62 Descriptive Psychology

During the crisis of the new approach to the study of the inner world of the subject, the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), a representative of the “philosophy of life”, made a critique of traditional philosophical schools with claims to a new world view created in life itself, this unique reality studied with the help of creative instincts and ingenious intuitions. The main psychological treatise is Descriptive Psychology (1894).

According to V. Dilthey, all the sciences of the spirit must be based on psychology. The natural science of psychology, especially during its development as an autonomous science, takes in V. Dilthey a negative connotation. The positions of psychology were subjected to criticism, which V. Dilthey calls explanatory, her assumptions in the depiction of elements — atoms and their associations, etc., which cannot be argued. Its object was not the comprehensiveness of human nature - explanatory psychology cannot interpret the true life of the soul because it deals with meager phenomena and interprets them erroneously. Natural sciences had at their disposal facts that are transmitted from outside, with the help of sensations as isolated phenomena. In psychology, facts are put forth from within as a kind of living connection of the inner life, as something primordial.

The antithesis of understanding and explanation is the main methodological principle of descriptive psychology. This opposition was a kind of criticism of naturalization in psychological study, which is inherent in the natural science of psychology. Comprehension as a method of comprehending psychology is fundamentally different from introspection. Understanding is not identical and expedient knowledge in terms: descriptive psychology must reveal the impossibility of excitement as an abstract category being built into concepts. The objects of descriptive psychology are the cultural person and the fullness of the finished inner life. It must be described, comprehended and analyzed in its entirety.

The principles of V. Dilthey were developed in the spiritual and scientific psychology of Edward Springer (1882-1963). Its tasks were to study the relationship of the personal spiritual structure of the personality to the structure of the objective spirit and the discovery of the types of semantic aspirations that were called “forms of life”.

From the general statement of V. Dilthey about the interaction of the structure of the inner life with culture and about value as conditioned by the expansive attitude of the personality of E. Springer proceeds to the systematization of values ​​and produces it in a more objective than emotional attitude, as it was in V. Dilthey, the beginning.

E. Springer identifies six types of objective values: abstract, economic, aesthetic, social, political, religious.