History of philosophy

History of philosophy The resurgence of the history of philosophy and how to do it has seen a growing number of books on individual philosophers and philosophical movements. Richard Rorty in The historiography of philosophy: four genres discussed this question of the history of philosophy, and proposed four genres. 1. He suggested that the least useful model of history of philosophy is that of neo-Kantian Windelband’s model of value complexes. The problem is that these create a philosophical canon on the basis of a limited number of perennial philosophical questions (doxographical model). Rorty notes that this genre of historiography is too disconnected from individual intellectuals but that it may make some sense if it covers only a century or two. 2. Analytic philosophers are generally disdainful of the history of philosophy. At best they are interested in a second genre namely rational reconstruction about what previous philosophers had to say about our contemporary problems (of language, meaning, reference). 3. There are also those who engage in historical reconstruction but obviously this too must begin from current philosophical problems. Any reconstruction is selective but in the final analysis, claims Quentin Skinner, it is constrained by the demand that the account be intelligible to the original thinker. 4. The fourth genre proposed by Rorty is what he calls Geistesgeschichte (e.g., Foucault’s The order of things or MacIntyre’s After virtue). These are mid-range narrative informed by intellectual history in general and is aimed at the level of problematics rather than solutions. For example, Foucault shows that starting with Kant, the question “what is man?” takes on urgency and led to different ways of conceiving of man. MacIntyre asks why traditional conceptions of virtue have been lost sight of and then suggests that ethics revive these conceptions. Makkreel agrees however he notes that the term Geistesgeschichte is usually associated with Dilthey’s approach to history and the question is whether Dilthey’s approach can make the history of philosophy more historical. But Jonathan Ree has asked whether such terms as historicism, culture, and epoch still are useful (after Popper destroyed the meaning of historicism) and Makkreel sets it as his goal to examine Dilthey relation to historicism/culture/epoch. Dilthey and historicism We can distinguish two brands of historicism. (1) Johann Herder and his cosmopolitan, culture-oriented nationalism and (2) von Humboldt’s and Ranke’s state centered nationalism. Herder’s historicism reveled in diversity of nationalisms and cultures, whereas Ranke’s Prussian school led to exclusivist tendencies. Dilthey as the retrospective epistemologist of historicism must be distinguished from both in that he questions the fundamental metaphysical concept of “nation”/Volkseele. Indeed Dilthey avoids all metaphysics whether of organicism of the German Historical School or of dialectics of Hegel (Idealism). Herder and Kant (despite their differences) believed there to be a purpose to history which involved human development through culture. Kant held that culture is nature’s way of pushing us to become independent of nature in liberating us from conditions that impair our freedom. Thus culture should establish institutions that free us to develop morally. For Kant this meant nations with republican constitutions and a league of nations that preserves peace among them. Thus Kant held that this cultural telos was universal and moral. Herder’s focus is the development of human diversity and individuality. Hegel tried to reconcile these two conceptions in his dialectic philosophy of history by taking Kant’s transcendental universal claims and Herder’s historicist reverence for multiplicity…which then Dilthey undermines in rejecting any rational or divine purpose to history. Of course, Dilthey does acknowledge purpose and progress in history but claims that these can be measured only in specific domains. There is no grand narrative; there are no special laws of history because history is not a separate/distinct metaphysical domain. Dilthey’s claims to explain nature and understand history is sometimes taken to mean that there is a metaphysical split between the natural and historical world, but his epistemological distinction between natural and human sciences makes no such a split. Instead in 1883 he shows that, in manner anticipating Husserl, the subject matter of the natural sciences is actually an ideal construction. Thus, the natural sciences abstract from the qualitative richness/facticity of the lived world in order to conceptually explain a part of the contents of external reality. Thus, the fundamental concepts of the natural sciences do not capture what is ultimately real in the external world; they merely allow the hypothetical prediction/explanation of its phenomenal determinations, and hence they do not explain the original factical sense of reality as the overall nexus of life (Zusammenhang des Lebens). Both nature and history have their place in this all-inclusive nexus of life but not such that they can be clearly separated as both have their place in the all-inclusive nexus of life. We access reality in our lived experience and find there nature and living nature. The human sciences cannot ignore either kinds of nature. It must understand the natural world and it must describe how we act on and reshape the natural world to our purposes. But if Dilthey admits to continuity between nature and history what is the basis for his distinction between the two? The answer has to do with the extent to which the sciences abstract from the life nexus. Whereas the natural science abstract as much as possible – hence “theoretical”, whereas the human sciences remain oriented to the life nexus in which both theory and practice are primordial. Later Dilthey came to describe that aspect of the life nexus influenced by human practices as the sphere of objective spirit. This is the sum total of human objectifications, including artistic, religious, and philosophical expressions which Hegel had reserved for Absolute Spirit. Objectifications are for Dilthey the communal (public) framework of elementary understanding. Higher understanding (interpretation) characteristic of the human science is invoked when elementary understanding becomes puzzling (anomalies). The task of higher understanding is to find a more appropriate context in terms of which understanding can assert itself. Thus, the sphere of objectification must be articulated into more specific contexts/spheres which Dilthey calls “systems of influence” (Wirkungszusammenhange). These systems are divided into two classes: cultural systems (in which we voluntarily unite to common purpose) and associations of the external organization of society (institutions which we always already find ourselves). Both classes of systems provide relatively determinate contexts in terms of which objectifications can be refined by the higher understanding. While philosophy provides for the highest understanding it nevertheless still relies on understanding in the other human sciences. Hence philosophy cannot exclude itself from the hermeneutical circle of the empirical human sciences. Thus, there is no strict exegesis of a philosopher’s text but such an exegesis must refer to both the cultural systems and external organization of society and, in this effort, the (later) reader is able to understand the author better than he did himself. As indicated above, Dilthey claims that historical progress can only be measured in specific domains, and these are the two classes of systems: (1) cultural systems and (2) external organization of society. Although there are no general laws of history, Dilthey did think that laws of development could be discovered within specific cultural or social systems even as these laws were unlikely to determine the development of the other systems (e.g., in his review of Marx’s Das Kapital, Dilthey spoke with interest of Marx’s law of accumulation of capital, but unlike Marx, Dilthey thought that any purposive development within one system is unlikely to determine the development in other systems). In speaking of epochs (of, for example, the arts), Dilthey notes that these do not coincide (e.g., Baroque epoch of painting came before Baroque epoch of music) because each has its own conditions, including technical advances, and hence the epochs can be out of phase. Thus epochs are not natural divisions of history, but retrospective historical judgments. Dilthey’s historicism (if one can all it that) thus involves a complex conception of the historical world. In the Aufbau (The formation of the historical world in the human sciences) he notes that history is not so much given as it is a concrete construct produced through the various human sciences. No human action or product can be understood except by regarding it as the cross-section of the several cultural and social systems. 