methodologies
which deny any fundamental distinction between the human sci-
ences and the natural sciences. Both argue that traces of objectivism
can be found even among writers stemming from interpretive tradi-
tions such as hermeneutics and phenomenology, one of the most not-
able of these being Wilhelm Dilthey (Gadamer 1975, 192ff.; Haber-
mas 1978, 178ff.; 1988, 153ff.). In Truth and Method, Gadamer (1975)
argues that the nineteenth-century historicist tradition represented by
Schleier macher, Droysen, and Dilthey still remained under the sway
of Enlightenment ideals of presuppositionless knowledge through
gradual extirpation of error (p. 153ff.). Where Schleiermacher tended
to reduce interpretation to an act of psychological identification with
the soul and intention of the author, the romantic Historical School
saw history in terms of a succession of unique myriad communities
that had to be faithfully represented by empathic imagination in the
manner epitomized by Rankes famous desire to write history as it
really was (pp. 162ff., 179ff.). The basic fallacy of these writers was to
believe that historical knowledge consisted in complete extinction of
the standpoint of the present and total immersion in the ethos of the
chosen period. Gadamer asserts that these tendencies came to a head
in Diltheys project of epistemological foundations for the human sci-
ences basedonthe inner certainties of feeling andlivedexperience. In
seeking to vindicate the rigor and objectivity of the human sciences,
Diltheyremainedprofoundlyinfluencedbythe example of the natu-
ral sciences and fell prey to a sort of self-denying, all-contemplating
historical objectivism (p. 8). An inner disunity prevailed in his
thought between the claims of life (Leben) and science (Wissen-
schaft). This stemmedfromDiltheys unresolvedCartesianism, which
prescribed that scholars methodically inspect their prejudices and
transcend their ties to cultural traditions in historical time to arrive at
objective truth, unconstrained by particular interests and customs:
Dilthey did not regard the fact that finite historical man was tied to a
particular time and place as any fundamental impairment of the possi-
bility of knowledge in the human sciences. The historical conscious-
ness was supposed to rise above its own relativity in a way that made
objectivity in the human sciences possible. We may ask howthis can be
492 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
so without implying a concept of absolute, philosophical knowledge
above all historical consciousness. (Gadamer 1975, 206ff.)
Although these theses were first mootedsome time ago, Gadamers
writings being nowmore than thirty years old and Habermas having
largely moved away from epistemological and methodological
issues, they have always underlain their thinking and continue to
influence prominent Anglo-American writers on hermeneutics and
social science.
1
Remarkably, however, very few commentators have
hesitated to assume either the fairness of Gadamers and Habermass
verdict onDiltheyor the coherence of their shareddialogical model of
understanding. Yet several scholars have now revealed a different
and more sympathetic picture of the nineteenth-century tradition
based on a wider mass of original manuscripts (Schndelbach 1974;
Makkreel 1975; Frank 1977; Riedel 1978a, 1981; Ermarth 1978, 1981;
Rodi 1983; Bowie 1997, 104ff., 138ff.; Harrington forthcoming), which
gives reason for questioning some of Gadamers and Habermass
claims. I argue here that this new research not only undermines
Gadamers and Habermass reading of Dilthey but also poses an
important challenge totheir account of the wider paradigmof verstehen
methodology as a whole, which encompasses other figures such as
Max Weber, Alfred Schtz, R. G. Collingwood, and Peter Winch.
2
I
suggest that the fact that traditional interpretive methodologies do
not generally thematize the researchers relation to the object-domain
in terms of normative dialogue still provides no reason for regard-
ing these doctrines as somehow misleadingly unreflexive and naive,
much less as covertly objectivist. Interpreters can still seek impartial
understanding of social life while suspending judgement on ques-
tions of truth and normative rightness without thereby reducing
human actors to physical objects and without ignoring their own in-
eluctableexerciseof governingvalueorientations (cf. Harrington1999).
