Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 to 1911) was a German philosopher who held that human life has to be understood from the inside, not only explained from the outside the way the natural sciences explain falling stones. Understanding another person, or another age, means re-living their experience through our own, with feeling and imagination as well as thought. Therapeutic Shamanism shares the conviction that the deepest knowing is from the inside out, and carries it further than Dilthey did, beyond humans to the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer.
Who was Wilhelm Dilthey? #
He was born in 1833 in Biebrich, on the Rhine near Wiesbaden, and studied at Heidelberg and Berlin. He held professorships at Basel, Kiel and Breslau, and in 1882 took the chair of philosophy at Berlin, where he stayed for the rest of his working life. He died in 1911 at Seis am Schlern in South Tyrol.1
His major works include Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), the essay “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” (1894) and The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). By the human sciences he meant the whole range of studies of human life, from history, literature and law to economics and psychology.2
What is the difference between explaining and understanding? #
For Dilthey, they are two different kinds of knowing. The natural sciences explain. They stand outside what they study, look for general laws, and treat each case as an instance of a rule. That works for planets and chemical reactions. It fails with people, because a human life is lived from within, full of purposes, feelings and meanings that no outside measurement can reach. In his 1894 essay he put the contrast like this. We explain “through purely intellectual processes”, but understanding calls on “the cooperation of all the powers of the mind”.3
He was scathing about philosophies that tried to know the world with the intellect alone. The knowing mind pictured by Locke, Hume and Kant was, for him, bloodless, with “No real blood flows in the veins” of it, only “the diluted juice of reason”. His own studies of the whole human being led him to treat knowing as the work of “a willing, feeling, and imagining being”.4
How, on his account, do we understand other people’s worlds? #
By starting from lived experience, what he called Erlebnis, meaning experience as it is actually lived, before anyone has turned it into a theory. Every person’s life is made of such experiences, and each one gets its meaning from the life as a whole, the way a word gets its meaning from a sentence. People then express their lived experience outwards, in gestures, words, laws, buildings, poems and rituals. Understanding works backwards from those expressions to the life that made them.5
We can do this because we are living beings too. Understanding, in his phrase, “is a rediscovery of the I in the Thou”. We find in another person’s expressions something we can recognise from our own life, and from there we can begin to re-live, in imagination, a world quite different from ours. “Understanding opens up the world.” He thought this was freeing. A person bound by their own circumstances “can experience many other existences in imagination”, and is made free not only by art but by understanding how other people have lived.6
The movement is circular. We understand the parts of a life through the whole, and the whole through its parts, going round again and again, each time understanding a little more. This circle, the hermeneutic circle, became central to the philosophy of interpretation after him.
How does Dilthey’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely in the idea that the deepest knowing comes from the inside. In shamanic practice, shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer into an Animal, a Plant or a Mountain brings not an intellectual understanding of that being but a deep felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer, a knowing from the inside out, and with it a sense of bond and connection.7 The old word for this kind of knowing is grokkingGrokking. Understanding a being from the inside out (the word is Robert Heinlein’s): deep, embodied, experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Its two shamanic routes are shapeshifting and dieting. Read the full answer, from Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, meaning to get inside something and know it deeply, a form of deep empathy.8 See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples? and What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Empathy is the meeting point. Empathy goes further than sympathy. It is embodied, emotional and visceral, and to feel it we have to open ourselves to experiencing being the ‘other’, to shapeshift into them to a degree. Deep empathy is at the heart of shamanic experience and practice.9 Dilthey’s “rediscovery of the I in the Thou” describes the same movement, reached through the study of history and literature, not through trance.
His complaint about bloodless reason is close to the teaching on the two halves of the brain. Modern, ‘civilised’ humans are strongly left-brain dominant, with the right brain’s experience of interconnectedness largely suppressed, whilst hunter-gatherers seem to have held a sense of self and a sense of interconnectedness side by side.10 Dilthey wanted knowing returned to the whole person, feeling and imagining as well as thinking; Therapeutic Shamanism asks for the same rebalancing. See Who is Iain McGilchrist, and what do the two halves of the brain have to do with animism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism go further? #
In who can be understood from the inside. Dilthey drew his line between nature, which the sciences explain from the outside, and the human world, which can be understood from within. He followed the old principle, going back to Giambattista Vico, that only what the mind has made can it fully understand.11 A person, a poem or a law could be re-lived; a river or a bird was left to explanation.
Therapeutic Shamanism does not draw that line. Everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, though in many different kinds of consciousness.12 Plants, for example, are no less conscious than humans; their consciousness is of a different kind, and understanding that difference is what lets us really understand Plant from the inside out instead of reading our own human way of seeing into it.13 Shapeshifting into Bird, or grokking a Stone, is a knowing from the inside close to the one Dilthey described, carried out to the other-than-human Peoples. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Did anyone object to Dilthey’s approach? #
Yes, in his own time. Neo-Kantian philosophers such as Heinrich Rickert warned that historicism, the view that everything human is shaped by its history, would end in relativism if carried through to its conclusion, since no standard would be left standing outside history to judge by. Dilthey, for his part, held that understanding history does not trap us but frees us, by opening up lives and worlds we could never reach on our own.14
Later, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer took up his questions and moved them on. Gadamer, in particular, held that there is no method or technique that guarantees understanding, and that understanding is something that happens to us as much as something we do.15 See Who was Martin Heidegger, and what did he mean by “being”? and What did Hans-Georg Gadamer teach about understanding and the limits of method?
