HUMAN SCIENCES
THE PROBLEM OF METHOD
The logical self-reflection that accompanied the development of the
human sciences in the nineteenth century is wholly governed by the
model of the natural sciences. A glance at the history of the word
Geisteswissenschaft shows this, although only in its plural form does this
word acquire the meaning familiar to us. The human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften)
so obviously understand themselves by analogy to the
natural sciences that the idealistic echo implied in the idea of Geist
("spirit") and of a science of Geist fades into the background. The word
Geisteswissenschaften was made popular chiefly by the translator of John
Stuart Mill's Logic. In the supplement to his work Mill seeks to outline the
possibilities of applying inductive logic to the "moral sciences." The
translator calls these Geisteswissenschaften.1 Even in the context of Mill's
Logic it is apparent that there is no question of acknowledging that the
human sciences have their own logic but, on the contrary, of showing that
the inductive method, basic to all experimental science, is the only method
valid in this field too. In this respect Mill stands in an English tradition of
which Hume has given the most effective formulation in the introduction
to his Treatise.2 Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities,
regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to
predict individual phenomena and processes. In the field of natural
(A)
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TRUTH AND METHOD
phenomena this goal cannot always be reached everywhere to the same
extent, but the reason for this variation is only that sufficient data on
which the similarities are to be established cannot always be obtained.
Thus the method of meteorology is just the same as that of physics, but its
data is incomplete and therefore its predictions are more uncertain. The
same is true in the field of moral and social phenomena. The use of the
inductive method is also free from all metaphysical assumptions and
remains perfectly independent of how one conceives of the phenomena
that one is observing. One does not ascertain causes for particular effects,
but simply establishes regularities. Thus it is quite unimportant whether
one believes, say, in the freedom of the will or not—one can still make
predictions in the sphere of social life. To make deductions from regularities
concerning the phenomena to be expected implies no assumption
about the kind of connection whose regularity makes prediction possible.
The involvement of free decisions—if they exist—does not interfere with
the regular process, but itself belongs to the universality and regularity
which are attained through induction. What is programmatically developed
here is a science of society, and research has followed this program
with success in many fields. One only has to think of social psychology.
But the specific problem that the human sciences present to thought is
that one has not rightly grasped their nature if one measures them by the
yardstick of a progressive knowledge of regularity. The experience of the
sociohistorical world cannot be raised to a science by the inductive
procedure of the natural sciences. Whatever "science" may mean here, and
even if all historical knowledge includes the application of experiential
universals to the particular object of investigation, historical research does
not endeavor to grasp the concrete phenomenon as an instance of a
universal rule. The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law
from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather to
understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness.
However much experiential universals are involved, the aim is not to
confirm and extend these universalized experiences in order to attain
knowledge of a law—e.g., how men, peoples, and states evolve—but to
understand how this man, this people, or this state is what it has become
or, more generally, how it happened that it is so.
What kind of knowledge is it that understands that something is so
because it understands that it has come about so? What does "science"
mean here? Even if one acknowledges that the ideal of this knowledge is
fundamentally different in kind and intention from the natural sciences,
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TRANSCENDING THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION
one will still be tempted to describe the human sciences in a merely
negative way as the "inexact sciences." Although Hermann Helmholtz's
important and just comparison in his famous speech of 1862 between the
natural and the human sciences laid great emphasis on the superior and
humane significance of the human sciences, he still gave them a negative
logical description based on the methodological ideal of the natural
sciences.3 Helmholtz distinguished between two kinds of induction: logical
and artistic-instinctive induction. That means, however, that his distinction
was basically not logical but psychological. Both kinds of science make
use of the inductive conclusion, but the human sciences arrive at their
conclusions by an unconscious process. Hence the practice of induction in
the human sciences is tied to particular psychological conditions. It
requires a kind of tact and other intellectual capacities as well—e.g., a wellstocked
memory and the acceptance of authorities—whereas the selfconscious
inferences of the natural scientist depend entirely on the use of
his own reason. Even if one acknowledges that this great natural scientist
has resisted the temptation of making his own scientific practice a
universally binding norm, he obviously had no other logical terms in
which to characterize the procedure of the human sciences than the
concept of induction, familiar to him from Mill's Logic. The fact that the
new mechanics and their triumph in the astronomy of Newton were a
model for the sciences of the eighteenth century was still so self-evident for
Helmholtz that the question of what philosophical conditions made the
birth of this new science possible in the seventeenth century was utterly
remote from him. Today we know what an influence the Paris Occamist
school had.4 For Helmholtz, the methodological ideal of the natural
sciences needed neither to be historically derived nor epistemologically
restricted, and that is why he could not understand the way the human
sciences work as logically different.
At the same time there was the pressing task of raising one branch of
knowledge—namely that of the "historical school," which was in fact in
full flower—to logical self-consciousness. As early as 1843 J. G. Droysen,
the author and founder of the history of Hellenism, wrote, "there is, I
suppose, no field of knowledge that is so far from being theoretically
justified, defined, and articulated as history." Droysen called for a Kant
who, in a categorical imperative of history, "would show the living source
from which the historical life of mankind flowed." He expressed the hope
"that the more profoundly grasped idea of history will be the center of
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TRUTH AND METHOD
gravity in which the chaotic movement of the human sciences will gain
stability and the possibility of further progress."5
The model of the natural sciences invoked here by Droysen is not
intended in terms of a specific content—that is, a theoretical model of
science to which the human sciences must be assimilated; on the contrary,
he means that the human sciences must be firmly established as an equally
autonomous and self-reliant group of sciences. Droysen's Historik attempts
to carry out this task.