20th c. views of historicity Heidegger (Phenomenology of intuition and expression, 1920) takes over Dilthey’s categories of lived experience, life nexus, facticity, and systems of influence as a means of understanding history. He accepts Dilthey’s effort to understand life on its own terms. In his 19921-22 lecture course on Aristotle, Heidegger looks to Dilthey and Aristotle for the categories that “come to life from life itself in an originary way”. Yet Heidegger in contrast to Aristotle and Dilthey who describe a multivarious reality, Heidegger increasingly attempts to trace back this multivarious-ness of history to a unitary origin. His attempt to understand historicity leads him to regress behind history itself. Hence, Heidegger dismisses Dilthey’s Aufbau as ontical, and it is replaced by an ontological Abbau or deconstruction that points to an originary experience of Being. If Dilthey thought of history as purposive without purpose, Heidegger gives up on purpose/teleology altogether. The history of the West is a series of declines from original unconcealment of truth that has been gradually covered up and needs to be retrieved. Contemporary existence in the Abendland is at the furthest remove (eschaton) from the origin of history. Instead of historical progression (telos), Heidegger views history from its first original point but we cannot retrieve this original point through historiographic empirical research rather we must retrieve by being open to our own future as a new dawn (Nietzsche). “If we think within the eschatology of (or remove from) Being, then we must someday anticipate the former dawn in the dawn to come; today we must learn to ponder this former dawn through what is imminent.” Heidegger attacks historicism as the viewpoint that sees the future as determined by the past and present in a continuous predictable sequence of events. On Heidegger’s view, 19th c. historicism is far from being overcome but is in fact seen as the triumphant organization of technology, of increasing control that provides a sense of closure and closes off any possibility of original understanding of Being. If the artist is open to the future in instituting new epochs of world history – i.e., retrieved the original dawn (Wiederholung) by a new dawn, Heidegger also claims that each new epoch is an epoch of errancy. One cannot derive epoch one from the other (as if you could string epochs together). There is tradition from epoch to epoch but this tradition emerges each time from the concealment of the destiny. The tradition of Being that remerges time and again in different epochs is thus characterized by ruptures/breaks. All efforts to rationalize these is also to conceal the question of Being. Derrida interprets this Wiederholung (original dawn) not as the retrieval of an original beginning but as a series of repetitions that have no beginning. There is for Derrida no original experience of Being in relation to which later epochs fall into errancy. If Heidegger radically questioned the orthodox interpretation of history (historicism), Derrida disperses the idea of a canonical tradition altogether (he doesn’t like Heidegger even try to reinterpret it). The dispersive effect of deconstruction can be seen in James Hillis Miller’s work who when referring to Whitehead’s claim that philosophy is merely a series of footnotes to Plato, writes that Plato is merely a footnote to still earlier footnote, etc. without ever reaching a primary text. Thus there is no beginning to philosophical/literary traditions that can ground these and justify any hermeneutical search for a determinate meaning. Poetry and philosophy have no advantage over the natural sciences and their efforts to explain natural phenomena. Just as the chain of cause and effect leads to an infinite regress without a metaphysical postulate of a first cause, so the chain of repetitions that constitute our intellectual tradition has neither a unifying telos nor a point of origin… Heidegger urged a radically new interpretation of our philosophical tradition, but Derrida disperses the idea of tradition altogether (there is no primary text). Neither philosophy nor poetry has any advantage over say science in establishing the significance of life. Without a point of origin and without a unifying telos there cannot be a canonical tradition (but only elusive textual traces). Gadamer has a more conservative but richer sense of tradition and historicity. He reinstates the dimensions of culture and institutionalization that Heidegger downplayed. This led him to recover a sense of hermeneutics lost in the German exegetical tradition going back to the Romantics, namely the application necessary to make an old text/problem relevant to the present day. Application as practiced in theological and judicial hermeneutics implicitly occurs in all domains of culture and it allows every human product to have an effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte). This means that Geistesgeschichte cannot be reduced to a history of ideas whose meaning remains constant, and while Gadamer suggests there may be a constant set of issues their ramifications can only be gradually explicated. Appealing to Aristotle’s phronesis in seeing whether traditional norms still apply, we cannot however decide whether these norms are still worth preserving. For that we need something like Kant’s reflective judgment, a critical capacity to supplement given universals with new universals not yet available. Kant and history of culture Gadamer’s effective history lacks a critical dimension because it accepts the authority of tradition. That is, Gadamer shares with Heidegger a regressive interest (i.e., tradition) but he lacks Heidegger’s radical openness to the future (recovery of Being), one that would make an authentic (eigentliche) philosophical response to tradition possible. Kant in his 3rd Critique proposes certain conceptions of culture and immanent purposiveness which can be used in a reflective (non-determinative) manner to give a critical edge to Geistesgeschichte. In fact, Kant proposed a theory of authentic interpretation (authentische Auslegung) that can be applied to his philosophical interest in history. In his later writings Kant becomes interested in history as a way of orienting philosophy to the problems of humanity. The meaning of history is not in accordance with traditional theodicies which project what nature intends to make of man but instead is pragmatically conceived in terms of what man can make of himself (what is man?). Kant rejects traditional theodicies as doctrinal or metaphysical speculations about history, and proposes an authentic interpretation of the future in accordance with the demands of practical reason (cf. Aristotle’s phronesis). Thus, the infinitely remote highest good of the 1st Critique is transformed into the idea of the ultimate purpose of history in the 3rd Critique. This transformation is made possible by Kant’s theory of culture. Kant distinguishes two modes of culture: (1) culture of skill and (2) culture of discipline. (1) The culture of skill develops man’s natural capacities under the formal conditions that promote his aptitude for purpose in general. The purposiveness of nature is fulfilled by ordering man’s relations in a civil society (Gesellschaft) and a cosmopolitan whole. But the culture of skill is not sufficient to define man’s ultimate purpose, for it is not adequate to furthering the will in the determination and choice of purposes. Thus, while a cosmopolitan society would provide for optimal historical conditions for human culture, it cannot ensure that man’s will is in conformity with the maxims of free purposes. (2) What is required is also a culture of discipline which consists in freeing the will from the desires. Discipline does not eliminate the desire but gains some kind of rational control over the desires so that we are not tied to the sensuous alone. The beautiful arts and sciences contribute to this culture of discipline because they make us more civilized, if not morally better, and win us a measure of freedom from our sensuous propensities. This disciplining of our inclinations is negative but it brings about a positive result by opening us up to purposes that are higher than natural purposes. Thus, the culture of discipline is the striving of nature to a cultivation which makes us receptive to higher purposes than nature can itself supply. So that while all culture involves the process of nature preparing humans to transcend nature, it is the culture of discipline that brings humans to the crucial point where they recognize their aptitude for higher purposes and assert their independence from purely natural purposes. Kant can be distinguished from Herder in that he gives a different emphasis to the cultures of skill and discipline. Herder constructs a speculative history of humanity by extrapolating the organic processes of Bildung, or formation, which increasingly makes us independent of nature. Kant is critical of Herder’s organic analogies for these are no less uncritical than doctrinal theodicies. An authentic interpretation of history must concentrate on the culture of discipline for it is only here that we are in control. The culture of discipline produces mental Bildung that makes us increasingly independent of nature. As Gadamer has pointed out mental Bildung has no goals outside itself and transcends the mere cultivation of talents. Here purposiveness of culture is purely immanent. The split