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Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-DC020-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-DC020-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/dilthey-wilhelm-1833-1911/v-1

3. The formation of the historical world

With his ‘Entstehung der Hermeneutik’ (‘The Rise of Hermeneutics’) in 1900, Dilthey began to sketch out a position which would define his work until his death. While he does not abandon the psychological description of lived experience, Dilthey comes to view its ability to capture the meaning of our life as more limited. Much of the meaning of our experience remains unconscious until it is expressed. Thus the description of the life of the subject cannot be done without the interpretation of its expressed objectifications. Dilthey resumed the task of a Critique of Historical Reason from this hermeneutical perspective, publishing Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences) in 1910.

There is a further problem which occasioned Dilthey’s move to hermeneutics and underscores the limitations of description. The descriptions of psychology seem to function primarily on the scientific level of representational consciousness which – however well-integrated – stands apart from the world. How do we deal with prescientific reflexive awareness according to which we are already part of the world? Can description also be applied to its more inclusive life-nexus? Here Dilthey found inspiration in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) and its theory of intentionality. Dilthey had given a seminar on this work in the Winter Semester 1904/5. Husserl in turn visited Dilthey and wrote that this meeting inspired him to occupy himself extensively with the problems of the human sciences (see Husserl, E. §2).

In Dilthey’s ‘Ideen’, understanding was used to describe the connectedness of facts of consciousness. According to his later hermeneutical writings, understanding must clarify these connections as meaning-relations. Since the meaning-relations of our experience and expressions are not necessarily measurable in terms of the framework of the psychic nexus, Dilthey turns to historical life as the ultimate framework for interpretation. Whereas the acquired psychic nexus incorporated the objective sphere into the life of the individual subject, in the Aufbau Dilthey becomes equally concerned to conceive the inverse way in which subjects are intentionally related to objective and public spheres. To do so Dilthey appropriates the Hegelian term ‘objective spirit’ as the overall historical context for understanding. He rejects Hegel’s particular definition of objective spirit as the socio-historical stage of the self-realization of absolute spirit in favour of a concept consistent with a reinterpretation of spirit as human activity. ‘Objective spirit’ designates the whole range of human objectifications, whether they be expressions in language and other media meant to communicate, or practices and deeds meant to influence. This objective spirit is at once the embodiment of human thought and action as well as the medium within which they occur. It includes the contexts we share to make interaction possible: not only the sociopolitical institutions originally considered by Hegel, but also the cultural institutions of art, religion and philosophy which he had classified as absolute spirit (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8).

Objective spirit provides the kind of overall framework for Dilthey’s hermeneutics that tradition comes to provide in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. But objective spirit is not as dominant as tradition in Gadamer, for Dilthey articulates it into more specific Wirkungszusammenhänge (systems of reciprocal influence), whether they be historical epochs or social and cultural systems. This is relevant to Dilthey’s distinction between elementary and higher understanding. The former orients an expression to the common context of objective spirit. That is, the elementary understanding of a sentence focuses only on what it explicitly asserts and is commonly assumed to mean. Problems concerning the implicit meaning of expressions call for higher understanding, which requires us to refer to more specific systems of reciprocal influence. Thus we attempt to determine any ambiguous expressions in a legal document by considering the particular legal system of the period in which it was drawn up. Only after having exhausted what the appropriate public contexts of expressions can do to clarify their objective meaning, should we turn to the subjective or psychological context. Now psychology is no longer the first of the human sciences, but the last. The highest or last mode of understanding is the Nacherleben or re-experiencing of an expression of lived experience. This re-experiencing does not involve reproducing the state of mind of the author. Hermeneutics expects us to understand authors not as they understood themselves, but better.

Although his hermeneutics ultimately focuses on the relation between lived experience, expression, and understanding (Erlebnis, Ausdruck, Verstehen), Dilthey admits that many expressions such as mathematical formulas and handshakes expressing agreement can be understood apart from relating them to lived experience. But when an expression does articulate our lived experience, as in a work of art, it can enrich our understanding of life in immeasurable ways. This is why Dilthey’s writings on the imagination of artists bear importantly on his theory of interpretation.

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Citing this article:
Makkreel, Rudolf A.. The formation of the historical world. Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-DC020-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/dilthey-wilhelm-1833-1911/v-1/sections/the-formation-of-the-historical-world.
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