Die Fortgang über Kant. Dilthey and the Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy

Though I agree with Keulartz's claim that Dilthey is an important pioneer of postmetaphysical thinking, the reference in his claim to Dilthey's overcoming of Kant at least needs some further clarification. After all, it's difficult to overestimate the influence of Kant's transcendental critique - that is: analysis, justification and limitation - of reason on the development of Dilthey's postmetaphysical philosophy. Already the reference in the title of Dilthey's KhV certainly is more than a playful wit. This already is apparent in the often quoted passage in Dilthey's diary of the 1st of april 1860, in which he expresses his wish to write »eine neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft auf Grund unserer historisch-philosophische Weltan­schau­ung«.[2] From the beginning Dilthey regarded his KhV as a continu­a­tion of Kant's transcen­dental enter­prise. In his inaug­ur­al lecture in Basel in 1967, Dilthey states: »Mir scheint das Grund­pro­blem der Philoso­phie von Kant für alle Zeiten festge­stellt zu sein ... die Philosophie soll über Hegel, Schel­ling und Fichte weg auf Kant zurück greifen« (V, 12-3). And at the end of the lecture Dilthey clearly prefi­gures the task of his later KhV: »Die Philo­sophie steht in einem gesetzmäßigen Zusammen­hang mit den Wissen­schaften, der Kunst, der Ge­sellschaft. Aus diesem Zusam­men­hang ent­springen ihr ihre Aufgaben. Die unsrige ist uns klar vorge­zeich­net: Kants kriti­schen Weg zu verfol­gen, eine Erfah­rungs­wis­senschaft des mens­chlichen Geistes im Zusammen­wirken mit den For­schenden anderer Gebiete zu begründen; es gilt die Gesetze, welche die gesell­schaft­li­chen, intel­lektuellen, morali­schen Erschei­nungen beherrschen, zu erkennen« (GS V, 27). Dilthey remained faithful to this task till the very end of his life. Still in one of his last works, Das geschichtliche Bewußtsein und die Welt­anschauungen, Dilthey declares with regard to Kant: »Wir müs­sen das Werk dieser Tran­szenden­talphi­loso­phie fort­setzen« (VIII, 14). For that reason I can approve of Inei­chen's charac­terisa­tion of Dil­they's relati­on to Kant: »Dil­theys eigene Positi­onen sind auf weite Stre­ken nichts anderes als eine Ausei­nander­set­zung mit der Kanti­schen Philo­sop­hie«.[3] And even when Dilthey criticizes Kant he often does this by radicalizing the tenor of Kant's critique of reason. As Les­sing and Rodi put it in their intro­duction to Band XX of the Gesammelte Schriften: »Kants Philo­so­phie ist der ständige Wider­part Dil­theys; seine Tran­szen­den­tal­phi­losphie ist der dauernde Orien­tierungs­punkt, in positi­ver Anleh­nung wie in kriti­scher Überwin­dung« (XX, xxvii; italics JdM)

In this article I will argue that Dilthey's turn to postmetaphysical thinking (as defined by Habermas), has to be conceived of as the outcome of a fruitful combination of positive continuation and critical overcoming of Kant's transcendental philosophy too. Moreover I will try to demonstrate that this transformation foreshadows the turn to postmetaphysical thinking in the twentieth-century traditions of structuralism and hermeneutics. Contrary to the interpretation of some leading philosophers belonging to these traditions, I will argue that Dilthey is more than a immature predecessor of these traditions. Though structuralism and hermeneutics have elaborate more profoundly some of the insights developed in Dilthey's KhV, Dilthey in his philosophical enterprise holds together a number of interdependent motives that has felt apart in these traditions. Only in the last decades new attemps have been made, for example by Habermas, to reintegrate again the structuralist and hermeneutic threads in Dilthey's thought. I will argue, however, that even these recent attempts not always surpass Dilthey's KhV in depth and scope.[40]

                                                                   I

The transcendental critique of Immanuel Kant is generally regarded as one of the turning points in the history of philosophy. It has often been argued that modern and contemporary philosophy cannot be understood unless we take the 'Copernican revolution' of Kant's critique of reason into account. This no less true for twentieth-century structuralism and hermeneutics than for Dilthey's philosophical enterprise. They all have their roots in Kant's transcendental critique.

Kant's starting point is that all our knowledge begins with experience, but does not all arise out of experience.[5] According to Kant, our knowledge must begin with experience, because for the cognitive faculty to be brought into exercise, our senses must be affected by external beings. At the same time, however, knowledge is not possible unless the two constituents of our cognitive faculty, namely sensibility and understanding, supply a priori elements from within themselves in order to bring order to the chaos of sense impressions. In sensibility the sense impressions are structured by the a priori intuitions of space and time and thus become appearances or phenomena. The understanding further interrelates these phenomena by means of its own a priori concepts or categories (e.g., the concept of causality). It is important to realize that according to Kant the phenomenological world that is the result of experience is not a subjective 'image' of the real world, since it is precisely the real, empirical world that is constituted in experience. Though ideal from a transcendental point of view, the phenomenological world is real from an empirical perspective (KrV A28, A35—6, B69). It is shared by all beings who experience the world in accordance with the same a priori structures, that is (in Kant's view), by all human beings. Though we can distinguish the things in themselves from the objects of (human) experience, these things are only thinkable, and can never become objects of experience. As Kant formulates the important ontological implication of his copernican revolution: »Die Bedingungen a priori einer möglichen Erfahrung überhaupt sind zugleich Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der Gegenstände der Erfahrung« (KrV A 111).

