The Relationship of the Human Sciences Essays

The Relationship of the Human Sciences Essays The Relationship of the Human Sciences Essay The Relationship of the Human Sciences Essay The Relationship of the Human Sciences to the Natural Sciences To a great extent, however, the human sciences do encompass natural facts and are based on knowledge of nature. If one were to imagine purely spiritual beings in a realm of persons which consisted only of such beings, then their coming-to-be, preservation, and development, as well as their extinction whatever representations we may form of the background from which these beings appear and into which they disappear would be dependent on purely spiritual conditions. Their well-being would be based on their relation to a world of spirit, their contact with each other and their interactions would be effected through purely mental means, and the lasting effects of their actions would be of a purely spiritual sort. Even their disappearance from the realm of persons would be grounded in the spiritual sphere. The system of such individuals would be known by pure sciences of spirit. In reality, however, an individual comes into being, survives, and develops on the basis of the functions of an animal organism and its connections to his natural environment. His feeling of life is, at least partly, based on these natural functions; his impressions are conditioned y his sense organs and the way they are affected by the external world. We find that the abundance and liveliness of his representations, the strength and direction of his acts of will, are in many ways dependent on changing conditions within his nervous system. His volitional impulses induce contractions in the muscle fibers when effect directed outwards is bound to molecular changes in his body; lasting results of his acts of will exist only in the form of changes in the material world. Thus the mental life off man is part of the psychophysical life-unit which is the form in which human existence and human life are manifested. Only by means of abstraction is mental life separable from that psychophysical life-unit. The system of these life-units is the reality which constitutes the subject matter of the socio-historical sciences. Whatever the metaphysical facts may be, man as a life-unit may be regarded from the two points of view that we have developed: seen from within he is a system of mental facts, but to the senses he is a physical whole. Inner and outer perception never occur in one and the same act, and consequently the reality of mental life is never even simultaneously with that of our body. On account of this, there are necessarily two different and irreducible standpoints for a scientific approach aimed at grasping the connection of the mental and the physical as expressed in the psychophysical life-unit. If I start with inner experience, then I find the whole external world to be given in my consciousness and all the laws of nature to be subject to the conditions of my consciousness and, therefore, dependent on them. This is the standpoint which German philosophy at the turn of the eighteenth century designated as transcendental philosophy. On the other hand, I can start from the world of physical nature, as I see it before me, and perceive psychic facts ordered within space and time; I then see changes within spiritual life subject to external interference-natural or experimental-consisting of physical changes impinging on the standpoint into a comprehensive picture of the dependence of the human spirit on the body. This results in a scientific approach which proceeds from Outer to inner, from physical changes to mental ones. Thus the antagonism between the philosopher and the natural scientist is conditioned by their antithetical starting mints. Let us now take as our point of departure the perspective of the natural sciences. Insofar as this perspective remains conscious of its limits, its results are incontestable. These results receive a closer determination of their cognitive value only from the standpoint of inner experience. Natural science analyzes the causal nexus of nature. Where this analysis has reached the point at which a material fact or change is regularly connected with a psychic fact or change, without a further intermediary being detectable between them, only this regularity itself can be established; no connection of cause and effect can be applied to this relation. We find uniformities in the one sphere of life regularly connected with uniformities of the other, and the mathematical concept of function is the appropriate expression for such a relationship. To conceive the course of mental changes running parallel to physical changes as comparable to the working of two synchronized clocks fits as well with experience as does a conception assuming only one clockwork, which, when taken informatively as a basis of explanation, considers both spheres of experience as but different manifestations of one ground. Dependence of the mental on the natural world is a relation according to which the overall natural context causally conditions those material facts and changes which are regularly, and apparently directly, connected with mental facts and changes. Thus the natural sciences regard the chain of causality as reaching into the domain of psychophysical life. But here we find a mode of change in which the relationship of the material and the Psychical is not governed by this sort of causal approach, and this change then in turn generates a change in the material world. In this context the physiologists experiments disclose he importance of the structure of the nervous system. By analyzing how the bewildering phenomena of life depend on each other, we can trace the sequence of natural changes which reach man, enter his nervous system through the senses, and give rise to sensations, representations, feelings, and desires which, in turn, affect the course of nature. The psychophysical life-unit which is filled with the immediate feeling of its undivided existence is analyzed into a system of empirically observable relations between facts of consciousness and observable relations of structure and the functions of the nervous system. For every psychic act shows itself to be connected with a change in our body only by means of the nervous system; and a change in our body, in turn, is accompanied by a change in our psychic state only through its effect on the nervous system. This analysis of psychophysical life-units provides a clearer notion of their dependence on the overall context of nature within which they appear and act and from which they withdraw again. It also clarifies how the study of socio-historical reality depends on our knowledge of nature. From this, we can establish the extent to which the theories of Comet and Herbert Spencer are justified in locating these sciences in their hierarchy of all the sciences. While the present work will attempt to ground the relative independence of the human sciences, it must also consider the other perspective, which places them within the which can show how the human sciences are conditioned by our knowledge of nature and constitute the final and highest member in a progression which begins with mathematics. Mental facts comprise the uppermost limit of natural facts, and the latter the underlying Conditions of human life. Because the realm of persons, including human Society and history, is the highest phenomenon of the empirical world, knowledge of it must at countless points be based on the system of presuppositions which accounts for its development within the w hole of nature. Man, because of his position in the causal system of nature, Is conditioned by it in a twofold respect. The psychophysical life-unit, as we saw, receives through its nervous system continuous stimuli from the general course of nature which it in turn affects. Where the psychophysical unit affects nature this is characteristically in the form of action guided by purposes. On the one hand, nature and its constitution can govern this psychophysical unit in the shaping of purposes themselves; on the other