Understanding Of Life

Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutics of life is closely related with his critique of historical reason.To overcome various crises of the times and to maintain the independence of human sciences,Dilthey proceeded to a critique of historical reason, which should epistemologically investigate the human's capacity to know himself, society and history.One of the important objectives of the expedition is to establish a foundational science which can lay a foundation for human sciences.In the early stage Dilthey hold that it is psychology that can act as the foundation of the human sciences.However, what did Dilthey advocated was descriptive and analytical psychology which utterly differs from the explanatory psychology.In the view of Dilthey the explanatory psychology had made a fatal mistake in that it had followed the natural science in the respect of methods and ignored the particularity of psychic life.With nexus, integrity and immediacy the psychic life is inner and only be presented in the lived experience.So, the only right approach is not simple discursiveness but description and analysis in the lived experience.Then Dilthey briefly explained the structure, development and individuality of the psychic life.The conception of structure of psychic life denotes life is a comprehensive continuum; The conception of development of psychic life denotes life proper contains an inner momentum; The conception of individuality of the psychic life does not emphasize the qualitative indifferences among persons but the quantitative ones. The former two involve the generality of the psychic life, and the third involves the difference of the psychic life. They form a complete perspective of descriptive and analytical psychology.Although it brought an innovation to the history of human thoughts, the descriptive and analytical psychology was criticized by others in many aspects.The criticisms and consequently self-reflection made Dilthey turn from the descriptive and analytical psychology to hermeneutics.It determines Dilthey's hermeneutics ought to be of life that hermeneutics was to become the basis of human sciences.The own long history of hermeneutics with rich fruits left prerequisites for the birth of Dilthey's hermeneutics of life.The hermeneutics can be traced back to ancient Greece with regard to origin,but before Schleiermacher it would still be a subsidiary approach as skill or tool.Schleiermacher overcame the shortcomings of previous hermeneutics, and constructed an common hermeneutics suitable to all texts.Moreover,he also defined Hermeneutics as the skills to avoid misunderstandings, raised the well-known proposition that understanding is reconstruction of the authors thoughts, and made a distinction between the grammatical interpretation and the psychological one.The birth of his universal hermeneutics is a landmark in the history of hermeneutics for he made an indelible contribution to future one.Dilthey orientated his own hermeneutics in principle while inheriting previous achievements especially from Schleiermacher's.Life is the ultimate and unique object of Dither's hermeneutics. Although it is unpredictable the life can be gradually grasped with efforts and, besides, it also always expresses itself in various ways and be externalized in the objective world.It thus becomes the primary task of hermeneutics of life to analyze life proper, to interpret its expressions and to expound its objectifications. As the very essence of sprit the life belongs to both the individual and the mankind with temporariness, relevance and history as its most unique nature.The term of expression does not make a great difference with show of life in essence, but appliance and definition of them made Dilthey undergo a process of thoughts, in different phase of which he made different classification and narration of them.In brief,the life is rich and deep, expressing themselves in different ways, and people have to further exchanging and understanding each other by virtue of express. Objectification of life is also called objective spirit as external expression of life.Founding and defining the conception of objective spirit, Dilthey expanded the field of hermeneutics and enriched its tasks by a big margin to transcend the general hermeneutics of Schleiermacher to a great extent.Hermeneutics of life consciously upgrades lived experience and understanding to methodology, according to the fact that human sciences is based on the relationship among lived experience, expression and understanding.As an intrinsic part of life,lived experience is closely linked with life and time.Lived experience is a threshold of the spiritual world and the first step towards human science, because it has the quality of nexus, indivisibility between the subjective and the objective and immediacy. Understanding is the process of grasping the inner mind and sprint from external objectifications of life. It is distinguished into the primary form and higher one. The technical level of understanding is interpretation. Between universal validity and relative one there is an inner contradiction difficult to overcome, which foreshadows a dilemma in his hermeneutics of history.Through interaction between lived experience and understanding we can grasp not only ourselves but also the others, the whole of life and history and a life-nexus of all human sciences. It must resort to real categories to enter the world of life. The real categories derive from the vivid life and are projected specially for understanding life.They are uncountable including meaning, value, purpose, development, power and so on. They are unable to be united with any logical form and together embody the richness of life from different angles.For Dilthey's hermeneutics of life,the world of history is the first testing ground where hermeneutics solves the question on the relationship between general validity and temporary one or between objectivity and subjectivity.History shares a considerable similarity with life,the world of which is a nexus of both structure and validity. Although the nexus is affiliated to the world of history, Dilthey still takes it for granted that it have general validity and objectivity on the base of people's commonality. The Commonality can be gained through the lived experience and understanding. Dilthey was self-contradictory for the opinions, because he completely ignored the gap in the space-time of history. And the conception of commonality is so abstract that it be equal to a false one. After all it is the times that cause the defaults, and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics can provide a very profound revelation in the way.Dilthey's work plays a significant role in the development of hermeneutics, especially enlightening Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur. Although Dilthey's hermeneutics of life has already been surpassed in some fields,its fruitful achievements and far-reaching implications make itself a key link of the history of western hermeneutics.