Martin Heidegger was born in a small town in southwestern Germany in 1889. The town, Messkirch, is not far from Lake Constance, which forms part of the border between Germany and Switzerland. Heidegger’s father was the sexton of the local Catholic church; the sexton is responsible for maintaining the church’s buildings and grounds, and ringing the bells.
From these humble origins, Heidegger rose to become one of the leading philosophers of his time; his work struck a chord with his contemporaries; one might say that he was “all the rage.” He played an important role in academic fashions such as postmodernism; he was more popular inside academia than outside it.
His reputation has been stained by his Nazi sympathies and Nazi connections; even after World War II, he seemed unwilling to condemn Nazism. Yet Heidegger’s mentor, Husserl, was Jewish, and many of Heidegger’s star students, such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, were Jewish; Heidegger remained friendly with Arendt until his death.1
If Nietzsche was the leading German philosopher around 1900, and Heidegger became influential around 1930, one might think that Heidegger was the successor of Nietzsche, that Heidegger picked up where Nietzsche left off. But Heidegger deals with different problems than Nietzsche dealt with, and Heidegger’s writing has a different tone. I find it difficult to get started with Heidegger. Heidegger begins with Aristotle’s conception of Being, while Nietzsche began with Schopenhauer’s conception of Will. Aristotle is important for Heidegger, perhaps because Heidegger was educated in Catholic schools, where Aristotle and scholasticism were taken seriously.
From age 14 to 17, Heidegger attended a Catholic boarding school in Constance (about 30 miles south of Messkirch). From age 17 to 20, he attended a Catholic school in Freiburg (about 50 miles west of Messkirch). Heidegger was influenced by a Freiburg theologian named Carl Braig; Heidegger read Braig’s book On Being: Outline of Ontology. Heidegger was also influenced by Franz Brentano, author of On the Various Meanings of Being According to Aristotle. And Heidegger was influenced by Edmund Husserl, Brentano’s student. “[Husserl’s] Logical Investigations, published exactly at the turn of the century, became a personal cult book for Heidegger. After borrowing it from the university library, he kept the book in his room for two years.”2
Heidegger’s development is very different from mine; Heidegger worked within a living tradition, had various university posts, and became well-known at a rather young age. The people who influenced me, such as Nietzsche, were long dead; I had little contact with contemporary writers, I tried to construct my own tradition, and I worked on my own.
Brentano was difficult reading for the young Heidegger. He tried to read Brentano at home in Messkirch, during school vacation. If he was struggling, he would go for a walk along the Feldweg (field way, field path), and resume his reading on a bench. Heidegger had a bond with the countryside. He wanted to “open up to the vastness of the sky and at the same time be rooted in the dark of the earth.”3
Heidegger’s connection to nature plays an important role in his life and thought. Nature is being, silent being. Our appreciation of nature is a kind of meditation, an openness to sensation. There’s a Zennish strain in Heidegger’s thinking. Zen values the “beginner’s mind,” and Heidegger wrote, “Perhaps philosophy shows most forcibly and persistently how much Man is a beginner. Philosophizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner.”4 Heidegger admired the Pre-Socratic thinkers, whom he regarded as open to being.
Heidegger was a champion of small-town life, and a critic of technology. He valued mood and feeling and poetry; he was especially fond of the poet Hölderlin, who was also from southwest Germany. Heidegger writes about moods and feelings — about how it feels to be alive. “To Heidegger, mood is the link between life and thought.” The Greeks had said that philosophy begins in astonishment. Heidegger said that philosophy “begins with a mood, with astonishment, fear, worry, curiosity, jubilation.”5
Mood has a special significance in my philosophy. My most original theory is a theory of decadence and renaissance, a theory of history; I sometimes call this theory “Cycles.” I began developing this theory as a teenager, after I noticed that my moods oscillated regularly, independently of experiences. This led me to polar opposites, the life- and death-instincts, the instincts or moods of societies, and finally to decadence and renaissance. My chief theories, Cycles and Connections, both originated in life itself, not in books or classes.
Heidegger and his teachers felt that philosophy faced two dangers. One danger was the argument that knowledge was subjective, that we couldn’t get outside our own heads, that we couldn’t get beyond psychology. The other danger was materialism, the argument that only matter existed, and that physical science would eventually replace philosophy; materialism was on the march in Heidegger’s day, and physical science was “riding high.”
In Heidegger’s day, there was a tendency to make man small, to reduce things, to reason in a reductivist way, to argue that “Man is nothing other than...”6 In such a worldview, what happens to the glory and greatness of man? What happens to the richness and drama of life?
Heidegger wanted to build an “objective spirit” that would overcome both psychologism and materialism. At first he thought that the Church’s “treasure of truth” was the solution, but soon he lost faith in the Catholic Church. Then he turned to logic. Logic offered a realm of pure thought, objective validity, eternal truth. Heidegger was led to logic by his theological studies and by his reading of Husserl’s Logical Investigations.7
My work also deals with “objective spirit,” but I didn’t go looking for it, it came to me; I didn’t turn to it as a way to overcome materialism or anything else, this was simply how the world worked. Telepathy, Paired Particles — the world was about spirit, the non-material. It was objective insofar as my personal experience agreed with quantum physics, agreed with what I found in novels, agreed with the wisdom of primitive man. Logic is more popular in academia than the occult, but the occult is closer to life, closer to nature, closer to imaginative literature, and more popular with the man on the street.