I set this argument in context first of all by recalling Diltheys rela-
tion to the Idealist tradition in German nineteenth-century philoso-
phy, inparticular his adaptationof Hegels concept of objective spirit
(objektiver Geist).
DILTHEYS RELATION TO TRADITION AND
THE CLAIMS OF GADAMER AND HABERMAS
In The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences of
1910, Dilthey emphasizes that his own use of the concept of objective
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 493
spirit in no way endorses Hegels speculative vision of the system of
reason working itself out in human institutions (Dilthey 1981, 116ff.,
180ff./192ff., 211ff./200).
3
Dilthey adopted the idea of the embodi-
ment of a peoples mind or spirit in customs, laws, language, and
myth chiefly as a means of characterizing the empirical domain of the
Geisteswissenschaften. In Hegels system, objective spirit formed one
stage inanideal development towardthe reconciliationof reasonand
reality in absolute knowledge. It began with the subjective spirit of
individuals and their particular wills and souls, then moved to the
union of individuals in the community based on morality, ethical life,
and political world history (Hegel 1971, 483-552). However, where
Hegel posited a further stage in the self-knowledge of spirit through
art, religion, and philosophyabsolute spiritDilthey (1981) rejected
this. History had to be understood solely from itself (p. 213), not
fromany ideal construction, metaphysical plan (pp. 183/194), or
unconditionallypositedvalue (p. 212). Eachculture andperiodhad
tobe consideredas unique, not boundbyanyinner logic of succession
or Aufhebung. The groundswell of life and lived experience that pre-
ceded reason and thought had to be recovered so as to reveal the
diversity of human cultures and the finitude of human striving.
We today must take our point of departure from the reality of life,
Dilthey declared; Hegel constructed metaphysically; we shall ana-
lyse the given (pp. 183/194).
Dilthey (1981) argued that the same insight into the sense of com-
munity or commonmind (Gemeingeist) linking a peoples history to
its customs, language, andliterature hadbeenreachedindependently
of Hegel by the early nineteenth-century Historical School, centered
initially at Gttingen: by legal and political historians such as Ranke,
Niebuhr, andSavigny; linguists andphilologists suchas Wilhelmvon
Humboldt, F. A. Wolf, and Jakob Grimm; and other scholars in politi-
cal economy, biblical criticism, and art history (pp. 111ff., 118ff.,
182/194). These writers comprehended the essence of human collec-
tives as more than the sum of individuals, without Hegels meta-
physical intuition (p. 182). Proceeding methodically from empirical
research, they coined new ways of representing the past that aspired
to objective validity (p. 114). They challenged the authority of tradi-
tional institutions such as the church and the monarchy but did not
repeat the merely pragmatic history of Enlightenment skeptics
such as Gibbon andHume (p. 124). More widely, Dilthey emphasized
that the gradual demise of speculative and idealist thought in the
nineteenth century hadrevealeda fundamental change in the interre-
494 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
lation of history and philosophy. Philosophy could no longer sustain
its claim to transcend historical relativity or to make history an abso-
lute groundof the system. Withthe manifest disparitybetweenclaims
for the rational necessity of history and the actual course of events in
Europe since the French Revolution, it had become clear that only
methodical research could be relied on to generate sound historical
knowledge. The present task of human beings in Diltheys view was
therefore to gain knowledge of themselves through empirical histori-
cal science, transposing outwardproducts andobjectivations of other
human life contexts back into lived experience through empathic
understanding, guided by philological analysis (p. 99ff.).
