Critical Methods in the Social Sciences (1940)
Two Lectures: Adorno on G. Simmel; Horkheimer on W. Dilthey.
Contents.
Editor’s Note.
Adorno—Lecture: On the Problem of Individual Causality in Georg Simmel’s Sociology.1
Horkheimer—Lecture: The Importance of Psychology for the Social Sciences in W. Dilthey.
A. Lecture Announcement.2
B. Lecture: The Importance of Psychology for the Social Sciences in W. Dilthey.3
C. Remarks: On Dilthey’s Relation to Max Weber.4
Horkheimer—Fragments: On the Standpoint of Science (ca. 1940).
Editor’s Note.
In 1940, Adorno and Horkheimer were both invited to deliver lectures through the Columbia sociology department on problems and methods in the social sciences—Adorno on Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Horkheimer on Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). Adorno’s ‘Simmel’ was first published in the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VIII (2003), ed. Rolf Tiedemann; Horkheimer’s ‘Dilthey,’ including the accompanying materials—the lecture announcement and the previously unpublished remarks on Dilthey’s relation to Max Weber—were sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA]. Horkheimer’s English-language lecture transcript would later be revised for publication in the third issue of the eighth volume of the ISR’s Studies in Philosophy and Social Science [SPSS], under the title “The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the Work of Wilhelm Dilthey.”8 There are indications that Adorno’s lecture was slated for English translation, perhaps publication.9 Apart from the date of Adorno’s lecture, which was delivered on April 19th, 1940, and seemingly as part of R.M. MacIver’s sociology lecture series, I haven’t been able to determine much more about the lectures. Horkheimer’s ‘Dilthey’ is referenced again in a methodological introduction written for but cut from the final version of the ISR’s abortive ‘Germany project’ proposal in 1940/41, Cultural Aspects of National Socialism.10 The short text would later be revised, in collaboration with Adorno, and published in SPSS as well:
Thanks to CTWG comrades Anatarah Bin AlKaf and Jerome Clarke for our recent discussions about missed encounters between the critical theory of society and empiricist currents in American philosophy. On their recommendation to look much more closely at the subterranean communications between critical theory and pragmatism, I stumbled across C.S. Peirce’s fantastic essay, “The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents” (1901).11 There, Peirce develops the method of abduction in the sense of a ‘rational hope,’ or the conviction in the economically practical “pursuitworthiness” of a scientific research hypothesis whose solution is possible but only on the scale of generations of inquirers in a scientific community: “ultimately to be reached, but which, even with the best logic, will not probably come in our day.”12 This paradoxical stance alone makes Peircean abduction good company for the ‘reverse induction’ of concept formation in critical theory. Their connection, I believe, is indeed pursuit-worthy.
Adorno—Lecture: On the Problem of Individual Causality in Georg Simmel’s Sociology.
In order to help you to conceptualize the unique way in which the problem of causality in the social sciences is sharpened—to a point—in the epistemological analyses of Georg Simmel, I would first like to say something about the tendencies in turn-of-the-century German philosophy he was associated with. Simmel is considered a Lebensphilosoph, and is generally classified under that title with Bergson. His thinking did indeed culminate in a metaphysics of life. But Simmel’s origins are rather different from Bergson’s. Simmel did not come from biology, but from those sciences which were customarily referred to in Germany as the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). His earliest works were devoted to the psychological theory of morals, his later works in particular to sociology, philosophy of history, interpretation of existing philosophies, and aesthetics. Simmel was someone who, for better or worse, can be called a philosopher of culture. His doctrine of life accordingly had a different accent from the outset than Bergson’s. It could be said that Bergson’s philosophy emerged from the posing of natural-scientific questions. Simmel’s philosophy emerged from the attempt to emancipate himself from the dominant naturalism of the 19th century, and to oppose categories such as matter, quantum, universal law with categories such as those of subjectivity, the determination of qualitative differences, and the individual. The concept of life, for Simmel, is essentially the attempt to turn the latter kind of categories into fundamental categories—categories which essentially emerge from the concept of subjectivity itself. Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie belongs to German Neo-Kantianism, despite all the contradictions that arise between them. Simmel himself declared himself a Neo-Kantian, in stating the intention of his Kant-book [1904]: “to enshrine those core ideas with which Kant laid the foundations of a new Weltbild in the timeless inventory of philosophical possessions—and so these ideas will be attainable, or at least approachable, to beings under the condition of time.”13 More specifically, Simmel belongs to the circle of such Neo-Kantian social philosophers as Windelband, Rickert,14 and Max Weber: the so-called Southwest German School.
The impulse of German Neo-Kantianism—or at least its Southwestern German wing, with whom Simmel had the closest proximity—was twofold: On the one hand, it emerged from the need to check the predominance of the empirical sciences and their appendage, utilitarian ethics, and to oppose them with the autonomy of knowledge [Erkenntnis], an a priori principle that is largely independent of discoveries in empirical research. On the other hand, this contrast between the subjective a priori and the empirical natural sciences for him signified something without precedent in Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, the natural sciences themselves, particularly mathematics and classical mechanics, were the medium of a priority. The technical developments of the natural sciences, especially the strict, a posteriori chemistry of the 19th century, relegated the aprioristic tendencies to the social sciences, which play no role in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The so-called cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) assert themselves as material for aprioristic philosophy all the more forcefully to the extent they seem to realize the autonomy of subjectivity as personal freedom, which, in the natural sciences, can only be maintained as abstract principle of knowledge. The concrete fullness of the human itself, which furnishes the human sciences with their proper object, seems to attest to the sovereignty of productive Geist more compellingly than does a nature it prescribes laws to, but that nevertheless remains external and contingent. Kant withheld human autonomy as a substantive principle from the realm of the exact sciences, relegating it to practical reason. If the epistemological-critical philosophical orientation of Neo-Kantianism wanted to remain true to the desideratum of Hegelian metaphysics, namely to eliminate the Kantian difference between pure and practical reason; and moreover, at the same time, wanted to avoid incurring the consequences of Hegelian speculation and instead remain on the terra firma of the developed sciences—then it was remitted to the human sciences as a matter of course. Geist, as ground of justification,15 claims the Geisteswissenschaften as its home territory.
However, this poses an extraordinary difficulty from the outset. That Kant restricted himself to the natural sciences was no accident. His concern was the possibility of a priori knowledge: its objectivity. For Kant, the secondary question of the subjectivity of its constitution was only a means for securing the objective character of knowledge, as opposed to the accidental character of the outward course of the world, more than naive realism had been capable of doing. For Kant, subjectivity is the condition of universal and necessary, or, one could say, lawful knowledge:16 subjectivity is itself the law which constitutes the unity of experience. This philosophical tendency towards subjectivity as something lawful,17 however, was only self-assured and unproblematic where the knowing itself was undoubtedly objective and lawful,18 or at least appeared to be in Kant’s time—namely, in the mathematical natural sciences. Once the Kantian question, how are synthetic a priori judgments possible, is transposed from the pure natural sciences into the human sciences, it becomes much more challenging. One can no longer content themselves with asking how these judgments are possible, as if their possibility was itself a sure thing, but must rather ask whether these judgments are possible at all. Certainly, Geist has the greatest chance of re-encountering itself, understanding itself, and rediscovering itself as the innate principle of its own object of inquiry in the sciences of man.19
But the apriority, objectivity, and lawfulness of its insights become that much more questionable. The human objects it investigates are subject not only to human transience, but singular in their essence, or at the very least seem to be; and their temporality is unquestionably an element of their truth, diametrically opposed to the timelessness of Kant’s a priori. The concept of objectivity acquires a paradoxical ring wherever the objects are subjects. For only the subject truly knows of subjects. This knowing subject is, however, not an abstract point-of-reference as in the natural sciences. The more content it possesses itself—that is, the more “subjective” this subject itself is—the more of that intellectual actuality it loses that it would otherwise have to work with.20 For Kant, the knowing subject supposed to prescribe nature its rules can, in a certain sense, forget itself in the knowledge of nature; knowledge in the human sciences, however, presupposes in each piece of subjectivity the same richness and significance of the content of subjectivity that tends, therefore, to dissolve the concept of the objective itself. To formulate it in extreme terms: the more subjective one is, the more the human sciences gain of that “objectivity” they are concerned with; by reassigning objectivity to the content of subjectivity, however, the concept of the objective itself becomes extremely problematic. Thus, the concept of law presents the greatest difficulties.
Accordingly, the subjectivity of the human sciences—both as knowing and known—, and no longer the universal transcendental principle of Kant, splits into separate individuals. Individuals are an essential object of the human sciences, and the instrument of their knowledge is not the pure function of thought but the individual itself. This, however, renders the concept of law in the Kantian sense—of necessity and universality—almost impossible. The realm of the human sciences is the realm of individuals, and so the realm of the particular,21 and when the Kantian postulate of universality is confronted by the particular, it seems a barren abstractum; individuals are also the knowers, and the content of their knowledge is determined by their individuality. In doing so, they expose themselves to all the risks of arbitrariness, relativity, and lawlessness. The Kantian spin on the question of subjectivity and Geist, once transposed from the realm of the pure forms of knowledge to the realm of the objects of knowledge,22 threatens to turn against the Kantian postulate of apriority, objectivity, and lawfulness. This postulate is virtually identical with the Kantian conception as a whole. Neo-Kantian idealism, as anti-naturalism, carries within itself the principle of the dissolution of Kantian transcendental idealism as doctrine of the necessary and the universal.
This problematic found its early expression in the reflections of Southwest German Neo-Kantianism. Windelband and Rickert attempted to get out of it by splitting knowledge into two spheres, separated from one another in principle.23 They established a contrast between the natural, “nomothetic,” or law-giving sciences and the cultural, “ideographic,” or particular-describing sciences. Both kinds of science were to share a ground in knowing subjectivity, and their difference was to be determined entirely through the difference of interest that subjectivity pursues. The distinction was to lie not in the objects themselves, but in the kind of question. For example, a stone can fall within the realm of the nomothetic sciences as a subject of geological laws or fall into that of the ideographic sciences as a historical product of the history of earth. The nomothetic natural sciences essentially correspond to the Kantian representation of universality and necessity. For the ideographic sciences, any such ground for scientific objectivity is missing. Ex definitione, the concept of law is excluded from the ideographic sciences. In order to grant the ideographic, cultural-scientific method with anything like objectivity at all, Windelband and Rickert, following in the footsteps of Hugo Münsterberg,24 have recourse to a conception of objective principle that regulates the selection of individual objects for scientific description. In this conception, the regulating principle is supposed to be the relationship to given values, which are themselves, in the last instance, constituted through the concept of culture.