For the young Heidegger, the world changes, but logic endures. Thinking occurs in time, but “the logical is a ‘static’ phenomenon, standing beyond any development and change.”8 Later Heidegger will argue that time rules all; “As yet, time for Heidegger has not become that force of Being that draws everything into its motion.”9
Logic may be eternally true, but what does it mean? Heidegger seemed uncertain: “Perhaps we stand here before something ultimate, irreducible, of which any further elucidation is impossible.”10
Sometimes, however, it seems that logic has meaning, that it leads to an insight about life. Logic might say, for example, “‘The rose is not yellow’ is a statement of negation.” From this ‘lack of yellow,’ we can abstract something more general, the notion of Nothing. Later Heidegger argued that metaphysics begins with “the experience of the Nothing,” which arises in “deep boredom, in the abysses of existence.”11
Sartre’s chief philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, was doubtless inspired by Heidegger; the feeling of nothingness is important in the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre. I discussed this feeling with reference to Hemingway’s “Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which deals with an old man lingering in a café late at night.
“‘Last week he tried to commit suicide,’ one waiter said.
‘Why?’
‘He was in despair.’
‘What about?’
‘Nothing.’”
Hemingway’s character is an old, solitary man because such people seem more susceptible to this kind of depression, more susceptible to the feeling of nothingness; married men, young people and women seem more engaged with the somethings.
So Logic’s analysis of statements of negation, such as “the rose is not yellow,” seemed to trigger a chain of reasoning that led Heidegger to the feeling of nothingness. As Safranski says, “The modest semantics of negation grow into the impressive ontology of Being and Nothing. And this Nothing is no longer the cool ‘Not’ of statement; it is a Nothing of angst.”12
Another example of logical argument having broad implications is an impersonal statement, such as “It’s thundering.” Such a statement is about a situation, about the here and now; to understand such a statement, “it is necessary to know and understand the context of the action situation.”13 This argument was the seed from which sprouted Heidegger’s later arguments about the importance of situation, the importance of the here and now. Existentialism focused not on life in general but on the particular, the unique current situation, the here and now.
When Heidegger was about 25, he wrote his thesis on the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus. Philosophers had often spoken of the “what-ness” of a thing; the term for what-ness was quidditas (from the Latin quid, what). Quidditas puts a thing into a general category. What is Socrates? A human being.
Duns Scotus focused, not on what-ness, not on the category, but rather on this-ness, on the unique individual; his term for this-ness was haecceitas (from the Latin haec, this). There was never a person quite like Socrates, he’s unique, every individual is unique. Likewise, this present moment in time is unlike any other, it’s unique. Duns Scotus (and Heidegger, and existentialism) emphasize this present situation, this unique here-and-now. Heidegger said, “What really exists is individual.... a this-now-here.”14
Life continually presents us with unique situations. General rules, moral laws, usually can’t solve the specific choices that we’re confronted with. Camus imagines a person walking along a river in the evening, noticing someone standing at the railing of a bridge, then hearing their body hit the water. The person has only a second to decide what to do. Jump in the water? Run downstream? Call for help? Neither Kant nor Aristotle can tell him what to do, this situation is unique.
Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, realized that life is continually presenting us with choices, and he realized that the most important philosopher of his time, Hegel, couldn’t help him to make decisions. Hegel focused on the vast sweep of history, and how consciousness grows through history, but Hegel was silent about this particular moment, and the choices that must be made now. Kierkegaard imagined someone asking, Should I walk in Deer Park today?
| A Wednesday in the Deer Park season. The religious individual has understood himself in the general consideration of the significance of necessary diversion, but it does not by any means follow that diversion is necessary precisely today.... He has to bring the general principle into connection with this particular moment on this particular day, with these particular moods and states of mind, and under these particular circumstances.15 |
Hegel deals with the general, Kierkegaard with the particular. Kierkegaard says, Life is here and now. We can only make decisions from our inner being, our subjectivity; no objective truth, no general rule, can guide us through unique situations.
If we must make decisions from our inner being, perhaps we should try to calm our inner being, and listen to our inner being. This is what Zen attempts through techniques like meditation.
Existentialism has a rather dark view of the moment; for example, Camus imagines a person jumping off a bridge. Zen also emphasizes the here-and-now, but it often finds peace and joy in the moment; Zen is sunnier than existentialism.
Heidegger felt that philosophy had often spoken in general terms, but these general terms couldn’t capture the moment, couldn’t capture the unique present. To capture reality, Heidegger argued, we need “live speech,” “spoken language,” or poetry.16 The general terms of logic can’t do the job.
Zen also uses poetry to capture the present moment. One wonders if Heidegger was familiar with Zen.
Heidegger’s biographer, Rüdiger Safranski, says that “throughout a philosophical life [Heidegger] continually asked this one question about Being. The meaning of this question is nothing more and nothing less than giving back to life the mystery that threatened to disappear in the modern world.”17 I’ve often said, We’re surrounded by mysteries. I’ve said that the issue of life-after-death is unresolved, and therefore we don’t know what life is, or what death is. We can’t answer the most fundamental questions. We’re beginners.
The occult is the most mysterious of subjects, and the most philosophical. It often overlaps with religion, as when it ponders life-after-death. As the occult overlaps with religion, so too Heidegger’s thought overlaps with religion. Safranski says, “More than anyone else, [Heidegger] kept open the horizon for religious experience in a non-religious age.”18
The occult regards the universe as magical, it says that action-at-a-distance is possible. Paired Particles demonstrates that two inanimate objects can have a rapport, Paired Particles proves action-at-a-distance. If inanimate objects can have a rapport, why not a rapport between an object and a person? If a clock stops when a person dies, is that chance or rapport?
