From idealism to phenomenology: Politics and the philosophy of history in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey

The work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) represents the most important and sustained attempt after Hegel to articulate a critical foundation for the historical-philological-philosophical sciences, known collectively as the Geisteswissenschaften. However, despite the renewed interest in critical social theory since the 1960's, Dilthey's work has remained on the periphery of recent hermeneutic debates, while the very idea of a hermeneutics of understanding has been called into question by post-structuralism.;The originality of the hermeneutic philosophy of history which Dilthey articulated in his last major work, The Construction of the Historical World in the Geisteswissenschaften (1905-11), lies in the fact that he was able to show how Idealist and Romantic philosophies of history grew out of the efforts to solve the central problems of post-Fichtean transcendental philosophy, while at the same time resisting the speculative temptations to which they had succumbed. By incorporating into the structure of transcendental subjectivity itself an awareness of the intrinsic limits of transcendental, hermeneutic reflection, Dilthey was able to take the decisive step beyond the 19th-century Geisteswissenschaften and formulate the central insights of the modern phenomenological movement. Dilthey's critique of historical reason ultimately draws its force from his probing exploration of the horizontal transcendence of life and the life-world for the knowing subject. Although his work anticipated many of the criticisms of Idealist and Romantic conceptions of subjectivity, meaning and history made recently by Gadamer and French post-structuralism, he nevertheless provides a qualified defence of Idealism and Romanticism against these critics and makes an important argument for the continued relevance of hermeneutics in the face of the post-structuralist challenge.;I show that Dilthey's thought was firmly rooted in the Idealist world-view of mid-century German liberalism and that these liberal cultural and political ideals influenced in important ways his systematic philosophy. Second, I argue that Dilthey's philosophy of life and theory of world-views represent original and fruitful answers to problems which had been raised, but resolved unsatisfactorily, by Kant and his immediate successors, and that Dilthey's reflections on the achievements and the limits of Kantian philosophy provided the decisive impetus to his project for a critique of historical reason.