Chapter 6 The Historical and the Normative Sciences

The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it is an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely, but to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of other subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our consciousness of norms.

The sciences which deal with our submissions to the individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their starting-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree; as suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, characterizes all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as an object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly understood that politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of phenomena-for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society as a psycho-physical object.

Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced object and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions to the world of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social will-acts which approach us in our immediate experience, and again seek to find what we are really submitting to if we accept the suggestions of our social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has most dissimilar consequences. We submit to an object and want to find out what we are really submitting to. That cannot mean anything else, as we have seen, than to seek the effects of the object and thus to look forward to what we have to expect from the object. On the other hand, if we want to find out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these relations, we come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one individual will always points back in its decisions to another individual will with which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or overcomes by a new attitude of will; and the whole network of these will-relations is the political or religious or artistic or social history of mankind. This system of history as a system of teleologically connected will-attitudes is elaborated from the will-propositions which reach us in immediate experience, with the same necessity with which the mechanical universe of natural science is worked out from the objects of our immediate experience.

The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate experience, but further in its also seeking identities. Without this feature history would not offer to our understanding real connections. We must link the will-attitudes of men by showing the identity of the alternatives. Just as the physical thing is substituted by a large number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in the same way the personality is substituted by an endless manifoldness of decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a most essential difference between the historical and the causal connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of will the identity of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject. If this factor of freedom were left out, man would be made an object and history a mere appendix of natural science. The connection of the historian can therefore never be a necessary one, however much we may observe empirical regularities. If there were no identities, our reason could not find connection in history; but if the historical connections were necessary, like the causal ones, it would not be history. The historian is, therefore, unable and without the ambition to look into the future like the naturalist; his domain is the past.

Yet will-attitudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as teleologically identical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual. That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the freedom of individual decision and related to the over-individual subject. The question is then no longer how this special man wills and decides, but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other connections the dependence upon the category of identity. The logical connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical connection has, in common with the causal connection, necessity; and in common with the historical connection, teleological character. Any individual will-act of historical life may be treated for certain purposes as such a starting-point of over-individual relations; it would then lead to that scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation, for instance, of law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system of history in the widest sense of the word.

The chief interest, however, must belong to the logical connections of those will-acts which themselves have over-individual character. A merely individual proposition can lead to necessary logical connection, but cannot claim that scientific importance which belongs to the logical connection of those propositions which are necessary for the constitution of every real experience: the science of chess cannot stand on the same level with the science of geometry, the science of local legal statutes not on the same level with the system of ethics. The logical connections of the over-individual attitudes thus constitute the fourth large division besides the physical, the mental, and the historical sciences. It must thus comprise the systems of all those propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality, independent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of approval-the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as well as the ?sthetic approval of the given world; the acts of conviction-the religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as well as the metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above all, the acts of affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the mathematical. But to be consistent we must really demand that merely the over-individual logical connections are treated in this division. If we deal, for instance, with the ?sthetical or ethical acts as psychological experiences, or as historical propositions, they belong to the psychical or historical division. Only the philosophical system of ethics or ?sthetics finds its place in this division. It is difficult to find a suitable name for this whole system of logical connections of over-individual attitudes. Perhaps it would be most correct to call it the Sciences of Values, inasmuch as every one of these over-individual decisions constitutes a value in our world which our individual will finds as an absolute datum like the objects of experience. Seen from another point of view, these values appear as norms which bind our practical will inasmuch as these absolute values demand of our will to realize them, and it may thus be permitted to designate this whole group of sciences as a Division of Normative Sciences.

Our logical explanation of the meaning of these four divisions naturally began with the interpretation of that science which usually takes precedence in popular thought-with the science of nature, that is, and passed then to those groups whose methodological situation is seen rather vaguely by our positivistic age. But as soon as we have once defined and worked out the boundary lines of each of these four divisions, it would appear more logical to change their order and to begin with that division whose material is those over-individual will-acts on which all possible knowledge must depend, and then to turn to those individual will-acts which determine the formulation of our present-day knowledge, and then only to go to the objects of knowledge, the over-individual and the individual ones. In short, we must begin with the normative sciences, consider in the second place the historical sciences, in the third place the physical sciences, and in the fourth place the psychical sciences. There cannot be a scientific judgment which must not find its place somewhere in one of these four groups. And yet can we really say that these four great divisions complete the totality of scientific efforts? The plan of our Congress contains three important divisions besides these.