The unsatisfactoriness of this theory, which suppresses the problem of Neo-Kantianism, as I have attempted to characterize it for you, more through bureaucratic-organizational measure than objective solution—could not remain hidden. It may not only be objected that the divorce of the spheres of nature and culture is an epistemological absolutization of what is essentially a social distinction between extra-human and human nature, but also that the distinction between nomothetic and ideographic fails to do justice to the factual composition of the sciences. So, it is impossible that the natural sciences terminate in pure laws, since laws in the natural sciences generate principles for the explanation of individual facts, and the life of the natural sciences exists solely in this interplay of individual fact and law. On the other hand, the restriction of the human sciences to the description of pure that-over-there would so impoverish them that despite the much-decried barrenness of the Kantian world, nothing would have been gained through this reversal into its opposite. The most essential interests pursued by humanity in the human sciences—namely, to wrest society from its blind contingency and consciously guide it via knowledge of historical tendencies, the laws of social development, and the objective possibility of history—would be lost if the ideographic approach were adopted. The value-relationship [Wertbeziehung], however, is supposed to make up for the omission of the question concerning historical and social law.
For according to Windelband and Rickert’s conception, values only lack an objectively binding and law-constituting character because instead of emerging from the autonomy of the knowing subject, they have been descriptively drawn from the actual course of history. Values are nothing other than what was important in history, and the question of their legitimation remains unposed. With the descriptive-historical approach, not only is the contingency of existence made into the measure of what the law should be,25 but the question of what is truly important in social life is—in the pure description of details, and the absence of any theory—exposed to the same relativity that the law was supposed to be lifted from and elevated above. That the concept of culture, itself marked by all of the unresolved contradictions of social life, is supposed to be capable of objectivizing the value-relationship all on its own—is absurd. One should not, therefore, be surprised that the more dogged thinkers of Neo-Kantianism in the human sciences, such as Simmel himself, later dissolved the pseudo-objectivity of the doctrine of values, along with the notion of the purely descriptive character of the human sciences, and developed the real consequences of the ruthless psychologism that reduces those free-floating values to the individuals the Southwest German school had already subordinated them to.
A thinker as dogged as Simmel, however, was not content to adopt the position of pure nominalism and relativism. The desire to reconstruct the a priori and, in more concrete terms, the desire to not simply string facts together one after the other in the social sciences, but rather bring them into objective, binding interconnections that actually render what has merely been described [das bloß Beschriebene] comprehensible—this desire remained effective in his work. Rather than simply avoiding the difficulty of the relation between the natural sciences and social sciences, he endeavored to unify the concept of law, which he was familiar with from the theoretical natural sciences, and the category of the individual, which appeared to him, as it had to Rickert and Windelband, decisive for the social sciences. Moreover, he endeavored to provide something of an epistemology of the social sciences capable of taking their concrete and non-formalizable character into account, without thereby handing them over to the blind contingency of the particular and without needing to adopt a pseudo-solution like that of the recourse to ‘value.’ However it is evident that this attempt makes the question of causality central to the social sciences. Necessary and objective knowledge in the social-scientific realm can be nothing other than the knowledge that has the power to determine the causal relationships of events internal to culture, rather than seeing them as merely contingent. On the other hand, the classical causality of the theoretical natural sciences is not valid in the social sciences.
In Problemen der Geschichtsphilosophie, one of his major epistemological works, Simmel defines the latter as follows: “The following is a possible, internally consistent definition of the concept of a law that governs an event. It is a proposition which states that, given the satisfaction of a certain set of empirical conditions, the satisfaction of another set of empirical conditions will unconditionally—that is, in every spatio-temporal frame—follow as the consequence.”26 He first demonstrates that there is no such unconditional universality to speak of in the historical realm. “As a matter of fact, these ideal conditions of isolation are never satisfied. Forces of very different direction and origin act concomitantly. The differentiation of a given force or cause within a uniform law governing a sequence of events turns on the following questions. Can the results of this force also be identified in other complexes? And, if this is the case, does the cause in question invariably produce the same result?”27 He then, in a series of arguments, demonstrates that any such isolation is impossible to carry out. In the process of advancing these arguments, which I cannot cover exhaustively here, the most important is that there is no absolute identity of causal elements across different historical contexts. Therefore, the possible application of causal lawfulness in the cultural sciences seems to be precluded from the outset. Simmel arrives at the following conclusion: “But consider all the instances that are supposed to fall under some putative law of history: they are never totally congruent in all respects. Therefore the law—which is derived from the observation of one situation and its consequence—only holds for this single case: in other words, this case and all of its absolutely identical repetitions. It does not hold for all the other cases which appear to connect cause and effect in the same way only as a result of the suppression of their differences. Because of our ignorance of the causal relations between the elementary components of these totalities, we have no knowledge of the crucial factor. Knowledge of the variations in the value of this factor would make it possible for us to compute a later event as a function of an earlier one. Therefore the putative law is only valid for one case. It has no legitimate application to future cases. Without knowledge of the properties of the basic elements, it is impossible for us to establish whether a certain discrepancy between an earlier and a later instance may concern precisely the factor which is responsible for the fact that a later complex phenomenon is a causal consequence of an earlier complex phenomenon.”28
But this is precisely the result Simmel cannot be satisfied with, and so he makes an attempt, albeit in an extremely cautious and hypothetical form, to rescue the principle of causality in the same domain where the conception of causality as a universally valid, and valid for all times, lawfulness is not possible. In other words: Simmel challenges the assumption taken for granted since Kant, namely, that universal law is the same as effective causality. Simmel characterizes the customary conception as follows: “We are not prepared to acknowledge a causal relationship in the absence of a causal law. In other words, the fact that B follows A is recognized as the causation of B by A only if a law obtains to the effect that in every case—in other words, invariably—B follows whenever A occurs.”29 However, for Simmel, the connection between causality and this kind of law is not an indispensable logical assumption. Rather, it appears to him “logically unobjectionable” that “[a]t one point in space and time, an event A causes an event B. At another point in space and time, it causes another event C.”30 In the sentences that follow, Simmel clarifies how he wants us to understand this kind of possibility: “The essential point is the following. This hypothesis does not replace causation with a relationship of purely arbitrary temporal succession. On the contrary, all of the definitive conditions which distinguish causation from the latter—the internality, productivity, and necessity [Innerlichkeit, Produktivität, Notwendigkeit] of the connection—are retained. There is only one difference. Instead of invariably being fulfilled by the same propositions, they are fulfilled by a varying set of propositions.”31
For Simmel, this restriction of causality in any one case to a single connection between two elements should by no means signify that this connection is merely left up to chance. Under the assumption of individual causality, history would not necessarily be ruled by anarchy: “[C]ausality would continue to hold in all of its objectivity and strictness. Actually, the domain within which causality obtains would be even more extensive. Instead of being valid for all cases, however, the content of any law would be valid only for one case. The valid content of a causal law would change for each successive case.”32 Having just proposed this theory, Simmel objects to it on the grounds that even though it is indeed logically possible, it is nevertheless sterile. He gives the following reason: “Consider an event which has a unique, nonrepeatable content. Consider also the distinction between a genuine causal relationship governing the moments of this event as hypothesized above and a case of arbitrary, purely fortuitous temporal succession. We have no method for making this distinction.”33 Even if one were to follow Kant and consider the category of causality a pure form of thinking that does not stem from experience, causal knowledge would still only be possible wherever concurrent and recurring events are compared with one another. Where this possibility for comparison is missing, however, where there is no universality whatsoever to confront individual events, it would not be possible to tell whether any two events were causally or only “fortuitous” in relation to one another. In order to elucidate this for you, I will use an example from the last few days. Immediately after the German occupation of Norway, it was reported from Brussels that there was an explosion near the German-Belgian border on the German side, and that, in all probability, a German munitions factory was blown up. If we assume this report is accurate, it is impossible to reach a decision about whether this was the consequence of a causal connection or mere fortuitous coincidence so long as the two, successive events, the occupation of Norway and the explosion, are known to us only in complete isolation.
The judgment: the explosion of the munitions factory was caused through an act of sabotage, carried out as protest by the workers of the munitions factory in response to the conquest of Norway, and was to that extent caused by it—this can only be considered valid, or even probable, if outside these two isolated events there are other moments both have a relationship with, and from which the connection between the two events can be deduced—for example, that Hitler’s expansionist politics have been met with resistance from significant sectors of the German people; that the resistance of the workers has been particularly spirited; that, under the conditions of domination in Germany, sabotage is the only really available means of expressing their resistance; and that other instances of sabotage were also connected to the German actions against Norway, e.g., the non-explosion of German shells that struck English warships and certain broadcasts from clandestine German radio stations, that point in the same direction. If we assume, however, that all of these other moments remain—as they have thus far—in the realm of conjecture, there would be no possibility of deciding whether a causal connection in fact exists between the German action and the explosion of the munitions factory as two absolute singularities. The individual causality Simmel speaks of presents itself as something rather like the Kantian thing-in-itself: as a possibility of thought, which, in its purity, escapes all experience and which, the same instant it does enter into experience, assumes the role of something akin to universal lawfulness. So thinks Simmel himself.