Kant's transcendental critique may be regarded as a brilliant solution to the problems of both rationalist and empiricist accounts of human knowledge. Earlier rationalism (as defended by Descartes and Leibniz), which has its starting point in the presupposition that all knowledge is derived from (innate) concepts that are shared by all, can explain why this knowledge is logically necessary and generally valid, but it cannot explain how these concepts correspond to the outer world. Empiricism (as defended by Locke and Hume), which has its starting point in the conviction that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience, offers a more satisfactory answer to the last question, but it is not able to explain the possibility of logical necessity and general validity. It inevitably runs into some form of epistemological relativism, as in the case of Hume. Kant's solution to this relativism is very elegant because he rescues the logical necessity and general validity of scientific knowledge by – paradoxically – emphasizing the very finiteness of human reason. He does so by arguing that the logical necessity and general validity of scientific knowledge is not derived from the nature of the things in themselves, but are instead intrinsic, absolutely indispensable features of our experience of the world. They are necessary conditions for the possibility of any experience whatsoever.However, elegant as it may be, Kant's solution is as unsatisfactory as the rationalism before him with regard to the problem of the development of knowledge. If all knowledge is derived from timeless a priori concepts, how is growth of knowledge possible? Neither traditional rationalism nor Kant can give a satisfactory answer to this question. Empiricism on the other hand can give an account of the growth of knowledge as a result of new sense perceptions. However, from an empiricist point of view this growth can only be understood as quantitative. In conclusion: neither rationalism nor empiricism can explain the qualitative growth of knowledge. Hence Hamlyn describes the opposition of rationalism and empiricism as an opposition between structure without genesis and genesis without structure.[6] In order to explain the phenomenon of qualitative change and learning, structure and genesis have to be related to each other by means of the concept of development. However, as we will see, this inevitably leads beyond Kant's rather static transcendental critique into some form of ontological and epistemological relativism.

                                                                   II

Wilhelm Dilthey not only introduced the aspect of development into transcendental philosophy, but he also broadened Kant's rather narrow conception of rationality to include feelings and the will. Although Dilthey never finished the six planned volumes of his monumental KhV, the ongoing publication of Dilthey's Nachlaß in the Gesammelte Schriften increasingly makes clear that in its completed parts he formulated the key concepts of the transformation of transcendental philosophy in twentieth‑century structuralism and hermeneutics.

As the title of the Kritik der historischen Vernunft suggests, it initially set out to complement Kant's transcendental critique of theoretical reason in the natural sciences with an equally transcendental critique of historical reason, investigating the conditions of the possibility of historical knowledge in the human sciences. Gradually, however, Dilthey's project became a fundamental transformation of Kant's entire critical philosophy, in particular of two ontological presuppositions of Kant's transcendental investigation. Already in the Vorrede of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften Dilthey clearly expresses the two main points in which he depart from Kant: "Nicht die An­nahme eines starren a priori unse­res Er­kennt­nis­vermögens, son­dern allein Entwic­klungs­ge­schich­te, welche von der Tota­lität unseres Wesens ausgeht, kann die Fragen be­antworten, die wir alle an die Philos­ophie zu rich­ten haben" (I, xviii; italics JdM).

First, Dilthey takes the categories to be categories of life rather than formal categories. In this context, Dilthey criticizes the intellectualism of Kant's critique: the life‑world is not an object of purely intellectual representation, but rather a reality which is immediately given in the interplay of thinking, willing, and feeling. As he puts it in a later essay on Schiller: »Der mens­chli­che Geist ist eine aus eigener Tiefe heraus ein­heitlich ge­stal­tende Macht über den Stoff des Wirkli­chen, welche im Denken denselben kon­struiert, im ästheti­schen Vermögen ihn beseelt und im Handeln ihm die Form des Ideals und der Freiheit aufprägt«.[7] Although Dilthey remains faithful to the cartesian-kantian Satz des Bewußtseins and, therefore, holds that »alles was für mich da ist, unter der allgemeinsten Bedingung [steht], Tatsache meines Bewußtsein zu sein« (V, 90; cf. I, 15; XIX, 59, 61), at the same time he develops a phenomenological notion of transcendental self‑reflection or Selbstbesinnung (I, 26, 120; X, 27; XIX, 57, 79, 304) that clearly goes beyond this subjectivistic ontology. After all, this transcendental self-reflection aims at an explication of the fundamental structures of the primordial nexus of life - »Zusammenhang des Lebens« (XIX 361, cf. I, 10; V, 139ff.) - in which man is always already situated and which precedes the theoretical distinction between subject and object (cf. XIX 59, 66, 166, 207).

Second, Dilthey rejects the Kantian presupposition that the a priori structures of experience are universal and timeless, claiming instead that they are characterized by historical development. »Das a priori Kants ist starr und tot; aber die wir­kli­chen Bedin­gun­gen des Be­wußtseins und seine Vor­ausset­zun­gen, wie ich sie begreife, sind leben­diger ge­schichtlicher Prozeß, sind Ent­wick­lung, sie haben ihre Ge­schichte, und der Ver­lauf dieser Geschichte ist ihre An­passung an die immer genauer induktiv erkannte Mannigfal­tigkeit der Empfin­dungsinhalte. Das Leben der Ge­schichte ergreift auch die scheinbar starren und toten Bedingun­gen, unter welchen wir denken. Nie können sie zerstört wer­den, da wir durch sie denken, aber sie werden entwickelt« (XIX, 44; cf. 51). We might compare these conditions with the rules of grammar, without whom we cannot speak but which also develop gradually in time.

