11 Language, Nature, and the Self: The Feeling of Life in Kant and Dilthey Eric S. Nelson The individual is ineffable. -Wilhelm Dilthey1 In the introduction to the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant maintained that the subject cannot theoretically know itself as a thing in itself.2 Kant denied the possibility of knowing oneself directly through intuition or theoretically through knowledge, at the same time as moral reasoning compels agents to postulate an independent autonomous self. The Platonic idea of selfknowledge, and the unity of morality and rational knowledge or practical and theoretical reason, is to this extent impossible due to the epistemic constraints placed on theoretical knowledge and the delimited scope of practical rationality in Kant's fi rst two critiques. This suspicion encompasses traditional rational psychology, as the metaphysics of mind and soul, can no longer be a feasible option after the critique of theoretical and practical reason. This is not Kant's fi nal word concerning psychology. The ineffability of the subject to itself, its nontransparency to itself, did not prohibit Kant from articulating elements of transcendental psychology in the Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, Kant engaged in empiricalpragmatic inquiry into human psychology and anthropology. However, among late nineteenthand early twentiethcentury neoKantians, especially Wilhelm Dilthey's critic Heinrich Rickert, the Kantian paradigm is construed, Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 263 4/7/14 10:34 AM 264 E R I C S . N E L S O N contrary to Kant, as abandoning psychology exclusively to the natural sciences. The neoKantian approach diverged from Dilthey's more historically informed Kantian position that psychology is a human science as well as necessary to understanding cognition and the nature of scientifi c inquiry. As a Geisteswissenschaft, psychology incorporates causal and naturalistic explanations of human behavior from a thirdperson perspective in contrast to positing an ideal realm of reasoning about "valid" ahistorical truths embedded in cultural values. Psychology already fundamentally involves (1) social, historical, and cultural dimensions that inform and orient human thought and practice, and presupposes (2) fi rstand secondperson processes of understanding, interpretation, and communication. Because of the mediating conditions of the self, I am not transparent to myself in intuition or introspection. I do not know myself directly but at best indirectly through understanding and interpreting my own practices, narratives, expressions, feelings, and the conditions of my life. In contrast with Kant, Dilthey did not offer a transcendental psychology independent of empirical psychology but argued for maintaining both the empirical and interpretive dimensions of psychological inquiry. Human consciousness, behavior, and agency are mediated through their biological conditions, socialhistorical nexus or context, and through social and individual ways of understanding, expressing, and interpreting one's own life. Based on Kant's fi rst Critique and its neoKantian interpretation nothing might appear less Kantian. Yet-despite the many differences-Dilthey interpreted himself as an heir to Kant's critical philosophy, while challenging its reifi ed dualistic division into empirical nature and ideal normative value upheld in neoKantianism. There are two signifi cant historical sources for Dilthey's approach. Not unlike Schleiermacher, it is misunderstanding, confusion, and inability to know the other that is the point of departure for interpretation as understanding that has become aware of the impossibility of transparent understanding and knowledge of oneself and others. Similarly, Dilthey separated hermeneutics into two complementary and overlapping strategies. Whereas linguistic interpretation examines a common language and its individuation in language use, psychological interpretation considers the singular individual in relation to its lifeconditions and contexts. Like Kant in the Critique of Judgment, Dilthey is concerned with how to articulate the singular without destroying it and how to transition from the singular to the more general through what Kant calls refl ective judgment and Dilthey designates interpretation. Psychology and language are linked in Dilthey, as are the "feeling of life" (Lebensgefühl) and sensus communis in Kant's third Critique.3 Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 264 4/7/14 10:34 AM 265 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y Through Kant's conception of the feeling of life and Dilthey's interest in biological and bodily life, Dilthey's hermeneutical culturalhistorically oriented "lifephilosophy" (or Lebensphilosophie, as it was categorized retrospectively by Max Scheler) is connected with the antireductionist and antimechanistic philosophy of nature inherited from thinkers as diverse as Leibniz, Goethe, and Schelling. Reifying the difference between natural explanation and human understanding, nature and spirit, facticity and validity, and the natural and historical worlds in order to prioritize the latter is more characteristic of neoKantianism and twentiethcentury hermeneutics than it was of Dilthey, who advocated a nonreductive and hermeneutical empiricism.4 Rudolf Makkreel has argued in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant and Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies that the Critique of Judgment has protohermeneutical aspects that have deep philosophical affi nities that help to illuminate Dilthey's overall project.5 Makkreel examined this relation primarily in terms of aesthetics through the feeling of life, hermeneutics through refl ective judgment, and the philosophy of history through immanent purposiveness. I pursue a complementary path in this chapter to the implications of this immanent purposiveness for the nexus of psychology and language, nature and spirit, and knowledge and the ineffable in Kant's third Critique and Dilthey's works. For Schleiermacher it is the religious ineffability of God and the human soul that inspires his theological hermeneutical project, whereas for Dilthey it is the ineffability of this individual life itself or an immanent worldly existence that encourages the reformulation of hermeneutics as historical, linguistic, and psychological interpretation in the context of the human sciences.6 Kant, Nature, and the "Feeling of Life" A number of Kant's earliest intellectual endeavors are devoted to explaining natural phenomena or articulating the basis of human inquiry into nature.7 Though Kant's mature critical natural philosophy has been decisive for modern thought, which brackets nature as more than a causal order, the other side of his thinking about nature often remains underappreciated even by Kantian inspired thinkers, particularly the neoKantian movement from Hermann Cohen to Heinrich Rickert, if not Ernst Cassirer, and in contemporary thinkers such as Habermas and Honneth who continue to prioritize spirit in the form of intersubjective communication. In radically separating nature and spirit, facticity and validity, and causality and morality, inadequate refl ection is given Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 265 4/7/14 10:34 AM 266 E R I C S . N E L S O N to other dimensions of Kant's thought that are expressed to varying degrees in the precritical writings, the Critique of Judgment, his historical and political writings, and the Opus Postumum.8 Kant is not exclusively a thinker of the rationality and scientifi cally knowable character of nature as a phenomenal order; he also conceived of nature in more ambitious and ambiguous terms. In his earliest thought, he examined the physical world by differentiating the living and dead forces of nature. In his mature critical philosophy, he approached nature as a Newtonian order of mechanical causality in the Critique of Pure Reason; as the setting of the application of moral responsibility and religious hope in the Critique of Practical Reason; and as purposive and sublime through the feeling of life and refl ective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. The systematic and historical signifi cance of this intersection of nature, freedom, culture, and individual experience and its cultivation in Kant's feeling of life, the feelings of pleasure and displeasure and their intensifi cation and diminishment, is more central than typically recognized, and a reference point for Dilthey. The context of the development of