The occult says that the whole world has a kind of life or consciousness; this is a magical world, an inter-connected world, an entangled world. Here again there’s a link with Heidegger; as Safranski says, Heidegger “found a way of thinking that remains close to things and avoids a crash into banality.”19 I’m not suggesting that Heidegger was receptive to the occult; perhaps he was “close to things” because he emphasized tradition, history, beauty in everyday objects. He may have stopped short of a magical universe. But there is at least an overlap between Heidegger and the occult — some common ground between them.
Heidegger’s small-town upbringing strengthened his connection to nature, and made him wary of modernity. It also made the outside world seem forbidding. The hometown was “enveloped in a splendor... which lay on all things. Their realm was encompassed by mother’s eye and hand. [We] enjoyed the bliss of a permanent weightlessness not experienced since.”20
When Heidegger left home, it was like a cold shower. He felt that he was being “thrown” into a world that he didn’t choose to enter. His entry into the world didn’t feel like “a gift or a promising arrival.”21 Being feels like a burden, he’s weightless no more.22 Wandering in the fields around Messkirch as a boy was completely different from “wanderings during which all shores were left behind.”23
When Heidegger was a student at Catholic schools, he depended on scholarships, since his family was somewhat poor, lower-middle-class. The scholarship stipulated that he study theology; sometimes it even stipulated that he follow a particular theologian, such as Aquinas. Heidegger’s dependence on such scholarships lasted until he was 27. Heidegger felt constrained by the “Catholic system,” and he developed an aversion for that system. The Catholic system, Safranski says, “became so distasteful to him that one of the reasons he later sympathized with the Nazi movement was its declared anti-clericalism.”24
Heidegger’s Catholic studies steered him toward ontology (the study of being), while Nietzsche had a bent for psychology. Neither Nietzsche nor Schopenhauer nor Freud seemed to influence Heidegger much during Heidegger’s formative years. Heidegger was influenced by Husserl, and Husserl aimed to banish psychology from philosophy.25
Heidegger was ambivalent toward Catholicism: he felt constrained by it, but he had a deep interest in scholastic philosophy, Catholic philosophy, and he sympathized with Catholics who were battling modernity. He joined a group called Gralbund (Grail Club), “a strictly anti-modernist faction of the Catholic youth movement.”26 Some of the conservatives behind this movement idealized the Middle Ages, and hoped to restore the Holy Roman Empire.
In an earlier issue, I discussed the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who inspired Osama bin Laden and other Sunni-Muslim radicals. Qutb said that holy warriors would have a hard life: “Qutb emphasized this struggle would be anything but easy.... True Muslims could look forward to lives of ‘poverty, difficulty, frustration, torment and sacrifice.’” Perhaps young people like Osama bin Laden were drawn to this message because they felt that the hard life was the heroic life, the glorious life, the meaningful life.
Heidegger also argues that truth is hard, the authentic life is challenging. “Whatever can be performed easily,” Safranski writes, “whatever is carefree and spontaneous, is suspected by him of superficiality.... He surrounds ‘truth’ with the halo of the difficult, the hard, and the recalcitrant.”27
Safranski says that this attitude may have reflected Heidegger’s social awkwardness. Heidegger criticizes the “cult of personality” because “he himself lacks that vilified personal polish.... Even in the 1920s in Marburg, when he was by then the secret king of philosophy in Germany, many colleagues and students — unless they knew him personally — would take him for the heating engineer or the janitor.”
For the young Heidegger, the hard road of truth, faith, and logic gave one “a certain depth of ethical power, the power of self-control and self-renunciation.”28 Asceticism develops strength of character; asceticism is weight-lifting for the soul. Perhaps Heidegger became popular because he gave young people something challenging, something to be proud of, maybe even something heroic; life as Heidegger depicted it was interesting, meaningful, dramatic.
Plato believed in Ideas. For example, he believed that the Idea of beauty is what makes individual objects beautiful; the objects “participate” in the Idea of beauty. Aristotle said that “participation” is nonsense, and beauty is only in individual things. Heidegger acquired Aristotle’s message from Brentano. “There is no Whole. There are only discrete objects. There is no such thing as dimension in itself, there are only objects with dimension. There is no love, but only the many separate events of love.... God is in the detail.”29
Husserl proposed to make a fresh start, and question received knowledge. Husserl’s “Phenomenology” attracted a following, and Heidegger became his assistant. I don’t think Husserl’s philosophy struck a chord outside academia; the very word “phenomenology” seems like an academic word, not a layman’s word. Safranski writes,
| “Toward the things!” was the motto of the phenomenologists.... They were on the lookout for a new way of letting the things approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew. Reality should be given an opportunity to “show” itself. That which showed itself, and the way it showed itself, was called “the phenomenon” by the phenomenologists.30 |
One might compare this approach to the approach of primitive man, since primitive man wasn’t encumbered with layers of knowledge, so he could see things as they are. I’ve often praised the wisdom of primitive man.