Even Dilthey, on whom the scientific method and the empiricism of
Mill's Logic had a much stronger influence, retained the romantic, idealistic
heritage in the concept of spirit (Geist). He always thought himself
superior to English empiricism, because he vividly perceived what distinguished
the historical school from all thinking in terms of the natural
sciences and natural law. "The real empirical procedure that can replace
prejudiced dogmatic empiricism can come only from Germany. Mill is
dogmatic because he lacks historical training"—this was a note Dilthey
made in his copy of Mill's Logic.6 In fact all the arduous work of decades
that Dilthey devoted to laying the foundations of the human sciences was
a constant debate with the logical demand that Mill's famous last chapter
made on the human sciences.
Nevertheless, Dilthey let himself be profoundly influenced by the model
of the natural sciences, even when he was endeavoring to justify precisely
the methodological independence of the human sciences. Two pieces of
evidence will make this clear and will, as it were, point the way for our
own investigation. In his obituary for Wilhelm Scherer, Dilthey emphasizes
that the spirit of the natural sciences guided Scherer's procedure, and he
attempts to give the reason why Scherer let himself be so influenced by
English empiricism: "He was a modern man, and the world of our
forebears was no longer the home of his spirit and his heart, but his
historical object."7 The antithesis shows that for Dilthey scientific knowledge
obliges one to sever one's bond with life, to attain distance from one's
own history, which alone makes it possible for that history to become an
object. We may indeed acknowledge that Scherer and Dilthey's handling of
the inductive and comparative methods was governed by genuine individual
tact and that such tact presupposes a spiritual cultivation which
indicates that the world of classical culture and the romantic belief in
individuality survive in them. Nevertheless, it is the model of the natural
sciences that guides their conception of themselves as sciences.
A second reference makes this particularly clear: Dilthey refers to the
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TRANSCENDING THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION
independence of the methods of the human sciences and substantiates it
by appeal to their object.8 At first blush, this sounds like good Aristotelianism
and could indicate a genuine detachment from the scientific model.
But in accounting for the independence of the methods of the human
sciences Dilthey refers to the old Baconian aphorism, "to be conquered,
nature must be obeyed,"9 a principle which practically flies in the face of
the classical and romantic heritage that Dilthey seeks to retain. Though his
historical training accounts for his superiority over contemporary neo-
Kantianism, it must be said that in his logical endeavors Dilthey did not
really progress very far beyond the simple statements made by Helmholtz.
However strongly Dilthey defended the epistemological independence of
the human sciences, what is called "method" in modern science remains
the same everywhere and is only displayed in an especially exemplary
form in the natural sciences. The human sciences have no method of their
own. Yet one might well ask, with Helmholtz, to what extent method is
significant in this case and whether the other logical presuppositions of the
human sciences are not perhaps far more important than inductive logic.
Helmholtz had indicated this correctly when, in order to do justice to the
human sciences, he emphasized memory and authority, and spoke of the
psychological tact that here replaced the conscious drawing of inferences.
What is the basis of this tact? How is it acquired? Does not what is scientific
about the human sciences lie rather here than in their methodology?
Because the human sciences prompt this question and thus cannot be
fitted into the modern concept of science, they remain a problem for
philosophy itself. The answer that Helmholtz and his century gave to this
question cannot suffice. They follow Kant in modeling the idea of science
and knowledge on the natural sciences and seeking the distinctive feature
of the human sciences in the artistic element (artistic feeling, artistic
induction). But the picture that Helmholtz gives of work in the natural
sciences is rather one-sided, seeing that he does not believe in "sudden
flashes of intuition" (or in so-called "inspirations") and regards scientific
work only as the "the self-conscious work of drawing iron-clad conclusions."
He refers to John Stuart Mill's view that "in modern times the
inductive sciences have done more to advance the methods of logic than
all the professional philosophers."10 They are, for him, the model of
scientific method as such.
Now, Helmholtz knows that historical knowledge is based on a kind of
experience quite different from the one that serves in investigating natural
laws. Thus he seeks to determine why the inductive method in historical
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TRUTH AND METHOD
research proceeds under conditions different from those obtaining in the
study of nature. To this end he uses the distinction between nature and
freedom, which is the basis of Kantian philosophy. Historical study is
different because in its domain there are no natural laws but, rather,
voluntarily accepted practical laws—i.e., commandments. The world of
human freedom does not manifest the same absence of exceptions as
natural laws.
This line of thought, however, is not very convincing. Basing the
inductive investigation of the human world of freedom on Kant's distinction
between nature and freedom is not true to Kant's intentions; nor is it
true to the logic of induction itself. Here Mill was more consistent, for he
methodically excluded the problem of freedom. Moreover, Helmholtz's
appealing to Kant without following out the consequences of doing so
bears no real fruit, for even according to Helmholtz the empiricism of the
human sciences is to be regarded in the same way as that of meteorology,
namely with renunciation and resignation.
But in fact the human sciences are a long way from regarding themselves
as simply inferior to the natural sciences. Instead, possessed of the
intellectual heritage of German classicism, they carried forward the proud
awareness that they were the true representatives of humanism. The
period of German classicism had not only brought about a renewal of
literature and aesthetic criticism, which overcame the outmoded baroque
ideal of taste and of Enlightenment rationalism; it had also given the idea
of humanity, and the ideal of enlightened reason, a fundamentally new
content. More than anyone, Herder transcended the perfectionism of the
Enlightenment with his new ideal of "cultivating the human" (Bildung
zum Menschen) and thus prepared the ground for the growth of the
historical sciences in the nineteenth century.11 The concept of self-formation,
education, or cultivation (Bildung), which became supremely important at
the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century, and it is
this concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of
the nineteenth century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological
justification for it.