Kant's thinking of Lebensgefühl encompasses Leibniz's argument that there is an organic or vital dimension to nature and, against Descartes and the Cartesians, that the theory of "living force" (vis viva) was a necessary condition for physics. As part of his project of integrating the new mathematicalmechanical explanation of nature with traditional religious and metaphysical insights into the nature of things, Leibniz explained nature and spirit as being continuous in consisting of myriad organic "monads" or "living points" that are dynamic, perspectival, and purposive unities. "All of nature is full of life," as nature consists of living monads, or vital seeds, and their aggregations.9 Leibniz's monadology thereby explains the individuation of substances from things to souls, and demonstrates the compatibility of individual freedom and morality with the causal material order of nature. Taking his point of departure from the eighteenthcentury debate over living forces, Kant's fi rst work attempted to distinguish living and mechanical forces of nature (1747; AA 1:1–182 ). This work was deeply fl awed and Kant abandoned this project as he assimilated Newton's physics and natural philosophy, becoming one of the fi rst to apply the Newtonian project to a wide range of natural phenomena (e.g., the KantLaplace nebular hypothesis).10 By the time of the composition of the fi rst Critique, the concept of living forces no longer has a constitutive role in physics or natural philosophy. Nevertheless, traces and analogues of Kant's early interest in living nature and his project of distinguishing living and dead forces remain at work, including-despite its apparent anthropocentric conclusion-his portrayal of experiences of the subBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 266 4/7/14 10:34 AM 267 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y lime and his return to a more dynamic conception of material nature in the Opus Postumum (e.g., the deduction of the ether). A richer notion of "life" continues to inform Kant's thinking. This is a controversial thesis given Kant's Newtonian physical world and his understanding of nature in the context of his moral philosophy. The postulate of an intelligible moral world and radical application of the moral law to sensuous existence in the second Critique and other practical writings has been criticized as the exclusion and domination of nature and bodily life from Nietzsche to Adorno. Likewise, as Adorno contends, nature as sublime and potentially purposive in the third Critique remains an anthropocentric and bourgeois gesture of spirit's dominion over abject nature that is inadequate to sensuous material existence and animal suffering.11 Nature as a refl ectively achieved whole in the "Critique of Teleological Judgment" and dynamic interdependent whole in his fi nal writings might be too little too late in contrast with romantic Naturphilosophie. Although I cannot respond to all of these issues in detail in here, I will sketch a strategy for addressing them and pointing toward Dilthey. Kant has a more complex approach to nature than its intelligibility as a mechanical or phenomenal order, as evident in the Critique of Judgment interpreted in an alternative light. Kant's critics have emphasized the inadequacy and exhaustion of natural beauty and the sublime before the avowal of human dignity as higher and other than nature. Still, nature (as beautiful and sublime to feeling and tentatively purposive and interconnected for refl ection) can be explicated through the feeling of life, its comportment or disposition in being intensifi ed or diminished in the beautiful and the sublime, and the protohermeneutics of refl ective judgment from the singular to the more general and from feeling to rational articulation. This is not about discovering the grail of the hidden unity of the third Critique and Kant's critical philosophy as a whole; it concerns clarifying nature and the relation of human freedom and individuality to nature. In opposition to anthropocentric humanism and personalism, with their problematic metaphysical assumptions about the human, naturalistic, postmodern, or posthumanist interpretations of the uncanny sublime suggest that the everyday conventions and personal life of the individual are disrupted by overwhelming impersonal powers that reveal the "human" to be a false ideological construction and the world to be an aesthetic, material, or mystical play of nonhuman forces. There is, however, a third option between anthropocentric humanism and impersonal naturalism. This is intimated in Kant's Critique of Judgment and its reception from Schiller and Dilthey to Marcuse and to some extent Lyotard, Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 267 4/7/14 10:34 AM 268 E R I C S . N E L S O N who rejected the oversimplistic identifi cation of the sublime with a politics of the sublime that would be terror and its celebration.12 Whereas the beautiful "carries with it directly a feeling of life's being furthered," the sublime "is a pleasure that arises only indirectly; it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger."13 Kant's sublime risks destroying the person while disclosing the possibility of reaffi rming the dignity of the individual in relation to the natural world. By placing it at risk, the abyss and terror of the sublime heightens the feeling of life, which is historically connected with early modern discourses of vis viva and the more materialist notion of the conatus, and is equally the possibility of renewed individuation in relation to the forces of nature. In relation to the forces and conditions of life, humans fi nd their own purpose in themselves and individuate themselves as moral beings in a worldly context. Individuation cannot be adequately understood as the subsumption of a particular under a universal category or the exemplarity of a type, as is the case with determinate judgment, and thus cannot be interpreted as the dominion of active spirit over passive nature. Individuation is not the assimilative drive and mastery of the conatus. It is the unpredetermined responsive and refl ective generation, formation, and cultivation of individual and social aesthetic and moral sensibilities in relation to the particular phenomena. This includes nature and feeling. The third Critique is accordingly about the generation and articulation of concepts. It concerns the coming to word and concept of that which is heterogeneous, not given, or without a concept;14 that is, the sensuous, the natural, and the felt in art and genius, language and the sensus communis. The sensus communis is a common shared sense, proceeding through feelings rather than a common conceptual understanding.15 As such, it allows for the relation and interpretation of the noncognitive and nonconceptual, in particular feeling.16 It constitutes a realm of preunderstandings that include and go beyond the conservative functions of reproducing custom, habit, and tradition, since it is expansive and open to be transformed by the new. The pinnacle of individuation in Kant is the genius who discovers novel ideas and ways of sharing them.17 Genius provides innovative forms and models for encountering and interpreting phenomena and oneself. Correspondingly, the genuinely and transformatively "new" has a signifi cant role in Dilthey's approach to traditional society, culture, and art.18 In the Critique of Judgment, Kant explored how nature can be judged refl ectively as having purposes, humans can be said to be ultimate purBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 268 4/7/14 10:34 AM 269 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y poses, and art can embody and enact "purposefulness without purpose" or purposiveness without a teleological fi nal cause. This playful and anarchic removal of barriers and predetermined purposes in experiencing the beautiful and the sublime is connected with the feeling of life and contrasted with the seriousness of ethical, political, and religious purposes as fi nal ends. Such felt spontaneity and playfulness, as the promise of freedom from a predetermined purpose and as responsiveness in relation to the forces and conditions of life, indicates a noninstrumental, noncoercive, and nondominating activity understood as a creative receptiveness or responsive spontaneity in encountering the myriad things and the world as an ineffable whole that invites further investigation and inquiry.19 Kant's third Critique is not then simply either the aesthetic use or moralistic domination of nature but