Dilthey: Hermeneutics without Absolute Logic
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Wilhelm Dilthey developed the most influential alternative to Hegelian systematics in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). His basic question was precise: How is historical understanding possible without recourse to absolute principles?[1]
The hermeneutic turn concerned the method of the human sciences. Dilthey drew a fundamental distinction between “explanation” and “understanding.” The natural sciences explain phenomena through general laws — they subsume the particular under the universal. The human sciences understand structures of meaning by re-enacting their inner structure — they reconstruct the whole from its parts.[2]
Life as an original whole is the starting point. Not abstract thought, but concrete life in its fullness and manifold forms is the primary reality. This life expresses itself in works — in texts, artworks, institutions, actions. The task of hermeneutics is to understand these expressions by tracing them back to the life that expresses itself in them.[3]
The reception of Hegel was ambivalent. Dilthey adopted from Hegel the emphasis on historicity and totality. Spirit is not timeless but unfolds historically. Every epoch has its own shape, its own worldview, its own truth. But Dilthey rejected the dialectical method. History is not the logical development of absolute spirit, but the living context of concrete human beings in concrete situations.[4]
The fundamental thesis was: historicity without absolute logic. The “critique of historical reason” was meant to show how historical understanding is possible without recourse to absolute principles. Every epoch has its own worldviews, which must be understood immanently — not evaluated from a supra-historical standpoint, but traced through in their own inner logic.[5]
The consequence for logic was radical: logical structures are not universally valid but historically conditioned. Hegel’s dialectic would then be merely the form of thought of a particular epoch — the epoch of German idealism. Other epochs have other forms of thought, equally legitimate.[6]
Dilthey developed the methodological alternative as the hermeneutic circle. Understanding always moves in a circle: from the part to the whole and from the whole to the part. One understands the sentence only through the text, the text only through the situation, the situation only through the epoch, the epoch only through humanity — and at the same time, humanity only through the epoch, the epoch only through the situation, the situation only through the text, the text only through the sentence. This circle is not a flaw but constitutive of all understanding.[7]
The legitimate intuition is clear: the historicity of all forms of rationality is real. Different epochs think differently — not merely about different contents, but in different forms. Greek philosophy, medieval scholasticism, modern science operate with different concepts, different methods, different criteria of truth. This difference is not merely external but concerns the structure of thought itself.
Critics such as Husserl accused Dilthey of reducing understanding to psychologism (cf. 16.1). Dilthey ultimately grounds understanding in “re-experiencing” — the psychological reconstruction of another’s lived experience. This overlooks that Dilthey’s own hermeneutic principles themselves explicate universal structures of understanding. The hermeneutic circle is not historically conditioned but a necessary structure of understanding as such. The distinction between explaining and understanding itself claims universal validity.[8]
The Hegel reconstruction developed here integrates Dilthey’s legitimate insight without falling into his absolutization. Logic is not timeless in the sense of a Platonic world of ideas, but explicates structures at work in historical enactment. The categories are not abstract thoughts but reflections on concrete practice — and this practice is historical. But the structures of reflection themselves — the four basic operations — are universal, because they explicate the conditions of possibility of any practice whatsoever.[9]
Dilthey’s lasting achievement lies in uncovering historicity. His limit lies in the relativistic consequence. An integration must show that universality and historicity are not alternatives but mutually condition one another. Universal structures realize themselves only historically, and historical forms are only understandable through universal structures.
Dilthey’s afterlife:
Wilhelm Dilthey’s influence on the reception of Hegel unfolded primarily after his death (1911), through his students. Hermann Nohl, Dilthey’s student and editor of Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (1907), interpreted Hegel through the lens of his teacher’s philosophy of life. This colored the reception of the “young Hegel” lastingly — Hegel as theologian, as philosopher of life, as romantic. Georg Lukács’s The Young Hegel (1948) was a deliberate counter-thesis to this reading: he rightly emphasized that the young Hegel also engaged intensively with economics, politics, and social questions. (On the Nohl edition, see the extended discussion in Chapter 23.1.)
Wilhelm Dilthey: Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, Leipzig/Berlin 1910, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Stuttgart/Göttingen 1958. ↩︎
Dilthey (1910), pp. 143-152. ↩︎
Dilthey (1910), pp. 205-220. ↩︎
Wilhelm Dilthey: Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels, Berlin 1905, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Stuttgart/Göttingen 1959. ↩︎
Wilhelm Dilthey: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Leipzig 1883, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Stuttgart/Göttingen 1959, pp. 116-120. ↩︎
Dilthey (1883), pp. 121-126. ↩︎
Dilthey (1910), p. 217. ↩︎
This critique is already developed in: Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method, Tübingen 1960, Part II. ↩︎
This integration follows: Kai Froeb, Hegel’s Science of Logic (in preparation), Ch. 25.3, The three circles. ↩︎