Or one might compare this approach to the approach of a poet or painter, who tries to see things as if for the first time. In an earlier issue, I discussed the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote a work called “The World,” “a sequence of 20 ‘naive’ poems ‘written in the style of school primers,’ in which the rudiments of a child’s world — the road, the gate, the porch, the dining room, the stairs, the poppies, the peonies — are portrayed.”
Husserl was especially interested in consciousness. He told his students to forget everything they’d ever heard about consciousness, and “observe, with the greatest possible impartiality and immediacy, what is taking place in consciousness, in my consciousness here and now.”31 Husserl advocated “phenomenological reduction,” i.e., perceiving something, and at the same time, paying attention to the process of perception.
So Husserl proposed to make a fresh start by looking at things and at consciousness as if for the first time. He claimed that he was building a foundation, and that other philosophers were “constructing their systems without foundations.”32 Phenomenologists thought it would take centuries to complete the foundation. Needless to say, the foundation was never completed.
Husserl’s project strikes me as a useless grinding of mental gears, remote from life, interesting only to academics. Husserl’s aspiration to make philosophy a “strict science” is often found among academic philosophers. In my view, philosophers shouldn’t aim at scientific precision, they should follow the example of philosophers like Montaigne, Thoreau, and Nietzsche.
Husserl initially studied math “because that science seemed to him reliable and exact.”33 Academic philosophers often seek mathematical precision, but the layman turns to philosophy for wisdom about life.
If a philosopher has a proclivity for math, and wants to make philosophy a “strict science,” he’s probably lost the balance between heart and head, between intuition and reason. In my view, a philosopher should write out of his whole being, just as he should live out of his whole being.
In the late 1800s, an important trend in philosophy was Lebensphilosophie, life philosophy. This trend is represented by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey, Ortega, etc. The Lebensphilosophie of the late 1800s rejected rationalism in the name of Life, as the Romanticism of the early 1800s had rejected rationalism in the name of Nature.34 According to Lebensphilosophie, truth isn’t eternal and abstract, truth emerges from life, and conduces to a good life.
One might say that Lebensphilosophie is a cousin of American pragmatism. Pragmatism said that truth isn’t eternal and abstract; pragmatism wants truth that proves itself in the world, truth that’s useful. Safranski says, “Life philosophy is the vitalistic variant of pragmatism. It asks not about the usefulness of knowledge but about its creative potential.”35
Academics like the young Heidegger were scornful of the popular Lebensphilosophie. The young Heidegger was loyal to logic, and felt that philosophy should be “a mirror of eternity,” not “inner experience.”36 Our philosophy shouldn’t grow out of our life; rather, our life should grow out of our philosophy; we should mold our life according to the timeless truths of logic.
But while the young Heidegger was scornful of Life Philosophy, “many of his later themes” can be found in the Life Philosophers, such as “a different experience of time... and art as the locus of truth.”37 Perhaps Heidegger wasn’t scornful of the leading Life Philosophers (Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey, etc.), but only of their disciples and popularizers.
Safranski discusses the chief representatives of Life Philosophy, including Nietzsche and Dilthey. In my view, Safranski misunderstands Nietzsche, but that’s not surprising, I think everyone misunderstands Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed (Safranski says) that consciousness can turn against life with “anxieties, moral scruples, and resignation,” or consciousness can “put itself in the service of life [through] value definitions that encourage life to free development.”38 So consciousness is in the “driver’s seat,” it can be anti-life or pro-life.
In my view, this is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche. Schopenhauer had said that consciousness is merely a skin over the unconscious, and Nietzsche begins from this fundamental insight. Nietzsche believed that amoral thinkers like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Thucydides were healthy, renaissance-type, but not because they chose to be so; they were born that way. If there was any choice in the matter, the choice itself would be the outgrowth of their nature, their basic health or sickness.
Nietzsche’s chief original idea is that morality is decadent. The only exception, the only non-decadent form of morality, is “natural morality,” the morality that says, “follow your nature.”39 Moralizing philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Kant were decadent, in Nietzsche’s view, and amoral thinkers like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Thucydides were healthy, renaissance-type. Montaigne is a good example of a healthy philosopher from a renaissance age; Montaigne subscribed to natural morality, and took issue with Socrates.
Nietzsche believed (Safranski says) that “There is no truth in the objective sense. Truth is the art of illusion, which turns out to be useful to life.”40 Again, I think Safranski is misunderstanding Nietzsche. When Nietzsche said morality is decadent, that wasn’t illusion, that was Truth; it was true in Plato’s time, and it was true in Kant’s time; it was Objective Truth. Nietzsche believed in Truth and rejected skepticism.
Nietzsche accepted Schopenhauer’s view that consciousness was merely a skin over the unconscious, but Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer’s moral teaching. Nietzsche wrote,
| I was the first to see the real opposition: the degenerating instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, and all of idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation.41 |
Notice that phrase “degenerating instinct.” Turning against life isn’t a conscious choice, it’s instinctive, unconscious. Some philosophers, like Socrates and Schopenhauer, have degenerating instincts, so they turn against life. Other philosophers, like Machiavelli and Montaigne, have healthy instincts, so they take an amoral approach to life, and they don’t turn against life. Nietzsche wrote, “Morality as it has been understood hitherto — as it was ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer as ‘denial of the will to life’ — is the instinct of décadence itself.”42 Decadence is an instinct, not a choice.