It will be clear that this transformation of the Kantian critique also leads to a reinterpretation of the notion of the 'transcendental': the subject of Dilthey's transcendental‑historical self‑reflection is not only the historicity of human life, but also the way quite different transcendental structures of experience develop in the course of history. For those, like Ineichen[8], who regards Kant's notion of transcendental investigation - an explicitation of conditions of the possibility that are both logically necessary and generally valid - as conclusive, the concept of a historical apriori is a contradictio in adjecto. However, there are good reasons to hold that Dilthey's transformation of the notion of transcendal philosophy is an inevitable consequence of Kant's anthropological turn. This has been argued quite convincingly by Krausser: »Gl­eich­gültig, ob dieses Apriori - von einem unendli­chen Verstand aus gesehen - ein Absolu­tum oder nur ein epochales und relatives Apri­ori wäre: als vom Men­schen 'er­kanntes' oder formu­liertes ist es jedenfalls als ein relatives Apriori zu betrach­ten, weil unsere Er­kenntnis und Formulie­rung eines Apriori - wie alle unsere Er­kenntnisse und Formulierungen - menschliche und also endliche und also wahr­scheinlich nur vorläufige und relati­ve Erkenntnisse und Formulie­rungen sind«.[9]

As a result of Dilthey's historization of the apriori transcendental analysis and empirical investigations in the human sciences become interdependent: »die Grundle­gung der Philo­sop­hie [tritt] in den Zusam­men­hang der positiven Wis­sen­schaf­ten« (XIX, 52). The genetic approach proposed by Dilthey aims at an explication of the development of transcendental structures in individuals as well as in collectives: "Diese [gene­ti­sche For­schung] um­faßt, wie dieses Ganze [the structure and contents of human knowlegde - JdM] in dem ge­gen­wärti­gen Indivi­duum sich entwickelt hat und wie es in dem Men­schen­geschlecht allmählich entstand" (XIX, 45). Dilthey rejects the idea that individual development recapitulates collective development, but he claims that they are interdependent. Whereas Dilthey in his writings on descriptive psychology in 1894-5 (V, 139-240; 241-316) mainly treats individual development, in his later writings such as Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in die Geisteswissenschaften (1910) collective developments becomes the focus of his interest.

Although Dilthey's early descriptive psychology is often called structuralist, and his later philosophy hermeneutic, in fact each of those two disciplines is based on a combination of structuralist and hermeneutic presuppositions (cf. the Introduction Johach and Rodi in: XVIII, xviii). Dilthey's descriptive psychology is a phenomenological description of the structure and development of the psychic nexus of the individual (V, 200f.; 213f.). In calling the psychic nexus a structure, Dilthey means that (1) it is not an aggregate of isolated elements but a connected whole of representation, feeling, and willing; (2) it is in a constant interaction with its physical and social‑cultural environment; and (3) it is characterized by an internal teleology (V, 211—213). The psychic nexus may be called transcendental because it is constitutive for our thinking, acting and feeling. Although it is possible to distinguish different substructures such as knowing, ethical reasoning, and aesthetic feeling (each of which can be further analyzed; e.g., knowing is a complex nexus of interrelated acts like perception, imagining, believing, judging), these subsystems should not be conceived of as separate faculties. In every single act of knowing, feeling, or willing, the psychic nexus works as a whole, which assures an increasing coherence in our attitudes toward the world.[10] For that reason we may regard the psychic nexus as a horizon of experience; it embodies a particular worldview.

Dilthey's definition of structure further indicates that it is not static but instead develops in constant interaction with the environment and in a certain direction. Although this development requires a certain biological maturity and the influence of the physical and social-cultural environment, it has to be constructed by the developing person himself or herself (V, 214). For that reason Dilthey calls the psychic nexus an acquired psychic nexus (erworbene seelische Zusammenhang), in which several developmental stages can be distinguished (V, 225-6; cf. VI, 95). The development as whole is characterized by the differentiation of subsystems and ongoing integration of these subsystems into a whole. In the beginning of its development, the psychic nexus is rather open, but the acquired psychic nexus gradually becomes less open to further changes: it shields us from having to react to every act of our environment (V, 219). Unlike many later developmental theorists (e.g. Piaget; see section 3 below), Dilthey recognizes that the acquired psychic nexus has an individual character. Although he does not in any way deny that there are more general developmental patterns, unlike his successors he emphasizes the irreducibly individual aspects of human development. Because Dilthey stresses the creative aspect of the human construction of transcendental structures and of the experience based on them, and also because he often takes the development of meaning in a novel or in a piece of music as a metaphor of human development (VI, 316; V 224-5; VII, 220-1), his account of human development is a prime instance of what we may call a narrative model.[11]

According to Dilthey historical developments resemble individual development in many respects. Like individual development, human history is conceived of as a development of the transcendental structure of experience: »Die Zei­talter sind in ihrer Struk­tur vonein­ander ver­schieden. Das Mittel­alter enthält einen Zusam­men­hang ver­wandter Ideen, die in den ver­schiede­nen Gebie­ten regie­ren ... Fakti­zität der Ras­se, des Rau­mes, des Ver­hältnis­ses der Gewalten bilden überall die nie zu vergeis­tigende Grundlage« (VII, 287-8, italics JdM; cf. I, 141). Dilthey calls this structure a dynamic system (Wirkungszusammenhang) which is embodied in its continuing products and which is characterized by an internal teleology (VII, 153). Unlike Hegel, but in accordance with his mentor Ranke, Dilthey states that it is impossible to give an a priori description of the stages of historical development (VII, 150-1). And like individual development, in historical development many unique patterns can be distinguished in different domains and different cultures.

In evaluating Dilthey's transformation of transcendental philosophy, we may notice that it inevitably leads to some form of ontological and epistemological relativism.[12] Following Kant, Dilthey states that the empirical world is (at least partly) constituted by the conceptual framework of the human mind, but, unlike Kant, he also states that these forms develop in time and, moreover, are culturally variant; from this he is forced to conclude that people possessing different conceptual frameworks live in literally incommensurable worlds. For that reason their judgments about 'their' worlds may differ essentially with no one being able to judge which is correct.

However, Dilthey's relativism is not absolute. In the first place there are fundamental human experiences (like birth, development, love, hate, death) that are shared by all people in all times and in all cultures, and that may not be open to development (VII 208-10; 147). We can understand the mourning of a mother who lost her child, even when she lives in a different culture or age or is in a different stage of development. In the second place, within a certain culture persons in the same stage of development live in a shared world and share the same presuppositions with regard to the domain concerned. In other words, among persons in the same stage relativism does not occur.[13] In the third place, the fact that different conceptual frameworks are incommensurable does not mean that they are incomparable.[14] According to Dilthey, in those cases where the transcendental structures of experience differ essentially, we may call upon a 'higher' hermeneutic understanding, by reconstructing the other's horizon of experience (VII, 210-16). Given a minimally shared life‑world, we are to a great extent able to re‑experience the lived experience of someone else as it is objectified in utterances, actions, and social and cultural products.If all individuals are in development, so also is the philosopher and human scientist investigating human development. They too go through a specific development, resulting in a conceptual framework that will influence their reconstructions of the developmental patterns of others. They all are in the hermeneutic situation that is inherent in human life. 
      