between nature and history initiated in Kant’s theory of culture is then exacerbated in the neo-Kantian theory of the Kulturwissenschaften. By conceiving of culture as a set of apriori values, Windelband and Rickert judge history by the degree to which these values are actualized. Kant’s authentic history of culture merely projected certain aesthetic and teleological ideas to orient our own strivings but Windelband and Rickert translate these reflective ideas into cognitive concepts that allow us to measure the whole of history in terms of a scale of values. The neo-Kantians rejected Dilthey’s theory of Geisteswissenschaften precisely because it made room for psychological and autobiographical understanding of human individuality. In contrast, the neo-Kantians would have the individuality of the idiographic method defined by unique complexes of value concepts. Thus, Dilthey’s individuality is established by the fact that human beings are not exhausted by the values of any cultural system. Every great individual/creator must be understood as the point of intersection of different cultural systems. The values system of the neo-Kantians was a perfect grand-scale linear type of history of philosophy for which Windelband is famous. In contrast Dilthey’s theory of the Geisteswissenschaften had a much richer and broader view of history of philosophy. Toward an authentic history of philosophy One can always write histories of philosophies as a series of arguments that different philosopher have had over time. This approach would take philosophy as a distinct cultural system that is conceived to develop autonomously. Dilthey’s hope that we could formulate laws governing the development of each cultural system was a reasonable way to scale-down the pervasive 19th c. faith in grand-scale historical laws. Yet today this seems like a vain hope to think of laws of cultural systems (even as there may be progress in a limited sense). But when it comes to the philosophical reflection on the meaning of life, Dilthey has no illusions about there being progress. In fact, as the social and cultural conditions of life become increasingly complex so it is increasingly difficult to develop a satisfactory Weltanschauung that articulates the meaning of life. The Geistesgeschichte of philosophy may well be regressive as it confronts ever more serious crises. Such a history is not likely to be a self-justificatory conversation with our ancestors which is how Rorty conceives the genre he calls Geistesgeschichte. Rorty thinks that we can now claim to be posing better questions even as we may not be better at solving the traditional problems that puzzled our ancestors. But is it not the case we that we may be able to do so because our conditions of life have become more complex? If philosophy is an attempt to reflect on problems of our time and articulate a Weltanschauung then it may be no better than literature or religion. Weltanschauung can have, after all, poetic, religious, and philosophical formulations. What distinguishes a philosophical formulation of Weltanschauung is that it not only establishes a certain framework for evaluating the meaning of life but it always remains in touch with the sciences. Thus superiority of a philosophical Weltanschauung is at the same time a disadvantage: to reconcile science and wisdom in a metaphysical system is one that led Dilthey to formulate three irreducible perspectives (worldviews): naturalism, idealism of freedom, and objective idealism. Husserl criticized Dilthey for this relativism (of worldviews) for Husserl thought that Dilthey was merely generalizing from historical data (and hence the worldviews are merely generalizations). Husserl therefore ignored Dilthey’s claim that the metaphysical formulation of a worldview represents an impossible project – namely to synthesize what cannot be synthesized, to produce a total comprehension where only an understanding of an indeterminate whole is possible. Husserl condemns metaphysical interpretations to the vicious cycle of repeatable types. But this has implications for the non-totalizing interpretations of the human sciences. Dilthey’s contribution here is his effort to locate certain general psychological and historical structures that prevent the hermeneutical circle in the human sciences from becoming vicious. Although Dilthey’s system of the human sciences overcomes relativism, it also no longer grants philosophy special status. Philosophy has itself been transcended (spawning ever new sciences) and hence must come to historically understand this kind of interdisciplinary inter-branching if it is to have some kind of role today. If philosophy can no longer initiate the questions of our age, it can still perform some adjudicatory function in resolving the “conflict of the faculties” (Kant). A quasi Kantian and Diltheyan approach to the history of philosophy would orient the traditional linear or horizontal narrative to an interdisciplinary vertical framework. We must learn to narrative disciplinary histories in relation to other disciplines… and this is true also for philosophy which has in the past merely tolerated other disciplines as inferior. The alternative is not to idolize other disciplines but to flesh out what the disciplines together with philosophy have to say/mean. If metaphysical constructions are doomed because there cannot be one hierarchical system, then the alternative is cross-illumination among disciplines. Thus, a set of philosophical ideas which have been refuted might well continue in modified form to influence the special sciences. Philosophy cannot afford to be a meta-discipline (in Hegelian terms, owlishly reflecting on the previous day, after the fact). To be Promethean (forward looking) and well as Epimethean (backward looking), philosophy must step back far enough into recent history to generate momentum to project into the future. Kant and Heidegger both had versions of an authentic history open to the future. Kant projected his cosmopolitan future by reinforcing his philosophical analysis with contemporary political experience of, for example, the French Revolution which he saw as a sign of progress because despite its failings it has elicited a sympathetic response from other countries. Heidegger’s openness calls for a fundamental bond between philosophers (Epimethena) and poets (Promethean). No single lineage can project an authentic future. Only a philosophy tied to the special sciences can gage where we stand and where we are going. The answer to how to write a history of philosophy thus lies in refining our understanding of the middle range of cultural structures. The study of texts qua texts can lead to arbitrary rational constructions. Historical reconstructions of social contexts can lead to antiquarianism. In rejecting the norms of mere texts and mere contexts, Quentin Skinner proposed a more adequate framework for historical understanding not only what the author of the text intended to say but also what he intended to achieve in writing the text. This involves examining the illocutionary force or intended use of a text. This is really the counterpart to Dilthey’s cultural historical approach which starts with context (to understand is to understand it is relation to the whole). But Dilthey was not content to orient understanding in terms of the objective spiritual medium of tradition for the human sciences were also called to define specific cultural contexts called systems of influence. Dilthey was instrumental in moving hermeneutics from its exalted religious and literary level of textual exegesis to the level of all historical objectifications. Actions/products/works too can be read as texts. Thus, Dilthey moved in the direction opposite Skinner who read texts as actions. Using actions as texts and texts as actions (reading from let to right and from right to left) require that we examine language (use) as core to any psychological-sociological analysis (cf. Charles Taylor).. References Rorty, R. (1984). The historiography of philosophy: four genres. In R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in history (64-65). Cambridge. Geistesgechichte Dilthey on self and history: Gesitesgeschichte. (cf. Kornberg) Intellectual history or Geistesgeschichte (Dilthey, Burckhardt or Lovejoy), the “history of the human spirit” as the great march through religious, scientific, and philosophical Weltanschauungen, is doomed to be nothing more than the history of intellectuals [see George Mosse, American Historical Rev. 1969, LXXXV (2)]. Dilthey offers us a Geistesgeschichte which is indeed about the higher reaches of human culture, ideas, values (which follow up on Ranke, Meinecke, Burckhardt). But it would be wrong to caricature Dilthey as neglecting social history even as he downplayed the relation between social-political forces and ideas. He was concerned in his neo-idealist way about “ideas wrestling with nature” (Meinecke). One decisive reality for Dilthey was the psychological dynamics at work in historical innovation; in which men with charismatic power forged new belief systems, new life-styles, and new forms of human integrity. Dilthey is concerned with the description of effects not the analysis of causes- and these effects