19세기 말 ‘정신의 위기’와 빌헬름 딜타이의 역사이성 비판

Abstract

The age through which Wilhelm Dilthey(1833-1911) lived was marked by unceasing challenge to traditions and a growing uneasiness about the future. He belonged to the older cultivated classes who felt a challenge to their existence and their way of life and thought. As his contemporaries, Dilthey was aware of the Industrial Revolution, but it did not dominate his conception of the social problem. He declared that the vital question of his age is the problem of understanding and guiding the turbulent forces at work in modern society. In Dilthey’s generation the spiritual unity was already breaking up. Some of his contemporaries tried to return to Kant’s philosophy to overcome the crisis of reasoning. Dilthey found the task of his philosophy of life in working out the epistemological and logical foundation of the historical studies and in building these into the Kantian structure. Simultaneously he was well conscious of the one-sidedness of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. His life-long project of a “critique of historical reason” was a alternative program. It aimed at explaining the complexity of human life in its depth. It is characteristic that Dilthey defined the human being as willing, feeling, ideating being. To understand the human being and his world appropriately Dilthey called for a specific method of interpretation. For him hermeneutical interpretation was not only the working method of the separate human sciences but also the key to providing them with a provisory critical-theoretical foundation. In this sense he regarded hermeneutics as a fundamental science(Grundwissenschaft) for all human sciences. He believed that a hermeneutical approach is best able to comprehend the actual working of the human mind and also the dynamic process of science itself.