The Development of Hermeneutics in Wilhelm Dilthey

Tracing the origin of hermeneutics down to the classic Greek age, Dilthey distinguishes two consistent hermeneutic tendencies: a philological exegetical tendency and a philosophical one, and tries to sketch out the development of hermeneutics which has brought out the conjunction or unification of two tendencies in interpretation. Dilthey assures that Schleiermacher opened a general hermeneutics, developing a new philological art of interpretation from the new psychological and historical modes of thought under the influence of German transcendental philosophy. Thus this conjunction of two movements, the new philology and German philosophy, laid the foundation for both the art of interpretation specific to Schleiermacher and a scientific hermeneutics in general. Until his days, hermeneutics had been a system of rules whose parts were held together by the aim of general validity for interpretation. But Schleiermacher sought for an analysis of the understanding behind these rules, or for a formulation of the goal of the understanding as a whole from which he derived the possibility of valid interpretation in general. Schleiermacher was precursor in enunciating a general hermeneutics as the art of understanding by deregionalizing and incorporating diverse special hermeneutics, the philological, grammatical, theological, etc. Dilthey owes to Schleiermacher the development of his hermeneutics. As a result of this influence, Dilthey takes the psychological direction of Schleiermacher and keeps supplementing his own hermeneutics for objectification and universalization with a category of fixed, objective signs and inscriptions of writing and the essential structures of the text. Dilthey, in a sense, seems to lose his critical balancing stance between two opposing hermeneutical tendencies by shifting the focus into the psychological and historical. In another aspect of aporia, a hermeneutical circle between whole and part, Dilthey also cannot find a way out and only operates his hermeneutical dialectic in that circular framework. Assuming the proposition that life itself grasps life is an ultimate claim of the dialectic of Dilthey's hermeneutics, I think we can vindicate his point of objectivity in that he never gives up his efforts to anchor the subjective flux of individual life with written signs and inscriptions in a text for the possibility of a universal meaning. Dilthey's insistent resort to a text and its world opening to a reader through interconnection can be credited as a groundbreaking hermeneutical enterprise for building a bridge between various epistemological, methodological inquiries and ontological, theoretical investigations as in the case of Gadamer in the next generation.