were focused on the realization of human freedom. It is spiritual and inward freedom that leads to powerful action. The decisive element in historical progress lies in the relation between conditions of society that determine and require, and the genius who forces these elements in an unpredictable ways, realizes wishes, and transforms ideals into realities. The movers of history possess an inner freedom to sustain ideal strivings and achieve authentic selfhood and this is the source of charismatic power. This concern with inner freedom also leads Dilthey to exaggerate the spiritual innovations of the great man and his causal efficacy in molding the character of an epoch. Hence Dilthey’s view of history was conceived in a view of exceptional human nature which is captured in the art of biography. Significant individuals allow us greater insight into human life and so establish for all of us a norm, or a model, of what is possible in the realm of spirit. View of human nature: descriptive and analytical psychology Here Dilthey offers an attack on scientific psychology as reductionist and determinist. The particular enemies were associationism and psychophysical parallelism, namely the theories that built on the exact natural sciences. In his polemic against explanatory psychology, he took on James Mill, J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, and August Comte. Natural physical categories were not applicable to the psyche: cause and effect, essentialism (fixed nature of things), and elementism all led to a one-dimensional and mechanistic conception of human nature which would eliminate all achievements from human existence. For Dilthey the whole self was an active independent psychic agency with it sown dynamics and inherent aims. The reason scientific psychology eliminated the self was its image as “soul”. The activity of the whole self takes the following form. Human personality shapes itself spontaneously in the direction of psychic integration and wholeness. In the course of development the self organizes around dominant value strivings and life ideals that then become the ruling factor for integration. The fully developed personality is not by and large a chaos of conflicting strivings, fragmented compulsions, transitory urges, and contradictory traits as such is personality is undeveloped. Rather what operates in the developed personality is “a principle of unity that subordinates the energies of personality to a purposive structure”. One can speak here of a telos of personality, a spontaneous push to development and the great determining agency of human personality. In exceptional individuals this acquires psychic nexus is played out in towering energy. A self-image is shaped, and ideal possibilities are projected into the future. Memory plays a key role as that dynamic agency linking meaning of one’s past to one’s present, and one’s projections into the future. Human development cannot achieve more than a unified structure which, adapted to the conditions of existence, is significant and enclosed in itself. The achievement of personality is a self-transformation from object to subject. From the individual as object as determined by the passive play of stimuli, moods and pulls to an active subject. The center of psychic life existing independently of external forces (influences and movements) becomes more powerful and more unified, and feels itself in this unified autonomy: there grows the consciousness of being an inherent aim….In development one becomes increasingly aware of oneself as a being tending towards unity. This unity shapes itself around the life values and the ideal self-image we embrace and internalize, In the process of development one feels increasingly aware of oneself, less determined by external forces and more selectively oriented to the world in terms of one’s own aims/purposes. My own development, the realization of those powers within me identified with my life-values, becomes my life-aim. Obviously Dilthey appreciated that most people do not achieve integration in this self-directed way but he is preoccupied with the dynamics of fulfillment (not pathology) in attaining the highest levels of psychic development. It I son such a basis that Dilthey bitterly attacked psychological methodologies and conceptualizations that led to reductionist and determinist view of the psyche. First he attacked the theory of psychological parallelism (where psychic events accompany physical life). What psychophysical parallelism maintains is that psychic phenomena are but epiphenomenal of the physical correlates that were deemed to be its causal origins. Of course, Dilthey deemed man to be a “psychophysical unity” rather what he complained about was the tendency towards physiological explanations as a sufficient account of the human psyche. The image of man that emerges here (in psychophysical parallelism) is one of localization of function and man as a passive and reactive being. Spontaneity and freedom are here ignored as shadowy emanations of physical foundations. The second problem Dilthey had with scientific psychology was it elementalism, namely the reduction of psychic phenomena to atom-like elements operating in lawful relations. These elements may be sensations, feelings, and ideas which then becomes the active agents of psychic life, the main operative factors in the mind. As a result the telos of psychic life remains unacknowledged; it becomes an illusion for its unity and solidity cannot be derived from the aggregate of elements. The whole self and its strivings are eliminated from the scientific canon. What could not be lawfully established was removed from the science of psychology. What Dilthey rejects is the model of human action that is short-range and reactive and could be analyzed in terms of cause and effect. Human action became periodic and episodic. In contrast, Dilthey emphasizes the self-propelled and long-range character of human action in the fulfillment of life ideals in realization of one’s particular energies. The third problem is that of associationism. In his 1894 Psychology, Dilthey set himself the task of an empirical psychology that would yet be adequate to human personality. Later in his Aufbau and Weltanschauungslehre, he abandoned this enterprise (of articulating a theory of lived experience) and set out on a more philosophical task of understanding the self, developing a language strikingly similar to Bergson’s avoiding both the metaphysical and Idealist language and grounding this task in the reflective understanding of self-creation (see also Nietzsche). Thus, in the Aufbau, Dilthey speaks of the self as perpetually unfinished, as a possibility to be realized. We all live in the acquired and habituated fixity of our being. However, and this is what the consciousness of freedom rests on, many possibilities of life lie in us in memory and our will directed towards the future that never becomes fixed. Freedom is consciousness of being able to realize one’s possibilities (potentialities) in the growth of self-knowledge. Vital life never becomes fixed; it is always possible for me to experience my being in new ways. Human nature is not a fixed datum to which I must adjust/adapt and which I must accept. Human nature is perpetually constituted by the self. Historical innovators forge new forms of self-understanding and create new models of human existence. Obviously these new forms are not spun out of thin air; they do have to do with desires and ideals ruled by historical conditions. But in reflecting/articulating these conditions of experience there arises a passion for a new form of integrity, psychic integration and wholeness. We can speak here of personality as something constituted by inner determinants because of the human attribute of self-consciousness and the capacity to take responsibility for one’s life (active attitude towards existence). Even if we see personality as the sum total of determinate forces, everything is still left…man to one to whom all this has happened is still the conscious being who can encompass these determinants in reflection, and gain perspective on them. Here later in his life Dilthey offers an extraordinarily fluid and dynamic conception of self. The course of life is held together in its succession through consciousness of identity…we experience ourselves as a meaningful unity, constituted by meaningful connection. We do not experience ourselves as the mere crystallization of numerous causal factors working to shape us. In fact, those who do experience themselves in this way are experiencing self-alienation. We not only experience ourselves as a meaningful unity, we also experience ourselves as shaping ourselves, determined from within. Our self-awareness revolves around several centers such as desire, ideals, talents, tasks, vocation, or life plan. Dilthey’s perspective is here heavily voluntarist even as our identity is not merely made up of decisions and commitments (contra Sartre). Rather it is made up of all those acts and experiences in which we take possession of our life as free and active agents. Our identity then crystallizes out of life experiences, crucial moments of self-awareness, important ideals that influence us, and key