Arnisaeus on the Question, why the Poor cannot be Virtuous: Philosophy and the Human Sciences under a Diltheyan Perspective

Let us imagine a young investigator who is under contract with a publisher for a volume on, say, “Politics at the End of the Renaissance.” He or she shall first delve into a mass of critical editions, translations, monographs, articles, encyclopedias as well as internet-available references. The outcome will be a seventy pages stark booklet, which shall be printed in 200 exemplars and read, say, by just as many among investigators, instructors, students, and the general public. The example above is what investigators, publishers, and readers did during the twentieth century. We are now in the twenty-first and we can do so much better. First, there shall be no unwanted dependence on paper any more. The interface device shall be entirely digitalized. Second, the information the investigator will gather will be complete, for the search engines will run through recursive series. Third, the role itself of the investigator shall lose its relevance, for instead of having one writer and 200 readers, we shall have 200 writers who shall be enabled to produce their own reconstruction of the history of the concept of cosmopolitanism. In this way, we shall have more interactive readers. And what is more, we shall have no need of having any booklet printed, for the social advantage of having 200 hundred people find out about such a relevant political category as “Politics” shall be achieved by the exercise they have managed for themselves. The leading idea is that all Europeans ought to have at least once in their lives the experience of what is a philosophical argument, i.e., an argument that is neither based on confessional or political choices, nor on material interests or whims of fashion and is nonetheless related with vitally important problems. Philosophy only makes it possible to exercise one’s reason to its full extent, which ought to be a right available to everyone. For this reason, philosophy ought to be present in all higher education curricula and students be given full freedom in selecting the argumentative strategy that fits best. Every youth ought to experience philosophy at least once in his or her lives, for this experience will give him or her meaningful orientations as regards what to do later in life. I am talking about the ability and the empathy of picking up new languages, translating, and last but not least gaining insights about one’s own cultural identity on the basis of a dialogical exchange. In fact, I am talking about re-considering the vital connection among individual psychologies and the communities they constitute (Hegel’s objective spirit) in terms of what Wilhelm Dilthey—the author of the first definition of the human sciences, nowadays a European icon—defined Wirkungszusammenhänge, namely productive systems that establish values and prefigure goals.