The outer expression of an inner life
In his Journals, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote:It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.The implication of this is that the person with the life to live has a point-of-view that is incommensurable with the point-of-view of, not just of the philosophers, but of theorists in any discipline. I see this as one aspect of the participant observer duality.Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was one of the first philosophers to think about this and the distinction between the natural sciences and what is usually called…