Moralizing is decadent — this was Nietzsche’s Big Idea. Nietzsche wrote, “Seeing morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first rank in the history of knowledge.”43 A sick philosopher like Socrates can’t trust his instincts because his instincts are degenerating, he needs to live by reason, not instinct. This was Nietzsche’s “last word” in his last book, Ecce Homo, and it was also his “first word” in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche said of his first book, “Socrates is recognized for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical decadent. ‘Rationality’ against instinct. ‘Rationality’ at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life.”44
It was around 1980 that I read Ecce Homo, and learned of Nietzsche’s view that morality is decadent. This was one of the decisive events of my life. Nietzsche’s view made a deep impression on me because I had already reached the same conclusion. I had read Marcus Aurelius, and tried to live a Stoic life, but it didn’t work. The Stoic approach made me gloomy, and affected my life in negative ways. On the other hand, Montaigne’s approach, Montaigne’s “follow your nature,” affected my life in positive ways — it made me happier, more light on my feet, more comfortable in my own body. So when Nietzsche said “morality is decadent,” I was astonished to hear my own idea, astonished to find that Nietzsche and I had reached the same conclusion — Nietzsche and I were on the same wavelength.
One might compare my experience to Martin Luther’s experience. As I had tried to live a Stoic life, and found that it didn’t work, so Luther had tried to follow the lofty ideals of Christianity, the lofty ideals of the monk and saint, and found that it didn’t work. Luther wanted to follow the path of virtue, but his lower nature got in the way. If he denied himself a slice of blueberry pie, he found himself day-dreaming about pie rather than focusing on the epistles of Paul.
The only way to forget about pie, Luther found, was to indulge in it — eat two slices. So Luther said, Sin boldly (Pecca fortiter). As Nietzsche put it, “When virtue has slept, it will arise refreshed.”45 Luther and Nietzsche aren’t giving themselves up to vice; they start with a disposition toward virtue, and they end with a disposition toward virtue. Once Luther had eaten two slices of pie, he could follow the way of the saint. The only way to be virtuous is to love virtue, not to force virtue.
Luther couldn’t crush the lower man, the carnal man, with reason and super-ego. As Horace would say, If you throw nature out the door, it will come in through the window. Only by acknowledging the lower man, giving him his due, could Luther achieve wholeness, happiness, virtue, the good life.
When Nietzsche criticized morality, he wasn’t advocating vice, he was advocating wholeness. Nietzsche’s ideal was Goethe; he said of Goethe, “What he aspired to was totality; he strove against the separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.... [He] dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, [he] is strong enough for this freedom.”46
Wilhelm Dilthey is one of the chief representatives of Lebensphilosophie. Dilthey had an impact on Heidegger, and he’s also an important thinker in his own right.
Dilthey was born in 1833, 11 years before Nietzsche and 56 years before Heidegger; Dilthey died in 1911. Dilthey seemed to view Nietzsche as a rival, and criticized him in harsh terms. The Spanish philosopher Ortega was a big fan of Dilthey, and regarded him as a more important thinker than Nietzsche.
Dilthey was an inter-disciplinary thinker, with a keen interest in history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology; Wikipedia calls him “a polymathic philosopher.” If you want to read something by Dilthey, consider one of his historical essays, such as “The Conception and Analysis of Man in the 15th and 16th Centuries.” Twenty-six volumes of Dilthey’s Collected Works have been published in German, and six volumes of his Selected Works have been published in English.
Dilthey was completely devoted to his work:
| In his early forties he confessed to his mother: “It is strange how completely I have lost every worldly ambition in the wish to accomplish my great studies. The great crisis in the sciences and in European civilization in which we are living occupies my mind so deeply and completely that the desire to be useful in it has destroyed every personal ambition.” There was in him a lofty disregard of outward recognition by the academic world of his own time, which is the more impressive as he climbed the academic ladder so easily and successfully.47 [Dilthey occupied Hegel’s Chair at the University of Berlin.] |
Dilthey had a deep interest in history, but not the old history of kings and generals. Hajo Holborn says that Dilthey produced “some of the finest studies in the history of philosophy and literature, in which he had created a new method of writing the history of ideas.”
Dilthey believed that ideas can’t be separated from “the totality of man’s living experience.”48 Intellectual life can’t be separated from life as a whole; “intellectual consciousness cannot be isolated.”49 Dilthey focused on “the whole man... this willing, feeling, thinking being.”50
Holborn says that Dilthey influenced R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (1946). Like Dilthey, Collingwood tried to describe the differences between the study of history and the study of the natural world. Dilthey would probably have agreed with Collingwood’s aphorism, “All history is the history of thought.”51 Dilthey was interested in how people in the past thought, how they saw the world — their worldview (Weltanschauung) or world-picture (Weltbild). History is a series of worldviews.
We can’t live without some sort of worldview. “One cannot live without some interpretation of life.”52 “The ‘world picture’ is the foundation of the experience of life (Lebenserfahrung).”53 Our worldview is not fixed once and for all. “Continuously the conception and evaluation of life and the world change, like shadows of clouds which pass over a landscape.”54
Dilthey aimed to take the rigid artifacts of culture and liquefy them — that is, turn them into living thoughts and feelings. While science aims to describe, history aims to understand, and “understanding brings back past life.”55 Heidegger liked Dilthey’s notion of “liquefaction,” and he tried to liquefy scholastic philosophy, so it could be used to create a “Catholic ideal” in Heidegger’s own time.56
Dilthey felt that understanding often draws on our own “living experience.” For example, if we have combat experience, we can understand military history better; the humanities are about life, they come out of our life-experience. “A political historian without a living interest in political action, a literary critic without poetic sense, a student of religion without religious feeling, etc., cannot hope to produce significant knowledge in his discipline. The cultural sciences require ‘aliveness’ (Lebendigkeit).”57
The humanities begin with living experience; this experience is expressed by the artist or writer; and finally this expression is understood by the recipient of culture. So the humanities are about living experience, expression, and understanding.
