© Richard E. Lee 1997.
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[Presentation for "Which Sciences for Tomorrow? A Dialogue on the Gulbenkian Commission Report: OPEN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES", Stanford University, 2-3 June 1996.]
Open the Social Sciences, the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, posed the question of C.P. Snow's "two cultures" as a division of knowledge going back at least to the seventeenth century. The study of natural things was privileged over what came to be characterized as the arts or humanities in these two domains grounded in the Cartesian dualism of "nature and humans", of "matter and mind", of "the physical world and the social/spiritual world" (Gulbenkian Commission 1996: 2). The primacy of the natural sciences based on the Cartesian/Newtonian model was well established by the beginning of the nineteenth century and the intellectual hierarchy sealed with John Stuart Mill's arguments for the application of the principles of the "exact sciences" to "the backward state of the moral sciences" and Auguste Comte's move to establish positivism as the methodological ground of historical and social inquiry.
It was in the Germanies, rather than in England or France, where the great movement of reform and rejuvenation of the university, both as a teaching and a research structure, was taking place during the nineteenth century. As the German historical school developed the criteria of objectivity and critical use of archival documents into a "science of history", Geschichtswissenschaft, the universality of Ranke's vision grounded in the timeless "'holy hieroglyphe'--God with his plan and his will" (Breisach 1983: 233), balanced the picture of uniqueness and ceaseless change historians painted. However, with the rise of the Prussian state and its expansionist agenda, theological underpinnings gave way to the construction of a Volksgeist as a foundation for an in-clusive German nationalism underwriting unification. The decline of the transcendent element left historicism, as science, open to positivist challenge and charges of relativism. In the first instance, it could preserve its objectivity only at the loss of its ethical orientation; in the second, it would cease to qualify as a producer of systematic knowledge. Consequently, in an especially sustained way in Germany, but not only in Germany, efforts were made to rethink theory and method in social research.
The Methodenstreit, or controversy over the purpose, properties, method and domain of sociocultural knowledge (Oakes 1975: 19-20), which ensued as a reaction to positivism had as a central theme the construction of a philosophical defense of a connection between meaning and values, Wert, and systematic knowledge of reality, Wissen. Wilhelm Dilthey considered the methods of German philosophy of history fundamentally flawed; the original immersion in the "factuality of the historical" and reliance on "original intuition" deteriorated into
Hegel's "Spirit," which comes to consciousness of its freedom in history, or Schleiermacher's "Reason," which permeates and shapes nature ... an abstract substance which condenses the historical world process in a colorless abstraction, a subject outside space and time (Dilthey 1988: 139).
Sociology, on the other hand, whether in the form practiced by Comte or Mill, announced the end of the "epoch of metaphysics" by "subordinating the historical world to the system of knowledge of nature". What was really created according to Dilthey, is "a naturalistic metaphysics of history, which as such was much less suited to facts of the historical process than Hegel's or Schleiermacher's was" (1988: 139).
In 1883, Dilthey began to make his case for an interpretative or hermeneutic approach to historically oriented human studies, the Geisteswissenschaften, roughly all of the humanities and the social sciences including history taken as a group, as distinguished from the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences:
we must meet the challenge to establish human sciences through epistemology, to justify and support their independent formation, and to do away definitively with subordinating their principles and their methods to those of natural sciences (1988: 142).
Dilthey considered it philosophy's task to demonstrate that the Geisteswissenschaften were "no less fundamental, comprehensive, and objective" than the Naturwissenschaften (Makkreel 1992: 38).
The original experiential foundation in descriptive psychology Dilthey proposed, denied Ranke's claim that objectivity entailed the effacement of the self. He purposefully rejected the impersonal and abstract Kulturwissenschaften, with its occlusion of conflict and the unstated postulate of progress, in an on-going debate with the Baden neo-Kantians, Wilhelm Windelband and his student Heinrich Rickert.
Windelband, too, refused the positivists claim for a single logical unity among the sciences. His strategy was methodological and taxonomical. He classified all the empirical sciences by their autonomous logical form rather than substantive content as either nomothetic (sciences of law, Gesetzeswissenschaften) or idiographic (sciences of event, Ereigniswissenschaften). In order to preserve both certitude and human freedom, he relegated psychology to the natural sciences, thus rejecting "the contingencies of the historical and psychological subject in favor of the timelessly valid, transcendental subject of logic" (Bambach 1995: 63). Nonetheless, Windelband wrote at the end of his life: "The law and the event remain as the ultimate, incommensurable entities of our world view" (1980: 185).
