History, Autobiography, Self-Reflection, And Fantasia

Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (Selected Works, Volume III), edt. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press 2002), pt. III., sect. 4, Autobiography, p. 222:

Here we approach the roots of all historical comprehension. Autobiography is merely the literary expression of the self-reflection of human beings on their life-course. Such self-reflection re-news itself to some extent in every individual. It is always there and expresses itself in ever new forms. It is found in the verses of Solon as well as in the introspection of Stoic philosophers, in the meditations of the saints and in the modern philosophy of life. It alone makes historical insight possible. The power and scope of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them pro- vide the basis of historical vision. Self-reflection alone enables us to give a second life to the bloodless shadow of the past. In combination with a boundless need to surrender to, and lose oneself in, the existence of others, it makes the great historian.

 

But, before this which Dilthey writes, there was the fantasia of Vico, the very capacity he found undervalued under the hands of the narrow-minded philosophes. I quote Isaiah Berlin in: Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, edt. Henry Hardy, intro. Roger Hausheer (Princeton University Press, 2013, 2nd edition), The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, p. 135

. . . fantasia–Vico’s term for imaginative insight, which he accuses the French theorists of undervaluing. This is the capacity for conceiving more than one way of categorising reality, like the ability to understand what it is to be an artist, a revolutionary, a traitor, to know what it is to be poor, to wield authority, to be a child, a prisoner, a barbarian. Without some ability to get into the skin of others, the human condition, history, what characterises one period or culture as against others, cannot be understood. The successive patterns of civilisation differ from other temporal processes–say, geological–by the fact that it is men–ourselves–who play a crucial part in creating them. This lies at the heart of the art or science of attribution: to tell what goes with one form of life and not with another cannot be achieved solely by inductive methods.