Wissenschaft as Personal Experience

Abstract

I have been invited to speak to you about as experience. (1) This is a subject I would scarcely have chosen myself, and I even hesitated to accept an invitation that involved speaking about my own experience. For the end result of intellectual endeavor is actually all that should be made public, not the inner process leading to it; what can be of more than private interest about the latter? I think that what is expected of me in surveying my past is to glean from my own experiences something like paradigmatic features that lie beyond the sphere and thus reveal something about contemporary thought in general. Approached for this purpose in the evening of a long life devoted to the study of philosophy, I shouldn't disappoint this expectation--taking into account the danger that what Nietzsche called cursed ipsissimosity might play its tricks upon one. I therefore accepted this disquieting task. My hesitation is heightened by the fact that Max Weber, who in 1919 gave a celebrated address entitled als Beruf (Scholarship as a Vocation), is looking over my shoulder, so to speak. The echo of his title was probably intentional on the part of my hosts, but I hope it does not leave me open to comparison with Weber's incomparable example. In contrast to the more objective nature of the word vocation in Weber's address, the reference to personal experience in my title forces me to enter the subjective, autobiographical sphere with all its unique and accidental qualities. I shall attempt here to use memories as guideposts leading to reflections of a more general nature. Unlike the narrower Anglo-American sense of the word science, the German Wissenschaft in my title also embraces the humanities and the social sciences; and it must primarily be these, including philosophy, that my assignment encompasses. The wissenschaftlich character of these disciplines is different from that of the exact sciences dealing with nature; nowhere else has so much thought been given to this difference as in Germany. In Heidelberg an audience scarcely needs to be reminded that at the turn of the century Heinrich Rickert made a distinction between a field of inquiry whose goal is explanation and one whose goal is understanding. In addition, I must mention Wilhelm Dilthey, whose lifework focused on the concept of experience. And then there is the philosophical theory of hermeneutics, which was not developed until my time and whose Nestor, Hans-Georg Gadamer, is still among us. These are the names of philosophers, and they point to the quite different character of philosophy as a discipline. Going beyond the specialized individual sciences, philosophy reflects--as the preceding examples indicate--upon their differing approaches to knowledge and their conception of truth, and in the process philosophy becomes itself a highly developed specialty. This self-mirroring of knowledge on a new level of truth can in principle be repeated at will in the form of ever new reflections on reflections. As concerns understanding, the cognitive approach of the humanities, it is clear that personal experience, understood as empathy with the object--itself the concrete embodiment of experience--is an indissoluble part of the intellectual process from start to finish, pervading the entire interpretation. How else can one study history, for example--the history of art, literature, religion, politics, of all the past thoughts, feelings, and actions of humankind? We must use our imagination; what has been experienced must be re-experienced. For here one subject encounters another subject, which no matter how alien and far removed in historical time, still remains human and thus approachable by us, albeit open to endless interpretations. But why should this encounter take place, why should the past be re-experienced? Goethe answered this question with the following words: Those unable to give themselves an account of the past three thousand years Must remain in the dark, naive, And live from day to day. …