DILTHEY'S POETICS

By BONNO TAPPER

University of Iowa

When in 1905 Dilthey's volume Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung appeared, Professor Harry Mayne called it a "Grundbuch fuer entwicklungsgeschichtliche Arbeit in der Literaturwissenschaft.""

The publication of Dilthey's collected works in eight volumes by Teubner has made conveniently accessible also his other writings on literary subjects, which were scattered in different philosophical and psychological journals and Festschriften. Dilthey's position in literary criticism can now be examined with a fuller view than the above mentioned volume of essays affords.2

It is not intended here to analyze the entwicklungsgeschichtliche character of Dilthey's own investigations. The ideas of continuity in history, of the individual and his generation, of a generation as consisting of a group of individuals undergoing the same influences, of the nature of these influences being on the one hand the accumulated intellectual Kultur and on the other the immediate surroundings these ideas are familiar to everyone, and in discussing this side of Dilthey's work a great deal which is now common knowledge would have to pass in review once more.

Dilthey's investigations in the fields of history and literature are interspersed with Abhandlungen in which he wished to account for the method followed in literary and historical work. These theoretical considerations by one who has generally been acclaimed as one of Germany's finest interpreters of literature deserve more than praise.

In Winckelmann, Hamann, and Herder a new critique of literature took its beginning. It shifted the ultimate criterion in literary matters from reason to feeling.

This new method of Einfuehlung rested upon two ideas which it had in common with the historical school: Man and the social combinations and the forms of civilisation which he has created,

1 Cf. Neue Jahrbuecher fuer das klassische Altertum, Geschichte, und deutsche Literatur und fuer Paedagogik, XIX, 356 ff.

2 The collected works will be referred to as Ges Schr.

have both had a history. His and their growth can be compared to the growth of an organism in nature. Applying these ideas to literature one looked upon a poem, a novel, a drama as an organism. It had not suddenly come into existence, but had developed. It was not mosaic-like, having been put together of independent individual parts; but it formed an organic unity. The greatest philosopher of the century helped, also practically, to give these ideas currency. In his Jugendgeschichte Hegels Dilthey points to the new tendency in exegesis, as seen in the philosopher's theological writings, in which Hegel tries to comprehend the Bible "als ein organisches, aus einer einheitlichen Substanz erwachsenes Ganzes.''

With these ideas Dilthey was thoroughly conversant when he began his career as a scholar in the middle of the last century. He had been trained in the historical school. He had listened to Jakob Grimm, Boeckh, Ranke and Ritter. His words, "Was der Mensch sei, sagt nur die Geschichte," may be taken as a statement of a fundamental principle in the household of his own thought.*

In Dilthey's system of the Geisteswissenschaften poetics occupies an important place. The foundation of all the Geisteswissenschaften is found in psychology. Poetics has the special advantage, that literary products-its material-because of their completeness and transparency are especially adapted to show the psychic processes which produced them. Now it is in art and, therefore, also in literature that according to Dilthey the individuation of the human historical world is represented." In consequence Dilthey hopes that poetics may be able to illumine the workings of the psychic processes in historical documents; it may thus have a particular importance for the systematic study of history."

Poetics is a part of aesthetics. The aesthetics of Dilthey's own day was based upon the analysis of the aesthetic impression. Following the development which started with Winckelmann, Dilthey wanted to complement, in the field of poetics, the analysis of the aesthetic impression by an analysis of the creative process in the poet. Already in 1877 he called this analysis the starting point

3 Ges. Schr., IV, 61, 62.

4 Ges. Schr., IV, 529.

5 Ges. Schr., V, 11; VI, 108, 109.

6 Ges. Schr., V, 273, 275.

7 Ges. Schr., VI, 109; VI, 125, 190.

8 Ges. Schr., VI, 271.

of poetics. It forms the central interest of the scientific study of literature.10

From this definition of poetics two questions emerge:

(1) What does Dilthey mean by individuation?

(2) Does his psychology contribute to a better understanding of literature ?11

The phrase individuation of the historical world must mean the representation of what is individual in the historical world. Anyone who has followed the discussions in Germany on the methodology of history which were stimulated by Windelband's Rektoratsrede will immediately recall the significance which the term individual has assumed in Professor Rickert's book on the Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung.

When Dilthey writes that in the natural sciences the goal of our knowledge is the uniform, but that in history our concern is with the particular,12 he gives an impression as if he opposed the sciences of nature to the sciences of history. This impression seems to be confirmed when he lays it down: "Waehrend wir in der Natur nur das Gesetzliche suchen, wird hier das Singulare zum Gegenstande der Wissenschaften. ''13

Dilthey uses the term individual or its equivalent the particular (das Singulare) first in the sense of the representative of a class, exactly as the natural sciences use it. The interest of history is not in the individual in itself (das Singulare fuer sich), but in its relationship to a general. As for instance the spirit of a whole epoch

9 Ges. Schr., VI, 108 footnote.

10 Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 1907, p. 159 (abbr. Erlebnis).

