Understanding historical life in its own terms: Dilthey on ethics, worldviews, and religious experience

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Notes

1 SW 2: 2. References are to the Selected Works [SW], followed by volume and page numbers. Minor alterations to translations are not acknowledged.

2 Most analytic philosophers still treat Dilthey as an epistemologist of human science and ignore this distinction, which is generally left implicit and unanalyzed by Dilthey himself; but at least some continental philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur) have capitalized on it by stressing the fact that making the distinction must be the work of a kind of philosophizing that is itself neither natural- or human-scientifically structured. See, e.g. EWP, 190–9, 237–47; and Makkreel’s introduction. Also Scharff (“More than One ‘Kind’ of Science?”, 125–34).

3 This is also Dilthey’s approach to theology, as “The Problem of Religion” shows (297–316) and as he explained to Husserl in their brief correspondence in 1911. Husserl’s response is what Dilthey would call epistemologically naturalistic. He complains that Dilthey fails to move on from his efforts to interpretively “relive” religious “life forms” and “to clarify and show by well-founded proofs the differences between supposedly and actually valid religion”. I understand “‘Possible’ religion”, he says, “similarly to Kant’s ‘possible’ nature” (Husserl, Husserl: Shorter Works, 206).

4 Dilthey’s influence on Gadamer is evident here, but although Gadamer does acknowledge that our “historically-effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) has both conscious and unconscious dimensions, his interpretation of our historicity in terms of the inheritance of ‘tradition’ appears to add a conservative note to his philosophical hermeneutics that is not found in Dilthey’s own conception of historical understanding.

5 Also, Dilthey’s letters to Yorck, outlining his plans for delivering these lectures (Dilthey, Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey, 89–92, 102–3).