Here you might object: what good is it to invent a logical possibility like individual causality if one also, at the same time, denies its possible empirical application in the social sciences? And to be sure, many will see Simmel’s initial approach as a piece of that infamous German Theorienspinnerei (theory-spinning). Although I in no way share Simmel’s philosophical standpoint myself, I would nevertheless ask that you examine the possibility he presents us with more closely. For the possibility exists that such theories index certain experiences that are rather important, even if it is difficult to translate these into practical and [workable]34 research methods. If we are to follow the trail of traces left behind of this kind of experience, let us return to Simmel’s critical formulation. For Simmel, what remains for individual causality, however one might imagine it concretely, after its universal lawfulness has been revoked is “the internality, productivity, and necessity of the connection.” Upon examining these expressions more closely, we find that at least two of them belong to the sphere of experience we possess of the human individual. ‘Internality’ is a mode of behavior of human beings, and which human beings transpose onto the historical causal-nexus, as if the sequence of two historical events were something that could be represented like two discrete stages in the meditation of an individual human being, stages which, though not ‘caused’ in a natural-scientific sense, nevertheless stand in particularly close-knit, internal connection with one another as moments of an in-itself self-contained and meaningful order of events. ‘Productivity’ has a similarly human ring to it.35
The third aspect Simmel provides for the “blind spot” of individual causality is that of necessity. It is, naturally, particularly difficult to represent this sort of necessity if one overlooks the sort of universality by which ‘necessity’ is defined in its conventional usage. Despite this, the attempt does not strike me as one completely foreclosed. Perhaps the easiest way to proceed is recall what was expressed in the older philosophical idiom with the words: that an event is adequate to its “concept,” or: that it obeys the law of its own essence. If for the moment we may forget the problems that accompany this concept,36 and even whether the essence of a single moment can be determined at all without returning to the other moments—and for the moment simply keep in mind that the non-universal lawfulness Simmel mentions has to be understood in the sense someone might say: the explosion of the munitions factory following the invasion of Norway is “necessary” because it corresponds to the concept of present-day German society that in moments of particular military and political risk, acts of sabotage happen regardless of whether the individual “factors,” by reference to which the causality between the two events can be established in the conventional sense, are known or not. Or, to give you another example to demonstrate in what sense this ‘necessity’ is meant: the Austrian author Karl Kraus waged a decades-long struggle against the linguistic sloppiness and corruption of journalism.37 In this struggle, the practice of pointing out ridiculous and silly printing errors played a not-insignificant role, errors which, in a certain sense, served to further underscore the phrase-mongering character of journalistic production itself. It is certainly possible to establish in each individual case the causal connections between the style of the authors in question and their respective printing errors. All the same, however, according to Kraus’s intention, the errors were ‘necessary’ in the sense that they emerge from the concept of journalistic sloppiness itself. I know very well that here it is objected that in order for this kind of judgment to amount to more than mere aperçu, it would be necessary to make the individual causal links clear and to reduce them to some kind of universal-lawful form.
However, I believe that this objection does not in any way exhaust the facts of the matter at hand. That is: even if these causal links cannot be demonstrated, there is a connection between journalistic sloppiness and sloppiness in printing, which does permit of demonstration, for example, in that certain mutilated stylistic figures and certain printing errors in their texts bear a striking resemblance to one another. Whether both facts can be traced back to a shared third cause, such as the working conditions of journalistic production today in general, or whether both facts only stand in relation to journalism as a whole in the sense, as we characterize it, of the relation between appearance and essence—remains, for the moment, entirely undecided. What is crucial is that we are speaking of a ‘necessity’ here even if we are not, this very instant, in possession of the causal links; and moreover: even if our express intention is not to uncover all of these causal links. It never occurred to Karl Kraus to investigate which connecting links exist, for example, between the state of a sloppily written journalistic manuscript and a sloppily printed journalistic text. On the contrary: in the spirit of his practiced approach, the “necessity” or, to use Simmel’s words, internality of their interlinking is all the more striking the less one knows about all intermediary links of that kind. Simmel surely did not have this kind of example in mind for individual causality, the meaning of which can only be understood on the basis of the polemical and ironic intention from which it emerged, and which cannot be understood if taken too crudely or literally. But the fact that the “internality, productivity, and necessity of the connection” is so striking here, where any recourse to elements that lie outside of the singular connection, as the law of causality demands, is absolutely out of the question, seems to offer us a clue as to what Simmel himself had in mind.
What have we found thus far in our closer examination of the possibility of this kind of individual causality? First, we have determined that the concepts of the ‘internality’ and the ‘productivity’ of the connection are concepts evidently belonging to the human realm. We could go a step further and say: both are determinations belonging to the sphere of freedom. The assumption of an in-itself meaningful and univocal, but not conditioned through universal causality, connection between events would be that of a behavior from freedom,38 one in which the individual moments would indeed be connected insofar as they stand in logical unity with one another, insofar as they belong to the performance of the same consciousness and cohere in acts of thought, but where they would nevertheless not be “causally” linked to one another, and would rather emerge from the spontaneity of the distinct individual and elude the regularity of the universal, the regularity customarily referred to as causality. So understood, the kind of possibility conceived by Simmel would come very close indeed to what Kant called Kausalität aus Freiheit (“causality from freedom”). There are several formulations of Simmel’s that directly echo this concept: “Each individual human psyche would therefore constitute an instance of limitation,39 as if the category of being, subjected to a unique lawfulness, had been drawn together into a single exemplar. But whereas all other manifolds at the very least tend towards higher-order commonalities, from which their differences might then be derived, in each personal psyche there would be found a definitive ultimate, one whose movements would proceed of its own accord, according to its own law.”40
Under this law, however, one would be incapable of representing anything but the autonomously willed decision of a single individual. Therefore whatever followed from individual causality would have to proceed of its own accord, according to its determination of itself—and not according to an external, universal determination. But what proceeds of its own accord, according to its own determination, is free. In this proceeding-of-one’s-own-accord, according to one’s own determination—in what Simmel calls ‘the necessary,’ while at the same time sharply distinguishing ‘the necessary’ from ‘the universal’—there is also something else. Above, we attempted to approach this ‘necessity’ by mentioning the concept of essence, but left open the question of whether this kind an essence can be meaningfully spoken of at all if one completely disregards the moment of the universal. Perhaps we can find some greater clarity about the meaning of what is ‘necessary of its essence’ [Wesensnotwendigen] if we formulate the matter in another way: that by which we are justified in designating the succession of two historical events as a necessary one, even if we cannot conceive of the connection between them as determined universally-lawfully, is nothing other than that the succession of the two events is rendered comprehensible through a theory adequate to both of these events and to the whole “system” in which they occur.
Therefore, we would only be justified in speaking of a necessity, for example, in the case of the succession of the events of the German invasion and the explosion, or in the case of the facts of journalistic style and printing errors, without our knowledge of the individual links to which universal laws would be applicable, if we were in possession of a theory that says something about the present state of German society under the terror and the tendencies of its members to react in certain ways in times of particular tension, or a theory about the decay of language in the era of the commercial manipulation of the word. What we earlier referred to as necessity of essence [Wesensnotwendigkeit], we might best re-articulate here as necessity of thought [Denknotwendigkeit]. That is: when our theory “hits” [zutrifft], then we are justified in seeing the events in question as ‘necessary’ in the sense of the theory, because we are capable of deriving them from the perspective of the theory itself. The source of justification for those statements of necessity would therefore be a theory of society. And I would in fact argue for the view that the sole justification for statements about causal connections within society, and that claim their necessity, insofar as they emerge from the consequent thinking of the theory of society. Even if countless causal moments enter into this theory itself, or indeed that all of its determinations perhaps prove, in the end, to agree with the accounts by conventional causality, is another question. For where we speak of these necessities of essence [Wesensnotwendigkeiten], conventional causalities are in any case not in play: the unity of the theory functions here, in a certain sense, as a stand-in for the universality of the causal principle.
It is clear that this theory has no independence above and beyond the events it conceives, but rather constitutes itself and continuously modifies itself on the grounds of the experience of individual moments. But we can say this much for certain: if there is no such thing as an internally coherent theory, then to speak of necessities in the realm of society would no longer make any rational sense. We have therefore worked out two elements in Simmel’s theory of individual causality that enable us to give his theory a more determinate content than mere abstract possibility, as it appears in Simmel himself. Now, our task is to consider Simmel’s own stance on both of these elements, and in so doing become capable of understanding and criticizing the abstractness of his own formulation. As for the moment of a theory of society that might enable us to grant meaning to the “necessity” he speaks of, namely the meaning of theoretical necessity of thought [Denknotwendigkeit], he makes no mention of this kind of theory. For he remained completely true to the intuitions of “ideographic” epistemology, since he retained the concept of the individual as the object and ground of justification for all statements about society. Whoever dissolves all social events to individual events in principle is not capable of offering a social theory that would determine individual behaviors as necessities of thought [Denknotwendigkeit]. Thus, the concept of necessity remains so empty for him.
Here, as with so many other moments in his work, it is as if Simmel had reached the limits of individualism and even identified the problems that cannot be solved with individualistic categories, but was nevertheless not capable of getting beyond the restrictions of the standpoint of contingent individuality. As for the second moment of the theory, namely the moment of freedom, Simmel himself discussed it, but dismissed it: “The meaning of every existence would remain its complete autonomy—not in the sense of freedom of the will, which, here, is not even in question—, the lawfulness belonging to or flowing from its being as such, not from any overarching system.”41 I must confess that the distinction Simmel makes here between autonomy and freedom of the will is not entirely clear to me.42 He excluded from autonomy any kind of lawfulness not belonging to the individual itself. But this very autonomy, that is, the lawfulness belonging to the individual and the individual alone, is what we refer to as freedom. Freedom is, as Hegel repeatedly and rightly emphasized, is the exact opposite of contingency. No individual whose actions succeeded one after the other in complete arbitrariness and independence vis-à-vis one another, so that the one would involve the exact opposite of the preceding, would ultimately be free. In a certain sense, they would rather be at the mercy of individual, contradictory moments, and any mention of self-determination would no longer make any rational sense. They would only be free if these individual actions and moments emerged from the unity that defines the individual as such from the start; in other words: if all of their actions were subjected to decision and control through individual consciousness. In the absence of any of the necessity inherent to the connection between action and consciousness, the concept of freedom would be a mere mockery. Therefore, Simmel’s attempt to separate autonomy and freedom of the will from one another, and to allow for the possibility of an individual who is indeed autonomous but at the same time unfree, is a fallacy. For what appears to him unfreedom—the internality, productivity, and necessity of the interconnection between individual modes of behavior—is the substance of the one thing that can rationally be called freedom.
Even so, I would like to come to Simmel’s rescue once more. There are, oftentimes, cases in which the errors and inconsistencies of philosophers point to much deeper experiences than the mechanical unwinding of conclusions. That Simmel attempted, however much in vain, to distance himself from freedom of the will has a good reason. If our contention that individual causality, that is, the internality and productivity of the connection, as Simmel claims, is something that in truth presupposes the freedom of the individual, then in Simmel’s own theory, however much he may deny it himself, this ‘freedom’ is in a certain sense hypostasized. It would mean that, with this principle in hand, one could only explain history and society if the individuals within them were in actuality already free. Precisely this, however, is not the case, and it is unlikely this escaped Simmel himself. For that reason, he was cautious; he refrained from turning the principle of individual causality into an actual principle of explanation for history, and introduced the principle solely as a possibility of thought—, as a possibility of thought, we would say, which has still to be actualized whatsoever. The laws according to which the world turns, the world human beings have thus far been dealt and have to deal with, is a world that is, in fact, governed far more by universal and natural-scientific causality than causality from freedom. If the universal causality is nevertheless incapable of explaining this world, the reason for this is that there is also, in fact, just as much contingency in the world as causality. Only if freedom were actualized would its contingency, along with its universal law, be overcome. The concept of individual causality stands opposed to both. In Kantian language, it is a regulative principle and not a constitutive one. Therefore Simmel was quite right not to apply it directly to empirical matters and express his reservation concerning the concept of freedom.