                                                                  III

Dilthey did not elaborate all implications of his fruitful approach to conceptual development, but, as remarked above, his KhV in many respects foreshadows both the structuralist and hermeneutic approaches to development that have been developed in the twentieth century. In this section I will discuss the way the structuralists Michel Foucault and Jean Piaget carry on the structuralist line of argument introduced by Dilthey.

Foucault further developed the notion of a historical a priori in his so‑called archaeological writings in the 1960s. In these studies of the history of the conception of madness, medical thinking, and the human sciences[15], Foucault seems to synthesize traditional history of mentalities with transcendental analysis. In his archaeological writings Foucault is interested not so much in the 'superficial' level of the development of thoughts, opinions, and theories (savoir), as in the 'underlying' conditions of the possibility of the knowledge, conceived of as a kind of grammar, which is to say as formative rules of discourse. It is this archaeological level that Foucault calls a a priori historique.[16] Like Dilthey, Foucault might be called a 'dynamic Kantian' in that he believes human knowledge presupposes an a priori structure that, though a priori, is nonetheless subject to change in time.

However, unlike Dilthey, Foucault in his archaeological writings holds that the successive a priori structures are discontinuous: they are radically different in each period. According to Foucault, in the conceptualization of notions like madness and health, radical ruptures can be found around 1600 and 1800, and these ruptures mark the transition from the Renaissance to the classical period and from the classical period to the modern era. (Foucault further suggests that a new transition is taking place in our time, leading to what may be called a postmodern historical a priori). Whereas Dilthey's argumentation is primarily at the level of what we may call the dynamic of developmental theory, Foucault seems to be interested primarily in the logic of the distinct stages. For that reason Foucault in his archaeological writings does not (want to) give an explanation of why any historical a priori or episteme (to use Foucault's special terminology) changes in the course of time. This is why Sartre accused Foucault of replacing the movie with the magic lantern.

In his book Le Structuralisme, Piaget raises a similar objection: »La succession des épistémè devient de ce fait entièrement incompréhensible, et cela de façon délibérée: leur créateur semble même en éprouver une certain satisfaction. En effet les épistémè successives ne peuvent pas se déduire les unes des autres, ni formellement ni même dialectiquement, et elles ne procèdent les unes des autres par aucune filiation, ni génétique ni historique.Autrement dit, le dernier mot d'une 'archéologie' de la raison est que la raison se transforme sans raison et que ses structures apparaissant et disparaissant par mutations fortuites ou émergences momentanées, à la manière dont raisonnaient les biologistes avant le structuralisme cybernétique contemporain. In n'est donc pas exagéré de qualifier le structuralisme de Foucault de structuralisme sans structures. Il retient du structuralisme statique tous ses aspects négatifs: la dévalorisation de l'histoire et de la genèse, le mépris des fonctions et, à un degré inégalé jusqu'ici, la négation du sujet lui-même puisque l'homme va bientôt disparaître. Quants aux aspects positifs, ses structures ne sont que des schémas figuratifs en non pas des systèmes de transformations se conservant nécessairement par leur autoréglage«.[17]

Although we may notice that Foucault's emphasis on the description of the logic of the succeeding 'stages' of historical development does not by itself exclude a complementary dynamic approach, his archaeological concept of development seems to exclude the development of such a dynamics part of the theory. Foucault's concept of structures turns out to be closed, that is, according to Foucault structures do not seem to allow influences from outside, whereas Piaget like Dilthey holds that structures are characterized by a fundamental openness to change. Before discussing Piaget's alternative in more detail, we first want to mention one further problem in Foucault's archaeology.

Foucault seems to neglect the hermeneutic dimension of his undertaking. In L'archéologie de savoir he states that archaeology is nothing more than a rewriting: that is, in the preserved form of exteriority, a regulated transformation of what has already been written. According to Foucault, archeology is the systematic description of a discourse‑object.[18] Elsewhere Foucault describes his method as a 'happy positivism'. Archaeology simply is an ahistorical discipline with an ahistorical technical language, which is able to survey and order history precisely because it is not in history.[19] Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault's archaeology as a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology. Foucault's naive form of positivism of the 'detached spectator' neglects the fact that this spectator is always part of the history he is describing and thus always offering a certain historically determined interpretation. In this sense Foucault regresses to a position that was already effectively criticized by Dilthey. It is only in his genealogical writings that Foucault acknowledges this hermeneutic dimension, although he then defends a Nietzschean hermeneutics. The Diltheyan approach was taken up not by Foucault but, as we will see in the next section, by Heidegger and Gadamer.

First we will return to Piaget's genetic structuralism, to see if it overcomes the problems we noticed in Foucault's archaeology. Like Dilthey and Foucault, Piaget regards himself as a 'dynamic Kantian'.[20] Unlike Foucault, however, Piaget does not concentrate on logical questions but on dynamic ones (though he does not properly distinguish these two types of questions). Although Piaget is generally regarded a developmental psychologist, he considered himself a genetic epistemologist in the first place, differentiating between genetic epistemology, genetic psychology, and child psychology: genetic epistemology, he writes, »has as its object the examination of the formation of knowledge itself, that is to say of the cognitive relations between the subject and object: thus it bridges the gap between genetic psychology and epistemology in general, which it helps to enrich by considering development«.[21]