It is this project that has ledmanytwentieth-centurywriters tocon-
nect Diltheys name with positivist attitudes that regard philosophy
as no more than a mere handmaiden of science (cf. Lukcs 1980,
417ff.). One reason for this is his close proximity to the German Neo-
Kantian philosophers who sought to extract from Kants tran-
scendental logic a theory of scientific knowledge based on analysis of
logical values and propositional validity. The two Schools of
Neo-Kantianism represented by Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich
Rickert at Baden and Heidelberg and Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp,
and others at Marburg saw the task of philosophy as being to define
the unifying principles under which each separate science fulfilledits
respective domain of objectivity. Dilthey certainly shared the Neo-
Kantians general appeal to epistemology as a way of overcoming
unlicensed metaphysics, although it must be stressed that he in no
way endorsed their strict and dogmatic distinction between objective
thought contents on one hand and the thinking subject and other
mere psychological moments on the other (cf. Makkreel 1975, 218ff.;
Harrington 2000). In a wider sense, Dilthey exemplifies a newrole for
philosophy that renounces any overarching normative vocation or
practical telos. With the rise of the influential proponents of sociol-
ogy, fromComte andSpencer toDurkheim, Simmel, andWeber, nor-
mative philosophy of history increasingly ceded place to positive
social science andsocial diagnosis. It is this scientistic ethos that has
fuelled so much twentieth-century European Kulturkritik from
Heidegger, Sartre, and Ortega y Gasset to Karl Lwith, Lukcs, and
the Frankfurt School. Numerous thinkers have deplored the nihilism
of the attitude that seeks only to observe but not evaluate, considers
only questions of genesis but not validity, and subordinates all nor-
mative judgements to analyses of social functions while simulta-
neously ignoring its own normative presuppositions (cf. Rose 1981,
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 495
39ff.; Benhabib 1986, 1ff.; Schndelbach 1987a, 1987b, 1992).
Gadamers and Habermass reception of Dilthey is certainly to be
understood in this vein.
However, we must askhowfar these general developments consti-
tute a specific objection to Diltheys work. Are Gadamer and
Habermas right to accuse Dilthey of borrowing from the methods of
the natural sciences simply because of his insistence on the scholarly
rigor andgeneral parityof status of the humansciences withthe natu-
ral sciences? Is it fair to censure him as Cartesian simply for his
appeal to method and the doubting of authority and dogma? It can
be argued that within the concepts available to him, Dilthey gained
far greater distance frompositivist inclinations thancanseemthe case
today in the wake of the more radical critiques of epistemology initi-
ated by Heidegger and existential philosophy. Heideggers massive
influence has arguably obscured the actual modernity and radicality
of Diltheys thought in this respect. Although himself a great admirer
of Dilthey, it can be argued that Heideggers project of the destruc-
tion of metaphysics has distracted attention from analogous ambi-
tions in Dilthey himself. Manfred Riedel (1978b) shows trenchantly
howDilthey defendeda similar undertaking inBook Two of his Intro-
duction to the Human Sciences, titled the Critique of Metaphysics
(Dilthey 1989, 171ff.). Prefiguring Heideggers analytic of Dasein,
Dilthey sought to show how the striving for a presuppositionless
account of the nature of things, for a perfect re-presentation of being
in thought since Plato and Aristotle, depended on a radical forgetting
of the prior context of lived experience from which all thought origi-
nates. Riedel points out that it was only in his last work on the Theory
of World-Views that Dilthey wavered from this concentration on the
transcendental function of lived experience in favor of the sort of
descriptive relativism and all-contemplating historical objectivism
with which some have associated him.
In the following, I wish to propose two theses against Gadamer
and Habermas: first, Dilthey does not necessarily overlook the
reflexive character of interpretationandfinite historical situatedness
of contemporary interpreters, and second, he correctly insists on
interpreters suppressing at least some kinds of practical interest and
prejudgement prior to beginning research, without thereby ignoring
the enabling function of our cultural preconceptions andbackground
assumptions. I first consider Diltheys statements onobjectivity inthe
humansciences andthenturntohis Kantianconceptionof thecritique
of historical reason.
496 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
OBJECTIVITY IN THE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN
Dilthey makes clear that while greatly admiring the achievements
of the Historical School, he in no way espoused the contemplative
pantheistic attitude typified by Rankes notion of effacing himself
before the past. Recalling the deep longing of the true historian for
objective reality which Ranke expresses very beautifully and pow-
erfully, Dilthey warned in 1883 that this longing can be satisfied
only through a scientific knowledge and that history cannot be
grasped by mere contemplation or intuition, but only through analy-
sis (1989, 143). He comments later that withthe development of com-
parative methods, progress reigns over the whole of the human sci-
ences and insight into the systems that interact with one another in
history is gradually conquered for historical consciousness (p. 175).