decisions and commitment that set us along a certain path. Thus identity development is more than absorbing value (from culture and society) and establishing ends/purposes (an internalization/absorption model), rather when life is lived authentically we are engaged in reflection/articulation of experience through which values are actively appropriated and decisions are made in a growing sense of a life-task (idealization of self perfection). This image is no longer one of hedonism or utilitarianism. First of all, it is often the case that the life of self-awareness leads to an anguished spiritual journey. Moreover, Dilthey is concerned with what we call higher values, values merging from great historical traditions/religions, from the Enlightenment to Stoicism. This view of values comes out of our Idealist tradition of universal ideals, heroic ideal, humanitarian ideals and ideals of personal development. Dilthey is interested in how these ideals steer humanity to higher ends since commitment to such values often involve courage and self-sacrifice, foster autonomy rather than dependency. Unlike Nietzsche or Freud, Dilthey is not interested in the pathology of values and the way these mask lower human impulses. He is concerned with life-enhancing modes existence: life in the context of consciousness and self-consciousness in an affirmation of inward freedom. Horkheimer alluded to Dilthey’s failing in linking intellectual movements to their social contexts – emphasizing self-awareness, self-struggle, and the triumph of the will, and in the face of these, social class plays a lesser role. Along with Cassirer, Dilthey is focused on intellectual biography. Of course Dilthey is aware that in many ways we are not free, but his focus is on the efficacy of self-awareness. But the existence of freedom assumes the existence of un-freedom, and decision assumes indecision. As Mannheim writes of the German ideals of personality culture, this tradition takes the development of personality as a process of intrinsic growth, self-creation and finding oneself. It is the desire for integrity and self- knowledge that are the dynamics of identity. Dilthey view of history must be understood in the light of this view of personality. If Dilthey transformed intellectual history into history of intellectuals, it was because he read into history his beliefs and affirmations of human nature. History becomes a theatre of individualism. All the historical individual Dilthey studies reveal a powerful inwardness. In their breakthrough to new life-values they shape their personalities around new forms of integrity. What Dilthey celebrates in all of them is autonomy. Free from the judgment of others and the influences of the external world. The norms they embrace are an amalgam of prevailing influences and new creations. For there is something in man that is not suffocated by the influences upon him, but transforms them these into norms. Significant individuals adhere to emerge out of certain images of idealized historical communities and traditions. And these norms are embraced in an agonizing journey of self-knowledge. This 19th c. sense of individualism in which fulfillment means development of personality, individual reflection and self-awareness are given more due than their due as forces promoting development. Individualism is here focused on inwardness and an inward spiritualized conception of freedom rather than say the meaning of freedom as, for example, determination in the political realm. Celebrated are the values of inward life, forthrightness, self-consciousness, development, self-perfection, and existential depths. Already in his youth, Dilthey reveals an acute sense of individual aloneness and uniqueness. Life is an odyssey of self-discovery – initially chaotic- and then eventually in given form to what one really is in establishing a center within oneself from which to experience and act on the world. Life becomes an act of self-determination and identity merges out of the lonely acts of self-creation. The idea that the individual is thrown back upon himself, alone in the world with whatever resources he can muster out of his inner being, is also part of the context that is part of the crises of his age, namely the decline of theology and metaphysics. There is no way of grounding religious and ethical imperative in an unchanging objective reality existing independently of the vagaries of human subjectivity. Without objective certainties, rooted in traditions of metaphysics and theology that once guided the human spirit, Dilthey wanted to still this crisis by achieving a great turn to subjectivity. The systematic investigation of the structures of subjectivity would reveal an inner cosmos in the self where the dynamics of inner freedom and existential moods prevailed. But this means that the spiritual of life finds its validity in concrete human experience and that this spiritual aspects of life depended on the ability of the individual to find these sources within himself. Getting in touch with the life of the spirit meant plumbing introspective depths, and it meant strengthening individuality in forming a more stable center within the self. This is the pervasive form of German individualism as it absorbed the historic German heritage of inwardness and spirituality (as seen later in Jaspers and Heidegger where the core of the human condition becomes man as lonely self-creator). Modern individualism takes on many forms and issues in many ideals of self-fulfillment (e.g., sensuous expansiveness, self-determination,), but Dilthey’s brand of individualism stand squarely within traditions and brought forth the versions of existentialism in the 20th c., stressing introspective awareness, psychological depth, and the transcendent power of self-awareness. Of course, Dilthey did much more than propose a new psychology and he is perhaps best known for his theory of cultural wholes (Weltanschauunglehre). He tried to mediate between German historicism and German Idealism (Hegel). The German historical school proposed various notions of collective Geist (Gemeingeist). One version was shaped in conscious opposition to the 18th c. rationalist universalism which would counter the idea of a universal human nature liberated by a system of universal laws and morals (of Enlightenment rationalism). German historians affirmed instead the particularity of national character and saw religion, morals, and laws of a nation as slowly maturing historical accretions of a specific national Volkgeist. The forces of creativity were not to be found in the rationalist fiat but in national customs and mores bound up with a specific social order. As opposed to the Enlightenment self-sufficiency of the individual, these historians saw human identity as an intensely social phenomenon (national character was central to personal identity). Dilthey traced the fortunes of this concept of collective Geist during the time of the flowering of German Idealism. Hegel’s intellectualized notion of collective Geist which finds its expression not in popular beliefs/customs but in philosophy, namely the rational will’s growing self-awareness. This tradition was continued by Humboldt and Droysen who gave the notion of collective Geist an Idealistic content as the agent of ideas and ethical imperatives tooted in transcendental realities. Dilthey saw it as his task to rescue Idealism from the onslaught of militant positivism by placing Idealism on a firm empirical footing. Positivism was hostile to the great metaphysical and religious traditions of the West, whereas Dilthey thought it necessary to restore the living core of Idealist in its view of human spirit by revamping its key conceptions. German historical thought (historicism) was the heir of Idealism but such notions as Geist, or national Geist, and the affirmation of transcendental ideas in history would all expire from the masterful scientific conceptualizations of Comte or Mill unless these ideas received empirical grounding in theory of human nature and human knowledge. Dilthey contributed to both but what is pertinent here in the context Dilthey’s individualism is his subtle methodological delineation of the relationship between individuals and cultural wholes. For Dilthey there are two historical realities: the individual and those super-individual units such as nations into which the individual is born. Dilthey’s effort was to define those super-individual units (and he pursued this throughout his life whatever other changes he may have made). He attacked those idealist units through his nominalist conscience by providing rigorous standards for understanding their complexity. According to Dilthey the individual is not simply embedded in a super-individual Geist (of say nation or epoch) rather the individual is the point of intersection between different social and cultural systems, reacting on their influence on him. The world of Geist produces a variety of super-personal (individual) systems and while these are all the product of interacting individuals they also possess a “massive objectity”. The individual is born within these social-cultural systems and experiences them as something objective (eine Objektivitat) in relation to himself, existing