This has yet another consequence for the relation between the individual and the universal. Simmel asserted that individual causality is a logical possibility, but epistemologically sterile. For, “[g]ranted, causality as a form cannot be derived from experience. Nevertheless, a given law is confirmed only by means of induction, by comparing the repetition of events which agree in content.”43 If the principle of individual causality, namely the autonomy and freedom of the person, is in fact a regulative idea, one which is not actualized in the world where we live, this seems to me to be connected to an epistemological difficulty that Simmel pointed out, an epistemological difficulty which is also in fact a substantive one. Elsewhere, Simmel writes that the opposition between the universal-lawful and the singular-particular in history “essentially coincides with the distinction between the individual and the societal group.”44 Therein lies the substantive moment I have in mind. That we can only recognize causality as general, whereas individual causality eludes our knowledge, is not a matter of our limited cognitive faculties, but is rather that the freedom we have conceptualized as individual causality can only be actualized, in its true sense, as universal principle. Were it in fact limited to the individual monad as Simmel the epistemologist assumes it is, then it would remain burdened with that contingency to which Simmel the epistemologist points. The individual sphere, as the sphere of freedom, cannot simply break free of the universal sphere, as the sphere of causality. For they are in fact most profoundly interrelated. In a world dominated through and through by universal laws, the individual is indeed contingent. Should the individual assume in itself, as Simmel says, the form of productive necessity, then this presupposes a transformation of the universal, one that simultaneously abolishes the unyielding, mechanical law of the universal and does away with the contingency of the individual. The true individual would be the true universal. Just so, for the contingent individual is the warped image of abstract necessity. Simmel was right to insist on universality as a condition for knowledge of necessity. But he was right in a much more profound sense than he himself knew: namely, that individual freedom can only exist, if it is to be at all, as universal and self-transparent. Otherwise, it remains inscrutable because it is contingent and non-transparent, because it does not even exist—not really, not yet.45
Horkheimer—Lecture: The Importance of Psychology for the Social Sciences in W. Dilthey.
A. Lecture Announcement.
Dr. M. Horkheimer will open a discussion on the importance of psychology for the social sciences. Some of W. Dilthey’s conceptions will serve as the basis for the discussion. Among his numerous writings, the following have been chosen as main sources:
Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Vol. I. (1st edition 1883). Now: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I. Leipzig and Berlin 1922.
Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. (Essays collected in Vol. VII of the Gesammelte Schriften. Leipzig and Berlin 1927.)
Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie. (1st edition 1894). Now: Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V., Leipzig and Berlin 1924, pp. 139-240.
The report will begin with Dilthey’s criticism of the discipline of sociology which he mainly attacks in its Comtean and Spencerian forms. In contrast, Dilthey develops his idea of historico-social reality as the expression of human nature. Then, we will discuss Dilthey’s concept of historical understanding (Verstehen) which leads to his distinction between natural and social sciences (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften). Dilthey criticizes traditional psychology and sketches the idea of a new psychology specially suited to the social sciences. After a short analysis of his psychology, the question will be raised to what degree psycho-analysis has fulfilled Dilthey’s postulates.
B. Lecture: The Importance of Psychology for the Social Sciences in W. Dilthey.
I am fully conscious of the fact that it is at best a bold undertaking to initiate a discussion on Dilthey. The subject-matter which interests us here is not to be found in any conclusive work. The great biographies of Schleiermacher’s life or of Hegel’s early history take up specific themes which do not bear upon today’s discussion. We German philosophers are traditionally blamed for the vice of dealing with comprehensive abstract problems which are difficult to understand. Dilthey not only has this fault, but an added one: The decisive parts of his work are incomplete. His writings, in spite of their impressive range, are composed of fragments, drafts and notes most of which were published posthumously. I must admit that I can not consider this lack of system for which Scheler, for instance, reproached him as something merely negative. The fact that Dilthey never found a final solution for the decisive problems with which he dealt, that he rather started over and over again, and that he spurned, through the formulation of a system, to pretend to a clarity which does not exist in these matters, gives to the study of Dilthey, even today, a stimulating character and at the same time a definite diffuse quality. It is the latter quality of which you will receive a sample today.
It is difficult to classify Dilthey in any of the branches of the traditional sciences.
He would have rejected the title of “philosopher of history” in the metaphysical sense. He always felt himself to be a disciple of the Enlightenment which identified knowledge with science and opposed it to speculation. Science, according to Dilthey, is based on analysis. The aim of the analysis is “to find the real factors through the dissection of the reality” (V, 174).46 Its tools are induction and experiment. The particular disciplines serve to “explore the uniformity of the simpler facts into which we dissect reality” (I, 94/95). Though he stresses—like Windelband and Rickert—the methodological distinction between natural and cultural sciences, he takes great care to preserve the cultural sciences from dogmatism. The propositions at which theoretical thought begins or those at which it arrives are, according to him, not unconditional truth, but only hypotheses. His concepts are, one is induced to say, forcibly adapted to positivistic thinking. Ranke’s desire to see things as they really have been is supplemented by Dilthey’s insistence that mere observation and verification is not sufficient, but that knowledge of “historical-social reality” (I, 95) must be based on the application of all the special theories of man and of science which are at our disposal. It is true that these are only auxiliary theories. The aim is universal history as the culmination of the whole of the cultural sciences (humanities). It is my conviction that Dilthey, in spite of all his polemics against Comte, nevertheless patterned this progress from the “simple” to the “more complex” (I, 94) too much after the model of the natural sciences.
Again and again Dilthey fought against any transcending of experience. For instance, the question whether the aim of the individual lies in himself, whether the value of life is realized in the existence of the individual, or rather in the development of a nation or of mankind in general, is for him a question of mere metaphysics (VII, 284). He shows himself to be a genuine member of Max Weber’s generation and, moreover, of the philosophy of recent centuries by stressing the importance of clearly separating knowledge from purpose, praxis from theory, thought from conviction. In the last years of his life, under the influence of phenomenology, he seems to have freed himself from this more narrowing than liberating view. In his later fragments we find discussions of the objectivity of values. Dilthey, however, did not draw the consequences which would have brought into clear view his contrast to a science free from value judgments (wertfreie Wissenschaft) (VI, 317; VII, 63 sw.).
If Dilthey did not want to be a philosopher of history, neither did he want to be a sociologist. The attack on sociology in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the cultural sciences) is perhaps the best known part of his theoretical writing. By sociology, he understands mainly the school of Comte. If the philosophy of history takes upon itself the impossible task of furnishing a unified theory of the whole of historical reality (that is to say a theory derived from the principle rather than from the compounding of manifold results of scientific analysis), sociology even goes beyond this progress by the attempt to use the theory of this whole for the future practical construction of society. Such aims are impossible, according to Dilthey. Dilthey criticizes Comte and his school especially for the assumption of a universal law, or meaning (Sinn), of human development, and for the grandiose way in which Comte’s sociology would generalize more or less vague analogies between the historical periods. Dilthey altogether hated the practice of “subsuming the method of studying cultural facts under the methods of the natural sciences” (I, 105).
That Dilthey does not discriminate between the history of philosophy and sociology is not quite so arbitrary as it may appear. It is probable that Hegel’s conception of society derives from the same source as Comte’s, namely from St. Simon. St. Simon discovered in the French Revolution that the forms of government and constitutions may change without any basic change taking place in social life. (Cf. Oeuvres, Paris 1865/78, Vol. XIX, p. 81-83) The laws which regulate political relations are based, according to St. Simon, on the particular form of production and of property. Society is the ever changing relation of men, conditioned by production and property relations. What Dilthey is attacking is the notion that one can relate everything in the history of mankind in such a unity that the whole development in the economic, political, legal, artistic, and religious spheres can be composed into one science. Dilthey fought the idea that sociology is a unified theory of history, an idea which runs through the nineteenth century ever since St. Simon gave expression to it. He pronounces it metaphysical. A science of the multifold relations and associations of men, like subordination, imitation, division of labor, competition, the perpetuation of social groups, the formation of hierarchies, of parties, and so on (see I, 421), a science of relations which in the historical change of their content and aims remain constant, that is, a formal, general sociology—such a science Dilthey recognized. He turns against St. Simon, Hegel and Marx, but not against Simmel.
For Dilthey, society is no inner unity but the sum total of external forms of organization which however must be derived from psychic factors. Thus Dilthey thinks of all the conscious and unconscious tendencies concealed behind the striving for community (“Geselligkeitstrieb” I, 66), of tendencies of domination and dependence, freedom, compulsion, etc. Society is therefore not to be taken as its own independent entity; it can be understood only by reference to psychic laws. Any given society exists only insofar as the various sides of the human psyche find expression in it. Approaching culture from an extremely psychological point of view, Dilthey is an extreme individualist. “If one could conceive of the existence of a single individual wandering about the earth, he would develop for himself, in complete isolation, all these functions (philosophy, religion, art) if he lived long enough. Because of this idea of the logical priority of the individual, psychology plays a fundamental role in Dilthey’s philosophy. Only the individuals who form society and the forces which they display are real. If the (“power-endowed”) individual were to fall away, so would society. The individual and his powers, man in other words, is not to be explained from society. Quite the reverse, society is to be explained from man and his eternal gifts. In every period of history, however, man presents himself in a new aspect, instilling the specific soul into any of the great epochs of humanity.
You have undoubtedly realized by now that, despite the increasing emphasis on his positivistic position, despite his underscoring of facts and his denunciation of metaphysics. Dilthey has at least as much in common with Hegel as with Gibbon or Buckle. One might say that Dilthey’s theoretical task is to try to realize, with the tools of modern scientivism, the tradition of classical German idealism, the idea that psychic structures express themselves in history, that cultures are divided and separated from one another yet possess an inner connection, that history is to be understood (Hegel would have said grasped) and not merely narrated. Dilthey shared Hegel’s urge never to remain on the level of the external and superficial. He strove to draw a distinction between appearance and reality, secretly, so to speak, and without being able to reconcile it with his theory of knowledge which was so closely allied with positivism. Dilthey’s numerous historical and methodological works constitute an effort to see history in its various provinces as an expression of man’s essence. Just as Kant saw the activity of the knowing subject operate with his transcendental factors in the system of mathematical natural sciences, Dilthey sees man presenting himself in actual history, in the manifestations of politics, art, and religion. He aimed at a critique of the historical reason. However, it is not when we examine ourselves, it is not by introspection, nor, as Dilthey once said, by brooding, that we arrive at what we are, but by an analysis of historical reality. Dilthey would have us study the social and historical world not for some assigned practical end, nor arbitrarily and without direction, but in order to experience what we ourselves are, in order to know ourselves. It is in this sense that he is the true follower of the idealists.