Piaget emphasizes the importance of Kant's starting points, especially of the »grande idée des juge­ments syn­théti­ques a priori et l'idée dérivée que, même dans le cas des jugements synthéti­ques a posteriori, l'intelli­gence ne se borne pas à recevoir des empreintes comme une table rase, mais structure le réel au moyen de formes a priori de la sensibilité et de l'enten­de­ment«.[22] However, Piaget like Dilthey criticizes Kant for treating a priori forms of sensibility and understanding as timeless. He thinks that Kant here remains caught in the traditional rationalist view that these forms are innate, and does not take the consequences of his own constructivism seriously enough. When we apply the Kantian idea that knowledge is an activity of the knowing subject instead of a passive occurrence to the a priori forms of experience, we should acknowledge that these forms themselves are the result of a long process of construction. »Plus précisément, la construc­tion propre au sujet épisté­mique, si riche soit-elle dans la perspec­tive kantienne, est encore trop pauvre, puis­que'elle est entière­ment donnée au départ, tandis qu'un constructivisme dia­lectique, tel que l'histoire des sciences ainsi que les faits expérimentaux réunis par les études sur le développe­ment mental sem­blent en montrer la réalité vivante, permet d'attri­buer au sujet épisté­mique une constructi­vité beaucoup plus féconde, bien qu'aboutissant aux mêmes caractères de néces­sité rationnelle et de structura­tion de l'expérience que ceux dont Kant demandait la garantie à sa notion de l'a priori«.[23]

This constructivism constitutes the cornerstone of Piaget's genetic epistemology. For that reason we could call his epistemology a transcendental constructivism. The constructive activity is the condition of the possibility of the knowing subject and the object known. Knowledge for Piaget is not making a mental 'copy' of things already given in reality, nor is it a mere unfolding of an innate conceptual framework. It results from a process of continuous interaction between subject and object, in which both the mental structure and the relations within objects are constructed: »Knowledge, then, at its origin, neither arises from objects nor from the subject, but from interactions – at first inextricable – between the subject and those objects«.[24] For that reason, just as in the case of Dilthey, knowledge for Piaget is above all a kind of praxis, since to know objects, the subject must transform them by displacing, connecting, combining, by taking things apart and putting them back together. »Hence the limit between subject and objects is in no way determined beforehand, and, what is more important, it is not stable«.[25]

Starting from a nondualistic situation, knowledge is a process of constant interaction between subject and object, in which both are constructed and differentiated. It is in this sense that Piaget talks about a construction of reality by the child (using book titles such as La construction du réel chez l'enfant). Are we to call Piaget an idealist for that reason? His constant critique of realism and his appreciation of idealists like Hegel seem to suggest this conclusion.[26] However, such an interpretation of Piaget undermines his fundamental Kantian conviction regarding the existence of things in themselves. The construction of reality does not refer to the noumenal world of the things in themselves – as is the case in idealism – but to the phenomenal world of appearances, that is, to the world as it is constructed in our experience. If we want to call Piaget an idealist, we are only justified to do so in the Kantian sense of transcendental idealism. On the level of the empirical world Piaget, like Kant, is a realist. The empirical world has a real character. It is not a subjective illusion.

So far Piaget's genetic radicalization of Kant's constructivism seems to agree with Dilthey's approach. Piaget's description of the successive stages of cognitive development follows Dilthey's general conception of development as an ongoing process of differentiation and integration (cf. V, 217). Whereas Dilthey formulated the points of departure for genetic structuralism, Piaget has worked them out fruitfully in his countless psychological experiments. However, on several issues their opinions differ essentially and, as we will now argue, Piaget's elaboration of developmental theory is not always an improvement over Dilthey.

First, his conception of the a priori structures of the human mind seems to be a retreat from Dilthey's categories of life to the one‑sided intellectual and formal categories of the Kantian subject. In addition, Piaget does not sufficiently keep in mind the influence of the (social) life‑world in the cognitive development of the child. As a result he seems to regress to the theoretical fiction of a subject isolated from society and history. Second, Piaget at several places seems to conceive conceptual development as purely functional adaptation instead of a rational achievement of the developing person. Third, like Foucault, he does not take into account radically enough the hermeneutic situatedness of the scientist himself or herself. Piaget does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that the interpretation of a developmental pattern by a scientist is itself based on a specific stage of conceptualization. This is related to Piaget's presupposition that all individuals follow the same universal pattern of development and that the scientists reconstructing the pattern are themselves at the highest stage. For that reason the issue of relativism cannot even appear as a theoretical problem in Piaget's philosophy.[27]

We therefore have to conclude that both Piaget and Foucault (at least in his archaeological writings) do not adequately appreciate the hermeneutic dimension of their theories of human development. For that reason it seems fruitful to consider the further development of Dilthey's critique of historical reason in the hermeneutic tradition.

                                                                  IV

Martin Heidegger and Hans‑Georg Gadamer are two of the most important continuators of the hermeneutic aspect of Dilthey's philosophy of life. For that reason I will present them here, focusing exclusively on those aspects of their thought that are relevant to our subject: the transformation of transcendental philosophy. I will show that Heidegger and Gadamer elaborate a number of Dilthey's insights in a more consistent way than Dilthey himself did, but that on the other hand with regard to some insights of Dilthey they seem to go back to a position that Dilthey quite rightly criticized and abandoned.

The leading question in Heidegger's philosophy is the question of Being. According to Heidegger this question has not been addressed rightly in western metaphysics, because in this tradition the difference between the ontic and the ontological has been neglected. Of course Heidegger does not deny that many ontologies have been developed (regarding nature, history, man, etc.), but in his view the more fundamental question concerning what we mean when we talk about the being of nature, history, or man is not even properly raised. Although Dilthey has justly pointed to the temporal and historical dimension of human life and reasoning (and in this sense overcomes the static character of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Husserl), Heidegger believed that, in the last analysis, Dilthey's philosophy is marked by an »ontologischer Indifferenz«[28] and therefore fails to grasp radically enough the temporal character of Being.

