Interpreting Dilthey: A Critical Explication

Name: Dorothy Ngaihlian

Subject: Contemporary Philosophy Western D
Class: MA Part 1 [ Semester 2 ]
 Interpreting Dilthey: A Critical Explication

Dilthey is best known for the way he distinguished between the natural and human sciences. He
defined the human sciences broadly to include both the humanities and the social sciences.
Whereas the main task of the natural sciences as Dilthey found them was to arrive at law-based
causal explanations, he projected the core task of the human sciences to be that of providing an
understanding of the organizational structures and dynamic forces of human and historical life.

The early Dilthey conceived his goal as a broadening of the critical project that would ground the
human sciences as Kant had grounded the natural sciences. His hope then was that the human
sciences would be able to arrive at lawful explanations just like the natural sciences.

Dilthey’s aim was to expand Kant’s primarily nature-oriented Critique of Pure Reason into a
Critique of Historical Reason that can also do justice to the social and cultural dimensions of
human experience. Understanding the meaning of human historical events requires being able to
organize them in their proper contexts and to articulate the structural uniformities that can be
found in this way. Dilthey’s reflections on the human sciences, historical contextualization, and
hermeneutics influenced many subsequent thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer,
Gadamer and Ricoeur. Recently, there has been some attention given to the ways in which
Dilthey’s empirical approach to experience influenced Carnap in his early attempts to overcome
metaphysics in favor of more analytical methods.

Dilthey’s ambivalent attitude towards Hegel can provide some initial clues about his own
philosophical approach. He admired Hegel’s recognition of the historical dimension of
philosophical thought, but rejected the speculative and metaphysical ways he developed this
relation. Like the Neo-Kantians, Dilthey proposed a return to the more focused viewpoint of
Kant, but not without also taking account of the higher emancipatory aspirations and broader
perspectives of later thinkers. Dilthey characterized his own expansive view of philosophy as one
of establishing integral relations to all the theoretical disciplines and historical practices that
attempt to make sense of the world. Instead of demarcating the boundaries that set philosophy
apart from other ways of engaging life, Dilthey conceives its critical task as articulating the
overall structures that define the human spirit in general.
Dilthey was indeed the author of quite well constructed and well pursued innovative
philosophical strategies. Although it dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, Dilthey's
work remains enormously relevant to current debates about science policy, art and literature, the
biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society,
psychology, and the embodied self.

To read Dilthey's writings in the present interpretative moment is to arrive at a configuration of

thought that calls for being understood on its own terms. We are talking about a hermeneutical
task, for we inevitably interpret Dilthey from our own hermeneutical situation in response to
present needs and questions. First and foremost, take the accepted view that the humanities and
the natural sciences have two distinct cultures, then consider that Dilthey is said to have helped
solidify the divide between these two cultures or styles of thinking. This was achieved by
distinguishing between understanding and explaining as the leading sensibilities of the
subjectively and inter-subjectively oriented human sciences and the objectively oriented natural
sciences. Yet, "Dilthey is a problematic source for arguments for dualism given his rejection of
two world theories." Instead, one ought to realize that it is "erroneous to identify Dilthey's
philosophy of the sciences with the human and historical sciences alone," because for him "all
sciences as practical pursuits presuppose a natural and social-historical world"

How ironic it is that Dilthey, "whose main intellectual purpose was to interpret other thinkers in
particular and historical life in general, should be so widely misinterpreted," particularly when he
is pictured as a dualist "who accepts nature as a nomothetic domain and thinks of historical
reality as a spiritual sphere that can be merely described idiographically". Another repeated
misinterpretation of Dilthey is that he is a relativist because he apparently embraced his own
typology of changing world-views. Dilthey distances himself from both traditional metaphysics
and objective realism. Based on the model of the subjective immanent purposive contexts of
human experience, he outlines purposive historical contexts that are objective. He calls them
"cultural systems" for they apply to a whole range of social and political interactions in which
human beings engage.
Dilthey's efforts to provide a comprehensive philosophical foundation for the human sciences
were provoked by attempts to undermine the independence of historical research itself. His
program of defending the autonomy of what he called the World of Human Spirit against
positivistic approaches is still a paradigm for current assessments of humanistic research, which
ought always to be reinterpreted and whose autonomy ought always to be preserved. We should
keep in mind, however, that Dilthey is not obtusely averse to positivism. True, he wants to
overcome it, but he also wants to treasure its empiricism, its attention to phenomena, e.g., in
empirical psychology, which he uses to break up the speculative element of idealistic
philosophy.

The presence of Dilthey's hermeneutics in the work of Wittgenstein is contrasted by analyzing

affinities and differences between Dilthey and the later Wittgenstein on issues such as
understanding, interpretation and meaning-holism. Both Dilthey and Wittgenstein seem to
suggest analogous ways of articulating the immanent holistic context of the life-nexus and form
of life through which understanding occurs, and which we cannot transcend to arrive at any
unconditional and eternal foundations.
Dilthey did not systematically prioritize hermeneutics, and did not even take it up for long
periods. Nonetheless, he broadened and extended hermeneutics from an auxiliary discipline to a
way of doing philosophy on its own, as testified by the continuation of his endeavor in the works
of Heidegger and Gadamer, who both adopted, and polemicized against, Dilthey's interpretation
of interpretation and his hermeneutical strategies. Dilthey reminds us that culture is about people
that take part in the project of constructing a society that ought to be less unequal, less unjust,
less segregating, and less passive with regard to differing starting environments. Today,
researchers in the human sciences delve into social objects, be they material or immaterial, but
always set by a person, which makes a repositioning with regard to technological development
more and more urgent. Persons are not there only to make sure machines work. They should
engage the moral questions a human being finds.