Crossing Horizons

My purpose in rehearsing and adapting some of Dilthey's major ideas has been to trace certain tentative lines forwards to a firmer conceptual base for the use of the category of experience in historical and cultural analysis. It seems to me that it is worthwhile going back to Dilthey precisely because of his attempt to ground such analysis in forms of experience by insisting, among other things, that the analysis itself is always part of human life-activity. Dilthey is important because of the centrality of the category of experience in his work, because of his attempt to render its analytical sense more fertile, and because he held that any guarantee of an absolute point of vantage outside of history, society, culture and the intersubjective forms we live by is an illusion, even though in his own work he did not fully reconcile his own position to this realisation. For him, historical experiences were 'nodal points of meaning' and to be respected by the historian for the vitality that clusters around them, so that even before they are fully understood and analysed, 'they colour the life of a community': 'Experiences, though conditioned by social changes and scientific development, emancipate themselves for a time from the chains of conceptual thought and so affect people's minds' (Rickman, 1979: 118)

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