Routledge History of Philosophy Volume VII: The Nineteenth Century by C. L. Ten

Author:C. L. Ten
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780415060035
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1994-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Zeitgeist is, once again, an appropriate context for the understanding of such expressions, and vice versa. Thus (to cite an example given by Dilthey), the historian can use the civil law of the ‘age of Frederick’ to ‘understand the spirit of that age; he goes back from the laws to the intentions of the legislature and from there back to the spirit from which they arose’, or in other words ‘the social values, purposes [etc.] present at a certain time and place and which [thus] expressed themselves’ ([8.35], 76). Another example, developed at some length by Dilthey, is Teutonic society in the time of Caesar and Tacitus:

Here, as in every later period, we find economic life, state and law linked to language, myth, religiousness and poetry… Thus heroic poetry arose from the warlike spirit in the Teutonic age of Tacitus, and this poetry invigorated the warlike spirit. From this same warlike spirit inhumanity arose in the religious sphere, as in the sacrifice of prisoners and the hanging up of their corpses in sacred places. The same spirit then affected the position of the god of war in the world of the gods.

([8.35], 150–1) It must be stressed, once again, that for Dilthey the Zeitgeist is an empirical generalization, not a deterministic force—for if it were the latter there would, presumably, be no change—no history. Yet historicity is, as we know, central to Dilthey’s vision of human life. Thus every ‘historical configuration’ is ‘ephemeral’. But historical change is of course neither random nor total. According to Dilthey it arises (in part at least) from the perceived imperfection inevitable in every age, from man’s ‘unfulfilled longing’ (due, for example, to the social inequalities—‘impoverishment of existence’ and ‘servitude’—said by Dilthey to spring from the power relations that are inseparable from human social life). Thus successive ages are linked in the following way:

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