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because Life expresses and "objectifies" itself. History becomes for Dilthey
a series of objectified experiences which we can understand insofar as
we can "re-live" (
nacherleben)
Hodges' translation) them. Understand–
ing, interpretation, hermeneutics are the art of deciphering signs of
expression.
The main point about this art of reproduction is that it enables
one to share in experiences that are ordinarily beyond the bounds of an
individual life and a specific historical time. "Dilthey instances the
effect of his own study of Luther and the Reformation in enabling
him at least to understand a religious experience of a depth and intensity
such as in his own person he was not capable of sharing." (Hodges)
It is this somehow parasitical attitude to life which makes Dilthey's
general reflections on history so highly characteristic for the spirit of the
nineteenth century, and it is quite in accordance with this spirit that
Dilthey found the highest type of man in the artist. For the general
genius-worship of his time was actually based on the conviction that only
the artist who possesses the capacity of expressing his "lived experiences"
is truly "alive," a conviction which Dilthey shared and from which he
concluded that if the Gods have refused a man the necessary talents
his seconcl-best chance to become "alive" is to decipher "expressions,"
thus partaking in the experiences of others. In Dilthey's concept, the
historian becomes a kind of an artist who has missed his calling.
The arti t as the prototype of man is an old topic of philosophy.
The difference, however, between the older concepts and the nineteenth
century genius-worship that started with German romanticism is marked.
For the former the artist was the supreme guarantee of man's creative
capacities, whereas romanticism already saw in art only the expression of
experiences and in the artist only a human being with more and more
interesting experiences. In Germany, Schleiermacher was the first to
detect in the "lived experiences" the central interest of man and he trans–
formed,accordingly, religion into religiosity, faith into religious senti–
ments and the "reality of God" into the feeling of dependence. It is by
no meam accidental that Dilthey's greatest admiration went to Schleier–
macher and that one of his most elaborate and best-known works was
devoted to his biography.
It is a matter of course that insofar as this hunger for life and
lived experiences of the nineteenth century was genuine, the passion for
understanding, for "re-living" has produced some great achievements.
These, however, do not belong to the realm of philosophy, and the
most serious shortcoming of Hodges' introduction to the work of Dilthey
(the first book in English to deal with his work) is that he places the
main accent on Dilthey the philosopher and leaves Dilthey the historian
who was a far more important man almost entirely out of his picture.
For Dilthey's
Interpretation and Analysis of Man in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Century
and his
Experience and Poetry (Erlebnis und Dich-