11 Dilthey's early interest in the psychology of poetic imagination became crystallized in an article on Goethe und die dichterische Phantasie, first published in 1877 in the Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie and later embodied in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. Ten years later the same subject received fuller treatment in a special study Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters. Bausteine fuer eine Poetik. Ideas expressed in an address of the preceding year on Dichterische Einbildungskraft und Wahnsinn were also taken up into this study. The fundamental concept of Dilthey's new descriptive psychology which these writings show in its first stages, was fully elaborated in the Ideen ueber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894) and in Beitraege zum Studium der Individualitaet (1895). Other writings, which especially bear upon the present discussion are: Die drei Epochen der modernen Aesthetik (1892), Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik (1900) and the revisions of the Bausteine. A very complete exposition of Dilthey's philosophy will be found in Professor Misch's Vorbericht of the fifth volume. See also the present writer's article on Dilthey's "Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften,'' The Philosophical Review, July, 1925, pp. 333 ff.

12 Ges. Schr., V, 236.

18 Ges. Schr., V, 271.

may be represented in an individual. The general here is the historical whole. Also Rickert speaks of the geschichtliche Zusammenhang as a general in history; but he sharply distinguishes it from the general of natural science. It is general only in-so-far as another individual, less comprehensive, is included in it.

Another usage of the word individual occurs in the Ideen. Individual persons do not differ from each other in their qualitative determinations. The difference between them consists in different quantitative relations.15

A third meaning of individual is found in Dilthey's concept of a literary product. He defines every great work of a poet as "eine Welt fuer sich." Its individuation proceeds from the inner centre of the work.16 Individual is used here in the sense of a whole, an unity. Moreover, this whole has grown from an inner germ; it has grown organically. Shakespeare's play King Lear is an individual in this sense. The crude greatness of the time has left its imprint on every sentence and character." In a literary product which deserves the designation individual, the parts (plot, character, poetic form) develop as "in organic growth from the life-experience of the poet.

9918

The first two definitions suffer from the defect that they do not tell us what we really want to know. It is not the uniformity and constancy (Dilthey says: Gleichartigkeit und Gleichfoermigkeit) 19 on the basis of which, according to Dilthey, the individual arises, but this particularity itself, the individuality of the individual, which needs be defined. The third definition of individual, as organic unity, has been applied to man and his affairs by writers in all fields. It is often but slightly illuminating. When we say that Romanticism or any other movement represents an organic unity, it is generally well understood that the word is nothing more than a metaphor. Organic unity means unity belonging to an organism or unity of an organism. The organic unity of Plotinus' tree is applicable to human life only with restrictions. For even used merely as a symbol for a whole developing from an inner formative principle, difficulties immediately arise. The growth of a tree can

14 Ges. Schr., V, 236.

15 Ges. Schr., V, 229, 236, 237.

16 Ges. Schr., V, 281.

17 Ges. Schr., VI, 187.

18 Erlebnis, p. 182. 19 Ges. Schr., V, 271.

be foretold. But who will say whether a poetic love will issue forth in Roman Elegies or in an Iphigenia? Who could have predicted that the author of the Dolores could speak with as intense a passion of the other lady of love, who "if she be not in the spirit of men" and "if in the inward soul she hath no place. In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face?" Dilthey does not share with other historians the beautiful illusion that history derives effects from causes.20 History must rather adopt the reverse method and attempt to reconstruct the cause from the effect. Its procedure is rather similar to that which Hippel proposed to follow in a novel : to write it backward, beginning with the death of the hero and from thence proceeding to his birth.21

Dilthey's survey of individuation in biology makes it clear that he did not confine the concept individual to the Geisteswissenschaften. It was in the field of the natural sciences that the eighteenth century first realized the importance of the problem of individuation. These sciences developed the concepts of species, type, development, milieu, structure and others, whence the Geisteswissenschaften borrowed them.

It would seem reasonable to conclude that individuation is of the same interest to the natural sciences as it is to the Geisteswissenschaften. But Dilthey does not agree with such a viewpoint. He declares that for the natural sciences every animal is interesting only in its relationship to its species, whereas Goethe and Frederick the Great are interesting as a "grosze singulare Tatsache."'22 Goethe and Frederick the Great are here the opposites of "jedes tierische Individuum"; the expression "nach seinem Verhaeltnis zur Art" is the opposite of "eine grosze singulare Tatsache." Dilthey recognizes here then on the part of history an interest in the individual in itself, an interest which does not relate the individual to a whole, of which it is the representative type. This passage contradicts the one quoted above, in which he makes the "lebendige Beziehung zwischen dem Reich des Gleichfoermigen und dem des Individuellen" the special characteristic of all history.2

23

In Rickert the term individual denotes a fundamental difference in method. Dilthey, too, knows two ways of procedure in the in

20 Ges. Schr., V, 38.

21 Ges. Schr., V, 38. 22 Ges. Schr., V, 272. 23 Ges. Schr., V, 236.