Gradual enlightenment develops through the constant coopera-
tion of the various sciences andan extension of historical horizons
fosters new truths and ever more general and fruitful concepts
(p. 176).
However, Dilthey (1989) notes that the demands of science will
often conflict with the tendencies of life (pp. 166/183). On one
hand, science and life are originally one, in that science grows out of
life and merely expresses a more methodical response to lifes prob-
lems (p. 164). On the other, science raises demands of objectivity with
which life is likely to interfere. In particular, if the human sciences are
to maintain their autonomy, they will have to resist the influence of
those advancing particular interests in society (p. 166). Competing
social classes, political parties, and churches encourage scholars to
match evidence to prior judgements and normative programs in a
way of which they may or may not always be aware:
Because historians, political economists, jurists and religious scholars
standinlife, they want to influence it. They submit historical personali-
ties, mass movements anddevelopments totheir judgement, andthis is
conditioned by their individuality, by the nation to which they belong,
andby the time inwhichthey live. Evenwhere they believe themselves
to be proceeding presuppositionlessly, they are determined by their
ambit of view. . . . At the same time, however, everyscience worthyof its
name contains the demand of universal validity. If there are to be
human sciences in the strict sense of science, they must set themselves
this goal ever more consciously and critically. (Pp. 166/183)
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 497
Significantly, Dilthey did not hold this conflict to be irresoluble.
Unlike Nietzsche (1983), Diltheydidnot see science as inherentlyhos-
tile to life. Not sharing Nietzsches glorification of the will-to-power
over against Wissenschaft and its deathly stupefying effect, Dilthey
believedthe two tendencies couldbe reconciled. Unruly enthusiasms
and interests could distort the scholars understanding, but science
only held value insofar it retained meaning for life; while life, for its
part, needed the more controlled grasp of its own impulses that sci-
ence supplied. Lifes caprices therefore had to be resisted not because
life stands at odds with science but because science offers life a higher
callingbasedonthe values of cognitionandreflection. The service sci-
ence performs for life must therefore pass first through the canons of
objectivity and impartiality:
Life and its lessons are the always fresh flowing sources for our under-
standingof the social-historical world; understandingreaches out from
life into ever new waters. Only in their effect of feeding back into life
and society do the human sciences attain their highest meaning, and
this meaning may be understood as constantly increasing. However,
the way to this effect must pass through the objectivity of scientific
knowledge. (Pp. 166ff./183)
This last proposition is contested by Habermas (1978, 178ff.).
Habermas maintains that Dilthey increasingly neglected the sense in
which our hermeneutic fore-conceptions and practical cognitive
interests first enable understanding by allowing us to form reflex-
ively meaningful relationships to others in communication. They are
not mere hindrances to objectivity that have to be methodically
overcome:
The cultural sciences practical relation to life, which determines both
their historical genesis as well as the factual context of their application, is
not merely appended externally to hermeneutic procedure. Rather, the
practical cognitive interest defines the level of hermeneutics itself a pri-
ori in the same way that the technical cognitive interest defines the
framework of the empirical-analytic sciences. Thus this practical rela-
tion to life cannot vitiate the objectivity of science. For it is only the
knowledge-constitutive interest that lays down the conditions of the
possible objectivity of knowledge. (Habermas 1978, 178, italics in the
original)
Habermas (1978) concludes that Diltheys dichotomy between life
andscience betrays covert positivism andseeks to uproot free her-
meneutic understanding from the interest structure in which it is
498 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
embedded on the transcendental level. Dilthey leaves off the
self-reflection of the cultural sciences just at the point where the prac-
tical cognitive interest is comprehended as the foundation of possible
hermeneutic knowledge andnot as its corruption. Inso doing, he falls
backintoobjectivism (p. 179). FollowingGadamer, Habermas insists
that the only way misleading preconceptions and interest structures
can be exposedas such is by allowing thementry into research so that
they can then face the corrective force of the other life context speak-
ing back to us indialogue andthrowing us into reflective self-aware-
ness: such interests cannot be suppressed in advance of the research
dialogue, nor even recognized as such, without jeopardizing the very
possibility of understanding (Habermas 1984, 132ff.; 1988, 136ff.,
143ff.). Dilthey therefore ought to have seen that objectivity of under-
standing only makes sense in terms of the intersubjectivity of reflec-
tive co-participants to contexts of communication:
Hermeneutic understanding ties the interpreter to the role of a partner
in dialogue. Only this model of participation in communication learned in
interactioncanexplainthe specific achievement of hermeneutics. . . . For
in an interaction that links at least two subjects in the framework of an
intersubjectivity of mutual understanding produced in ordinary lan-
guage through constant meanings, the interpreter is as much a partici-
pant as the one he interprets. The relation of observing subject and
object is replaced here by that of participant subject and partner.