In order to properly raise the question of Being we must, according to Heidegger, analyze the Being that is characterized by a certain (implicit) understanding of the Being of beings: man. Because Heidegger, unlike Dilthey, is not so much interested in developing an anthropology as in studying man insofar as he has an understanding of Being, Heidegger prefers to speak of Dasein, (human) there‑being. The analytic of Dasein, that is the phenomenological description of the essential structure of Dasein (to which human understanding belongs), is the subject of the first part of Sein und Zeit. Heidegger planned a the second part to deal with the question of Being itself, but for reasons we will discuss below, he never wrote that part.

In the published part of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger not only explicitly connects his analytic of Dasein with Husserl's phenomenology (cf. SuZ, 27—39), but also, albeit more implicitly, with Kant's transcendental philosophy, when he views his goal as attaining a veritas transcendentalis (SuZ, 38). In Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, he elucidates this transcendental character as follows: »Transzendentale Erkenntnis untersucht also nicht das Seiende selbst, sondern die Moglichkeit des vorgängigen Seinsverständnisses, d.h. zugleich: die Seins­verfassung des Seienden. Sie betrifft das Überschreiten (Transzendenz) der reinen Vernunft zum Seienden, so daβ sich diesem jetzt allererst als möglichem Gegenstand Erfahrung anmessen kann«.[29]

However, Heidegger's analytic of Dasein is especially inspired by Dilthey's hermeneutics. We find both of Dilthey's transformations of Kant elaborated here.[30] Heidegger rejects Kant's conception of a transcendental subject that is outside the world and outside history (SuZ, 184). According to Heidegger Dasein essentially is being‑in‑the‑world. The way Dasein understands the world is determined by the fact that Dasein is always already situated in the world. Understanding always takes place from within a specific horizon. Understanding therefore is not so much a specific method (e.g., that employed in the human sciences) but the very mode of existence of Dasein. In understanding, Dasein projects a meaningful whole. Further, this being in the world has a profoundly temporal character. The facticity of Dasein means that its past determines what it is, and at the same time Dasein's understanding is directed toward future possibilities.

Dilthey, although he emphasizes the historicity of man, does not according to Heidegger distinguish properly between the ontic character of mere entities (Vorhandenes) and the ontological character of human existence (SuZ, 45) In Heidegger's view Dasein should not be conceived as an entity with certain qualities that 'is' in time; rather its very existence is temporal and for that reason cannot be conceived of in ontic terminology. Because Dilthey did not distinguish sharply enough between the ontic and the ontological, he fails to acknowledge the fundamental difference between empirical and transcendental questions.

It is certainly to Heidegger's credit that he elucidated this important difference between ontic and ontological questions, which is at most only implicit in Dilthey's writings. However, in Sein und Zeit Heidegger did not yet understand historicization as radically as Dilthey did (notwithstanding the latter's ontological indifference), and for that reason Heidegger remained victim of the timeless conception of transcendental philosophy as put forward by Kant and Husserl. In Sein und Zeit the being‑there of Dasein, even if characterized by temporality, is conceived as a timeless structure. After finishing the first volume of Sein und Zeit Heidegger realized that in that work he had not approached his question radically enough. After his well‑known 'reversal' (Kehre), he abandoned the transcendental foundation and took as his goal a rethinking of the history of (the understanding of) Being. This starting point brings Heidegger somewhat closer to Dilthey's developmental hermeneutics. However, as we will see, Heidegger's reversal also has implications that prevented him from a further elaboration of Diltheyan hermeneutics..

According to the later Heidegger the history of western thinking shows a succession of different modes of understanding of Being. Following Dilthey's philosophy of history, Heidegger distinguishes in the history of western culture relatively global stages, such as those of the Greeks, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Era. The understanding of Being in the Modern Era ('technicity') is strongly criticized by Heidegger, because according to him it rests on the reduction of beings to sheer objects of human interests and needs. More generally, the history of western metaphysics shows an increasing Seinsvergessenheit.[31] After his reversal, when his main goal is to rethink Being as such, he no longer finds the scientist a fruitful interlocutor, since science is now seen as the very expression of technical thinking. After the reversal Heidegger turns to artists, and to poets in particular.

Whatever else might be said about the often quite provoking thoughts in Heidegger's later writings, they contain some serious problems as far as human development is concerned. The main problem is that, when his later work is taken as the lens through which to understand his previous writings, Heidegger's earlier critique of the subject‑centeredness of western metaphysics radically shrinks, in fact virtually eliminates, the role human subjects play in their own development. In Heidegger's monolithic conception, the history of Being seems to be an autonomous process in which the human subject has an exclusively passive role. Whereas in Sein und Zeit the there‑being of Dasein constantly projects Being, after the reversal the thrownness of man is stressed throughout. Though the later Heidegger often remarks that Being cannot appear without man, he also emphasizes the role of what he calls Gelassenheit.[32] Although Heidegger is right in criticizing the way many classical and (especially) modern writers overestimate the (autonomous) subject's role in history, he himself seems to underestimate its role (also in this respect he inspired Foucault's archaeological analysis of the anonymous historical a priori).

Furthermore, after the reversal there is a strong tendency in Heidegger's writings completely to separate Being from beings. As a consequence, Heidegger entirely separates his (increasingly esoteric) thinking of Being from the (empirical) sciences, which only research beings and nothing but beings.[33] Although Heidegger is right in arguing that ontological questions are fundamentally different from empirical ones, these two types of questions cannot be completely separated. In this regard Dilthey's emphasis on the mutual dependence of ontological and empirical questions is more to the point (see section 2 above). In addition, the monolithic character of Heidegger's history of Being leads him to overlook the »unermeßliche Mannigfaltigkeit von Entwicklungsgeschichten« (XIX 316) that characterize the human world.