is deeply ethical in locating the individuation and selfarticulation of the person in a worldly, sensuous, and bodily as well as a social context. The self does not cognitively or theoretically know itself but fi nds itself in the third Critique in its comportment, cultivation (Bildung), and culture in relation to nature, the sublime, and the supersensible.20 "Life" from Leibniz to Dilthey Kant's work is a decisive connection between Leibniz-who uses organic models to introduce intelligible principles such as appetite, perception, and purposiveness into nature-and nineteenthcentury Naturphilosophie, Lebensphilosophie, and pseudoscientifi c vitalism.21 Indeed, these ideas have been criticized for their reliance and reifi cation of teleology and organicism, yet the different thinkers associated with these categories and movements may be distinguished and examined in their own terms. For example, Dilthey, though sometimes vaguely associated with these movements, was a critic of employing vitalist, teleological, and organic models in the natural and human sciences. Dilthey was an advocate of natural scientifi c inquiry, which he also wrote about, since the natural sciences legitimately pursued mathematicaldeductive and causalexplanatory theories of natural phenomena under universal laws. Given his proximity to Kant as well as J. S. Mill and empiricism, Dilthey is misconstrued when he is assimilated to "irrationalism." The "positivism" that Dilthey rejected was Comte's, and he criticized it for mistaking a perspectival worldview for metaphysical truth. Likewise, Dilthey did not eliminate materiality and causality in critiquing materialism as a speculative metaphysical position that leaped Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 269 4/7/14 10:34 AM 270 E R I C S . N E L S O N beyond the empirical and immanent phenomena themselves into the immeasurable and unfathomable.22 His encouragement of empirical inquiry and critique of traditional metaphysics, as the expression and articulation-more akin to art and poetry than science-of a feeling of life in a worldview instead of being a universally valid truth, was a source for early logical positivism. According to Gottfried Gabriel, Rudolf Carnap in particular adopted concepts and strategies from Dilthey, employing them in his critique of Heidegger.23 In addition to a modern "positivistic" and critical "epistemological" conception of nature (Natur), Dilthey articulated a less reductive notion of life (Leben) allowing him to rehabilitate tendencies from early modern and romantic Naturphilosophie, especially Spinoza, Leibniz, and Goethe, without making the same metaphysical and speculative assumptions about the nature of things. Naturphilosophie expressed and articulated a feeling and perspective of life rather than being a metaphysical truth. Encountering, embracing, and celebrating nature and life is a way of living and communicating a life. "Nature" is not a constant here but lived, enacted, and interpreted in a multiplicity of lives. Life is not independent of its expression (Ausdruck), understanding (Verstehen), and interpretation (Interpretation or Auslegung), and should not be confused with universal scientifi c much less highly questionable metaphysical truths. "Life" is not only biological life but socialhistorical life, and is most adequately addressed as "a life" as expressed and interpreted in living it, and accordingly in selfrefl ection (Selbstbesinnung) as well as autobiographical, biographical, and historical narratives. Although this is not a Kantian approach conventionally conceived, it can be elucidated by Kant's approach to the feeling of life, refl ective judgment, and sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment insofar as Kant's descriptions of the beautiful as free of calculative interest, the sublime as apparently counterpurposive, and the refl ective purposiveness associated with nature are ways of non-mechanistically-yet not metaphysically or teleologically in the strong sense-experiencing and articulating the nexus of life as involving both the "external" natural world and the "internal" relations of the faculties of the subject. This analysis also places Kant's philosophy in a different light, as it has a "hermeneutical" dimension insofar as the human subject intrinsically lacks the transparency of selfknowledge (at least as intelligible) but does live from the feeling of life that provokes questions of the selfunderstanding, interpretation, and individuation of that life. The protoor quasihermeneutical dimensions of the third Critique indicate strategies for a hermeneutics of "a" or "individuated" life that does not rely on metaphysical selfknowledge or rational psychology.24 Kant's thought then does not leave us with the "bare nature" of Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 270 4/7/14 10:34 AM 271 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y the natural sciences, as it addresses questions of individuation and personal identity through refl ective judgment and the sensus communis, which do not command or legislate to the phenomena but unresponsively or responsively interpret and communicate them, in the context of the heightening and lessening of the "feeling of life" that seeks a sort of balance and harmony in relation to itself and its world.25 As Makkreel notes, such harmony is not a determinate synthesis or totalization: "A harmony involves a reciprocal relation between two distinct elements; a synthesis, as Kant conceives it, involves a onesided infl uence for the sake of a strict unity."26 Kant in a sense offers an alternative answer to a Leibnizian question in a Newtonian context: what is a living human being or person in the natural world given the physical world disclosed by the new sciences? Leibniz had linked morality with an account of living nature by interpreting monadic life as a principle of individuation, as a singular and unique "living mirror" refl ecting the entirety of things, and as consequently having its own moral dignity and worth in a rational order of nature. Kant employed an immanent feeling of life to connect the moral, intelligible, and transcendent with the pragmatic and the natural in the individual. Kant thus radically transformed Leibniz's threefold account of nature in his metaphysics as theologicalmoral, teleological, and physical. Kant's concern with Leibnizian questions during the period of the Critique of Judgment is further suggested by his publication in the same year of a response to Eberhard's Leibnizian criticism of the critical philosophy. Language, Interpretation, and the Individual No mistake of method is more disastrous than the renunciation of the scope of historical and biographical facts in the formation of a general science of human nature. The achievements of human nature exist for us and can be studied only in the midst of society. The same relationship obtains between universal science and the analysis of historical phenomena for all other major expressions of social life.27 Not unlike Kant then, Dilthey faced the Leibnizian issue of how to articulate the living dynamic individual in relation to the apparently impersonal contexts and systems of that life. Dilthey's work was commonly, yet incorrectly attributed with espousing a dichotomy between nature and spirit, naturalism and spiritualism, or their reifi ed duality in Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 271 4/7/14 10:34 AM 272 E R I C S . N E L S O N explanation.28 In fact, Dilthey insisted on the plural multiplicity, inherent confl icts, and overlapping tensions and intersections between naturalbiological and socialhistorical life in a singular individual life in its larger lifenexus or context (Lebenszusammenhang). Unlike later hermeneutics, Gadamer recognized this tendency in Dilthey as positivism and scientism; Dilthey did not exclude materiality or diminish experimental empirical inquiry in the natural and human sciences in the name of linguisticality or intersubjective spirit.29 In this emphasis, Dilthey remains closer to Kant than to Hegel, the Kant of the third Critique, which also concerns empirical inquiry proceeding from particulars and contexts rather than a mathematical mechanical ordering of the phenomena. Dilthey's controversial emphasis on descriptive and analytical, or interpretive, psychology is a response to the LeibnizianKantian legacy under altered conditions. The project of an interpretive psychology was criticized by both reductionists, committed to thoroughly naturalizing the mind, and antireductionists who sought