(Habermas 1978, 179ff., italics in the original)
This thesis needs to be challenged on at least two counts. First, it is
hard to see why Habermass idea of the transcendental status of
practical interest obviates the needto suppress at least some aspects of
human praxis which may condition researchmerely externally and
thereby distort it. It is not hardto think of examples of the influence of
largely particularistic material interests and affiliations that lack the
sort of fundamental anthropological universality with which
Habermas endows Gadamers andHeideggers thesis of hermeneutic
fore-conceptions (cf. Heidegger 1962, 188ff.; Gadamer 1975, 235ff.).
Interpreters can possess a whole range of subjective penchants, idio-
syncrasies, and political and economic commitments which must be
distinguished from what more widely could be described as general
cultural preconceptions and value orientations. Examples of value
orientations would be, say, socialism, liberalism, feminism, Catholi-
cism, or environmentalism. In Max Webers view, such value orienta-
tions or value ideas first constitute and discriminate the topics we
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 499
hold culturally significant and worthy of investigation and thereby
determine the object domainof the cultural sciencesprecisely in this
Kantian transcendentalist sense invoked by Habermas (Weber 1949b,
76). But these value orientations and general cultural worldviews
essentially differ from particularistic material interests in that they
emerge from our acculturation in particular historical traditions as
structural outlooks which open up possibilities of cultural debate
with which other parties can constructively engage and critically
argue. Particularistic interests, on one hand, result from acts of indi-
vidual will and economic influence which distort and diminish these
possibilities by subjugating them to the self-advancement of particu-
lar institutions and corporations.
4
It would be naive to think such
interests could somehow be removed or enlightened or otherwise
made goodsimply by some act of imaginary dialogue with a notional
interlocutor. Interpreters surely have a duty to attempt to bracket
these interests prior to research and strenuously to exclude themfrom
processes of empirical observation (cf. Weber 1949b).
Second, it is not clear that Dilthey does in fact uproot the process
of understanding from its context of enabling evaluative norms. His
aim in the passages above is only to establish three rather modest
points: (1) that there is a prima facie difference between descriptive
andevaluative statements (cf. Dilthey1989, 78), (2) that this difference
has not been observed sufficiently rigorously by contemporary Ger-
man scholars, and (3) that it should at least be an aspiration of the
human sciences to proceed impartially, even if not something they
ever truly achieve. Only in this sense does he write, After some dis-
turbances which have arisen in the course of our national develop-
ment . . . we today are filledwiththe striving to deliver this objectivity
of the human sciences ever more presuppositionlessly, critically and
strictly (pp. 167/183). In no way, however, does Dilthey deny the
embeddedness of each generation of interpreters in different
evaluative frameworks of lived experience. He emphasizes that each
generation understands the past through elements that have arisen
from the presuppositions of the time (p. 166) and therefore that we
too must recognize that the process of forming concepts does not
take place in a realm beyond the norms and values that show up in
our grasping of objects (p. 177). We can only seek impartiality
within the limits of our place in the historical flux of life. For when-
ever we study other ages and cultures, we carry over our acquain-
tance of customs, habits, political arrangements and religious pro-
cesses, and the last presupposition in this act of transference is the
500 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
context of experience which the historian has himself lived through
(pp. 197/203).