hand, nature qua system of means for attaining these ends codetermines the psychophysical unit. Thus even in those cases where we exert our will, where we act on nature, we are dependent on the system of nature precisely because we are not blind forces but rather volitional creatures that reflectively establish their purposes. Accordingly, psychophysical units find themselves dependent on natural processes in a twofold manner: beginning with the earths position in the cosmic whole, nature as causal system conditions socio-historical reality. For the empirical researcher, the great problem of the relation between nature and freedom within socio-historical reality is subdivided into countless particular questions involving the relation between facts of the human world and influences of nature. On the other hand, the purposes of the human world have their repercussions on nature or on the earth, which man in this sense regards as his dwelling and in which he is busily making himself at home. These retroactive influences on nature are also dependent on using the laws of nature. All purposes lie exclusively within the sphere of human spirit, for this is what is truly real for man; but a purpose seeks its means of realization in the system of nature. The change which the creative power of spirit produces in the external world is often nearly inconspicuous. Yet only through it does the value thus created exist for other people as well. The few pages which came into the hands of Copernicus as the material remnants of the profound mental efforts by which the ancients first conceived the idea that the earth moves became the starting point for a revolution in our conception of the world. Now it can be seen how relative the delimitation of these two groups of sciences is. Disputes such as those about the status of universal linguistics are unproductive. At both points of transition between the study of nature and that of the human world I. . , where nature influences the development of the mind and where it is either influenced by or forms the passageway for influencing other minds-both sorts of knowledge always intermingle. Knowledge of the natural sciences overlaps with that of the human sciences. Because of this twofold formative influence of nature on human life, we can combine knowledge of how nature shapes human beings with insight in to how it provides us with material for action. Thus an important part of grammar and of music theory is derived from our knowledge of the natural laws of sound formation. Even a genius of accomplishments is conditioned by an understanding of this dependence. Here it can be further seen that, to a great extent, knowledge of the conditions supplied by nature and explored by natural science provides the basis for the study of the facts of the human world. The development of the individual, the manner in which the unman race has been dispersed throughout the earth, and finally mans historical destiny-all these are conditioned by the cosmic whole. Wars, for example, are a chief component of all history. They are the result of political decisions by states, but they are fought with weapons. The theory of war depends primarily on knowledge of the physical conditions which provide the basis and means for a conflict of wills, for the purpose of war is to impose our will on the enemy by means of physical force. This involves coercing the enemy to the point of defensiveness, until his position is ore disadvantageous than the sacrifice demanded of him and can only be exchanged for an even more disadvantageous one. In making such calculations the physical conditions and means are most important; therefore the scientific study of war has very little to say about the psychological factors involved. The sciences of man, society, and history take the sciences of nature as their basis in two ways: first, insofar as psychophysical units themselves can be studied only with the help of biology; second, insofar as nature is the medium of their purposive activity, which is aimed mainly at the domination of nature. In the first respect, the life sciences provide the basis; in the second, it is chiefly those of inorganic nature. The relation to be clarified consists first of all in the fact that these natural conditions determine the development and distribution of human life on the face of the earth, and secondly in the fact that the purposive activity of man is bound by the laws of nature and is thus conditioned by his knowledge and use of them. Thus the first relation shows only the dependence of man on nature, while the second includes this dependence only as the reverse side of the history of his increasing domination of the earth. Ritter has applied a comparative method to that part of the first relation that involves mans connections to the nature that surrounds him. He presented us with brilliant prospects. In particular, his comparative appraisal of the continents in terms of their contours yielded a sense of how world history might be predestined in accordance with the overall spatial articulation of the earth. But this approach, which Ritter regarded as teleology of universal history, and which Buckle placed in the service of naturalism, has not been confirmed by subsequent research. In place of the inception of a uniform dependence of man on nature, a more cautious conception has developed, namely, that the struggle of human, moral powers with the conditions of mechanistic spatiality has steadily reduced the dependence of those peoples that have a history, in contrast to those that do not. Thus here, too, a science of socio- historical reality has asserted itself-one which uses natural conditions to explain, but nevertheless is independent. The second relation shows that the dependence involved in adapting to conditions is connected with the overcoming of spatiality wrought science and technique in such a way that man in history attains mastery precisely by means of submission. The problem of the relation of the human sciences to our knowledge of nature can be solved only when we have resolved the opposition with which we began, namely, that between the transcendental standpoint for which standpoint which regards the development of the human spirit as subject to the conditions of nature. This task constitutes one aspect of the problem of knowledge. If this problem can be isolated for the human sciences, then a solution acceptable to all s by no means impossible. The conditions for such a solution would be a demonstration of the objective reality of inner experience and a proof of the existence of an external world from which we can then conclude that this external world contains human facts and spiritual meaning by means of a process of transferring our inner life into this world. Just as the eye which has been blinded by looking directly into the sun reproduces the suns image in the most diverse colors and in the most diverse places, so our perception multiplies the image of our inner fife and transfers it in manifold modifications to various points in surrounding nature. This process can be represented and Justified as an analogical inference from our own inner life that is originally given immediately to us alone. By means of representations of the objectifications linked with our own inner life, similar appearances in the external world are associated with a corresponding similar underlying source. Whatever nature may be in itself, it is sufficient for the study of the causality of the human spirit that natural phenomena can always be interpreted ND used as signs of reality, that uniformities of coexistence and succession can be- interpreted and used as a sign of such uniformities in reality. But-once we enter the world of human spirit and investigate nature insofar as it provides the content of spirit, insofar as it is woven into the will purposively or instrumentally, then nature is for us Just what it is in us. What nature may be in itself is here entirely irrelevant. It is enough that nature be given in such a way that we can count on its lawfulness for our actions and appreciate the beautiful appearance of its existence.