to preserve "truth" by bracketing the natural causal and social interpretive worlds. This project threatened the balance of power arranged between mechanical nature, including the physiological body and brain, and rational discourse concerning ideal values, logical validity and essence, and timeless rational truths. "Psychologism," a charge that often confl ates the real error of reducing logical validity with the fear of reducing metaphysical truths to empirical mental states and their associations, was to be avoided even by positing a dichotomy between facticity and validity, as in neoKantianism, or an otherworldly realm of ideas and essences, supposedly independent of causal conditions and interpretive contexts, as in Frege and Husserl, in particular in Husserl's polemical and problematic Logos article "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science." Despite his proximity to empiricism, Dilthey did not advocate Mill's psychologistic position that the laws of logic and mathematics are inductive truths based in psychological associations and habits, although he rejected Platonism by insisting on their human and hermeneutical contexts. Induction is an important element of empirical inquiry for Dilthey, which he reconceived as interpretive through refl ective judgment.30 Dilthey's scientifi c, naturalistic, neoKantian and phenomenological critics, each side identifying him with the opposition, either reduced life to matter or banished facticity, materiality, and sensuous bodily existence from the life of the mind. Comparable to Leibniz and the Kant of the third Critique,31 Dilthey was concerned with the tensions, intersections, and continuities between these dimensions of human life that could neither be absolutely separated from each other. In this regard, Dilthey brings to fruition the consequences of Kant's sensus communis- Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 272 4/7/14 10:34 AM 273 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y as a form and confi guration of life-for our understanding of meaning and linguistic practice.32 In the fi rst major portrayal of his project of a "critique of historical reason"-that is, of a worldly and embodied reason in the Introduction to the Human Sciences-Dilthey formulates the complexity of the relations between ideal meaning or logical validity and the facticity inherent in psychology, language, and history. He counterpoises this relational nexus to the elimination of the lived and experienced for the sake of the ideal and the reduction of thinking and the thought to psychological associations. Instead of reducing meaning, validity, and value to psychological states that are then reduced to material states, Dilthey established the role for interpretive psychology in selfrefl ection and human scientifi c inquiry. Whereas psychology is the mediating link between the human and natural sciences for Dilthey, with both explanatory and interpretive tasks in relation to individual life, neoKantians such as Rickert reduce psychology to a natural science in order to divide the norms and values of the cultural sciences from the facticity of nature. Rickert thus differentiated the intelligible realm of value and validity, which oriented practical philosophy and the cultural sciences, from the brute facticity and sensuous materiality of nature and the natural sciences.33 When we consider the facticity of meaning, its relation to its historical, linguistic, and psychological conditions and context, both linguistic and psychological refl ection and interpretation prove necessary. Consciousness is not transparent to itself and so we do not declaratively know ourselves through contemplation and introspection. Even the relation of motive and action withdraws from clarity since the conscious motive is not always the real one.34 Psychology cannot be separated from language and history, and therefore must be both interpretive and empirical. We do not have direct and transparent selfknowledge through introspection, and only cognize our own and other selves through the "externality" of expressions and objectifi cations, that is, through interpreting how we act, behave, and produce. Dilthey began developing the basis for a descriptive and analytic psychology in the Introduction to the Human Sciences. Against the dominant neoKantianism and positivism of his time, psychology can be considered a human science rather than exclusively as a natural science applied to humans. Contrary to traditional epistemology and metaphysics, this is not a science of consciousness in and for itself. The psychology of the empirical self becomes a pressing issue once it is recognized that (1) consciousness cannot escape its own contexts and conditions, including language and history; (2) philosophical thought cannot be separated from empirical research; and (3) psychology plays a constitutive role in selfBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 273 4/7/14 10:34 AM 274 E R I C S . N E L S O N refl ection and human scientifi c inquiry.35 The human science of psychology unfolds in Dilthey's works as descriptive and analytic, as well as experiential and empirical. The psychology developed by Dilthey from his early to later thought is an interpretive psychology, because of its emphasis on livedexperience (Erlebnis) in relation to sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung), and expression, understanding, and interpretation. Interpretive psychology takes on an orienting role insofar as consideration of the activities of the individual from out of the "internal" or fi rstperson perspective of the individual characterizes one crucial form of inquiry in the human sciences. Dilthey developed interpretive psychology as a socialhistorically informed psychology and an authentic psychology of the individual.36 It addresses both the fi rstperson plural (in the pronouns "we" and "you") and fi rstperson singular (in the pronouns "I" and "you"). Interpretive psychology expands the fi rstperson perspective to analyze the ethicalnormative character of that perspective. The internal human world is constituted through socialhistorically formed practical goods, interests, norms, purposes, and values.37 These are related to individual capacities such as will, thought, and feeling, as well as the decision, judgment, and imagination that are involved in the formation of meaning for someone in particular. These activities, events, and structures-centering on the feeling, thought, and will of the individual and the relation of the body to its world in the bodily "feeling of life"-are at the core of Dilthey's concern with the physiological and psychological life of the individual.38 Dilthey articulated questions concerning human signifi cation, that is, the situation in which meaning occurs as language and history, and how this signifi cance is enacted by a bodily being in an environmental milieu as well as socialhistorical epoch. Such questions are not resolved or made more intelligible by a reduction of the socialhistorical to mental and bodily states.39 Psychology researches life from both its bodily and psychic sides, which he argued are bound together.40 The self, who is addressed and responds through personal pronouns, is referred not only to the context of its language but to the historical character of its selfinterpretations and narratives. The situation of this selfunderstanding calls for interpretive psychology insofar as the perspective of the desires and thoughts of the individual agent need to be encountered in order to ask particular kinds of questions. These questions are not only forgotten in the reduction of the world to the representation of explanatory relations and ideal validity claims, but reduction does not always meet its own goal of making the phenomenon more intelligible.41 Interpretive psychology moves from the description of the fi rstperson perspective of "inner" and "lived" experience, which is always Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 274 4/7/14 10:34 AM 275 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y symbolically mediated and thus never "pure," to the analysis of the immanent contexts and conditions of this internal perspective through the facticity and singularity of the individual. The individual, and its experiences, occur and can only be interpreted in relation to its socialhistorical situation, that is, its formative epoch and generation, its environment and milieu. Although we can explain elementary psychic and bodily processes causally and naturalistically, all higher psychic processes