Re: Husserl

Rolfe Windward (rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu)
Wed, 26 Jun 1996 09:27:30 -0700

It was my impression that what made Dilthey (and Troeltsch or Meinecke?)
interesting from a CHAT perspective was his approach and development of the
historicist (Historismus) tradition. That is, a way of thinking in which
events are always interpreted within the context of a specific historic
situation which can be empirically assessed and analyzed in terms of
individuality, development and relatedness (easch person, event, nation or
era is seen as a unique individual that develops over time through its own
internal means and through interaction with other developing individuals).
The "genetic understanding" and the feeling of individual worth for each
instance would stand in contrast to a history that looks for means to an end
(e.g., a case in point for didacticism) or as an instance of law.

I was always fond of that since it emphasises the individual as flux and
change rather like von Bertanaffly's approach to General Systems Theory (&
likely because I'm a closet Romantic also). Expanded from a methodology to a
world view (Weltanschauung) it creates problems of relativism I suppose but
not for the historiagrapher (as Calvin Rand expresses it, contextualism is
an elemental historicist precept -- relativism is a consequence _of_
historicism _for_ other disciplines such as moral philosophy, religion or
science).

Is that an incorrect interpretation?

Rolfe

Rolfe Windward [UCLA GSE&IS: Curriculum & Teaching]
e-mail: rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (Text/BinHex/MIME/Uuencode)
70014.646 who-is-at compuserve.com (text/binary/GIF/JPG)