Traina, Robert A.

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Asbury Theological Seminary

He rmeneutical Values inthe Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey1833 - 1911Robert A. Traina*Wilhelm Dilthey, the German philosopher of history, has had asignificant impact upon contemporary bibUcal hermeneutic. At times thisimpact has not been salutary. One reason for this phenomenon is that theuse of Dilthey has depended on the point of view of the user. His workssuggest various possibilities to various interpreters. In addition, it needs tobe recognized that Dilthey himself was not a biblical expositor, and thathis position hardly accorded with an evangelical interpretation of Scripture. In fact, he probably had pantheistic leanings which obviously wouldnot lend themselves to a sound bibUcal hermeneutic.^Nevertheless, if one utiHzes Dilthey 's thought with care, it maybe possible to find in his writings valuable hermeneutical insights whichcan be adapted to the articulation of a biblically-oriented theism. It willbe the purpose of this article to state some of these insights without implying approval of his entire philosophy of history and without engagingin an exhaustive analysis of his thought.The assumption underlying our findings is that the Scriptures consist of kerygmatic-historical documents, and that therefore a hermeneuticof history is most appropriate to their interpretation.One of the significant insights of Dilthey involves his distinctionbetween the material and methodology of the natural and the historicalsciences. In fact, it was probably this distinction which provided hisstarting point. He held that whereas the natural sciences are concernedwith the non-human world, the essence of the historical sciences is the� Vice President-Academic Administration and Professor of English Bible atAsbury Theological Seminary.1. Cf. William Kluback's statement that "the concept of pantheism was central toDilthey's thought . . . the basic idea of a pantheistic force in the world was akey to Dilthey's thinking," in Wilhelm Dilthey's Philosophy ofHistory (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1955).2. Ibid., p. 52.Hermeneutical Values in the Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey 9psycho-physical world of dem Geist, expressed and manifested in certainconcretions and objectifications. He consequently held that the nomotheticapproach is germane to the natural sciences, for they are concerned withworking out general algebraic laws of phenomenal behavior based uponabstracting natural phenomena from their context and substituting symbols which can be manipulated and which can be used to explain recurringcausal patterns. In contrast, the idiographic method corresponds to thesubject matter of the historical enterprise, and its goal is to find and tounderstand den Geist behind its expressions.Two inferences may be drawn from these distinctions: First, historical documents demand a hermeneutic, whereas no hermeneutic is possiblein the investigation of the non-human world; second, a scientific approachwhich supposedly Umits historical possibilities to what compHes with theso-called "laws of nature" does not accord methodologically with thecharacter of historical materials. For whereas science deals with the usual,history deals with the unique. Consequently, the canons of science are notproperly applicable to bibUcal history, especially to miraculous history, byway either of interpreting its significance or determining its occurrence.Dilthey further illuminates an historical hermeneutic by suggestingits twofold character as involving both outer history and inner history.Inner history consists of a dynamic reality which finds various modes ofexternal self-expression. Historical understanding has as its goal a hermeneutic of such inner history. However, the understanding of the innerhistory of Geist can be achieved only through an understanding of its expressions, for in the last analysis understanding is the reversal of the causalprocess. When a hermeneutic based on the dual character of history isapplied, it follows that one must move through the Hterature to the lifeand spirit of the writers and characters who produced it. The purpose ofsuch a process is to understand (verstehen) the inner life which gave expression to the literary externalization. Thus biblical hermeneutic wouldneed to be concerned with understanding Hfe through the expressions whichit causes and by which its knowledge is mediated."^In fact, it is Dilthey's contention that linguistic and literary documents are the most reliable vital expressions for interpreting den Geist. Thisview is based on two major factors. First, such expressions represent relatively fixed and stable phenomena to which one can return time and timeagain, in contrast to momentary and fleeting expressions which are not3, Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 Vols. (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner-Verlagsgesellschafte, 1959-60), Vol. V, p. 332; cf. also p. 318 and Vol. VI, p. 309.Also cf. Herbert Arthur Hodges, The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (London:Routledge and Paul, 1952), pp. 128, 263.10 The Asbury Seminariansubject to careful and repeated reflection. It is for this reason that Diltheydefines exposition as "flie skilled understanding of permanently fixedmanifestations of Ufe."'* Second, mental life finds in language alonecomplete, exhaustive, and objective expressions, with the result thathermeneutic finds its perfect form in the development of rules for interpreting documentary expressions of the past.Dilthey thus holds that hermeneutic is interpersonal: The inter-preter-1 moves through literary expressions to the writer-Thou. Such aninterpersonal hermeneutic involves the interpreter's empathetic re-enactment of the writer's Ufe which produced the document. Thus to interpretis to relive or to re-experience the life of the writer. To understand theGospels, for example, is to relive the experience of the disciples, to followin their original encounter with the historical Christ.Such re-enactment seems to be the essence of the feasts of theHebrew calendar and the sacraments of the New Testament. To commemorate the Feast of the Passover one needed to re-experience the Exodus-event; and to eat the broken bread and to drink the wine was to relive thedeath oi Christ and to take up one's cross and follow Him. Properly toengage in these memorials was to re-perform the life and events whichthey embodied.Such interpersonal re-enactment, which bridges the historical time-gap, is possible, claims Dilthey, because of the fundamental similaritybetween the present 1 and the past Thou. The interpreter is able to discover the 1 in the Thou and the Thou in the 1, because every I and Thouhave universally shared life and meaning which provide the basis for thepossibility of an immanental pre-understanding. Such pre-understanding isfoundational to the indispensable ability to interrogate the text. Justas in conversations the listener needs to be able to ask questions of thespeaker when the speaker's meaning is not clear, so the reader must beable to interrogate the writer