and occurrences are historical products.42 This means that psychology as a science of the individual must be interpretive in order to articulate the individual as individual in his or her socialhistorical context. Dilthey contends that the individual can and should be approached through the discipline of descriptive and analytic psychology. Interpretive psychology considers the individual, the processes and structures that operate at the level of the individual, as individual rather than explaining away individual features in terms of some construct that does violence to particularity (constructs such as the economy, power, or tradition). Considerations of essence, ideal meaning, and validity can also be reductive insofar as-for instance, in neoKantianism-they do not concern meaning in relation to meaning for anyone in particular. However, the human sciences can and should take the individual (as a particular) as an object of research. They cannot operate then exclusively through the idealizations of logical and explanatory reduction but they require and presuppose taking a phenomenon as it discloses itself (such as the individuality of an individual, the sociality of the social). Individuality is not accidental or extrinsic to human life nor even to social life. The individual is the intersection or crossing of socialhistorical forces, processes, and structures without which they would not occur.43 Dilthey's thought proceeds from the individual in its socialhistorical and worldly context to the individual as singular, individuation, and the individual as a crossing of multiple systems and processes, that is, socialization.44 If the individual is signifi cant for the human sciences, then interpretive psychology should play a central role in their formation and refl ection. Concern for the singular is not only found in Dilthey's interest in psychology, but in biography and autobiography as narratives that enact the individual and perspectival character of history, language, and psychology as well as show the plurality and unfathomability within all immanence. Biography does not concern the universal but the unique in its historicity.45 The life disclosed in biography is interpreted by Dilthey, in his early Life of Schleiermacher (1870), as the unfolding and interacting relation of the singular and the whole;46 of individual and generation.47 The study of the historical formation of the individual in the context Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 275 4/7/14 10:34 AM 276 E R I C S . N E L S O N of his or her generation is basic to Dilthey's conception of history.48 A "generation" is not merely the receptivity, homogeneity, and dependency of its members; it consists of their sharing in possibilities unavailable to other generations.49 Autobiographical understanding is how the individual interprets herself in her generation and socialhistorical world. It would be meaningless for that individual, as individuated, if it were only a story about the community, society, and tradition. Likewise, it would be vacant without relations to others from friends to strangers. Selfunderstandings, interpretations in the form of action and event descriptions, as narratives that differentiate between agents, are as essential to interpretation as appealing to collective customs, norms, values, and traditions. If the identity of individual and group is not simply presupposed so as to avoid the diffi cult questions of their relatedness and distance, their connection becomes a pivotal question for the human sciences: how is the individual also socialized and set within a social lifeworld? In biography, the question "who" is addressed to another as in autobiography it is addressed to oneself. The question of "who" is not that of a thingly "what" and thus demands a different way of responding than the "why" of causal explanation. Ricoeur distinguished the signifi cance of who and what in Dilthey while misconstruing its import. Dilthey's interest in biography-as central to history-and interpretive psychology-as central to the human sciences-is oriented by the question of the singular50 and understanding singularity responsively from out of itself instead of reducing the fi rstperson perspective of the who, and hence the potential upsurge of singularity, to a thirdperson psychological explanation (contrary to Ricoeur).51 The immanent structures of the "who" are analyzed by Dilthey through the "categories of life." These lived and performatively enacted categories, a forerunner of Heidegger's existentials, are irreducible to the instrumental and abstract categories that humans apply to things.52 Dilthey's distinction of "inner" and "outer," "internal" and external," refers to the difference of fi rstperson and thirdperson perspectives. Thus, meaning and validity do not occur in relation to the "interiority" of private psychic states; they are fi rst and foremost symbolic formations of meaning and validity that are fundamentally socialhistorical. As Matthias Jung claimed, the "internal" or fi rstperson viewpoint-both in its plural (we, you) and singular (I, you) forms-is radically distinctive for Dilthey from the objectivating or "external" thirdperson perspective (which perceives and constructs beings as abstract isolated objects).53 The fi rstperson perspective is symbolically reproduced through the webs or nexus of signifi cation of the lifeworld. Interpretive psychology, biogBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 276 4/7/14 10:34 AM 277 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y raphy, and autobiography function for Dilthey as orienting exemplary disciplines for the human sciences, because of how they bring individual experience and selfunderstanding into the foreground of human scientifi c inquiry.54 The Interdependence of Epistemology, Psychology, and Hermeneutics In this section, I explore the role of psychology and its centrality in Dilthey's "middle period" from 1883 to 1896.55 Dilthey's writings from the early 1890s articulate an interpretive psychology in the context of the intersection of epistemology and life. This defi es Heidegger and Gadamer's assimilation of Dilthey to traditional epistemology, which he radically transforms, and neoKantianism from which he radically diverges.56 Dilthey argued for a phenomenality or immanence prior to the intellectualism of phenomenalism and for the independence of reality from the subject through the resistance and tension, which intensifi es the feeling of life even as it reveals the cogivenness of self and world. Under the traditional form of an argument for the "external" existence of the world, Dilthey radicalizes this canonical epistemological problem by anticanonically demonstrating the bodilyworldly character of human life. This work suggests a hermeneutics of bodily being in the world that offers a basis for interpretive psychology.57 Dilthey developed the interpretive human science of psychology primarily in his Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894) and in his Contributions to the Study of Individuality (Beiträge zum Studium der Individualität, 1895/ 1896). One principal task of this psychology is to correct the abstraction and reifi ed dualities of previous epistemology. Dilthey thereby contested the assumptions of neoKantian epistemology, which claimed the "absolute independence of epistemology from psychology. It alleges that Kant's critique of reason has in principle emancipated the theory of knowledge from psychology by giving it a particular [i.e., transcendental] method."58 Contrary to the claim that knowledge concerns ideal validity independent of facticity, Dilthey argued that knowledge involves a knower and thus always presupposes what he called the "acquired psychic nexus."59 The epistemologist abstracts from the living psychic nexus such that he believes in the transparency, independence, and certainty of a selfconsciousness unencumbered by the facticity of the world. EpisteBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 277 4/7/14 10:34 AM 278 E R I C S . N E L S O N mology, however, cannot be liberated from the empirical conditions of knowledge. The epistemologist presupposes the acquired psychic nexus while denying its role: "He presupposes it. He makes use of it, but he is not in control of it. Interpretations of this nexus in psychological concepts suggested by the language and thought of his times necessarily insinuate themselves into his epistemology."60 Rather than freeing knowledge from psychology, neoKantianism presupposes an inadequate and inappropriate