HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION IN WILHELM DILTHEY\u27S PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

This essay is an examination of Wilhelm Dilthey\u27s theory of historical consciousness as it assumed the central position of importance in his philosophy after 1900. The understanding of his concept of historical consciousness is held to be necessary in order to comprehend the nature of his hermeneutic and its importance for methodologies of teaching, writing, and research in the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften. This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that it was only after Dilthey\u27s growing awareness of the inadequacy of psychological categories as a foundation for the understanding of Man and Life that he found the true basis for such understanding to lie in man\u27s historicity. Dilthey\u27s all-important concept of historicity was only fully developed after his re-encountering the ideas of objective and subjective Spirit in the early writings of Hegel. It was particularly during his studies of Hegel\u27s early writings in preparation for this Jugendgeschichte Hegels that Dilthey\u27s conception of the human sciences and mankind changed from a standpoint of seelische Vorgange to Geistesleben. Hence it was Hegelian ontology--as that ontology was developed in Phanomenologie des Geistes and the Jena Logik--that serves as the foundation for the theory of historicity or historical consciousness which Dilthey adopts in his later philosophy. Finally, this dissertation has as its impetus the belief that hermeneutical philosophy is perhaps the only methodology for those working and teaching in the humanities and the history of ideas which gives full attention to both the essentially historical nature of all knowledge of the external world and man\u27s self-knowledge as well. Dilthey\u27s hermeneutic helps to reveal to those working within the human sciences the great landscape of the inner world of Man. In this context, Dilthey\u27s thought is seen as a foil and a rebuke to a narrowly-positivistic concept of the human sciences and understanding. This is so because man is not just another physical object of the natural world but a living subject who interprets the world through a context of historically-derived meanings and relationships. Hence the inner world of man\u27s understanding of Life by virtue of the historicity of all of man\u27s knowledge is seen as the most concrete and intelligible part of human existence