404
PARTISAN REVIEW
So too withdrawal and seclusion are aspects of the point of view from
which she looks at the world. In the foreground are nature and death;
in the background is the family circle where the overwhelming papa
and the gifted brother have presided; general ideas are fragments of
a theology which lives only as a morality of propriety and rejection.
And thus what we have in this poetry is the Puritan sensibility, in a
feminine role, isolated from the life of its time, removed from the way
of life which engendered it, and profoundly involved like a fire in
consuming itself.
JosEPH HANNELE GoLDSMITH
DILTHEY AS PHILOSOPHER AND HISTORIAN
WILHELM DILTHEY: AN INTRODUCTION.
By H. A. Hodges. Oxford
University Press.
$3.50.
D
ILTHEY's
LIFE
stretched through the entire nineteenth century. When
he was born in 1833, the German eighteenth century had just
come to an end with the death of Hegel and Goethe; when he died
in 1911, the European nineteenth century had three more years to live.
These biographical data remain essential for the evaluation of the man
and his work. For although Dilthey in many respects represented the
best aspects of the "spirit of his age," he never went beyond it and he
never left the narrow framework of academic life. He had nothing to
do with the great rebels of and against the nineteenth century, and his
antipathy to Nietzsche was anything but a matter of "tempera–
ment" (Hodges). The great hatred of men like Kierkegaard, Marx,
Nietzsche for mere contemplation as the supreme content of intellectual
life must have shocked and horrified Dilthey whose ruling passion was
very much like the passion of the famous collectors of the nineteenth
century although he did not collect objects. His collection was a more
precious and more refined one; it was a collection of inner experiences,
(
Erlebnisse)
whose main concern was to present a complete exhibition
of "life itself."
Dilthey has been best known for his attempt to lay the foundations
of the human studies (
Geisteswissenschaft)
as different and even op–
posed to the methods of natural science. History in which all other
branches of the humanities are comprehended presupposes a secure
method of "hermeneutics," the establishment of a science and art of
interpretation. At the core of historical science as of history itself lies
for him the problem of understanding. He had planned (and never
achieved) a Critique of Historical Reason; the main function of this
reason was man's capacity to understand. The objects of the under–
standing reason are the expression of
Erlebnisse
("lived experience"
in Hodges' translation), as they are presented in history and culture,