William James met Dilthey in Berlin in 1867. James was “greatly attracted by Dilthey and curious to learn more about him. He was quite disappointed that Dilthey parted from him without inviting him to his house.” Dilthey later became a fan of James. Dilthey “did not praise many of his contemporaries as highly as he did ‘the psychological genius of William James.’ The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared to him the highest achievement in the psychological understanding of religion.”58
Holborn says that Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie is akin to James’ pragmatism (as I said above). Both regard truth, not as something “out there,” something objective, but rather as something to live by, something interwoven with life. And both LifePhilosophy and pragmatism prepare the ground for existentialism; Jaspers called pragmatism a “preparatory stage of existentialism.”59
Like Bergson, Dilthey felt that time was fundamental, you couldn’t conceive of man outside of time. Life is being-in-time (Zeitlichkeit). Dilthey wrote, “the present includes the presentation of the past in the memory, and that of the future in the imagination.... Thus, the present is filled with pasts and pregnant with the future.”60
Dilthey criticized Kant for viewing time as mere appearance, mere phenomenon. Dilthey wrote, “Kant took time and thereby life itself to be merely phenomena.” In Dilthey’s view, nothing is more real than being-in-time, life-in-time, “the lived life... the growing out of the past... the tending of the self toward a future.”61 According to Dilthey, “Life is the fundamental fact that must be the starting point of philosophy. It is what is known from within, it is that behind which one cannot go back. Life cannot be brought before the judgment seat of reason.”62
For Dilthey, man doesn’t exist apart from time, or apart from society; time and society are both fundamental. “The self can never be alone, it exists always and inescapably among other human beings.”63 Psychology shouldn’t study man in isolation; man can only be understood in relation to society and history. “To make the single individual the basic unit of psychological study is unrealistic. The individual is a member of society; by its civilization he is molded.”64
In his last years, Dilthey turned from psychology to philosophy. He viewed philosophy as an attempt at self-understanding, an attempt to raise life higher through self-consciousness. In Dilthey’s view, “The historic systems of philosophy constitute the high-points in man’s own understanding of himself and of the world.... Philosophy consequently is the highest expression of life, through which it advances to new stages.” The mission of philosophy is “to realize the creative nature of life by the ability to raise experiences into consciousness and transform them into systematic ideas.”
This is a good definition of philosophy, one of the best I’ve seen. But is a definition of philosophy actually philosophy? Thoreau doesn’t give us definitions of philosophy, he gives us philosophy itself. With Dilthey, I feel like I’ve gone to a restaurant and received an excellent menu, but haven’t received any food.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | When I discussed Erich Heller, I wrote, “Heller was interested in Heidegger’s writings, and knew that Heidegger had given some support to the Nazis. So Heller visited Heidegger, and asked for an explanation. He received only ‘stony silence’ from Heidegger.” back |
| 2. | Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ch. 2, p. 25 back |
| 3. | Safranski, Ch. 1, p. 3. This is a quote from Heidegger, not Safranski. back |
| 4. | Safranski, Ch. 1, p. 1, quoting a letter that Heidegger wrote to a former teacher. back |
| 5. | Safranski, Ch. 1, p. 1, quoting Safranski, not Heidegger. back |
| 6. | Ch. 2, p. 29. According to the materialists, “The spirit that lives in Man was nothing but a cerebral function.”(p. 30) One critic of the materialists, Hermann Lotze, pointed out that just because something is based on something else, that doesn’t mean it’s identical to it; for example, human life is based on breathing, “but this did not mean that it was just air.”(p. 30) Lotze’s reasoning follows Leibniz, who used this reasoning against Hobbes’ materialism.
While scientists saw ideas as outgrowths of brain chemistry, Marxists saw ideas as outgrowths of economic factors, class interests. Scientists and Marxists might be called two schools of materialism; these schools agree in questioning the validity of ideas. Safranski says that materialism was buttressed by “belief in progress.”(p. 30) Materialists seemed to feel that they could improve man’s health, education, and welfare, once they got rid of those silly religions and ideologies. Materialists made man small, but they thought they could make man happy and healthy; Nietzsche satirized this goal as The Last Man. In 1866, F. A. Lange published The History of Materialism, which Safranski says “greatly influenced” Nietzsche. According to Lange, Kant had divided the world into “a world of phenomena that we can analyze by laws,” and “a world that reaches into us, which used to be called ‘spirit’ and by Kant was called ‘freedom’ with reference to the internal man, and the ‘thing in itself’ with reference to the external world.... Freedom is the secret of the world revealing itself to us, the back of the mirror of phenomena.”(p. 31) Our mind, our will, our spontaneity — all give us an insight into how the world works, how nature works, how species evolve. Lange proposed to restore Kant’s division. Lange said that science was justified in focusing on matter, but matter wasn’t the whole story. Scientists err when they push materialism too far, when they forget Kant’s other world. “It was Lange’s great achievement to have demonstrated that... there is a freezing point of materialism, where nothing moves anymore.”(p. 32) Lange said that empiricism seeks truth, while religion/poetry deal with values. Lange said that values/ideals can’t claim truth, they’re merely constructs. Safranski says, “It is an idealism ‘as if,’ because the values here recommended have lost their old dignity and viability since the self-made element was discerned in them.”(p. 33) For Lange, ideals are artificial; Safranski calls this attitude “frivolity.” Lange’s argument was carried further by Hans Vaihinger. “A philosophical best-seller at the end of the century, giving eloquent expression to this educated-middle-class frivolity, was Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of ‘As If.’ In it the values are described as useful fictions.”(p. 33) Safranski says that German society in this period accepted the artificial, “there was widespread delight in the non-genuine.... It was the era of fake materials. Marble was painted wood.” Was a reaction growing beneath the surface? Was the public ready to welcome Heidegger’s argument for authenticity?