before him, remaining after he is gone, and acting upon him through their institutions. These systems range from cultural systems (religion, art, philosophy, ethics, and science) to the external organization of society (institutionalized relationships of family and state). Beyond these systems and institutions there are epochs and nations which are also autonomous insofar are they are centered in themselves forming coherent gestalt of values, ends, and conceptual knowledge. These systems are not substantial entities, super-personal realities though which individual gain their conscious identity, for Dilthey criticizes Hegel for his mystification of Geist. There are no super-personal realities of a monolithic character, with a life and permanence of their own. For such notions would undermine the spontaneity and creativity of the individual. Epoch and nations are empirical realities but whether these contain coherent set of values, ends, conceptually knowledge is a question for empirical research. The fact that individuals do identify with cultural and social wholes, with common memories and common national culture so as to constitute a whole with the more or less common horizon defines an epoch or nation and establishes a common domain of meaning from which individuals then derive their values and criteria for knowledge. Yet epoch and nations are never homogenous and there always remain tensions and conflicts within the common horizon. Older ideas survive and adjust to new parameters whether of thought or practice, and new creations begin to develop in the womb of the present. Dilthey’s conceptualizations of units that transcend the individual are heuristic devices or abstractions that are intended to help the historian describe the fluidity and complexity of reality. One reason Dilthey wanted to demarcate his conception from those of the Idealists is that he wanted to affirm the spontaneity and freedom of the individual as an effective force in history. That is, the individual is not merely a product of social-cultural spheres/forces of a given time/place but the individual as both shaped and shaping his milieu. The milieu is simply the range of possibilities within which the individual accomplishes his tasks….the milieu is one with numerous interstices for individual achievement. Yet Dilthey also imposed his deep strand of conservative thought on the German historical movement. For example, in education he held that inculcation of fixed traditions of German consciousness was important and that German culture need be protected against the invasion of modern revolutionary spirits and it abstract universalism. We are historical and social beings rooted in collective identities of time and place yet we are also historical innovators. Freedom here has to do with dynamic inward forces through which the individual can take (make one’s own) over his life possibilities in a decisive manner. The manner in which the individual absorbs the Geist of his age is not a matter of socialization, or parental norms, and shame and guilt. We are not individual kneaded as if we are clay. The individual and social are brought together in his theory of developing lived experience attaining integrity and autonomy through which the individual then absorbs the Geist of his age. Historical innovation was not a celebration of rebellion or dissent. His individualism was inextricably linked to the inwardness (of autonomy, solitude, self-examination, and inner struggle) of Western tradition (between the seductions of the world and the liberating power of transcendence). This modernist conception of inner freedom was to assure a similar kind of freedom/autonomy at a higher stage of historical development. Dilthey is no defender of pluralism and his integration at the level of the individual and of history is ultimately that of aloneness of the individual dealing with the brevity of life, suffering, pain, and death. His model is intended as inimical to the power of nature in us and the short-term view of life. Innovation occurred within the context of great traditions rising to ever higher plateaus. Life-nexus and Dilthey (cf. Owensby) The pivotal role played by “Life” in Dilthey’s philosophy is well-recognized. Max Scheler first grouped Dilthey, with Nietzsche and Bergson, as “life-philosophers”. In fact, Dilthey’s emphasis ob “life” places him within the broader life-philosophy movement in Germany from 1880-1930, whose roots lie on German Romanticism, and whose defining characteristic is the rejection of absolute rationalism of Idealism in favor of life as the totality which can be thought only in part. Dilthey is a Lebensphilosophe in the sense that life is an all-encompassing whole within which and for the sake of which thought/reason occurs. Life is not the totalization of all thought (as with Hegel’s Absolute), nor is life an apodictic foundation upon which the edifice of science can be built. Life is the fundament of all knowledge because thought/reason emerges as a life-serving process; thought arises from life but it cannot penetrate life and act as its foundation. Paradoxically “life” is what is most familiar and what is most mysterious. But what did Dilthey mean by “life”? Heidegger suggests that the term is too vague to provide any ontological grounding (p. 253). Ermarth suggests that “life” is a set of overlapping contexts whose minimal limit is the empirical reality of the individual’s life and whose extent encompasses the socio-historical world as a whole (pp. 108-125). But Ermarth draws this description from across Dilthey’s life-time of writings and so it obscures the way in which Dilthey’s view of “life” changes in his life. Prior to and up to 1894, Dilthey was focused on the individual psychological processes in ordering the world according to values and purposes. This relation between the acquired psychic nexus and the individually ordered world is referred to as “life” and hence life is a totality but it is not a rational totality. Thought arises in relation to the world – and here Dilthey relies on organic metaphors which, however he later, when he is hermeneutically focused on the objectifications of life, he rarely uses. The earlier descriptions of life that Dilthey provides always include genetic description of awareness of self and world. That is, life is a totality whose parts become distinguished in our awareness step by step. The life-nexus is always given as an indeterminate whole within which acts and contents are undifferentiated. A sense of self arises from the resistance of the world through our conative impulses. The awareness of subject-object emerges from a primordial unity only in the final stage of development. Yet life is not merely subjectivity (and Idealism): self-consciousness is always a correlate of consciousness of the world. The self and world are always in relationship. “Without the world we would have no self-consciousness and without self-consciousness no world would be present. What comes to pass in this act of contact is ‘life’” Thus, the genetic account is derivative not foundational. Subject and object is derivative from the life-nexus (Lebenszusammenhang) which is always a structure/relational. Subjectivity therefore always presupposes a subject-object distinction and this distinction is not yet there at the primordial level of awareness. Hence, we are concerned with (1) interaction of psychological processes and external world, and (2) the genetic account of awareness of self and world. (1) Interaction of psychological processes and the world In 1894 Dilthey maintained that life is characterized by a subjective-immanent purposiveness; that is, a life-nexus that is in adaptive reciprocity between inner life of instincts, feelings, and volitions and an environment of mean, ends, and obstacles. The enhancement of life is an increasing articulation of psychic life in relation to the environment. Purposiveness is therefore subjective insofar as it describes the structure of lived experience and it is immanent because it refers to nothing beyond experience in order to ground it. In contrast, Dilthey in his later writings emphasized the objective meaning relationships grounded in a shared social and cultural matrix of objective spirit (or what he called, after Hegel, the objectifications of life). Thus, while the early Dilthey did focus on the psychological it was not narrowly psychological in the sense of subjective – he always stressed the psycho-physical individual in the world. Yet until 1894 Dilthey always used organic metaphors of reciprocity, between psychic life and the world as being a lived relationship, in terms of preservation and adaptation to the milieu. The external world is presented in representational processes which are evaluated emotionally for their significance for life. These feelings are then transformed into a volitional response to the state of affairs of the external world. Thus, there is a constant interaction between the self and the milieu of external reality in which the self is placed, and our life consists of this interaction (or transaction). To live is a constant adaptive interaction between self and world. The world is always viewed with respect to preservation and fulfillment of