Why We Should Bring About a Crisis in Psychology

Abstract

ion of individual mental life. As individuals, we belong to the total realm of the minded and, in reflection, come to realize that our personal existence is truly unique only in relation to the social and cultural context wherein we are participants with others. We are from the standpoint of life, even in the farthest reaches of our individuality, social-cultural beings whose significances are thoroughly conditioned by those historical coherences that cannot, however, subsume us entirely. Conversely, these social and cultural coherences exist only in virtue of being lived through by individuals, even as they cannot be resolved into the experiences of individuals. There is for Dilthey a reciprocity and, therefore, a continuity, between the individual and the social-cultural orders, even as there always remains for him an essential tension between individual life and those wider and more enduring coherences of meaning, values, and purposes that characterize humanity. Individual life is never closed on itself; it cannot became an object investigated in a vacuum. Individual life can be understood only as open to, and continuous with, those wider historical coherences of culture and society that characterize the human historical world. In founding the human sciences in life, the individual mind is never subjective but is a complex set of vital relations wherein we as individuals are constituted as part of the historically-minded world. On this view, knowledge in the human sciences is not opposed to life, it is not the fixing of individual conduct, or belief, rather knowledge is the discursive articulation of our understanding of individual expressions and communal objectifications, a term Dilthey borrowed from Hegel, of lived experience that