conception of the psychological which undermines the purity of its own epistemic project and blocks it from opening and articulating the relations between knowledge and experience, knowing and its bodily, psychic, and socialhistorical conditions. The abstract dualities of neoKantian thought, such as the separation of intuition and intellect, matter and form, and facticity and validity, "destroy the coherence of a living nexus."61 Dilthey contended that epistemology cannot be reduced to even an interpretive psychology and yet it cannot do without it either: "It would certainly be impossible to have a thoroughly elaborated descriptive psychology as the foundation of epistemology. But, on the other hand, a presuppositionless theory of knowledge is an illusion."62 Knowledge and the theory of knowledge occur in the tension of validity claims and facticity of those who make such claims and their world. Rather than the "logicism" of reducing psychology and the human sciences to a foundational epistemology, or metaphysics of ideal validity, or the psychologism that reduces epistemic and logical validity to psychological facts, Dilthey argues for the interdependence of the theory of knowledge and the knowledge achieved in the individual sciences. Epistemology is a "founding" of the sciences only in the sense of selfrefl ection and articulation, as it is fundamentally founded in the practices of the sciences. Dilthey established the founding/ founded character of epistemology in the interdependence of a multiplicity of forms of inquiry.63 Dilthey describes how the interpretive psychology informing epistemology is "psychology in movement; to be sure, in movement towards a determined end. It rests on the selfrefl ection that includes psychic life examined in its entire scope-questions of universal validity, truth and reality are only determined according to their sense."64 Questions of meaning and validity are situated refl ectively in the context of their worldlybodily sense and socialhistorical signifi cation. Dilthey makes clear that epistemology cannot be deduced from selfknowing consciousness or from logic and psychology, and consequently descriptive psychology cannot be posited as a fi nal ground or foundation.65 It is incorrect to accuse Dilthey of psychologism, since Dilthey advoBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 278 4/7/14 10:34 AM 279 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y cated the importance of refl ecting on the facticity of consciousness and knowledge without reducing validity claims to mental processes or contents. This would run essentially counter to Dilthey's development of an interpretive human science of psychology rather than a causal explanatory psychology, which would reduce thought and the truth of its claims to physiologicalpsychological effects.66 Nor does Dilthey further "naturalize" truth in reducing mental to material causal relations, even as he refuses to bracket causality in order to isolate a realm of ideal meaning and value. The confusion is due to Husserl's analogical assimilation of Dilthey's position, including his psychology, to naturalism in the essay "Philosophy as Rigorous Science." Levinas accordingly commented in an early work that Husserl's problem with "psychologism" was its reliance on the ontology of naturalism.67 There is a radical questioning of and break with the reduction to naturalism in Dilthey, including the explanatory reduction to psychology and psychology to material relations. Explanatory psychology refl ects the unifying tendency that is inappropriate for the human sciences in being unreceptive to how its objects are given. It instead "sets up a causal system claiming to make all the manifestations of mental life intelligible"68 and presupposes that "it is able to derive from a limited number of welldetermined elements an absolutely complete and transparent knowledge of the appearance of the mental."69 It dismantles the lifenexus and puts in its place a constructed systematic totality.70 Such strategies have their role and usefulness, even within the human sciences, but are inappropriate for an interpretive psychology concerned with individuality. In the face of the opposition of positivist psychologists such as Ebbinghaus and neoKantians such as Rickert, Dilthey critiqued the assumptions of transparency and totality in explanatory psychology and resituated the legitimate use of causal explanation in relation to the interpretive inquiry of the human science of psychology. The interpretive or hermeneutical phenomena are formed in relation to evaluations, intentions, norms, prescriptions, purposes, rules, and values. Yet this dimension is seen in the context of the enactment and facticity of these phenomena rather than from a perspective that detaches them from their worldly socialhistorical embodiment, such as occurs in the subordination of the objects of the "cultural sciences" to questions of norms and values-understood as "goods" independent of sensuous desire, facticity, and particularity71-in neoKantianism.72 It is a misconception of metaphysics and the representationalism of disenchanted and secularized epistemology to believe that the transcendent and transcendental can be known outside of the immanence and phenomenality of the exBook NOW Schalow 13686.indb 279 4/7/14 10:34 AM 280 E R I C S . N E L S O N periential and empirical. The moment of transcendence and the transcendental conditions of life occur within life's immanence and can only be articulated receptively from out of its immanence. Dilthey's interpretive psychology is descriptive, formative, and analytic rather than causal, constructive, and hypothetical. This hermeneutical psychology is relevant for cognitive knowledge, as humans encounter and understand each other and their world out of the cogivenness and proximity of self and world and the historicity of their life. Humans are worldly historical beings, insofar as they act within a situation, that is, an environment and epoch. Similarly, descriptive and analytic psychology refers to this fundamental historicity of human life.73 Without the ontic, empirical, and temporal contexts and conditions of that life, epistemology is impossible and irrelevant. The language of grounding and founding is retained by Dilthey while being drastically reconceived as the hermeneutics of "a life" interpreted in relation to its overlapping contexts of history, language, and psychology. Language, Psychology, and Sensus Communis Dilthey's hermeneutics has its sources in language rather than being reduced to the individual's psychology.74 To mention an example from Of German Poetry and Music (Von Deutscher Dichtung und Musik), Dilthey showed the constitutive signifi cance of language, myth, and poetry (Sprache, Mythos, Dichtung) for the formation of communal life.75 Early human history is characterized exactly by the power of the whole over the individual such that individuals are formed by and bound to a common life (Gemeinleben) and sensus communis (Gemeingesit) characterized by language, myth, and poetry. This sensus communis is the condition of the greatest creations of a people and the greatest creation and creative epoch of a people is precisely in the formation and cultivation of their language and myth.76 The sensus communis is not only relevant to "early" traditional humanity. It plays a role in modernity, even as differentiation and individuation fundamentally characterize the achievement of modern societies. For example, Dilthey asked: "Who is the subject of Bach's music?" and responded that it was not the isolated individual, but the community as conditioned in relation to the form of that particular society, that is, what can be more typically described as the sensus communis of Protestant Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 280 4/7/14 10:34 AM 281 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y Christianity in eighteenthcentury Germany.77 The individuality and interiority privileged by this community were themselves an expression of this religious community rather than being merely subjective or the creation of isolated subjects.78 Individuality has its socialhistorical conditions such that the importance of the individual could not simply be separated from socialhistorical reality. Ordinary understanding and its complications are the point of departure for interpretation, which for Schleiermacher is twosided: linguistic interpretation analyzes the generalizing structures of language, and psychological interpretation concerns their individuation. Already in his