the individual and actions required to attain such fulfillment. The interaction is predominantly evaluative and purposive – not logical or dialectical since both of these are fundamentally rational. What is important in this organic characterization of life is that life for Dilthey is not primarily biological. Descriptive psychology draws from the entire range of lived experience (Erlebnis) in relation to the environment. Ermarth claims that Dilthey restricted the term “life” to the human world and this was clearly so in the later Aufbau (1911) but in the early work up to 1894 “life” occurs at all levels. Organic metaphors allow Dilthey to highlight two principles of life central to his psychology. Reciprocity of organism and milieu illustrates that the structure of life is one where things in the external world are always enlivened through feeling and the inner life of feeling is always externalized in volitional responses to the world. Life of this inner and outer can never be reduced one to the other. The purposiveness inherent in the organism is used to portray the internal unity of the cognitive, affective and volition components of psychic life. Psychic life is unified in the purposive response to the world. Later in the Aufbau when Dilthey emphasizes hermeneutics, descriptions of the unity of psychic life give way to an analysis of the way in which cultural products stand in relation to tradition or objective spirit. This does not mean that the psychological analysis is abandoned but that life is viewed in a more encompassing manner and that organic metaphors of inner life will no longer do. Of course already in 1883 Dilthey recognized the inadequacy of organic metaphors for discussing social-historical systems. The shift in Dilthey’s conception of life is made explicit if we compare on his theory of the life-categories in his 1892-93 Leben und Erkennen, and the later 1910 Aufbau. In 1992-93 Dilthey, for example, views meaning psychologically in terms of subjective processes of feeling and willing whose fulfillment is the goal of life. The life categories are used to describe psychological processes involved in the individual’s ordering of and reaction to the environment. I contrast, in the Aufbau (1911) Dilthey applies temporality to the life categories of meaning, purpose, and value to enable him to view the course of an individual’s life as a totality. Thus, the category of meaning is the expression of the connection of individual moments of the past into a mnemonic whole. The past is given as a remembered whole which forms the context within which individual events are situated. This formulation is an objective approach to life in which the events of life are to be understood in relation to other events and the cultural milieu of which they are a part. In 1992-93 Dilthey explains that the categories of life are not meant to replace the formal categories of Aristotle or Kant. Indeed, Dilthey admits the existence of purely formal categories (identity, sameness, and difference) arise from the intellect (reason) alone. However this formality limits the usefulness of these categories for understanding life as it is lived (which also includes the feeling and will). In contrast to the formal categories the categories of life remain puzzling. In lived experience these categories have an indubitable certainty yet are indistinct. They can be described but they cannot be derived unequivocally from the intellect/reason. This is because the categories of life derive not from the intellect/reason but from the structure of life itself (the life nexus). Life categories of acting (Wirken) and suffering (Leiden) arise in us spontaneously through hindrance with the world. The psycho-physical life-unit lives in the consciousness of its free vitality; but also that which resists it, and therefore lies beyond its reality, is grasped by the life-unit as a volitional vitality since it determines the strength of the will. The reciprocity of individual and world entails a volitional tension between intentions of the individual and the obstinacy of the world. The categories of purpose, value, and meaning are grouped with the categories of essence and meaning (Sinn) because together they articulate “what makes life worth living” These categories further articulate the correlativity of the life-nexus by describing the individual’s evaluative ordering of the world in relation to his concerns purposes, The center of the structure of life itself…expresses itself in these categories. The categories of essence and meaning point to the system of concerns of inner life the fulfillment of these is equivalent to the fulfillment of life. Thus, these categories articulate the distinction between that which is indispensable and decisive for life and what is unessential and indifferent. Value is the relation of concerns and feelings in relation to the meaning manifold so as to organize the practical field in a way conducive to the fulfillment of life, and this Dilthey calls the purposiveness of means-ends. Every thing in the individual’s milieu is related to him/her as life-enhancing, thwarting, or indifferent to the fulfillment of life by virtue of its relation to feeling. That is, the individual is always involved in value relations. But the individual orientation towards the world is more than a series of isolated acts and the historical world is more than an aggregate of unrelated things. Things are always located in larger nexuses of values and purposes. The psycho-physical life-unit comes to terms within itself with a gradation of interests from the middle point to the periphery of interests on all sides. Not only is there a gradation of these different values, but also a connection, a system. At this level of analysis of the life-nexus there is only a hint of a more determinate and encompassing understanding of the world in the I-world connection. Later in the Aufbau when Dilthey turns his attention to the historical world as a whole (and its social-cultural systems) he discusses the different ways in which the individual is situated in the world of different systems of influence (Wirkungszussammenhange). It is enough to indicate here that inner life is always situated within a world and emerges from within a life-nexus (of world and I). 2. Genetic account of awareness of self and world The reciprocity between self and world is not initially given intellectually as between thinking subject and its representations of objects but only gradually emerges in stages of awareness which Dilthey calls Innewerden (a term which defies easy translation and Dilthey uses it in different contexts). But I will use the phrase “reflexive awareness” in order to emphasize its self-given quality. Unlike reflection which is a mode of consciousness in which the subject purposively takes distance on an object in order to gain perspective on it, in reflexive awareness that which is conscious is not distinct from that of which one is conscious. Reflexive awareness gives access to consciousness without objectifying it. If consciousness were objectified then a duality would arise between observing (for itself) and observed consciousness (in itself) and the possible infinite regress. Reflexive consciousness is intended to preclude this regress as it is a consciousness prior to the subject-object split. Dilthey distinguishes Innewerden from Vorstellung. Prior to the separation of subject and object, Innewerden is an awareness in which acts and contents of consciousness are viewed correlatively. Thus reflexive consciousness is not a Vor-mich-stellen (placing before me) in which the subject is confronted by an object. In contrast Vorstellung is representation and assumes a distinction between subject and object wherein the subject conceptually places before him/her an independent object. Innewerden is an awareness which is also an appropriation. That of which I am aware is also immediately mine – my life –even if not yet mine for my thinking/reason. Dilthey distinguishes three stage of reflexive awareness of the life nexus. In primordial reflexive awareness there is no separation between awareness and that of which it is aware. It is a primordial act of being-for-itself (Fur-sich-sein). There is not yet a sense of a determinate self and the immediacy of life is feeling (feeling as mine). This is the feeling of life/self. Feelings are then reflexive awareness. But Dilthey does not claim that reflexive awareness is feeling – a special kind of feeling. In fact, all desires/feelings are also reflexive awareness. Representational acts may also be accompanied by reflexive awareness and hence the self is not fundamentally intellectual. This is in marked contrast to Descartes for whom the beginning was the cogito (I think). Representational acts can entail feeling and volition involved in intellectual states, however, this reflexive awareness of representational acts is derivative and is the third stage. At the second stage self-consciousness becomes more determinate in that reflexive awareness begins to differentiate between the sphere of mine-ness defined by spontaneity of feeling and volition and the sphere of not-me of resistant things. The reflexive awareness of emotions and volition bestows