Dilthey and Heidegger

“Dilthey plays a massive, massive role in Heidegger, even if he doesn’t always name him (Heidegger got stingier and stingier with references as time went on). To simplify, much of what Heidegger is doing in the first decade of his work (1918-1928) is an attempt to carry out Diltheys program of a hermeneutics of life while overcoming the limitations imposed on Dilthey by the positivistic psychology of his time. Dilthey argued that the Geisteswissenschaften need to be based in a psychology of the historical subject. Heidegger, for his part, corrects Diltheys approach by replacing his conception of psychology with a phenomenology of historical existence derived from Husserl and Aristotle. Husserl contributes his analyses on intentionality, which, negatively speaking, allows Heidegger to overcome the sealed off sense data psychology of the 19th century. As for what a corrected phenomenology up to the ask of clarifying historical existence would look like positively, Heidegger turns towards Aristotle, whom he interprets as an ur-phenomenologist showing us what phenomenology beyond the Cartesian metaphysics of the subject would look like.

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As for reading recommendations, I have two brilliant books in English on the Dilthey-Heidegger complex. The first is Charles Bambachs book on the crisis of historicism and how Heidegger is the outgrowth of that [Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism]. If this book didn’t exist, someone would have to write it. The second is Heidegger Becoming Phenomenological [by Robert C. Scharff], which is exactly on this subject. Both are extremely useful.

As for Heidegger’s own texts, the locus classicus for this connection is GA64. This is the “Dilthey Draft” of Being and Time, as Gadamer puts it. A shorter and more mature text is this essay by Heidegger [“Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der gegenwartige Kampf um eine historische Weltanschauung”] in which he explains exactly how he reads Dilthey and what he got from him. It should be in GA80.1 or 80.2, if it has been translated. If you read only one thing, make it this.

Finally, there are several brilliant books on this subject in German, chief of them Landgrebes dissertation and Misch’ book on phenomenology and life philosophy.”