early account of linguistic and psychological interpretation in Schleiermacher, Dilthey focused on the links between ideal meaning (validity), the facticity of language and history, and individuality and the psychological correlates of meaning. Dilthey's project of an interpretive psychology, that is, the descriptive and analytic psychology developed in his middle works, emerged in this context. Whereas psychological interpretation concerns the individuation of a life in relation to its various contexts, Dilthey transforms Schleiermacher's linguistic interpretation into interpretation of all actions and expressions of historical life. The arts of linguistic and psychological interpretation are both hermeneutical. Their common context is the interpretation of the interconnections and tensions across differences, which does not constitute the unity of a synthesis but at most a refl ective harmony. This contests the reifi ed division of a noninterpretive psychological science of "mind" in contrast with a hermeneutics of action and expression, as Apel argues.79 Overlooking the refl ective, interpretive, and pluralisticholistic character of Dilthey's project, which is evident in relation to the third Critique, has led to a common yet inaccurate claim that Dilthey is a dualist about nature and spirit, vital life and historical reason, explanation and understanding, or "indirect" and "external" objective experience (Erfahrung) and "direct" and "internal" subjective lived experience (Erlebnis).80 The latter claim is inappropriate to the extent that experience is interpretive, even of the "self," and consequently "indirect" or mediated without either direct immediate selftransparency or the mediated fi nality of synthesis and totality. The phenomenology of the movement of experience, whether construed as cognitive knowledge or lived experience, occurs in fi nitude, and is possible only because of the sensus communis and the intersubjective communicative dimensions of a historical form of life. If we consider the facticity of meaning, its relations to a historical context and individual situation, Dilthey does not suppress linguistic meaning and conceptual validity but articulated both in relation to the Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 281 4/7/14 10:34 AM 282 E R I C S . N E L S O N socialhistorical life in which they occur. Dilthey unfolded questions concerning the situation in which meaning as language occurs and how meaning is enacted in the comportment of a bodilyperceptual being in a milieu.81 Psychology is part of the human sciences insofar as the feeling of and for life cannot be excluded from them, and as feelings, desires, volitions, and thoughts of individual life need to be interpreted in order to pursue particular kinds of questions about worldly, socialhistorical, and linguistic agents. The lived experiential and empirical world is forgotten if its medium of interpretation in communication is lost in either the reduction to naturalistic or materialist causation in explanation or to ideal truths, values, and validity claims in philosophical demonstration. Notes I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of this volume, Frank Schalow and Richard Velkley. I would also like to thank Rudolf A. Makkreel, for his support and encouragement of my research since my time as a graduate student at Emory University, as well as Alice A. Frye. 1. GS 13/ 1:1; GS 5:330/ SW IV: 249. Unless otherwise noted, Dilthey references are to the pagination of the Gesammelte Schriften (GS) and, when available, translations in the Selected Works (SW): GS 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, ed. B. Groethuysen, 4th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1959); GS 5: Die Geistige Welt: Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Erste Hälfte: Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften, ed. G. Misch, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957); GS 7: Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. B. Groethuysen, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956); GS 8: Weltanschauungslehre: Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Philosophie, ed. B. Groethuysen, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1960); GS 13: Leben Schleiermachers: Auf Grund des Textes der 1. Aufl age von 1870 und der Zusätze aus dem Nachlass, ed. M. Redeker (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1970); GS 18: Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte: Vorarbeiten zur Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1865–1880), ed. H. Johach and F. Rodi (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977); GS 19: Grundlegung der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, ed. H. Johach and F. Rodi, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997); DDM: Von Deutscher Dichtung und Musik, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957); SW I: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); SW III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002); SW IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); SW V: Poetry and Experience, ed. R. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Princeton, Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 282 4/7/14 10:34 AM 283 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); DP: Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, trans. R. M. Zaner and K. I. Heiges (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). 2. AA 5:175: All references to Kant's works will be to the Akademie edition, unless otherwise noted, cited by volume and page: Immanuel Kant, Kants Gesammelte Schriften, edited under the Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenshaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902–97). 3. On the importance of and resonance between the third Critique for Dilthey, see Rudolf Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21–25; and Rudolf Makkreel, "The Feeling of Life: Some Kantian Sources of LifePhilosophy," DiltheyJahrbuch fi ir Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 3 (1985): 83–104. Signifi cantly, Makkreel shows in the latter that there is no evidence that Dilthey was explicitly aware of Kant's use of Lebensgefühl. 4. See E. S. Nelson, "Empiricism, Facticity, and the Immanence of Life in Dilthey," Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, vol. 18 (2007): 108–28. 5. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies; and Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 6. I develop this point in greater detail in Nelson, "Schleiermacher on Language, Religious Feeling, and the Ineffable," Epoché 8, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 297–312 and Nelson, "Schleiermacher and Dilthey," in History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 2: NineteenthCentury Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order (1840–1900), ed. A. D. Schrift and D. Conway (Chesham: Acumen Press, 2010), 139–60. 7. For an insightful overview, see Martin Schönfeld, The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8. On the greater complexity and nuance of Kant's historical and political thought, for instance, see my "Moral and Political Prudence in Kant," International Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 3, (September 2004): 305–19. 9. G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 207; D. Rutherford, "Leibniz and the Problem of Monadic Aggregation," Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 76 (1994): 65–90. On the importance of vital nature as a mediating link between matter and spirit in the development of Leibniz's thought, see Christia Mercer, Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 270–99. 10. Schönfeld, Philosophy of the Young Kant, 36–55. 11. Kant's deepening of the paradigm of the domination of nature is a major theme in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). Also note Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80; and Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 209–10. 12. JeanFrancois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982– 1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 67–71. Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 283 4/7/14 10:34 AM 284 E R I C S . N E L S O N 13. Kant, AA 5:245. 14. Kant, AA 20:202–3. 15. Kant, AA 5:238, 293. 16. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 164. 17. Kant, AA 5:317. 