Another key element of Diltheys thought that highlights his
understanding of the cultural presuppositions and reflexivity of
research is his idea of the construction of historical reality in the sub-
ject of historical knowledge: his Kantianproject of the critique of his-
torical reason.
THE CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL REASON
By the critique of historical reason, Dilthey understood two
things: first, deduction of the conditions of possibility of knowledge
of history; second, analysis of the historical character of reason itself.
Hegel had affirmed the historicity of reason, but not without subju-
gating history to the system. Dilthey sought to determine the
epistemological preconditions of historical knowledge without arbi-
trary metaphysics. He therefore saw himself as performing for the
human sciences what Kant had accomplished for philosophy on the
basis of the achievements of the natural sciences inthe eighteenthcen-
tury. But where Kant drew the concepts and categories necessary
for knowledge and experience from mathematics and formal
logic, Dilthey held that the concepts and categories of the human
sciences arose from our experience of life over time and history.
They themselves evolvedthrough history andtherefore couldnot be
fixed a priori.
Dilthey thus begins by stating that to determine the preconditions
of historical knowledge, we must examine howthe historical worldis
constructed in the living subject of knowledge:
The totality of the spiritual world [die geistige Welt] is made up in the
subject; and in the determination of the meaningful connectedness of
this world, it is the movement of the spirit whichjoins together the indi-
vidual logical processes. Thus on the one hand, this spiritual world is
the creation of the comprehending subject, but on the other hand, the
movement of the spirit orients itself toward gaining an objective
knowledge of this world. Andso we are facedwith the problemof how
the construction of the spiritual world in the subject makes possible an
objective knowledge of spiritual reality. (Dilthey, 235/207).
This idea of the constructionof historyinthe collective humansubject
and of the self-recollection of the subject in historical experience over
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 501
time can be seen as a last residue of the speculative tradition in
Diltheys thought. Dilthey inherited the idea of the self-education of
humanity through history from Lessing and the German Enlighten-
ment and from Vicos principle of the convertibility of truths open to
man with deeds done by man: verumet factumconvertuntur. However,
it must be stressed that the force of Diltheys argument does not
depend on this speculative motif.
5
His point is simply that human
beings could not understand the past unless they were practical
agents capable of feeling and emotion who themselves contribute to
the making of history. Paraphrasing Vico, Dilthey writes, The first
condition for the possibility of a science of history is that I myself am
an historical being, that the person who studies history is the same as
the one who makes history (p. 347). Dilthey shows here how our
lived experience, our finite living through time in specific cultures
and contexts of tradition, makes possible both historical action and
knowledge of historical action through the human sciences. There-
fore, whenever he insists on objectivity, his strictures are inseparable
from his derivation of the conditions of possibility of this objectivity
inlivedexperience. Two further elements of his writing illustrate this:
first, his concept of communality between peoples; second, his dis-
tinction between elementary forms of understanding and certain
higher forms.
Diltheydefines objective spirit as the manifoldforms inwhichthe
communality [Gemeinsamkeit] which exists between individuals has
objectified itself in the sensible world (pp. 256/221):
Every single expression of life represents an aspect of communality
within the realm of this objective spirit. Every word, every sentence,
every gesture or formula of politeness, every work of art andevery his-
torical deed is understandable only because a communality joins those
expressingthemselves init withthose understandingit. The individual
experiences, thinks and acts always in a sphere of communality, and
only in such a sphere does he have understanding. (Pp. 178/191)
This notion of communality does not imply any assertion of some
common human nature or universal psychological disposition. In a
manner that resembles the contemporary arguments of Habermas
and Davidson (1984), Diltheys reasoning here is that no person or
culture couldbe so radically different fromthe one interpreting it that
all understanding between themwere impossible. For if this were so,
our very concern to understand the other could never have first
arisen. Our very sense of the unfamiliarity of the other shows that we
502 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
at least possess a horizon for improving our understanding, just as
two people could not accuse each other of misunderstanding each
other without first presupposing a basis of shared understanding at a
deeper level.
