The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life, by Jos De Mul (translated by Tony Barrett)
🤯🖤
“For every generation of poets and thinkers attempts to make sense of the enigmatic, unfathomable face of life, with its laughing mouth and mournful eyes. This will remain and unending task.” — William Dilthey
This is perhaps the most rigorous, detailed, and intricate work of scholarship I have ever read. Those adjectives may sound daunting, but I mean it in the most positive sense: the breadth and depth of detail is rendered non-linearly accessible to the reader through an immaculate web of internal cross references. For example, if the reader wishes to start with the final chapter, in which the author pulls together his entire hermeneutic reconstruction of William Dilthey’s ontology of life, you absolutely can, for whenever and wherever you decide you need to see more details about the author’s particular claims in the reconstruction, the appropriate cross reference is provided.
Dilthey is a lesser known German philosopher that straddled the late 19th and early 20th century philosophical transition, and, in many ways, pioneered it.
While on the one hand paying homage to his Kantian heritage, he radicalized the a priori structures of transcendental knowledge — i.e. the structures that exist prior to experience and that make all experience, and thus knowledge, possible — by transforming them from timeless and universal to historical and dynamic. To Dilthey, these structures are a historically developed and ever changing psychic nexus that we are thrown into and inseparable from, that both make all experience possible but also grow and change and evolve with experience in ways both within and beyond our control. This nexus — which exists prior to, makes possible, and undermines, the subject/object abstraction that Descartes, and later Kant, rebuilt philosophy upon — is a web that in and through we experience and interpret life in all of its ambivalence, contingency, and finitude.
For Dilthey, our attunement to this existential condition (of ambivalence, contingency, and finitude) is fundamentally hermeneutical — i.e., interpretive. In response to our tragic limitations in the face of our finite existence, we are forever both grasping and overcoming its meaning, leading us into a hermeneutic circle that makes all meaning possible yet malleable. For whatever limits we set interpretively can always be expanded and changed.
Dilthey’s historicist radicalization of the a priori and the resulting illumination of human being as ambivalent, contingent, and finite, led the way for several of the most significant currents in 20th century philosophy, including existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.
Bravo, Jos. 🤯