Allow me to dwell for another moment on the difference between natural and cultural sciences as conceived by Dilthey. By nature we mean the aggregate of objects, as we order them on the basis of our sense perceptions and arrange them in a space-time continuity. The natural sciences are engaged in systematically determining and classifying the facts given by sense perception in their space-time relationships. Cultural sciences have to deal with the same objects, reality is not divided into nature on the one hand and on the other hand the mind. But the cultural sciences deal with nature as something possessing a psyche. Certain objects in nature compel us to consider them as the expression for human psychic life, past or present, so that we are able to know its true character from that which we ourselves are. That does not mean that we can learn nothing new from a knowledge of other beings, for if we could not, introspection would suffice for us to get at ourselves: the study of history would be unnecessary. The examination of other living beings, of other epochs and cultures, tends to illuminate certain structures and tendencies within ourselves which we would not have been aware of otherwise. An investigation of the historical world reveals structures which are working within us and which we see reflected in objective reality. This most complicated—and in Dilthey’s writings very highly differentiated—process of an interplay between consideration of the external psychic reality and experience of our own personal life is the process of “understanding” (Verstehen), by which the cultural sciences are differentiated from the natural sciences.
The understanding does not consider objects according to the relationship between cause and effect (as in natural sciences), but between external and internal, whole and part. The objects of understanding are grasped only when they are conceived as the expression of human existence and placed in the context of the existing living in and with them. As Dilthey phrases it, the object must be “re-translated” in the life-relationships of the understanding subject; it must be understood as an “objectivization of life” (historical documents, social institutions, works of art, and so forth, are explicable only through such re-translations).
The life-relationship in turn can only be experienced (erlebt). It must be immediately present to the subject in its totality. Only then can the parts be comprehended out of the whole. That does not mean that this whole is given only to mystical intuition. Dilthey insisted that a basic scientific analysis of all individual data and relationships must precede understanding. But this analysis must always have the whole before it, the totality which operates in every individual datum, and it must integrate every individual phenomenon in this whole, for there alone does it have its truth.
The arguments which are immediately raised against Dilthey’s notion of the understanding are easy to see. They lie ready to hand. If Dilthey is right, a large part of our knowledge depends upon the inner wealth of the individual, who strives for such knowledge. Knowledge, in Dilthey’s own words, is brought into the neighborhood of the artistic process. In this case not a few of the modern methodologists would strike this whole section of knowledge from the realm of science and assign it to poetry, somewhat after the fashion of the logical empiricists. In economics they would like us to limit ourselves to mathematics, in human psychology to experiments with the tachystoscope or similar apparatuses, in animal psychology to vivisection, and blind oneself to the meaning expressed in these phenomena. But if these critics are right, a sphere of decisive experience would thus fall out of scientific activity.
Dilthey’s conception of the understanding becomes clear when one realizes that he is dealing with the method of history. It is not so much a matter of how we understand men or animals in their everyday surroundings, but of how we understand history. History does not speak to us through the living being but through the fragments of past cultures through their philosophy, religion, poetry, and plastic arts. Dilthey’s work is concerned primarily with the great philosophical and theological achievements of the Renaissance and Reformation, of classical German idealism, of the poets and musicians of the modern era. Understanding thus becomes hermeneutics, the interpretation of historical documents. Schleiermacher, with whom Dilthey was concerned all his life and who was in many ways Dilthey’s teacher, was the first to systematize the philosophical and other methods of historical understanding under the heading of hermeneutics. Heidegger then took the problem over from Dilthey. According to Heidegger, a true ontology is nothing but an understanding or interpretation of being, in a sense, to be sure, which has nothing to do with universal history and which is limited to a monadologically conceived existence.
From what I have said, one might be tempted to bring Dilthey much too close to Bergson. Bergson too taught that we know ourselves by proper understanding of reality. The durée, the élan vital, flows in us as in all being. It is one and the same life which finds expression in all living beings, in nature as a whole. But whereas Bergson described the stream of life, which is omnipresent, in the most general terms—one need only think of his continuity of a qualitative succession, of the presence of the whole in every moment, of the advance of the past into the future, of the creative becoming, and so forth—for Dilthey, knowledge of man or of life is the product of a methodical application of all available sciences to the historically given material. For Bergson the whole, the stream of life, is always attainable; it is always revealed in all its fullness by the act of metaphysical intuition. For Dilthey, on the other hand, the knowledge of historical life is the goal and end of all science. And here he produces his claims upon psychology.
Traditional psychology has failed in historical analysis. Whoever studies human life in its various cultural products without being intimately acquainted with the results of traditional psychology has actually lost little. It is indeed very important to obtain valid insights about those psychic structures which are to be found wherever psychic life itself exists. But the construction of the psyche out of elements of consciousness, as it was attempted in the Textbooks on experimental psychology of Dilthey’s day, cannot contribute to the processes of understanding what really matters in the interpretation of history. Dilthey’s main charge against traditional psychology is a methodological one. According to Dilthey, it attempts “to develop a complete and transparent knowledge of psychic phenomena from a limited number of unequivocally defined elements.” (V, 139) Among these elements we must count sensations, reflections and feelings. Life appears as a mechanical combination of ultimate unites. Dilthey calls such psychology explanatory or constructive psychology, the chief representatives being the associational psychologists, and Herbert, Spencer, and Taine. He attacks psychology not because it makes use of hypotheses but because it turns the hypotheses into principles, so that the cultural sciences which look for their foundation in psychology would depend on something uncertain, specifically, on the weak assumption that the psyche is an accumulation of fixed elements held together by a band of associations, subordinated—we need only think of Spencer—“to the real relationship between physical phenomena” (V, 161).
Dilthey wants us to break away from such a conception of the psyche which derives from a false analogy with the natural sciences. Psychology as the very basis of the cultural sciences must start from the concreteness of life, as presented to each of us in inner experience. The knowledge of ourselves has as its object not only the stream of perception, as psychic reality appeared to Hume or Berkeley, but the structural whole (“Strukturzusammenhang”), that is to say, to the principle by which the intelligence, impulse, emotions, and the will are bound to “the articulated totality of the psychic life.” (V, 176) The description and analysis of such Strukturzusammenhänge, insofar as they are typical, that is, insofar as they occur basically in every human being, was for Dilthey the task of the psychology of the future, of descriptive and analytical psychology (beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie).
I shall pass over the problems arising from the concepts of proper and alien experience, givenness, type, etc., and shall limit myself to a few examples of what is meant by structural whole or totality. In every second of our conscious life, there is not merely one sensation or one desire present, but a psychic whole. For such structural totalities, Dilthey offers the example of the contemplation of a beautiful landscape (V, 203/4). As soon as we reflect, we see that not only is the sensation given to us, but the sequence of its successive aspects is guided by our attention and will. The whole might be permeated by a feeling of happiness or sadness. Here exists a meaningful interweaving between sense perceptions, attention and feeling. It is a matter of “different sides” of one and the same act, the contemplation of a landscape, which interpenetrate. This totality is experienced, it is not theoretically derived or constructed.
Another example is offered by the process of weighing various courses of action until one reaches a practical decision. Here it is a matter of an inner succession of conditions, in which images, feelings, and the will are interconnected, but which is also a unified series, continuous or broken into by other experiences. This totality too is experienced, not constructed. Given to us are not isolated sensations bound together by associations but such totalities—each with its specific and concrete meaning and content, such as the development of a love or a hatred, of a political or a religious creed. These examples might sound to you somewhat strange: obscure and commonplace at the same time. You might think it odd to make elaborate epistemological makeshifts striving for a “Sinnzusammenhang” while simply discussing a set of experiences whose unity is obvious, for instance the unity of the object in the case of the identical landscape to which all the sense perceptions, acts of attention and will, moods and feelings of the spectator are related as long as he is face to face with this specific object. Still, in analyses of that type, however poor they appear to us today, Dilthey tried to overcome the sterility of experimental psychology which at his time had usurped the place of philosophy in European academic life. He felt that the interaction or interconnexion between man and nature, his activity, his tenacious effort to conceive and enrich his own life and the life of his fellow men, as well as his effort to destroy it (as we see today), that entire conscious and unconscious life, cannot be reduced to the so-to-speak blind, meaningless, qualitatively insufficient elements of traditional psychology. He failed to see, however, that with the means of mere psychology (whatever may be meant by this word) individual or social life cannot really be reconstructed at all. While criticizing the lag between our concrete knowledge of man and scientific psychology, he sticked to the latter’s superstition that valid insight must confine itself to the realm of the immediately given—the données immédiates de la conscience which play so vast a role in Bergson’s vitalism as well. His idea of Sinnzusammenhang is an insufficient means to determine the concrete being of man by a positivistic restriction to the given, the the “data” of his so-called inner life, whereas this concrete unity can be understood only by transcending those limits and analyzing man as a real element of a real world. If I may use broader historical terms: Dilthey intended to “save” decisive insights of the great German idealists, and particularly Hegel’s, namely, the objective, the so-to-speak worldly character of the human spirit, while abandoning at the same time the doctrine of the supra-individual, absolute character of that spirit, replacing it by the empirical, individualistic, even monadological unity of the “sense” within the psyche of man. He intended to overcome the thingifying trend of “scientific” philosophy while clinging to the basis of all its thingifying, namely the individualistic experience, the “Erlebnis,” which, aloof from extramental reality, is something as abstract as the atomistic psychic data of the traditional psychology against which he struggled. He wants to make science out of Hegel’s sphere of the objective spirit: therefore he replaces it by the individual, empirical spirit or, at his best, by psychical “types,” and that is what makes him fail in his attempts at dealing with concrete unity. But the individual never can be built out of the individual himself. Dilthey’s failure is the necessary failure of reconciling the irreconcilable which is so immensely characteristic of all German thinkers of his period who took philosophy seriously, particularly for Husserl and Lask. But Hegel’s Philosophy of History and Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge cannot be combined. This accounts for a certain clumsiness and obscurity, as well as for the fragmentary character of his whole work.