Safranski links Lange and Vaihinger to William James and Charles Peirce. American Pragmatism respects ideas that have positive results. Safranski quotes James: “Our errors are not such terribly important things in the end. In a world where, despite all care, we cannot avoid them, a certain measure of carefree frivolity seems healthier than exaggeratedly nervous fear.”(p. 34) back |
| 7. | The phrases “objective spirit” and “objective validity” can both be found in Safranski, Ch. 2, p. 39. These two phrases aren’t in quotes, they aren’t from Heidegger, they’re from Safranski.
Safranski says that Husserl “defends the psychology-free validity of logic like a Platonic realm of ideas against the moles of naturalist psychology.”(p. 38) back |
| 8. | Ch. 3, p. 44, quoting Heidegger back |
| 9. | p. 44, quoting Safranski back |
| 10. | p. 44, quoting Heidegger back |
| 11. | pp. 44, 45, quoting Heidegger back |
| 12. | p. 45, quoting Safranski back |
| 13. | p. 45, quoting Safranski back |
| 14. | Safranski, Ch. 4, pp. 62, 66 back |
| 15. | Concluding Unscientific Postscript, II, 4, 2, A, 3 back |
| 16. | Safranski, p. 63 back |
| 17. | Safranski, Preface, p. ix back |
| 18. | Preface, p. x back |
| 19. | Preface, p. x back |
| 20. | Ch. 1, pp. 7, 8, quoting Heidegger, not Safranski. back |
| 21. | Safranski, p. 2 back |
| 22. | See Ch. 1, p. 2 back |
| 23. | Ch. 1, p. 8, quoting Heidegger back |
| 24. | Ch. 1, p. 10 back |
| 25. | “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason,” by Hajo Holborn, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1950, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 93-118, jstor.org/stable/2707454 back |
| 26. | Ch. 2, p. 18 back |
| 27. | Ch. 2, p. 22 back |
| 28. | Ch. 2, p. 23, quoting Heidegger, not Safranski. Safranski says that, for the young Heidegger, “Formal and mathematical logic was a kind of worship; he allowed logic to take him into the discipline of the eternal, and there he found stability on the swaying ground of life.”(p. 24) Heidegger wrote, “A strong, ice-cold logic opposes the delicate modern soul.”(p. 23) He advocated “rigorously logical thinking, hermetically sealed against every affective influence of the spirit.”
Husserl had argued that logic was more than a subset of psychology. “Husserl’s investigations aim at freeing logic from naturalism and bringing out once more its normative — that is, spiritual — character.”(p. 27) back |
| 29. | Ch. 2, p. 25, quoting Safranski back |
| 30. | Safranski, p. 72 back |
| 31. | Safranski, p. 74 back |
| 32. | Safranski, p. 73 back |
| 33. | p. 74 back |
| 34. | p. 49. Safranski: “Life philosophy replays the Sturm und Drang protest against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Then ‘Nature’ had been the battle cry. Now the life concept has the same function.” back |
| 35. | p. 49. According to Ortega, The ancients believed in things; the moderns, starting with Descartes, believed in thought as the basis of things; the most advanced of the moderns believe in life as the basis of thought.(Historical Reason, 1940, #3) This is the credo of Life Philosophy. back |
| 36. | p. 48, quoting Heidegger back |
| 37. | Safranski, Ch. 3, p. 54 back |
| 38. | Safranski, Ch. 3, pp. 49, 50 back |
| 39. | Nietzsche wrote, “All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life.”(Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” #4) I haven’t been able to trace the saying “consciousness is only a skin over the unconscious.” I believe it’s in Schopenhauer, and I believe Nietzsche agreed with it. back |
| 40. | Safranski, Ch. 3, p. 50 back |
| 41. | Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy,” #2 back |
| 42. | Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” #5 back |
| 43. | Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy,” #2. See also my book of aphorisms and this essay. back |
| 44. | Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy,” #1 back |
| 45. | Human, All-Too-Human, #83 back |
| 46. | Twilight of the Idols, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” #49 back |
| 47. | “Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason,” by Hajo Holborn, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 1950, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 93-118, jstor.org/stable/2707454 back |
| 48. | Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey. In Dilthey’s view, “Ranke, Carlyle, and Tocqueville [were] the three greatest nineteenth-century historians, in whom the rise of modern historical consciousness had found its most forceful expression.... Carlyle looked for the historical man and hero. He approached history... as a problem of inner life or of the relation of faith and action. [Holborn says this was Fichte’s approach; Holborn calls Carlyle “a true Fichtean.”] Alexis de Tocqueville Dilthey calls ‘the greatest analytical mind in politics since Aristotle and Machiavelli.’ As most clearly demonstrated in his classic study of American democracy, Tocqueville tried to isolate the individual elements important for the internal structure of nations and to show the interaction of the various functions in a modern body politic.”(Holborn) As for Ranke’s approach to history, Dilthey considered it dramatic, panoramic, aesthetic. back |
| 49. | Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey back |
| 50. | Holborn, quoting Dilthey. My own ideas seem to contradict Dilthey’s theory. My chief ideas, which I call Cycles and Connections, grew out of my experience; I see no link between my ideas and the larger situation of my society. Dilthey criticizes introspection, but for me, introspection was more fruitful than history.
