Eric Sean Nelson, "Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher and Dilthey" (Summary)

Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey are often considered representatives of nineteenth-century hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. Schleiermacher's thought is rooted in the modern appropriation and transformation of traditional metaphysics and Protestant theology, with his early Romantic works focusing on the intuition of the infinite and his absolute dependence on God. In contrast, Dilthey developed an epistemic pluralism and moderate skepticism in response to metaphysics, distinguishing between natural and human sciences based on their contexts, methodologies, and objects.

Schleiermacher was a post-Katian thinker of religious transcendence and the ethical ideal of the highest good that informs and orients ordinary life. Dilthey, on the other hand, interpreted modernity as an irrevocable break with premodern forms of thought, including Schleiermacher's dialectics. Schleiermacher's faith and intuition of the divine lost priority as they became one way of expressing lived-experience, mood, and worldview, and infinity became an immanent yet self-interrupting characteristic of life.

Dilthey's works explore the central thread in his critique of historical reason, focusing on the idea that understanding is an art rather than a doctrine of science. Hermeneutics is a doctrine of art oriented according to the idea of understanding given the universality of misunderstanding, and it requires judgment or a sense of appropriate application that is cultivated.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, a philosophical, theological, and scientific inquiry, emphasizes understanding, judgment, and the role of feeling, desire, and affectivity in linguistic interaction, interpretation, and individuation. He critiques rule-based hermeneutics and emphasizes the need for contextualization and mediation to articulate God's word. Schleiermacher also discusses psychological interpretation, which involves receptiveness to the traces of the singularity of the other.

Individuals are irreducible to language, and language is used and created through the language-forming power and style of individuals. Schleiermacher's approach is not mere "external reconstruction" aiming at correctness, but is oriented toward the question of truth through receptivity to what addresses and claims us.

Language is the only presupposition and defines the scope of hermeneutics, but it cannot close itself to what is other than language in a pure immanence of linguistic integration or mediation. The infinitity of sense confronts language on the side of both the whole and the individual.

Jean Grondin has emphasized the quest for the whole understood as completeness in Romantic hermeneutics, but the whole is not so much a complete system as an infinity of intercrossing relations that are ultimately referred to the nonrelational. Dilthey characterized three senses of "whole" in Schleiermacher's thought: organizing inner form, system, and relational context or Zusammenhang.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics emphasized the correctness of understanding through theoretical articulation, but he did not presuppose correctness as the sole model of truth. Interpretation calls for responsive feeling and imagination, and Schleiermacher also called traces and seeds, which are the presence of something that cannot be thought as presence, disclosure of nondisclosedness, and revelation of that which is concealed as concealed. Werner Hamacher explored Schleiermacher's appeal to the "trace" in the context of recent literary theory.

Dilthey argued for a nonreductive experientialism in epistemology, expanding it beyond cognitive or theoretical knowledge and transformating it. He interpreted the processes of life immanently and in relation to a dynamic context that is never fully visible. Dilthey believed that the metaphysical unity of the world is incommensurable and cannot be conclusively combined. He rejected strong holism in the philosophy of the social sciences and remained a role for weak holism.

The primary intention of the human sciences is the empirical description of individuality in its life-context. Dilthey's writings from the early 1890s should be interpreted in the context of an interpretive psychology occurring in the space and intersection of epistemology and life. Understanding is the unending and irreducible intersection of prereflective elementary understanding and reflexive interpretation between self and other, individual and context, and singular and whole.

Dilthey's theory of the human sciences is not merely an epistemology but a theory of knowledge that relates knowing to its context. The human sciences involve the study of dynamic interconnected systems that articulate the intersection of meaning, value, purpose, and force. Understanding, which should be construed verbally as "to understand" (verstehen), is intrinsically interpretive for Dilthey.

Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutic approach to studying history and culture critiques historical reason, focusing on the complexity and concreteness of life. Understanding is not merely subjective but mediated through human expressions and practices, providing more than just scientific access to objects. Dilthey's phenomenological descriptions show how historical life is both about and matters to the individual in its relational context.

The human sciences aim for objectivity, universality, and truth, linking lived experiences with social-historical structures. Schleiermacher and Dilthey focus on the individuality, personality, style, and sensibility of the author in their historical context. Their thought has been retrospectively designated as "hermeneutical" owing to their interest in associated issues of sense and meaning, context and historicity, understanding and interpretation, and in the communicative and explicative dimensions of human life and inquiry.

Twentieth-century hermeneutics, beginning with Heidegger's critical reception of Dilthey in the 1920s, emphasizes not only the linguistic character of thought and the disclosive power of language but also its reversals, limitations, and breakdowns. Interpretation is aimed at the individual and the singular, as well as the context and the whole in their relational interdependence. The hermeneutical circle occurs through both contextualization and individuation, and is provisional and can always begin anew as more is learned about the individual and the context.

Self-understanding is a complex and questionable concept, as the individual does not have direct or unmediated self-knowledge. Meaning is inevitably of "diverse provenance," or pluralistic, and involves a multiplicity of elements and sources that entail addressing and researching the text, author, context, and truth claims of a work to interpret and evaluate it.