It is not only in human life, but in all life that we find structural totalities of this kind, conditioned in their differences from one another by the natural and social environment. On closer view it becomes evident that “life” adjusts itself to the environment by means of such totalities. The individual either changes the environment through practical activity or learns to submit to it. Psychology must not detach itself from the fact that man’s psyche is determined by its aims through this “purposeful” (zweckbestimmt) character, which is not deduced from a concept of purpose outside of us ourselves, but that on the contrary the conception of a purpose external to us stems from inner experience. (V, 215) “Purposiveness (Zweckbestimmtheit) is by no means an objective concept of nature, but denotes merely the structural totality experienced in the drives, the pleasure and pain of an animal or human being.” (V, 210) The assumption that life is directed towards the satisfaction of impulses and to happiness is, to Dilthey, not a bare hypothesis; it can be made out and described by means of our inner experience. The hypothesis would rather be involved in the way this striving appears from the outside, namely as the law of the self-preservation of the individual and the species. (cf. V, 210)
In the process of contending with the environment the individual acquires a structure, that is, relatively stable habits, “habitualities,” moods, values, and so on, which are not always directly given, but nevertheless play a part in every living structural totality. On the basis of the interplay between spontaneous and acquired, thingified psychic structures, Dilthey attempts to reach a concept of “development” which is no longer restricted to the natural sciences. This concept is the psychological foundation from which Dilthey derives his method of historico-genetic presentation, as evidenced in his writings on Hegel and his famous studies of German poets, of Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, and Schiller.
In this interplay of man’s thingified and spontaneous psychic structure, Dilthey grounds his conception of man as an essentially historical being (Geschichtlichkeit). The doctrine has since become the principal ontological category in German Existenzphilosophie (Heidegger and Jaspers). The acquired structure (which Dilthey once called the “pattern of the psyche”) attains, with the increasing age of the individual, an ever greater prominence over his immediate experiences. There arises “the dominance of a psyche which has made and objectivized many experiences over the individual states of mind of a given moment (their independence of the changing life) and that is what gives the artistic productions of maturity their special sublimity, as Beethoven’s Ninth symphony or the final act of Goethe’s Faust.” (V, 225)
Under the influence of Husserl’s Phenomenology Dilthey strove to correct in terms of a more modern point of view the still more or less naturalistic concept of acquired structure. According to his earlier theory, it is in the last analysis connected with the immediacy of the psychic life only through the obscure mechanisms of association, reproduction, and such. This is later mediated. In consequence, the present experience is related to the earlier one not through a mere external association but the earlier is implied in the present as its “meaning” (Bedeutung or Bedeutsamkeit). The view that life is essentially historical is not restricted by this changed formulation; it is made more precise. However, the task of psychology as the fundamental discipline of cultural sciences itself remains to derive the specific phenomenon which is the subject matter of each cultural science from the typical psychic structure from which it originates. Now the latter structure can be made visible to us at any time through “reflection” (Selbstbesinnung). I quote Dilthey: “Every analysis of the phenomenon of religion necessarily meets concepts like feeling, will, dependence, liberty, motive, concepts which can be elucidated only within a psychological context. Such an analysis has to deal with the structures of the psychic life, since it is in this life that the ‘consciousness of God’ (Gottesbewusstsein) arises and gains power… Similarly, jurisprudence encounters in concepts like norm, law, responsibility, psychological structures which require a psychological analysis. It cannot possibly present the connections in which the law-consciousness arises or those in which purposes become effective in law and where the individual will is subjected to the law—without clearly understanding the typical structure of every psyche. The political sciences, which deal with the external organization of society, find in every group relation the psychic facts of community, dominance, and dependence. … History and theory of literature and art everywhere find themselves referred back to the basic yet compounded aesthetic feelings of the beautiful, sublime, witty or ridiculous. Without proper psychological analysis these words (in religion, law, art) remain obscure and dead writing to the historian. This is so, and no amount of specialization of the fields of knowledge can prevent it. Just as the systems of culture, of economy, law, religion, art and science, just as the external organization of society in the family, community, church, and state originate from the living structure of the human psyche, so can they be understood only in this structure. They contain structural totalities in themselves, because the psychic life is itself a structural totality. The understanding of these internal psychical totalities everywhere determines the understanding of those social totalities. They could come to exert their overreaching power upon the individual only because uniformity and regularity prevail in the psychic life and make possible a like ordering for many living beings.” (V, 147-148)
The articulation of whole cultures and epochs of human history is also according to Dilthey understandable only in that we reconstruct the way in which the individual spheres of culture are interconnected in the typical men of every epoch. Here we have to reconstruct what significance and what weight religion or law or economy or science possessed for them. It is only on this basis that it is meaningful to speak of different cultures, it is only on this basis that we can establish essential historical periods, and finally sketch something like a history of mankind. The life spirit of an epoch obtains its typical expression in its great personalities, in its poets and philosophers, and for this reason, too, according to Dilthey, biography is “the most essentially philosophical form of history.” (V, 225)
In conclusion I wish to raise the question whether the plan of that psychology which Dilthey sketched in his Ideas of 1894 has attained fulfillment since that time. I pass over Dilthey’s critique of traditional psychology which has since made headway. That critique was a general trend of the time. I need only remind you of Bergson and Gestalttheorie. Both agree that psychic life cannot be constructed from the elements which are actually obtained as a result of mere abstraction. I also pass over the attempt to build a theory of history and society on a psychological foundation, as attempted by Pareto. Similar to Dilthey, Pareto composed for himself a psychology which could help him in his study of society. To be sure, it is markedly different from that of Dilthey, in structure as well as in content. I should only raise the question whether, notwithstanding the opposition between the naturalistic principles of Freud and the historical principles of Dilthey, the theory of psychoanalysis does not meet some of Dilthey’s requirements. For Freud, too, History is understandable only through a return to the basic psychic tendencies. the same forces which determine the individual rule the universe. For Freud, history is a struggle between the libidinous and destructive forces, between Eros and the death impulse. When Dilthey says that “Hunger, love, and war are the most important forces in the moral world,” “that the most powerful impulses are hunger drive, sex, and care for the new generation” (V, 201), Freud would certainly add but slight corrections. The agreement is rooted even deeper. It lies above all in the conception of a coherent totality of meaning (Sinnzusammenhang) in each individual existence, a totality which develops itself in the struggle between the individual being and his environment. Freud holds expressly the view that each of our experiences have a meaning; their “sense” derives from their interwovenness in the whole structure of our life and can be dexribed only by analysis of the totality. Freud’s socio-historical studies—as for instance Totem and Taboo—are paragons of a psychological interpretation of history.
The character traits, preferences, and values of the individual develop themselves from the conditions and difficulties that he encounters from early childhood. I do not wish to pass judgment here upon the truth of Freud’s various theses, the Oedipus complex, for example. In any case, these theories might be considered as the fulfillment of Dilthey’s demand that the individual life, in its typical structures, be presented as a coherent totality of meaning. The single phases of the development of impulses, namely the oral, anal, and genital, as described in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (V, 7 ff.) represent, in Freud’s view, typical structures which can be found in every normal psychic life. It is not accidental that the acquired structure (“erworbene Zusammenhang”), which was established on the basis of earlier experience is, in Dilthey’s view also, largely unconscious, and must be revealed only through “analysis.” I do know that Freud and Dilthey would explain the unconscious in a quite different way, but I can give you an example to show that the agreement between them is not superficial. In his speech on “Poetical Fantasy and Madness,” Dilthey says that in metaphysics, poetry, and myth ever the same images recur in the history of mankind: “We find in dreams and madness, with striking regularity, specific images always bound to sensations and internal states, pictures which interpret, explain and represent these states. They are a kind of poor, shrunken symbol, and the realm of these symbols can be scrutinized.” (VI, 101) The symbols are “poor” in dream and madness, but they recur, richer and with more varied differentiations in the great cultural achievements of mankind which are permeated by them. Dilthey’s concept of the typus appears here in connection with the doctrine of symbols which Freud developed in his theory of dreams and in his studies of cultural history. We note in passing that the best side of Freud’s theory stands in crass contradiction to his empiricist and naturalistic theory of knowledge, in like manner that Dilthey’s doctrines contradict his positivistic opinions on the logic of science.
We should not exaggerate, however, the extent of agreement between them. At present this agreement is the more obvious because of Dilthey’s historic achievements—but some of his results, like those of his disciples and above all the biographical ones, are characterized by a strongly individualistic psychological trend, a trend which has been transformed into a caricature through the present fashion of popular biographies of great men. There is, however, another side of Dilthey’s theory which recalls the Hegelian dialectic much more than psychoanalysis. I refer here to the flair for what Hegel called the objective spirit (objektiven Geist). There is no doubt that the categories of individual psychology elucidate the works of the founders of religion, the achievements of statesmen, philosophers and poets, but on the other hand it is true that an understanding of the problems, the inner laws of the cultural spheres etc, will help in no lesser degree to clarify the psychology of these world-famed men. Without an exact knowledge of the political and religious situation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the characters of Luther and Calvin cannot be explained. The same holds good for the aesthetic problems. He who has not advanced to a point where he can cope with most subtle technical details can say nothing about Greco and Tintoretto despite his profound knowledge of some neurotic symptoms which come to light in their works. This is the reason why Freud’s essays, and particularly those of his followers on artists and politicians, sometimes show a somewhat pedantic trend. Paradoxically enough, on the opposite side the vagueness of Dilthey’s psychological categories lead to the same results.
One could perhaps sum up the difference in the following way. If we compare an article of Dilthey’s on a poet or a musician with a study of Freud’s, let us say on Leonardo Da Vinci, Dilthey’s individual psychology appears to us rather abstract and narrow, it appears so to speak more psychologistic, more traditional than Freud’s categories, which are saturated with a wider psychological experience. In Freud’s analysis the connections between the work of an artist and his experiences in the decisive periods of his development are in fact established. He deals with very specific events, sexual experiences, threats and anxieties. Dilthey, on the other hand, refers to abstract conceptions like expression, imagination, impulse, will and so forth which he holds in common with the traditional psychology rejected by him. But still Dilthey has an inkling of what art or poetry or philosophy really is. He sees the artist in relation to the specific cultural tendencies of his time and of world history. If he speaks of a Roman, he speaks about Roman law and Roman imperialism as realities in the soul of the Roman citizen, not only of his inner life in the abstract sense of individual sentiments etc. If he speaks of the old German mythology he speaks of the life in woods and fields through thousands of years, of the lack of cities, the dependence on the seasons, etc.