Rickert extended Windelband's project with the explicit purpose of restoring meaning to history as science. He argued, however, that the difference between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften was not one of classification, but one of concept formation--that is, the universal concept of similarity operational in the natural sciences and the particular concept of difference implicated in history. "Value" served as a formal, transcendental, a priori principle, "valid (geltend) rather than real (seiend)": as Charles Bambach writes, "an absolute reference point by which all objects in the world of being can be judged. ... Rickert rejected the relevance of temporality and historicity and insisted that values are transhistorical and transcultural, as well as absolute and unchanging in their validity" (1995: 106). Ethical imperatives guide both natural scientists and historians according to Rickert. He states that we
must see all the theories that believe they can reject the idea of freedom as being theoretically invalid. The crucial reason for this is that science itself needs freedom even when investigating causal connections. Only a theoretical (transcendental) subject who is not dependent on causality can take a position on the value of truth. Only when we grant the possibility of such a subject can we recognize something as being true and meaningful (Rickert in Bambach 1995: 117).
Dilthey repudiated this argument, and the Kantian mathematical concept of time without concrete duration (as Troeltsch called it), and factuality without historicity, all in favor of a science of history whose ground was the reality of temporal history itself to which all human beings belonged.
Dilthey aspired to overcome the extremes of both idealism (he was empirical) and positivism (he posited no general laws: since human choice can make changes, life is not totally determined by nature). For Dilthey, the original connectedness of life is directly available through lived experience (Erlebnis) and historical reason is replaced with reflective understanding (Verstehen) which articulates potential human significance provided by Erlebnis into "definite and exclusive possibilities" to "find meaning in history without positing a final goal" (Makkreel 1992: 257, 243). "A dynamic system (Wirkungszusammenhang)", the subject matter of human studies, Dilthey writes, "differs from the causal system (Kausalzusammenhang) of nature in that it produces values and realizes ends according to the structure of psychic life. ... Historical life is creative. It is constantly active in the productions of goods and values" (quoted in Makkreel 1992: 315). Any appeal to an idealized concept of value, such as in Rickert, denied the historicity of values and the value of historicity itself, including the historicity of knowledge or truth.
In order to maintain the scientific status of human studies and respond to charges of relativism while maintaining the roots of inquiry in actual historical existence, Dilthey advanced a hermeneutic approach based on the study of "typical" individuals as a consideration of the possibilities and limits of an individual's existence within a specific historical-cultural context. Dilthey had tried to fuse subject and object by arguing that both consciousness and the world shared the same temporality and historicity. But in the end, his effort to secure rigorous certitude without sacrificing human finitude was undermined by the project itself. Occupying as he did an intellectual space between the historicists and the neo-Kantians, he partook of the same fundamental commitment to the Cartesian Fragestellung in which truth was grounded in the "scientific objectivity" of the "self-knowing subject" (Bambach 1995: 181-2).
In the same year of the appearance of Dilthey's Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883, the Methodenstreit erupted in economics. The "historical school" challenged the universality of deductive theory in the classical approach in favor of inductive history. As Ernst Breisach explains, this was
really a far-reaching dispute over the structure of reality. ... [As] Menger's followers opened the doors of economics even wider to psychology and mathematics ... economists preferred to theorize on the timeless and typical processes of the market and thereby moved ever closer to the ideals of the ahistorical natural sciences (1983: 299).
The historical approach of Schmoller emphasized the concrete, price history, actual past behavior, and description, while Menger's neoclassical, "pure", theory stressed the abstract, price theory, typical economic behavior, and universal theoretical models.
The marginalist revolution soon overcame the historicists position and established economics as a value-free discipline displacing political economy and Dilthey's project of finding a via media between the chaotic events of human affairs and the deterministic laws of the natural world without positing a new disciplinary sphere was finally put to rest by Max Weber. Weber argued against both the positivists and their opponents. On the one hand, he held fast to the axiological dimension and identified interpretation or understanding as the goal of human studies. At the same time, he emphasized the verifiability of knowledge in the sense of "sufficient ground": "A historical 'interpretative' inquiry into motives is causal explanation in absolutely the same logical sense as the causal interpretation of any concrete natural process" (1975: 194), he wrote. Operationally, however, he lifted his "ideal type" out of time and context and "historians [were] separated completely from the world of values they investigated. They [became] totally detached observers who objectively created islands of explained actions in a landscape of total obscurity" (Breisach 1983: 284).
Positivism was to have its revenge in the form of behaviorism. The Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists "rejected the view ... that there is a radical distinction between the natural and the social sciences" (Ayer 1959: 21). According to Otto Neurath:
[S]ociology is not a "moral science" or "the study of man's spiritual life" (Sombart's "Geisteswissenschaft") standing in fundamental opposition to some other sciences, called "natural sciences", no, as social behaviorism, sociology is a part of unified science. ... The fruitfulness of social behaviorism is demonstrated by the establishment of new correlations and by the successful predictions made on the basis of them (Neurath 1931-32: 296, 317).