6
Diltheys concept of communality should therefore be
understood as signifying a sort of transcendental medium of
intersubjectivity in which we grow up as children, learn language,
andfirst comprehendthe gestures anddemeanors of others (p. 256ff.).
It is to this originary socialization that we owe our ability to decipher
all particular languages and forms of life:
Out of this world of objective spirit, the self receives its nourishment
from earliest childhood. It is the medium in which our understanding
of other persons and their life-expressions is accomplished. For every-
thing in which the spirit has objectified itself contains something com-
munal for the I and the You. (Pp. 256/229)
Dilthey distinguishes between elementary forms of understand-
ing and certain higher forms (pp. 253ff./220ff.). This distinction is
important because it indicates his insistence that while the higher sci-
entific forms of understandingmayoriginate fromelementaryunder-
standing in daily communication, they do not, pace Gadamer and
Habermas, imply any orientation to restore communication with the
authors of the items in question. Elementary understanding arises
fromthe imperatives of life andconsists in unquestionedregular con-
nections between outward signs and inner states. Asmile is naturally
assumed to mean pleasure, tears to mean sorrow, a shaking fist
anger, andsoon(cf. Scheler 1985, 21). The transitiontohigher forms
of understandingoccurs inthe event of repeatedfailures of communi-
cation, in the encounter with strangers, in the experience of being
relativized and decentered by other cultures, in a realization of the
difference of history frommythical precedent, and above all in a real-
izationof the diversityof other humanlanguages andthe multiplicity
of other worlds disclosed within these languages (p. 258ff.).
7
Under-
standing, then, takes the form of a reflective inference of analogy,
and this critical inferential understanding is then institutionalized in
the humansciences. Diltheymakes clear here, however, that while the
methodical understanding of the human sciences may have evolved
from practices of reciprocal clarification between speakers in day-to-
day conversation, it does not itself take a dialogical form. Hermeneu-
tic exegesis involves retrieving the continuity and coherence of given
expressions from their original context and thereby restoring the
readers sense of the flowof meaning, but this does not involve inter-
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 503
preters entering into imaginary dialogue with the authors. Under-
standing in its scientific formfor Dilthey remains a detached descrip-
tive operation, not a normative conversation.
CONCLUSION
I hope to have shown how even as he emphasizes scientific objec-
tivity, Dilthey does not overlook the reflexivity of understanding and
finite embeddedness of interpreters in ongoing social life and histori-
cal change in the present. Again and again, Dilthey reiterates that
thought andcognitioncannot gobehindlife, cannot secure aninde-
pendent ground behind or beyond different cultural life contexts and
self-understandings (Dilthey 1924, 194; 1989, 50). His concern to
secure objectivity in the midst of competing frameworks of value and
interest didnot therefore implysome hankeringafter absolute knowl-
edge above all historical flux, as Gadamer supposes.
It may be suggested, then, that traditional accounts of interpreta-
tion in the human sciences, such as those of Dilthey, as well as Weber,
Schtz, Colling- wood, and others, cannot be accused of objectivist
tendencies purely for their failure to theorize the relation of interpret-
ers to their subject in terms of dialogue (cf. Harrington 1999, forth-
coming). Gadamers characterization of all pre-Heideggerian herme-
neutics in terms of either prescriptive exegetical methods or
psychologistic empathy has tended to give many English readers of
his work a rather partial picture of earlier German hermeneutic
thought which needs to be corrected. Against such a reading, one
should emphasize that there is no reason why scholars today should
not follow Diltheys example in seeking to understand their subjects
impartially in historical and cultural context while provisionally sus-
pending judgment on issues of truth and rationality: this does not
amount to indifferent historicism. It is one thing to highlight the
ineluctable role of contemporary cultural values and normative
beliefs in the study of society. It is another to say we must positively
assert our contemporary values and norms in research in order to
have an argumentative dialogue with our subjects. Sociologists,
historians, and ethnographers who do not seek to come to an under-
standing with their subjects in dialogue do not automatically suc-
cumb to objectivism or positivism.