If the two tendencies in his historical writings had penetrated one another as he postulated in his theory of interaction in the process of understanding, each of his writings would indeed be a piece of concrete theory of history. Unfortunately, the reader of his methodological writings (some of which we have discussed here) will be disappointed if he turns to the historical essays. We discover that the historical writings largely present the history of the psychological development of a person in a manner not very distinct from the usual biographies. Dilthey’s own postulate was that each particular investigation of a cultural fact must place the phenomenon in three connections which in turn are interdependent. First, in the “knowledge of the whole of the historical and social reality,” second, in the typical structures of intellectual activity as such, and third, in the specific problematics of the respective cultural fields, whether poetry, art, or philosophy, which have their own laws of meaning (Sinngesetze). (I, 88-89) This postulate, that the subjective mind can be rightly understood only in connection with the objective mind (pardon the Hegelian terminology), has not been fully worked out in his historical writings. In his study on Schiller, we find for instance that such problematical psychological concepts as natural gifts, will to greatness, inner purification, incessant striving, etc., play the main role. This inconsistency, however, need not necessarily diminish the ingeniousness of some of Dilthey’s methodological investigations.
C. Remarks: On Dilthey’s Relation to Max Weber (1940)
Max Weber’s distinction between science and values seems to me to be obsolete. It is based on both a historical and a logical error. Historically the rejection in modern times of all view points taken from outside the theory signified the rejection of religion’s predominance over science, that is, the rejection of propositions which can no longer be upheld by science. One of the deepest roots of the tragedy of the modern mind is that it shrank from actually fighting out the conflict between religion and science, and merely delimited two different spheres of life and culture into which contradictory propositions were distributed. This dubious solution, compared to which Averroes’ doctrine of the double truth represents a deep insight (Bäumker, 350), merely eliminated the contradictions from thought, with the result that they are now fought out in reality with even greater brutality. Like all his predecessors, Max Weber transformed the historical conflict into two sharply distinguished fields of culture, namely, the field of ethos and the field of science.
The logical error is that the abstract concepts which are derived from this division are fixated and hypostasized instead of being integrated. The theory of reality which determines an individual or a group in their action and towards which scientific efforts are directed is an intellectual whole permeated by practical tendencies. One can separate this whole into the so called purposive side on the one hand and the scientific side on the other. It is obvious, however, that the true concept of human knowledge cannot be restored merely by putting the separate abstract parts together again. The problematic character of the view that man should decide for himself merely according to his feelings for the values which he wants to realize and that in science he will then find the means for this realization, will be recognized as soon as we cease to consider values as an unorganized mass. If we assume, with Plato, an intrinsic connection or even a hierarchy of values culminating in the highest idea of the good, we shall see the contradictory character of Max Weber’s thesis. Weber charges science with the task of providing the answers for the most contradictory ethical and political questions. According to him science must tell what men should do if they wish to overthrow a tyranny and establish a democracy, what they should do if they want chaos or if they want order, war and peace. According to Plato, and, in my opinion, according to every reasonable philosophy, this thesis amounts to the view that science must also answer the question, what I have to do if I want to accomplish absurd and evil things.
If this criticism of Max Weber is met by the question, how is it possible to recognize the good, I would answer that, in contrast to all contemporary relativistic conceptions, the meaning of science is nothing other than the search for an answer to this question. Sociology studies the concrete conditions under which man could live in liberty and happiness; it investigates the helplessness originating from too great an isolation of the individual and the slavery arising from excessive collectivization. It would be a formalistic slogan to say that this very helplessness and slavery could be the aim of man under certain circumstances. Even the National Socialists do not aim at serfdom, even their reactions contain a kernel of truth, though in a distorted form. To disclose this truth, to distinguish right from wrong is at least as important a task of science as to search for physical formulas, be it even the formula of the whole universe. To avoid dogmatism, one must be careful not to posit the present level of knowledge as absolute; one must be careful not to overlook the possibility of error, the tension between concept and reality, the continuous change in the relation between thought and reality. One must be careful not to hypostasize isolated achievements.
In human knowledge theoretical and practical tendencies are intrinsically interwoven. The proclamation of blind ethics and characterless science signified in Max Weber’s time the rejection of those forces of imperial Germany which attempted to dominate ethics and science rather than progress in the methodology of science. His doctrine is rather dogmatic and misleading despite its apparent clarity. Dilthey too was hampered rather than aided by such conceptions (as to the identity of Weber and Dilthey, cf. I, 197).
I am certain that Dilthey would have abandoned his positivism in this sphere too if he had been able to make use of his insight into the interconnection between the particular spheres of culture within the totality of historical reality, an interconnection which he himself emphasized in his historical studies. Many contradictions are to be found in Dilthey’s work. It is possible that theory has nothing more important to do than to avoid contradictions, but I doubt it. It appears to me that it is less objectionable if a work contains contradictions than if only one side, the wrong side, is incorporated in it and if the right one is eliminated for fear of contradictions. Where contradictions exist there is also the possibility of overcoming them. Where only one side is asserted and the other negated or eliminated, this progress of knowledge is much more difficult to achieve.
Indeed the results of the understanding cannot be proved in the same way as the law of falling bodies or the statement that a chair stands in this room. Let us take the following case. A child insists he is not ill in spite of the fact that he has an insane look in his eyes. A good teacher deduces from that fact the terror of a cruel home and perhaps some more specific data. A logical empiricist or a physicist, however, would tell us that this special terror cannot be proved. He would say that it does not even play a role in science, that it is sufficient for science when the two empirically established facts, the face and the relatively accelerated or delayed movement of the eyes, of this or that color, are placed in a relation in the empirically measurable domestic situation.
He would say that we lose nothing by omitting the statement about the child’s expression because such a statement is not spatially measurable. But such reasoning overlooks, however, that this complex of phenomena, which one might subsequently be able to delimit in a physical way, stands out from the abundance of facts as a determinable unity only in the process of understanding. For the child, and perhaps for the future of society, it is much more important for the educator or the doctor to perceive the terror than to restrict himself to physically measurable data which would never have directed him to the phenomenon of terror if he had not perceived it in an understanding way.
It may be that the proof for the validity of many statements in the cultural sciences is sometimes difficult to give. Whether it is successful, will depend upon the fact that those to whom it is directed have the necessary differentiation of the psyche. But the view that in certain fields there are only a few who can reproduce the process of understanding does not prove that there is no distinction between truth and falsity in these fields. It is necessary to repeat the epistemological truth that the problem whether knowledge is possible in a field and the problem how it can be proven as universally valid are not directly identical but are different problems at first.
Horkheimer—Fragments: On the Standpoint Science (ca. 1940)
Thing-in-itself.
There must be some matrix or ground transcending experience in order to make some generalization of the kind that event A generates event B. Universal propositions must be de jure not de facto grounded in the objective connectedness of events. There must be something more to causation than constant conjunction, if scientific explanation has cognitive meaning. Otherwise all historical data may be accidental runs of events. If past events are not evidence for future ones, science is blind, all is luck. The probability that not all alleys are blind ones is the epistemological ‘cash value’ of such categories as substance. … He introduces into the events his personal feelings, supplied by his own introspection, his inner life. “Descriptive science”
Self-Contradiction of Logical Empiricism.
There is no need to give too much credence to the ‘philosophy’ of logical empiricism. For it asserts there is no philosophy apart from science, and claims to limit itself accordingly. For the logical empiricist, science consists in activities that generate predictions. Predictions are the purpose of science. But where are the predictions of logical empiricism? Here, what’s at issue aren’t the energy-saving mathematical techniques their logistics have to offer the various branches of scientific activity. These may indeed facilitate the generating of new predictions. The question is rather: how are the statements logical positivism approaches philosophy with—about physicalism, science, poetry, metaphysics, and so forth—verifiable? Above all: where does it derive the right to criticize anything at all? Even asserting that the most abstruse concern of the metaphysical speculator revolves around a pseudo-problem already oversteps the fixed lines of logistical pedantry. Is this supposed to be a prediction? Is this supposed to mean that the speculator will always generate less relevant insights than the logistical verificator or falsificator? All critique of positivism that doesn’t consist, at most, in barbaric suggestions for the further abbreviation of thought-procedures will inevitably appear as baseless insults from the standpoint of the positivist himself. Of course, the logic of his own language condemns him to silence whenever the question of the actual comes up. Were he to speak, he would only get caught up in contradictions—and in the end, contradictions are not his concern. You just need to remind him of it. Nowadays, even the most modest insights aren’t predictions anymore. “You’re a scoundrel” could be a prediction, but when you’re a scoundrel at the appropriate—that is, appropriately large—scale, you needn’t appear one. My diagnosis doesn’t require the confirmation of future acts, nor even past ones. It follows from the cognition of social reality—and of your position as an accomplice within it.
False Conclusions.
In the apathy of specialists, the ruling order is affirmed. Thinking operates inside of disciplinary boundaries; it doesn’t dare at totality. This kind of good will exults in accomplishing its one task, and it remains oblivious to what social relations its success contributes. The specialist, therefore, cannot tell whether his will is good or bad. Because he’s achieved something good, he finds everything good. He commits in reverse that mistake of the rebel who concludes from a single instance of injustice the badness of the whole. Yet both mistakes are not equally false. To conclude the badness of the world from the existence of a single evil is logically permissible. To conclude the goodness of the world from its privileges, however, is a fatal misstep.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Über das Problem der individuellen Kausalität bei Simmel [Vortrag 1940],” in: Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII. Im Auftrag des Theodor W Adorno Archivs, edited by Rolf Tiedemann (edition text + kritik, 2003), 40-59.
[Notes by R. Tiedemann:]
Lecture delivered in MacIver’s sociology seminar, Columbia University, April 19th, 1940.
[Adorno’s] In-text citations to: Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Studie, 4th Edition (München: Leipzig, 1922).
Lecture dictated [to Gretel Adorno] in shorthand; transcript subsequently converted into a typescript on typewriter; finally, revised by hand by the author, and the typescript also has several annotations in Horkheimer’s handwriting. Two suggestions for English translation inserted into the text point to the possibility that Adorno might have translated his text into English during the lecture itself; another indication in this direction is the fact that the title is translated into English in the mimeographed program from 1944 [“Ten Years on Morningside Hights. A Report on the Institute’s History 1934 to 1944 (December 1944).” Sourced from: MHA Na [656], S. [4]-[41]; partial transcription on Substudies here], as “Simmel’s Theory of Individual Causality.” The only other mention of the work is found in a letter from Gretel Adorno to her parents-in-law, dated 4/21/1940: “Max’s essay on state capitalism is meanwhile finished, Teddie’s lecture at Columbia on Simmel last Friday was a very great success, and the rough draft for the Likes and Dislikes study for the radio project is finished.” [English quote from: Theodor W. Adorno, Letters to his Parents 1939-1951. Edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity, 2003), 45.]