The problems just mentioned limit the fruitfulness of Heidegger's later thinking, at least for the study of human development. This is a pity, because Heidegger's later thinking emphasizes precisely the historical character of understanding and the historicity of Being, and in that context raises many problems that are relevant to a philosophy of human development. Fortunately, Gadamer has made an attempt in his philosophical hermeneutics to an »urbanisierung der Heideggerschen Provinz«.[34] Although Gadamer follows Heidegger in his reversal toward a radical historicization of Being, he does not turn his back on the human sciences, as Heidegger did. Further, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics does not display the problems we noticed above in Heidegger's later thinking. In Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics the role of the human person in the course of history is acknowledged. And in his practical orientation, that is, in his recognition that thinking always is interlocked with human praxis, Gadamer to a certain extent resembles Piaget.

As is the case with Dilthey's and Heidegger's work, in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics understanding takes a central position. In Wahrheit und Methode Gadamer analyzes the process of understanding. He criticizes Dilthey because the latter's notion of understanding, influenced by the methods of the natural sciences, remains monological. According to Gadamer understanding is essentially a dialogical process. In a dialogue we do not primarily aim at reconstructing what the interlocutor means, but at a joint understanding of the subject matter. Real dialogue issues in new forms of meaning that transcend the understanding of both interlocutors. Moreover, for Gadamer understanding primarily aims at (practical) application. We understand primarily in order to give direction to our actions.

Two concepts are important in this context: the notion of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) and the notion of fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). The notion of effective history resembles Dilthey's notion of dynamic system (Wirkungszusammenhang), since it refers to the historical movement which carries both the interpreted objects and the interpreting subjects to a new level of understanding and new action upon the world. Therefore the meaning of an utterance, text, or action is not static, but unfolds in the course of interpretation. The result of a fruitful interpretation is a fusion of horizons: »Daher ist Verstehen kein nur reproduktives, sondern stets auch produktives Verhalten«.[35] We can compare this process to an alloy of different metals, which has qualities (e.g., hardness) not found in the individual metals even though other qualities in those metals (e.g., brightness) are lost.

When we read a novel, our own horizon of experience is integrated with the one presented in the novel. Similarly, a developmental psychologist who interprets an utterance of a child does not simply reconstruct the horizon of the child's experience, but integrates it with the horizon of his or her own experience (containing, among other things, the psychologist's own developmental theory). This has important implications for a philosophy of human development as well. Every reconstruction of the development of a foundational pattern presupposes a specific foundation on the part of the philosopher; this foundation is not so much an obstacle for the reconstruction as the very condition of its possibility. Furthermore, without certain differences between the reconstructed horizon(s) and the one on which the reconstruction is based, the reconstruction itself would be unnecessary.[36]

Although in his analysis of the process of understanding Gadamer avoids the problematic objectivism of Foucault and Piaget, his philosophical hermeneutics still contains a problem we noticed in Piaget as well as another problem of its own. The first problem is this. Like Piaget, who often expresses his admiration for Hegelian dialectics, Gadamer sometimes seems to follow Hegel in his conception of history as an ongoing process of all‑embracing or 'totalizing' integration. According to Gadamer, the process of understanding leads to »die Erhebung zu einer höheren Allgemeinheit, die nicht nur die eigene Partikularität, sondern auch die des anderen überwindet« (WM 310). On the one hand Gadamer seems to follow Heidegger in his view that every fusion of horizons, apart from a 'production' of new meanings and therefore understanding, also results in a partial loss of meaning and understanding (just as the alloy gains new features and loses others). On the other hand, though, Gadamer, like Piaget, often seems to follow Hegel in his absolutist conception of development as an ongoing totalization.

The second problem is that Gadamer does not give a convincing account of the problem of conflicting interpretations of (human) reality. The only criterion Gadamer seems to offer is that interpretations are justified if they stand their ground in the course of the effective history.[37] If effective success is the only criterion, radical relativism seems to be unavoidable. Although I agree that some form of developmental relativism is indeed inevitable, I believe that at least in cases where conflicting interpretations are based on a shared (developmental) foundation, a rational comparison of conflicting interpretations of reality is possible. In these cases we can compare conflicting interpretations with reality as it is reconstructed on the basis of a shared ontological foundation. Especially in the (human) sciences, such a reconstruction plays a more prominent role than Gadamer admits. However, at some places in Wahrheit und Methode (cf. WM 312) he gives reconstruction more credit than he usually does.With regard to the problem of how to make an adequate reconstruction of (human) reality, it will be useful to combine structuralist analysis with hermeneutic understanding. In the next section we will see that this is exactly what Habermas tries to do. With such an integration of the hermeneutic and structuralist approaches to development, Habermas returns to Dilthey, enriched by the achievements of both of these traditions.

                                                                   V

Like the structuralist and hermeneutic philosophers discussed in this chapter, Habermas regards his philosophy as a transformation of Kant's transcendental philosophy. In his discussion of Dilthey in Erkenntnis und Interesse Habermas describes a kind of analysis of rationality that is neither purely transcendental nor entirely empirical. He discusses a theory that offers a »nicht-empirischen und gleichwohl von Momenten der Erfahrung nicht vollends abgelösten Genesis der Vernunft«.[38] This theory aims at elucidating the genesis of conceptual frameworks, in order to formulate the foundations of communication directed at mutual understanding. Because of the contribution of empirical knowledge in transcendental philosophy, Habermas prefers to speak of his project as a quasi‑transcendental philosophy.

Another title given to this project by Habermas is rational reconstruction of the historical genesis of transcendental frameworks. In this concept of rational reconstruction, Habermas explicitly links the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the genetic structuralism of Piaget. In Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften Habermas already made it clear that he shares Gadamer's dialogical conception of hermeneutics. Like Gadamer he describes understanding as a fusion of horizons. This means that Habermas subscribes to the view that there is no absolute truth and objectivity. Habermas for that reason also criticizes the objectivist view on human science.[39] However, Habermas does not follow Gadamer in all respects. According to Habermas hermeneutics does not have the universal import that Heidegger and Gadamer attribute to it. In Habermas's view, human communication often is influenced by relations of labor and power, and these relations often cannot themselves be understood by hermeneutic understanding. In cases where communication is distorted, this situation cannot be understood but needs to be explained by a functional model of understanding. In this case it is necessary to abandon the internal hermeneutic perspective and to take a perspective from without. Such a functional reconstruction of the causes of distorted communication also enables us to criticize this type of communication.