My ideas grew out of my experience, but my experience may have been merely a catalyst, a way for truths to emerge, truths that have an apparently independent existence. Truth seems to unfold through the course of history, using individual philosophers and scientists as its tools. Of course, we can’t assume that Truth will always unfold, it probably requires a certain level of civilization. If we fall below this level of civilization, perhaps the process will be reversed, and Truth will be rolled up, instead of unrolled.
Dilthey criticizes Nietzsche for his introspection: “Nietzsche stands as a warning of where the brooding of the individual mind leads, which tries to grasp the essence of life within its own self. He denounced history, perhaps in disgust at its unlimited critical detail.... And this brooding about one’s inner self, this ever renewed self-observation, what did it find? Exactly what characterizes the present historical state of our economic life and of our society: the ‘living dangerously,’ the reckless expansion of one’s own power.”(Holborn) Dilthey misunderstands the saying “Live Dangerously.” It doesn’t mean “expand your power,” it means “live a full life, be fully alive.” back |
| 51. | Wikipedia. According to Holborn, “Kant had asked how scientific knowledge is possible,” while Dilthey asked, How are the cultural or historical sciences possible? “The task of philosophy is not to create this knowledge, but to furnish its epistemological basis.” back |
| 52. | This is from Dilthey’s disciple, Ortega, Some Lessons in Metaphysics, #10 back |
| 53. | Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey. back |
| 54. | Holborn, quoting Dilthey back |
| 55. | Safranski, p. 51 back |
| 56. | Safranski, p. 51 back |
| 57. | Holborn, quoting Holborn, not Dilthey back |
| 58. | Holborn. Dilthey was dissatisfied with the experimental psychology of his day, which emulated natural science. He proposed a new kind of psychology, which he called “descriptive and analytical psychology.”(Holborn) “The new psychology rejected the whole approach of natural science to psychology as incapable of dealing with the great and significant creative actions of the human mind and particularly of penetrating into the world of history. Experimental and explanatory psychology can deal at best with certain aspects of the psychological attitudes of present-day men, but it has no way of experimenting with historical man, which means that it has to exclude most of the sources from which we must hope to gain a knowledge of man.”(Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey.)
Would Dilthey have approved of Freud’s approach? Jung’s approach? Freud and Jung often made forays into history, and often wrote about creative figures like Shakespeare and H. G. Wells. And Jung called his approach “analytical psychology,” a phrase he may have gotten from Dilthey. One might say that Dilthey’s psychology went beyond Freud’s insofar as Dilthey focused, not on the unconscious, but on the whole person — consciousness, knowledge, feeling, willing, etc. And Dilthey considered man, not as an isolated individual, but as part of society. Thus, Dilthey’s views remind me of Freud’s disciples — people like Anna Freud, who studied ego psychology, and Erik Erikson, who studied the individual in a historical context.
Karl Jaspers tried to carry Dilthey’s psychology further. A psychiatrist by profession, Jaspers wrote The Psychology of Worldviews, which he called “understanding psychology.”(Holborn) This kind of psychology, Jaspers said, is a cultural science, not a natural science. (Jaspers was a friend of Heidegger’s, and like Heidegger, he’s often called a representative of German Existentialism.) back |
| 59. | Quoted in Holborn, p. 97, footnote 17 back |
| 60. | Ortega, Dilthey’s disciple, said that life “consists not so much in what it is as... in what it has not yet become.” Life “is that paradoxical reality which consists... in being what we not yet are, in starting to be the future.... From moment to moment, we find ourselves forced to choose between various possibilities.”(See “Ortega and Ecological Philosophy,” by W. Kim Rogers, Journal of the History of Ideas, July 1994, vol. 55, #3. The last sentence is from Ortega’s Some Lessons in Metaphysics, #2) back |
| 61. | Holborn, quoting Dilthey. How would Dilthey account for dreams that anticipate the future? Don’t such dreams indicate that the future already exists, that time doesn’t have the linear character that common sense supposes? Perhaps Kant was right, perhaps the thing-in-itself, the core of reality, is beyond time, perhaps the past, present, and future are mixed up together in the thing-in-itself.
Bergson was receptive to the occult, and he probably understood time better than Dilthey. Dilthey seems oblivious of the occult. Bergson distinguished between clock time and experienced time.
Perhaps Dilthey focused on books rather than life itself. This may be a common fault among academics. Nietzsche is a more lively writer than Dilthey. Dilthey is too concerned with definition, classification, method. Dilthey treats scholarship as an end in itself, rather than an aid to living. But perhaps I shouldn’t criticize Dilthey until I’ve read more of him. back |
| 62. | Safranski, pp. 51, 52 back |
| 63. | Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey. back |
| 64. | Holborn. I’m quoting Holborn, not Dilthey. back |