See: “Vorlage zur Eröffnung der Vortragsveranstaltung,” 1-page typescript. In: Max-Horkheimer-Archiv [MHA] Na 636, S. [334]. English in original.
[Lecture Text] “The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the Work of Wilhelm Dilthey,” English version [1a)], 18-page typescript with handwritten notes. In: MHA Na 636, S. [293]-[313]; German version [1b]: S. [314]-[333].
Max Horkheimer, “3. Über das Verhältnis Diltheys zu Max Weber; über die Widersprüche bei Dilthey; zur Logik geisteswissenschaftlichen Verstehens (= Vorarbeiten zum Vortrag? Vorbereitungen zu Diskussionsbeiträgen?),” English draft, 5-page typescript. In: MHA Na 636. English draft [3a)], S. [335]-[339]. ([3b)] German draft, 6-page typescript: S. [340]-[345].)
“[Über die Möglichkeit allgemeiner Aussagen und das Ding an sich [GS 12, S. 313]; abgeschrieben und datiert von Friedrich Pollock, 1940 ?],” one-page typescript. In: MHA Na 800, S. [51]. English in original.
“[Selbstwiderspruch des logischen Empirismus] [1940?],” In: Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 12. Edited by Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr and Alfred Schmidt (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 312-313. Author’s translation.
[MHGS Ed. Note:] “On the basis of its content, the note could have been written in connection with the essay ‘The Latest Attack on Metaphysics,’ which appeared in 1937. The sheets were located among the materials for ‘The Authoritarian State’ in the Nachlass, hence the date ‘1940.’”
“[Falsche Schlußfolgerung],” in: MHGS, Bd. 12 (1985), 325. Author’s translation.
Max Horkheimer, “The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the Work of Wilhelm Dilthey” In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science [SPSS], Vol. 8, No. 3 (1940), 440-443.
See footnote 1, above.
The original draft of what would later be published in SPSS as “Notes on Institute Activities” [Vol. 9, No. 1 (1941), 121-123] was a methodological introduction to Cultural Aspects of National Socialism titled “Scope and Method,” where we find the following:
The social sciences increasingly require that their problems and studies be oriented to a unified theory of society, just as the economic investigations of the 19th century were based on the theory of classical economics of a free market economy. By contributing to the correction or differentiation of this theory, the various economic investigations gain an internal connection. They have reached that high level of development at which they feel a definite lack of connectivity, and the collaboration of European and American scholars is expected to fructify empirical studies through the medium of an integrated social theory. Such a requirement is also associated with the increasing uneasiness about the relativism that has dominated not only the social sciences but the entire cultural pattern of the last decades. One is aware of the fact that democracy has no conclusive theory of society and history such as it could oppose to the ideological onslaught of totalitarianism. Those fears might have some legitimate basis, but we think that at present a conclusive theory cannot be elaborated out of which the problems and ideas of social research may be unequivocally derived. Moreover, there is a certain danger that the recent situation may give birth to a new dogmatism which may prove detrimental to the progress of thought. Dilthey’s criticism that the sociology and philosophy of history of his time indulge in the construction of universal systems without having any appropriate basis for such is still valid for us (cf. SPSS, New York 1940. pp. 431-32). Pluralism as well as monism have become equally questionable. Such a theory cannot be imposed upon the problems from without. The danger exists that the situation may give birth to a new dogmatism which may prove even more deleterious than the relativism it sets out to oppose. We shall attempt in the following four prospects to indicate some characteristics of the method we suggest applying. This method is intended to overcome the all-too-prevalent dissociation of empirical from theoretical studies and of “factual” from “normative” social theory. Some methodological elements through which those conducting this research hope to overcome empiricist pluralism without falling into new dogmatism are the following.
See: C.S. Peirce’s Collected Papers (CP 7.162—CP 7.256): https://colorysemiotica.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/peirce-collectedpapers.pdf
C.S. Peirce: “Abduction, on the other hand, is merely preparatory. It is the first step of scientific reasoning, as induction is the concluding step. Nothing has so much contributed to present chaotic or erroneous ideas of the logic of science as failure to distinguish the essentially different characters of different elements of scientific reasoning; and one of the worst of these confusions, as well as one of the commonest, consists in regarding abduction and induction taken together (often mixed also with deduction) as a simple argument. Abduction and induction have, to be sure, this common feature, that both lead to the acceptance of a hypothesis because observed facts are such as would necessarily or probably result as consequences of that hypothesis. But for all that, they are the opposite poles of reason, the one the most ineffective, the other the most effective of arguments. The method of either is the very reverse of the other’s. Abduction makes its start from the facts, without, at the outset, having any particular theory in view, though it is motived by the feeling that a theory is needed to explain the surprising facts. Induction makes its start from a hypothesis which seems to recommend itself, without at the outset having any particular facts in view, though it feels the need of facts to support the theory. Abduction seeks a theory. Induction seeks for facts. In abduction the consideration of the facts suggests the hypothesis. In induction the study of the hypothesis suggests the experiments which bring to light the very facts to which the hypothesis had pointed. The mode of suggestion by which, in abduction, the facts suggest the hypothesis is by resemblance, -- the resemblance of the facts to the consequences of the hypothesis. The mode of suggestion by which in induction the hypothesis suggests the facts is by contiguity, -- familiar knowledge that the conditions of the hypothesis can be realized in certain experimental ways.
I now proceed to consider what principles should guide us in abduction, or the process of choosing a hypothesis. Underlying all such principles there is a fundamental and primary abduction, a hypothesis which we must embrace at the outset, however destitute of evidentiary support it may be. That hypothesis is that the facts in hand admit of rationalization, and of rationalization by us. That we must hope they do, for the same reason that a general who has to capture a position or see his country ruined, must go on the hypothesis that there is some way in which he can and shall capture it. We must be animated by that hope concerning the problem we have in hand, whether we extend it to a general postulate covering all facts, or not. Now, that the matter of no new truth can come from induction or from deduction, we have seen. It can only come from abduction; and abduction is, after all, nothing but guessing. We are therefore bound to hope that, although the possible explanations of our facts may be strictly innumerable, yet our mind will be able, in some finite number of guesses, to guess the sole true explanation of them. That we are bound to assume, independently of any evidence that it is true. Animated by that hope, we are to proceed to the construction of a hypothesis.” (CP 7.218-CP 7.219)
On abductive reasoning as the kind that leads to judgments of the relative “pursuitworthiness” of theories, and the problem this poses to previous attempts to reduce Peircean abduction to the distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification,’ see:
Daniel J. McKaughan, “From Ugly Duckling to Swan: C.S. Peirce, Abduction, and the Pursuit of Scientific Theories.” In: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Summer, 2008, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Summer, 2008), pp. 446-468
Author’s translation. [Translator’s note:] Georg Simmel, Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität. Leipzig : Duncker & Humboldt, 1904.
[Translator’s note:] Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “[Review:] Heinrich Rickert, Unmittelbarkeit und Sinndeutung.” In: SPSS Vol. 9, No. 3 (1942), 479.
[Translator’s note:] “ground of justification”: [Rechtsgrund]
[Translator’s note:] “lawful”: [gesetzmäßiger]
[Translator’s note:] “lawful”: [Gesetzmäßigkeit]
[Translator’s note:] “knowing itself”: [Erkenntnisse selber]
[Translator’s note:] “sciences of man”: [Wissenschaften vom Menschen]
[Translator’s note:] “intellectual actuality”: [geistigen Wirklichkeit]
[Translator’s note:] “the particular”: [Besonderen]
[Translator’s note:] “forms of knowledge”: [Erkenntnisformen]; “objects of knowledge”: [Erkenntnisgegenständen]
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] Hugo Münsterberg (1863-1916), Psychologist, Professor at Harvard University; Founder of Psychotechnics.
[Translator’s note:] “contingency of existence”: [Zufälligkeit des Daseins]
[Translator’s note:] English from: Georg Simmel, The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay. Translated and edited by Guy Oakes (The Free Press, 1977 [translation of Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1905]), 103.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 104.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 106.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 106-107.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 107.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 107. Translation amended.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 107.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 107.
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] In the typescript, in brackets, [“funktionierende”] with translation suggestion: “workable.”
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] Instead of this last sentence, Adorno originally dictated the following: “Productivity [Produktivität] is a concept borrowed directly from the human sphere, and in the social sciences in particular from the sphere of human labor. The relationship of ‘productivity’ between the two moments mediated by one another through individual causality would be one similar in kind to the relationship between human labor and its product, even though it cannot be transposed as easily into universal concepts as the labor-relation can.”
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] In the original dictation, Adorno continues: “[…] instead of proceeding here from the representation of individual moments, moments to be causally interpreted and processed, in a certain sense, into a general principle, but rather assume to the contrary that a comprehensive [übergreifendes] moment is there from the beginning, a moment which is not some abstract universality designating something common to a series of individual moments, but constitutes that which is individual before such extrapolation is even possible. The kind of ‘necessity’ here would be something similar to […]”
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] In the typescript, in brackets, [“Schlamperei”] with translation suggestion: “sloppiness.”
[Translator’s note:] “a behavior from freedom”: [eines Verhaltens aus Freiheit]
[Translator’s note:] “instance of limitation”: [Grenzfall]
[Translator’s note:] Author’s translation. This quotation and the following are exclusive to the section titled “Anmerkung über individuelle Kausalität” in the 4th edition of Simmel’s Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1922), and for that reason were not included in the Oakes translation published as Problems in the Philosophy of History (1977), since the translation is based on the 2nd edition (1905) of Simmel’s book.
[Translator’s note:] Author’s translation (see above footnote).
[Translator’s note:] “freedom of the will”: [Willensfreiheit]
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 107.
[Translator’s note:] Simmel, Problems of the Philosophy of History (1977 [1905]), 113.
[Note by R. Tiedemann in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter, VIII:] The typescript concludes with the following, in brackets, and clearly for the sake of opening the seminar discussion: “If I have discussed Simmel’s problematic hypothesis in such depth, the reason for this is that I believe, for all its difficulties and contradictions, his theory is an expression of the coordinates of causality and freedom, contingency and necessity as they are so arranged today.”
For Horkheimer’s own excerpts of and quotations from Dilthey’s work, see: “Exzerpte zum Werk Wilhelm Diltheys, Typoskripte, 12 Blatt ;” In: MHA Na 636, S. [348]-[358].