or any vital expression in order to understand it. And this abiUty to ask questions presupposes at least a possiblepoint of contact between the interpreter-1 and the interpreted-Thou.To put it another way, it is because man is an historical being thathe is innately equipped to interpret historical documents. This historicity of the interpreter exists in three senses. First, the interpreter, like theobject of interpretation, is a living, breathing human being who has thepossibiHty of realizing what he finds in history and is therefore able tounderstand history. To interpret history is to interpret one's own realities4. /Z7zy., V, pp. 217-300.Hermeneutical Values in the Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey 11and potentialities. Second, since man is a product of the same historicalforces which produced the past, these forces still live in him. Therefore,the interpreter is really interpreting his own past. Finally, every person isa congenital interpreter of history because he exercises the faculty ofmemory, which involves remembering and interpreting one's own past. Thepossibility of writing and understanding biography is inherent in the possibility of writing autobiography.Thus it is because the interpreter of history is at least potentiallythe same as the maker of history that he is capable of reliving the past,which is the essence of a hermeneutic of history. For example, the biblicalexperience of peace is understandable because the reader knows anxietyand he at least has the possibility of peace. Healing is interpretable becausewe experience brokenness and have the potentiality of being made whole.On the other hand, the person who has experienced an evil father has difficulty interpreting the Fatherhood of God. We are able to understand lifeout of ourselves only when we have lived it.But if understanding is the discovery of the I in the Thou, then itwould follow, says Dilthey, that the presupposition to all hermeneutic isself-hermeneutic. The better we understand ourselves, the better weunderstand historical persons through their vital expressions. It is thatperson who has insight into his own life who is able to interpret life out ofhimself. And in turn, the better we understand past-Thous through theirdocuments, the better we understand ourselves.There are those who would argue that such an hermeneutic is"subjective" and therefore invaUd, for a sound hermeneutic is "objective."To this Dilthey would reply that of course it is true that a good hermeneuticis not merely subjective, but he would hasten to add that a purely objectivehermeneutic is impossible. Dilthey would call into question the dualisticsubjective-objective schema. Proper interpretation, he would say, is trans-jective. To be sure, it does involve past-Thous whose personal beings andexpressions stand over against the interpreter. There are real objects whichare being interpreted, so that the interpreter is not holding a hermeneuticmonologue. A hermeneutic of history is notmerely a self-hermeneutic. Atthe same time, no interpretation is possible without an "I" who is doingthe interpreting, and the "I" cannot interpret except in terms of his own5. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Concord and Liberty, translated by Helene Weyl (NewYork: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1946), pp. 166-167.6. Cf. Dilthey, op. cit., VI, pp. 201-202, 236.7. Cf. Kluback, op. cit., p. 14.8. Cf. Hodges, op. cit., p. 119.12 The Asbury Seminarianlived experience. Neither the object nor the subject can be eliminated fromthe hermeneutic process. Therefore both the character of the object andthe character of the subject- will influence the interpretive process.^It is this transjective character of hermeneutic which accounts fortwo phenomena in biblical interpretation, namely, the fact that singlepassages are given different interpretations by different interpreters in thesame historical period and by interpreters in different historical periods,and the fact that the failure to live the Bible affects one's ability to understand it. In both instances what is indicated is that the history of thesubject necessarily colors the interpretation of historical objects. Incidentally, the same principle applies to historical value-judgments.^^The historicity and temporaUty of both historical object and subjectleads Dilthey to hold to a dialectical view of a hermeneutic of history.On the one hand there can be no understanding of history unless there isa commonality between interpreter and interpreted. Unless there aretransferrable or recurring elements as between the Thou and the I, noreliving and therefore no understanding is possible. On the other hand,the fact that each individual is influenced by the convergence of a numberof temporal-historical factors which are in some sense unique and unrepeatable means that some factors are not transferrable or recurring. Thereis no transcendental self which is unaffected by the historical process. Manis one and yet not one; he is the same and yet not the same. To denysameness is to deny the possibility of contact between past and presentand therefore to deny a hermeneutic of history and the possibility of therelevance of such a hermeneutic; and to deny differentiation is to denythe mutability and influence of the temporal-historical process and therefore to deny history. ^Thus, for example, the historical Jesus is both unique and not unique.In some ways the life of Jesus is beyond hermeneutic because it is unrepeatable and cannot be re-experienced. On the other hand, there cannotbe discipleship unless there are elements in the history of Jesus whichrecur and are repeatable. Jesus can be followed because in some sense Hishistory is re-livable; but we cannot be twentieth-century "Christs,"because Christ was historical and is in a real sense beyond re-living.We have stated some of the hermeneutical insights which may begained from Dilthey. A number of others could be discussed, such as9, Cf. Hajo Holbom, "Wilhelm Dilthey and the Critique of Historical Reason,"in Journal of theHistory of Ideas, XI, 1 (Jani 1950), 109.10. Cf. Dilthey, op. cit., VI, p. 297.11. Ortega, loc. cit.Hermeneutical Values in the Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey 13his fascinating concept of "divination," but space does not permit. It ishoped that the writings of Dilthey will eventually be translated intoEngUsh, thus making possible greater acquaintance with his views andfurther use of his insights in developing a biblical hermeneutic.12. In addition to the books mentioned and the writings of Dilthey himself, thefollowing books wDl be found helpful for further acquaintance with Dilthey;William Kluback and Martin Wcinbaum, Dilthey's Philosophy of h.xisTcucc(New York: Twaync, n.d.); and Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Mcafiini; inHistory, ed. by H. P. Rickman (Magnolia, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, n.d.).

Hermeneutical Values in the Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey

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Hermeneutical Values in the Writings of Wilhelm Dilthey

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