504 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / December 2000
NOTES
1. Bauman (1978) repeats Gadamers assertion that
Dilthey. . . never ceasedtobe fascinatedbythe ideal of objective understand-
ing of history, ie. understanding which itself would not be historical; he ear-
nestly sought a vantage-point above or outside human existence, from
which history could be seen as an object of objective study. (P. 170)
Charles Taylor (1995) likewise affirms that the whole problematic of howto under-
stand other cultures needs to learn from Gadamers critique of the Cartesian aspect in
Dilthey, while Shields (1996) argues for a similar conception of dialogical under-
standing by appeal to Bakhtin. See also Bernstein (1983, 37) and Hekman (1986, 117ff.,
139ff.).
2. Habermas (1988) views Dilthey, Weber, Schtz, and Winch as all exemplifying a
distinct paradigm of traditional objectifying, that is, nondialogical, interpretive
methodology:
Fromthe point of viewof hermeneutic self-reflection, the phenomenological
andlinguistic foundations of interpretive sociology belong with historicism.
Like the latter, theyfall preytoobjectivism, for theyclaima purelytheoretical
attitude for the phenomenological observer and the linguistic analyst when
in fact both of themare bound up with their object domain through commu-
nicative experience and thus can no longer lay claim to the role of the unin-
volved observer. . . . Gadamers excellent critique of the objectivistic
self-understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften applies to historicism and to
the false consciousness of its phenomenological and linguistic successors as
well. The pluralism of lifeworlds and language games is only a distant echo
of the worldviews and cultures that Dilthey projected onto a hypothetical
plane of simultaneity. (P. 153f.)
3. References tothis text are tothe SuhrkampTaschenbuchedition, editedbyM. Rie-
del (1981) in my own working translations. An abridged translation exists by H. P.
Rickman in Dilthey: Selected Writings (1976). Page numbers for passages translated by
Rickman appear after the stroke (/). Year of publication is omitted in all further refer-
ences to this text.
4. Examples might include the influence of the British Conservative and Labour
Parties inresearchonBritishsocial history via the conduit of government funding pref-
erences and university curriculum directives (emphasis on social harmony versus
workers movements, etc.), the influence of the AdamSmithInstitute andTrades Union
Congress in research projects on contemporary industrial relations, or the Papacys
interest insympathetic accounts of the historyof the Catholic Churchthroughsponsor-
ship of select priest-historians.
5. It is misleading to see Dilthey as here renewing the grand Reflexionsphilosophie of
the Idealists, as Habermas (1978, 149) supposes at one point.
6. On the relevance of this argument to the critique of some tendencies in
Post-Structuralist thought, see Frank (1984, 116ff.).
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 505
7. One is reminded here of Ernst Cassirers idea of the transition from mythic to
linguistic consciousness. One culture meets another where before it believed itself
alone in the universe. Henceforth, people realize that the signification of signs is arbi-
trary, that meanings are not natural but conventional, and that words are not pictures,
nor substances, but symbolic functions. See Cassirer (1953, Vol. 1, 186ff.; Vol. 2, 235ff.).
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Austin Harrington is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leeds, U.K. He is the
author of Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: ACritique of Gadamer and
Habermas, forthcoming from Routledge, as well as related articles on Dilthey, Max
Weber, and Alfred Schtz in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, Theory
and Psychology, Sociology, and Max Weber Studies.
Harrington / OBJECTIVISM IN HERMENEUTICS? 507