Pattern and Meaning in History (RLE Social Theory) by H.P. Rickman

Author:H.P. Rickman [Rickman, H.P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: pUEhtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Harper and Row Pub.
Published: 1961-01-15T03:51:26+00:00

CHAPTER III

INDIVIDUAL LIFE AND ITS MEANING

* * *

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

The historian must tell a meaningful story and the meaning with which he imbues his account is already present in human life. How does it arise and how can we know it? Dilthey planned his work as a continuation of the Kantian Critiques, a Critique of Historical Reason, in fact. He therefore formulated a question analogous to those at the beginning of each of Kant’s Critiques and asked; How is meaningful experience possible? Dilthey’s epistemological position hinges on the answer to this question. In this chapter I have therefore, assembled passages which, together, constitute Dilthey’s answer.

Awareness of meaning characterizes human life in general and provides the unifying framework of individual experiences. This meaning is not constituted by reference to something transcendental but by relations within life. We can grasp these by unbiased attention to the concrete reality of our lives. There is, to start with, the temporal structure of our lives. What we experience is not time by the clock, not the succession of tiny unconnected units of time. Every moment carries with it some awareness of the past and an anticipation of the future. What we call the present is always something with a temporal structure of its own and filled with some content of thought, feeling, or desire. Thus lived time has already a distinctive quality. Mental life has also some inherent structures through which different types of mental operations are linked together; sense impressions stir memories, memories awaken feelings, feelings arouse desires, desires may issue in actions. Acquired structures overlay the inherent ones. When we talk about a person’s love of music we are referring to moments of his life, to experiences and actions, which are singled out and linked to each other in some pattern. Thus, every experience contains a complex pattern. Take the example of listening to a piece of music. At any moment there must be awareness of the notes which have gone before and anticipation of those to come. There is enrichment of experience derived from previous hearings of the piece. There is an interlocking of sense experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and, perhaps, desires. All this makes up the meaning of the experience.

We approach this meaning through what Dilthey calls the categories of life. By categories he means, by and large, the same as Kant did. They are the general forms of predications about life which, on the one hand, refer to what constitutes it as what it is and, on the other, provide the means of comprehending it. They are, though, and here Dilthey diverges from Kant, derived from experience itself and cannot, therefore, be wholly formalized, nor exhaustively listed.

At times Dilthey talks of meaning as one of the categories, namely the one through which the pattern of the past is reconstituted in memory. He then places this category of the past beside ‘value’ as the category of the present and ‘purpose’ as the category of the future and assumes that each of these categories, from a different point of view, organizes the whole of experience.

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