Behaviorism was fundamentally linked to replicable, empirical studies--an experimental method based on the observation of independent cases--and thus could claim objectivity. Judged against Neurath's standard, its record is dubious at best, but by the 1950's when its moment had waned somewhat in psychology, behaviorism became widely influential in American quantitative social analysis and political science in particular.
The importance of Dilthey's project was that it had been based on ontological rather than epistemological concerns; he had made a bid to reclaim phenomenological time for both the natural and the human sciences. His failure was contingent on the Cartesian principles (the subjective reality of history versus the objective ideal of science) from which he was unable to dissociate himself and the social sciences increasingly inclined towards the "view from nowhere"--value-neutrality and a neutral or absolute conception of time. The tension persisted, however, within this scientistic "third culture", caught as it has been between the mutually exclusive principles of Wert, operative in the humanities, and Wissen, defining the purview of the sciences.
Richard Hoggart, one of the founding fathers of Cultural Studies in the mid-1950's, used a wonderful phrase in his Uses of Literacy to describe the "time" of empty progress: "like the clicking-over of lantern-slides with no informing pattern" (1957: 159). In fact, in an unsystematic way, the trajectory of Cultural Studies over the past forty years has been much a replay of the foregoing debates. As Fred Inglis (1993) says, from the beginning Cultural Studies has been concerned with the study of values, from the inside. The geopolitical crises which spawned the first New Left in Britain, convinced the early protagonists of cultural studies such as Edward Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Hoggart of the necessity of basing social analysis on the lived experience and individual agency of real historical human beings. This was associated with an inversion of the high/low cultural divide which redefined working-class culture as intrinsically valuable and worthy of study. Hoggart opposed the impressionistic social commentary of the novel just as he contested what he called the additive models of quantitative social science. These latter fractured the whole- way-of-life concept of culture he shared with Williams and sapped it of meaning. Both quantitative methods and the orthodox Marxist base/superstructure model robbed Thompson's whole-way-of- struggle of history and the lived experience of real human agents.
From the beginning, Cultural Studies employed a variety of methods over a range of subject matters which spanned all of the humanistic and social scientific disciplines. By the end of the 1960's, as the trajectory of Cultural Studies moved out from the original consideration for working-class culture, the concerns for values, agency, and historical time came into conflict with the anti-humanist and a-temporal tendencies of structuralism. However, the anti-essentialism, the anti-foundationalism, and the demise of the subject as theorized by poststructuralism, have nullified the Cartesian dualities on which Dilthey's project collapsed.
During the same period from the late 1960's, complexity studies, emphasizing irreversibility and self-organization in a determined but unpredictable world, have effectively abdicated a role of guarantor of truth in knowledge and reintroduced the arrow-of-time into the natural sciences. The world of nature, like the human world, has now been shown to bring order out of chaos--it is creative. The recognition that its "universals" are historical suggests to a growing number of scientists that the human world would be better taken as a model for the natural world than vice versa. The future then becomes an open future, rather than a law-bound Newtonian one, determined only by creative choices and contingent circumstances at unstable moments of transition.
These discussions are especially relevant today in the context, for instance, of the perceived "crisis of the university" (itself a manifestation of the transformative, systemic crisis of the modern world-system). This can be summed up as the interlocking pressures of a triple conjuncture since 1968: one is economic or material, that of declining resources meeting expanding demand (world-scale crisis of accumulation); a second is political or ideological, that of rising expectations based on the rhetoric of success through education encountering the reality of limitations on both rewards and access (world- scale crisis of liberalism); and the third is intellectual or theoretical, that of an objective, value-neutral ideal at the heart of the institutional apparatus of the university challenged by epistemologies of skepticism and complexity (world-scale crisis of the structures of knowledge).
These destabilizing structural pressures are forcing change, but unlike the situation a century ago, those of us searching for a way out of the contemporary intellectual, political, and institutional quandaries have been liberated from Cartesian/ Newtonian constraints. The structural sequestration of the spheres of knowledge no longer appears as an unquestioned given. The study of government need not, must not, be isolated from the study of language, or analyses of market operation automatically separated from considerations of culture in departments like Political Science, English, Economics, Sociology or Art History. This has the effect of freeing knowledge production from the aporia of uncovering infinite disconnected particulars in search of impossible universals. Defensible, intersubjective interpretations of relationships among constituent parts of concrete wholes on the other hand suggest a realistic answer to the ethical imperative of scholarly participation in the creation of a social world and its constituting and constitutive intellectual structures where Wert and Wissen are necessarily fused.
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Bambach, Charles R. 1995. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Breisach, Ernst. 1983. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working- class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.
Inglis, Fred. 1993. Cultural Studies. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Makkreel, Rudolf A. 1992. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Windelband, Wilhelm. 1980. "History and Natural Science." trans. Guy Oakes. History and Theory, XIX, 2: 165-85.
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