In their so‑called debate about hermeneutics and the critique of ideology, Gadamer forcefully argues that a functional reconstruction remains hermeneutic in the sense that it is based on a certain pre‑scientific disclosure of reality, especially social reality. He adds that in the case of non‑understanding there is not necessarily any distortion of communication, since most of these cases have to do with conflicts of interests that exclude agreement. In a way, Gadamer's arguments against Habermas can be supported by arguments of Habermas himself. In his discussion of rational reconstruction in Was heisst Universalpragmatik?, Habermas rightly states that in a rational reconstruction we cannot separate object‑language and meta‑language, because in the explication of the conceptual framework the speakers themselves are interlocutors in the reconstruction. However, in the same article Habermas seems to think conceptual frameworks have some objective existence such that they could be reconstructed apart from a horizon of interpretation.[40] We have to conclude that Habermas is not always consistent with regard to the status of conceptual frameworks.

However, we might argue that, even when a rational reconstruction is not an objectivist kind of observation but instead an interpretation based on the conceptual framework of the philosopher or psychologist, this does not reduce the value of the rational reconstruction. It enables us to interpret specific patterns of development that are themselves open to dispute, just like the foundations on which they are based. When a certain developmental pattern is accepted as a justified interpretation (which among other things is dependent on the stage of development of the interlocutors discussing the reconstructed pattern), then it can help them find agreement. If there is no common foundation of reasoning or if there are serious conflicts of interest, we have to accept with Gadamer that rational reconstruction can offer no solution to the disagreement.

We may call this type of rational reconstruction depth hermeneutics. In Rekonstruktive vs. verstehende Sozialwissenschaft (1983), where Habermas elaborates this notion with the help of Kohlberg's genetic‑structuralist theory, he comes closer to Gadamer's view. Although he again criticizes the relativism inherent in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, he admits that it is impossible to return to some naive form of objective hermeneutics. He calls Kohlberg's theory of moral development an example of the kind of rational reconstruction he wants to defend.[41]

After reading Habermas, Kohlberg agreed to this description of his approach. Explicitly referring to Habermas, he writes: »Interpretation, the hermeneutic art, rests on trying to come to agreement with another member of a speech community, who is expressing his or her belief about something in the world.«.[42] A page later, Kohlberg concludes that the word 'cognitive' here means »not only (a) phenomenological or imaginative role‑taking activity, and (b) the search for logical or inferential relations and transformations, but also (c) the definition of the subject's structure in terms of the meanings he or she finds in the world«. However, like Habermas, Kohlberg is not always very consistent in his interpretive turn. Kohlberg also often speaks about conceptual frameworks as being objective. For instance, in his discussion of Habermas he wrongly identifies his position as »hermeneutic objectivism«.[43] Moreover, Kohlberg's belief that his own theory of moral development is identical with a philosophical justification of the highest level of moral reasoning is problematic and ends in a naturalistic fallacy.[44Although Habermas's theoretical analysis of the possibilities and problems of developmental theories is in many respects more philosophically coherent than Kohlberg's, even in his case some obscurities and problems remain. In the first place it is remarkable that Habermas sticks to a notion of a universal telos of development and therefore, unlike Dilthey, excludes a priori the possibility of 'forks' in the developmental pattern. In the second place Habermas holds on to a rather restricted ontology. He seems to distinguish only three domains of human development, corresponding to the three faculties of the mind distinguished by Kant. Moreover, he identifies domains of developments and dimensions within these domains. A problem in the dynamic of Habermas' developmental theory is his excessively rationalistic view of stage transitions. Habermas seems to suppose that people make their developmental transitions on purely rational grounds. He seems to forget that the reasons distinguished in a reconstruction and evaluation of a developmental pattern are always made explicit afterwards, when we look back at the development we (or subjects whom we are investigating) have gone through. In the actual transition, rational arguments often do not play such a prominent role.

                                                                  VI

The reconstruction presented in the preceding sections has shown that in transcendental (or foundational) analysis after Kant, the notion of development has become an increasingly important issue. Moreover, it makes clear that foundational analysis of development itself shows conceptual development. Whereas Dilthey's philosophy approached the development of foundations from both structural and hermeneutic perspectives, in the structuralist and hermeneutic movements after Dilthey these perspectives took their own course. However, in the work of Habermas and Kohlberg these philosophical traditions are reintegrated. As we have seen, the development of foundational analysis, like many other developments, has not been a process of simple progress, but a complex learning process in which gains on one side were accompanied by losses on the other.

We may conclude that Dilthey's conception of human development in many respects is fruitful with regard to contemporary analysis of human development. In the first place our analysis of the problems of sheer structuralist and hermeneutic approaches shows that is fruitful to stick to Dilthey's combination of structuralist and hermeneutic lines of argument. In the second place Dilthey's view concerning the interdependence of ontological and empirical investigations seems to be topical in the light of postmetaphysical thinking. In the third place, against later unilinear structuralists like Piaget and unilinear hermeneuticists like Heidegger, it is more plausible to accept Dilthey's idea that developmental patterns need not be linear, but may instead show many forms of branching. Of course a topical philosophy of human development cannot be identical with Dilthey's since it needs a number of refinements enabling theorists to elucidate various aspects of development that were not yet envisaged by Dilthey, at least not explicitly. In many respects Habermas's concept of rational reconstruction seems to be a fruitful elaboration of Dilthey's model of human development. However, we have to avoid the residual objectivism that can be found in Habermas, by retaining Dilthey's and Gadamer's emphasis on the hermeneutic dimension of the rational reconstruction. In that case, we have to accept the developmental relativism that results from this decision, and hence distinguish, more carefully and emphatically than Habermas did, between the actual developments of individuals and groups and the rational reconstruction made afterwards.

Endnotes