Methodological Individualism

72 Psychologism in early social science(c. 1910). Dilthey here makes a distinction between two classes of lifeexpressions:(1) concepts, judgements and thought structures and (2) actions([1927] 1986: 153). He also makes a distinction between elementary and higherforms of understanding of life-expressions. By elementary understanding,Dilthey means understanding of ‘single life-expressions’, for instance an assertionor a facial expression. A third example would be ‘elementary acts of whichcontinuous activities are composed, such as picking up an object, letting thehammer drop, cutting wood with a saw’ (p. 154). 26 The higher form of understandingalso goes in two directions: either it seeks the relation between productand producer, or it is oriented to the relation between expression and what isexpressed, which is not at all reducible to what the producer intended to express.When understanding is oriented to the producer of a life-expression, understandingtakes the form or ‘re-creation’, or ‘re-living’ (Nacherlebnis). This is not,however, a psychological form of understanding. According to the later Dilthey,all understanding rests on the objective mind. ‘It is the medium in which theunderstanding of other persons and their life-expressions takes place’ (p. 155).A sentence is intelligible because a language, the meaning of words and ofinflections, as well as the significance of syntactical arrangements iscommon to a community. The fixed order of behaviour within a culturemakes it possible for greetings or bows to signify, by their nuances, a certainmental attitude to other people and to be understood as doing so. Indifferent countries the crafts developed particular procedures and particularinstruments for special purposes; when, therefore, the craftsman uses ahammer or saw, his purpose is intelligible to us. In this sphere the relationbetween life-expression and mental content is always fixed by a commonorder. This explains why this relation is present in the apprehension of anindividual expression and why – without conscious inference based on therelation between expression and what is expressed – both parts of theprocess are welded into a unity in the understanding.(Dilthey [1927] 1986: p. 156)Dilthey’s commitment to the idea of an objective mind is clearly a move awayfrom psychologism, at least in epistemology and methodology, but is it also abreak with ontological and methodological individualism? H.P. Rickman, one ofthe authorities on Dilthey, argues that he made no metaphysical claims about theentities of the objective mind (1962: 42; 1979: 116f). They are human creationsand have an existence independent of individuals.I am not at all convinced that this is a correct interpretation of Dilthey, but Iwill not argue that point here. I will call attention, instead, to a decisive differencebetween Dilthey and the methodological individualist Max Weber. Thelatter made a distinction, similar to that of Dilthey between elementary andhigher understanding, but he called them direct and explanatory understanding.Weber, even used exactly the same example of a woodcutter, as did Dilthey,before him. For Weber, however, explanatory understanding, does not include