upon that which is experienced over against things the character of being separated from the object. Resistant things remain mine as volitional objects or obstructions but they emerge, due to their resistance, as a more determinate not-me. This is not the inner-outer distinction between the thinking subject and a representational object, but a mine/not-mine distinction tied to the reflexive awareness of feelings and will. What is distinguished is not merely inside and outside of us; rather what is ours is characterized by the reflexive awareness of feeling, desire, and volition. The feeling of self then becomes more determinate along with the growing awareness of the world as “other”. It is the reflexive awareness of our psychic states as these are conditioned by the world. A determinate awareness of self arises only through the reciprocity of the inner feeling and willing and the world, and it appears in different degrees in different kinds of acts: the changing determinations of feelings of self are grounded in emotional fluctuations while the more constant ground is found in volition. The feeling of the self because it involves reciprocity of inner life and environment is most prominent in individuals who are constantly confronted by environmental and interpersonal resistance. Hence the feeling of self emerges especially in people who are constantly in a position to oppose their active power to circumstances and other people. As we have seen the structure of psychic life is given as a purposive nexus of feelings, volitions, and instincts mediated by thought processes. Every stream of perception and thought has an inner side of volitions, feelings, and instincts which are separable only in reflection. It is the body that forms the exterior of this inner life (Eigenleben), and it is from this Eigenleben, spatially oriented by virtue of its reference to sense perception, that differentiation of self and world arises. The external world is given at this second stage of awareness predominantly as a volitional and evaluative fact through the reflexive awareness of intention and resistance (in contrast say to the abstraction of the natural sciences which present the world as spatially ordered field of surfaces). Vision which is always the most clearly given focal point is also given to us in relation to a certain spatial orientation and it is distinguished from the subject in decreasing clarity – from the most clearly seen spatial orientation. That is, visual objects stand in relation of decreasing clarity from this reference point. The visual field is always correlated with a sense of the body’s position through the feeling of pressure, kinesthetic sensation, and the ability to change relations in this visual field through movement. Prior to a conception of an absolute essentially mathematical space, there are as it were lived relations of visual distance which we alter by moving. Hence space is not, as Kant would have it, an apriori condition for this visual, tactile, and kinesthetic experience. Absolute space is a construction which arises from this original experience, and geometry is an intellectual analysis of this representational construct. Natural scientific knowledge situates sense objects in an idealized, geometrical space even as in lived experience objects of outer perception are oriented round the volitional and emotional point of inner life. Thus, the body is always given in a spatial-temporal whole as the boundary of the inner life for it is only within the limits of the body that arbitrary, unmediated movement is possible. Voluntary movement is accompanied by sense impressions in muscles, joints, skin while such impressions are absent in movements observed beyond the body. Thus, the area of the body is demarcated from an environment within which impulses to move produce movement only indirectly insofar as our arbitrary movements of the limbs mediate movement of external objects by acting on them as these were another body. Volitional impulses to move which arise from needs/desires are always accompanied by sense impressions and so always encounter resistance. Resistance is experience within the self (inner life) which reflects some hindrance of intention by something beyond the self. Hence, we get a consciousness of “otherness” through volitional movement. The final stage of reflexive awareness is the awareness of our intellectual and perceptual acts as our own. This appropriation of intellectual states accompanies intellectual and perceptual acts but these acts do not necessarily entail reflexive awareness. Only when the acts and contents of perceiving and thinking are accompanied by reflexive awareness do I become aware of them as mine (have an intellektuelle Gefuhle), otherwise the sense of self is submerged in the intellectual and perceptual absorption of the object…without such intellektuelle Gefuhle the perceptual/intellectual act and content coincide without differentiation. That is, representations have an inner reality only insofar as they are related to our feelings and will as something beyond us. It is reflexive awareness (through pressure of feeling and resistance of will) that an activity beyond me is revealed. In other words, only feeling and will and the reflexive awareness that accompanies them reveals to us the resistant other and at the same time the self. Without this reflexive awareness, a representation ha only a dead objectivity (tote Gegenstandlichkeit) and the sense of self also recedes. The intellectual works together with the sense to distinguish perception of external objects from subjective states, thus giving rise to the mediated experience of he inner and outer, self and object. Strictly speaking therefore the inner/outer distinction is a more derivative awareness than the mine/not mine (subject/object) distinction found at the second stage. Inner/outer is brought about through the mediation of thought when it is confronted with the unexpected or possible, whereas the experience of resistance is immediate. Whenever a perception is given to one of the senses and cannot be matched (either in being repeated or by some other sense), an inference corrects the perception and grasps it as a subjective state of the self defined by the boundary of the body. In the face of unsuccessful sensory verification, thought construes this perceptual experience as located in the bodily self as opposed to the external world. When there is successful sensory verification, my perception is confirmed by an inference. It is the intellect that judges sensory verification as corroboration, and the situated the perceptual representation in the external world as profile of the object. What is originally given in reflexive awareness as an undifferentiated part of a whole is presented as the mediated perceptual experience of something external to a subject. That is, what we are reflexively aware of in feelings and exertions is perceived as something external, and just as the intellect and the sense present this content as objective, reflexive awareness presents this content a related to the perceptual act of a self. This awareness of a self of representational acts over against objective representations is the most determinate yet most derivative sense of self provided by reflexive awareness. That is, the self is defined as subject of representational acts situated within a body, and some of this subject’s representations are shown to be subjective and some objective. However, this awareness occurs only after the mediation of thought, and assumes the correlation of act/content and impulse/resistance found in the first two stages. In sum, awareness of the I-world relation emerges only gradually in three stages of reflexive awareness. (1) The first stage provides an indeterminate awareness of the correlativity of acts and contents of consciousness prior to any distinction between subject and object. (2) The second stage differentiates between volitional impulses and a world of resistant things. Because volitional and emotional impulses are located in my body as mine they are differentiated from a resistant not-me. (3) The third stage differentiates the inner and outer in that perceptual representations are judged to be objective or subjective on the basis of sensual validation or lack thereof, and reflexive awareness presents these representations as related to a subject of corporeally located representational acts. Concluding that the traditional representational subject-object are not epistemological or metaphysically foundationally but a product of the life process. Dilthey analysis shows that life is a totality which gradually articulates itself: (1) in reciprocity between organism and world, (2) within increasing complexity of relations inherent in the life-nexus, and (3) increasing determinacy of awareness of these relations. Importantly, this self-articulation of life is not a dialectical unfolding of ideal relations – reflexive awareness never brings life to intellectual clarity. Indeed if it did so life would be distorted, simply because the relations of the life-nexus are not just intellectual. Life is a volitional-evaluative-representational nexus given in reflexive awareness hence is always unclear to the intellect.