The Rise of Hermeneutics

Abstract

Note from the translator: In the existential historicism of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) we seem to touch the very fons et origo of that great German historiography, with its accompanying developments in philology and art history, with which his work was contemporaneous: 1 there can indeed be no history worthy of the name that does not breathe something like his spiritual enthusiasm for the traces that life has left behind it, something of his visionary instinct for all the forms of living activity preserved and still instinct within the monuments of the past. Dilthey's own voluminous and often fragmentary writings turn almost exclusively around the supreme mystery of the historiographical act: that Verstehen or understanding which, far from being a subjective or purely intuitive leap, implies a whole complex procedure of intellectual reconstruction (Nachbildung, Nachfiihlung, Nacherleben, Nachverstdindnis, to use his characteristic terminology) .2 In his life-long effort, not only to solve, but also and essentially to define, the problem, Dilthey counted among his predecessors and precursors the forgotten theoreticians of the ancient traditions of classical and Biblical hermeneutics, as well as the practitioners of that modem philology that reached its climax in the system of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-I834). The Rise of Hermeneutics (1900), originating largely from Dilthey's research into the life and work of Schleiermacher, still constitutes one of the most satisfactory brief accounts of the history and significance of hermeneutic theory.3 It may also be read as an introduction to Dilthey's own concept of Verstehen, now seen as the unification of the two main rival tendencies-grammatical and psychological-that dominated the historical development of that theory. Dilthey's thought, for all its suggestive power and subsequent influence, cannot be said to have achieved ultimate philosophical coherence