18. On the new and otherwise in Dilthey, see E. S. Nelson, "Disturbing Truth: Art, Finitude, and the Human Sciences in Dilthey," theory@buffalo, vol. 11: "Aesthetics and Finitude" (2007): 121–42. Also see the important discussion of difference and plurality in Dilthey's thought in Amnon Marom, "Universality, Particularity, and Potentiality: The Sources of Human Divergence as Arise from Wilhelm Dilthey's Writings," Human Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 1–13. 19. On the spontaneity and responsiveness of life, note Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 106, 156. 20. Kant, AA 5:265; on the sublime and supersensible conditions of the subject and its moral cultivation, compare Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 79–81, 83–84. 21. Schönfeld, Philosophy of the Young Kant, 35; on idealist and romantic Naturphilosophie, see Helmut MüllerSievers, SelfGeneration: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); and the initial essays in M. Friedman and A. Nordmann, The Kantian Legacy in NineteenthCentury Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 22. E. S. Nelson, "Begründbarkeit und Unergründlichkeit bei Wilhelm Dilthey," Existentia, Vol. 12, no. 1–2 (2002): 1–10. 23. See E. S. Nelson, "Dilthey and Carnap: Empiricism, LifePhilosophy, and Overcoming Metaphysics." Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy 23 (2012): 20–49. 24. Several points developed in this chapter rely and expand on Makkreel's analysis of the hermeneutical dimension of Kant's thought in Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (1990) and the importance of Kant's "feeling of life" for Dilthey in Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (1992). 25. Compare Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, 3–6. 26. Ibid., 47. 27. Dilthey, GS 6:107/ SW V:35. 28. For example, Paul Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader: Refl ection and Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 48. 29. H.G. Gadamer criticized Dilthey's position as an aporia between positivism and romanticism, Mill and Schleiermacher, in "Wilhelm Dilthey nach 150 Jahren: Zwischen Romantik und Positivismus," in Dilthey und Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. E. W. Orth (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), 157–82. 30. This argument differs from and corrects Gadamer's account in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 52–53; and Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004), 6–8. 31. See Kant's discussion of the "destination of the mind" ("Analytic of the Sublime") in Critique of Judgment, section 29, AA 5:269–70. 32. On Dilthey's "form of life" and Wittgenstein, see D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 284 4/7/14 10:34 AM 285 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y Induction, Probability, and Skepticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 181. 33. Heinrich Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 1986), 38–39. On the background and import of the different senses of facticity, see the introduction to François Raffoul and E. S. Nelson, eds., Rethinking Facticity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 1–21. 34. Dilthey, GS 5:68. 35. Dilthey, GS 1:58–59/ SW I:108–9. 36. Dilthey, GS 1:65/ SW I:115. 37. Dilthey, GS 1:9/ SW I:61. 38. Dilthey, GS 18:175. 39. Dilthey, GS 1:9/ SW I:61. 40. Dilthey, GS 18:61. 41. Dilthey, GS 1:9/ SW I:61. 42. Dilthey, GS 5:35. 43. Dilthey, GS 1:51/ SW I:101. 44. Dilthey, GS 5:60. 45. Dilthey, GS 1:33/ SW I:85. 46. Dilthey, GS 13/ 1:xxxiii. 47. Dilthey, GS 13/ 1:3. 48. Dilthey, GS 5:36. 49. Dilthey, GS 5:37. Dilthey developed "generation" in this early work (GS 5:36–41). Generation as facticity and possibility is taken up by Heidegger and plays a signifi cant role in his discussion of destiny in Sein und Zeit: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of 'Sein und Zeit,' trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 385. Heidegger cites GS 5:36–41 in this discussion. 50. Dilthey, GS 1:33/ SW I:85. 51. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 52. 52. Georg Misch explored in detail the affi nities and differences between Dilthey's categories of life and Heidegger's existentials in Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 53–55, 88–173. On the signifi cant differences between the hermeneutical philosophies of Misch and Heidegger, see E. S. Nelson, "Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy," Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39, sup. issue (2012): 10–30. 53. See Matthias Jung's account of this point in Erfahrung und Religion (Freiburg: Alber, 1999), 9–14, 274–75. Jung connects the fi rstperson perspective of "inner experience" with the immanence of the principle of phenomenality (13ff.). 54. Dilthey, GS 1:33/ SW I:85. 55. On the categorization of Dilthey's "three periods," see Matthias Jung's Dilthey zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1996), 14–18; and Johannes Rütsche's account in Das Leben aus der Schrift Verstehen (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999), 33–45. Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 285 4/7/14 10:34 AM 286 E R I C S . N E L S O N 56. This attitude is expressed in Levinas's assimilation of Dilthey to neoKantianism : "This same general [naturalistic] tendency of the times helps us understand why Dilthey and Windelband were questioning the method of the Geisteswissenschaften. To them, it was merely a question of completing Kant's theory of knowledge, which was only a theory of the knowledge of nature, with a similar theory for the sciences of the mind. Here, also, the only remaining problem of philosophy is that of a theory of knowledge." Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, trans. A. Orianne, 2nd ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1995), lvii. See also E. S. Nelson, "Biological and Historical Life: Heidegger between Levinas and Dilthey," in The Science, Politics, and Ontology of LifePhilosophy, ed. Scott M. Campbell and Paul Bruno (London: Continuum, 2013), 15–29. 57. For a detailed account of Dilthey's transformation of epistemology, see my "Interpreting Practice: Epistemology, Hermeneutics, and Historical Life in Dilthey," Idealistic Studies, 38, nos. 1–2 (2008): 105–22. 58. Dilthey, GS 5:148/ DP 32. 59. The "acquired psychic nexus" [erworbener seelischer Zusammenhang] is the nexus of explicit "higher" and the implicit "elementary" forms of understanding, of the intertwined structures of surface selfunderstandings and unconscious depth, through which the self both structures and is structured by the world. 60. Dilthey, GS 5:149/ DP 32. 61. Dilthey, GS 5:149/ DP 32. 62. Dilthey, GS 5:150/ DP 34. 63. Dilthey, GS 5:150–51/ DP 34. 64. Dilthey, GS 5:151/ DP 35. 65. Dilthey, GS 5:150/ DP 34. 66. Dilthey, GS 5:146–47/ DP 30–31. 67. Levinas, Theory of Intuition, lviii. 68. Dilthey, GS 5:139/ DP 23. 69. Dilthey, GS 5:139/ DP 24. 70. Dilthey, GS 5:144, 175/ DP 28, 57. 71. Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 39. 72. Rickert argues that the concept of the cultural sciences includes all of the human sciences "except for psychology" (Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 42). Psychology is excluded because it is concerned with facts that can be generalized rather than with the individuating values that defi ne a cultural science as cultural (ibid., 44–45, 74). The difference between the cultural and natural sciences consists in the fact that the former is individuating, the latter generalizing (ibid., 8). By excluding psychology from the cultural sciences, Rickert is rejecting Dilthey's claim that psychology is interpretive and fundamentally concerns individuation (compare ibid., 86–87). Heidegger notes how Rickert treated psychology as analogous to mechanics and thereby placed it at the opposite end of those sciences concerned with validity (logic) and value (the cultural sciences) (Heidegger, GA 21:89). Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 286 4/7/14 10:34 AM 287 K A N T A N D D I L T H E Y 73. Dilthey, GS 5:180/ DP 62–63. 74. Dilthey, GS 14:623/ SW IV:61. 75. Dilthey, DDM 27. 76. Dilthey, DDM 27. 77. Dilthey, DDM 193. 78. Dilthey, DDM 197. 79. Compare Kant, AA 5:185–86, 190; KarlOtto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 27, 160. 80. Michael Lessnoff, in an otherwise good account highlighting Dilthey's empiricism and relation to Hume, asserts this in "Dilthey," ed. S. G. Shanker, G. H. R. Parkinson, C. L. Ten, Routledge History of Philosophy: Vol. 7, The Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1994), 207. 81. Dilthey, GS 19:15. Book NOW Schalow 13686.indb 287 4/7/14 10:34 AM