Wilhelm Dilthey: A Hermeneutic Approach to the Study of History and Culture (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 257 cart~sien qui s'inspire du mod/Ae math6matique. Mais si la rh~torique est l'outil par excellence de la raison pratique, elle doit utiliser tout l'arsenal argumentatif, et ne pas se limiter ~ la m6taphore et aux figures. Car si le pn~te peut se contenter de faire voir, le philosophe, lui, cherche ~ faire pr6valoir sa vision sur toutes celles auxquelles il s'oppose. Le recours au mythe et h l'image ne peut lui suffire. Si la critique du rationalisme abstrait, telle qu'elle est enterprise par les humanistes italiens et surtout par Vico, ne peut laisser personne indiff6rent, il faut la compl6ter en fournissant au philosophe une m6thode capable de guider les hommes. C'est uniquement en associant rhOtorique et dialectique, et pas en les opposant l'une l'autre, que l'on disposera d'une techniques efficace, la rh~torique 61argie, ~. la lois cr~atrice et critique, instrument indispensable ~ la raison pratique. CH. PERELMAN Universit~ de Bruxelles. Ilse N. Bulhof. Wilhelm Dilthey: A Hermeneutic Approach to the Study of History and Culture. Volume 2 in the "Martinus Nijhoff Philosophy Library." The Hague, Boston and London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 198o. Pp. x + 233. $37.oo. Wilhelm Dihhey's writings have struck many commentators as a smorgasbord offering delicacies to appeal to every kind of palate. In the concluding sentence of this book Ilse Bulhof uses a slightly different metaphor: she talks about "the winding alleys of Dilthey's maze" (p. 197). A little earlier she writes: "Dilthey's mind was like a garden in which he cultivated side by side all kinds of ideas. This absence of a will strong enough to create order out of chaos give his thought, however, the character of a maze" (p. 195 ). Bulhof makes her own selection and does some evaluating as she leads us through Dilthey's "garden": "... Dilthey's insight, however gropingly fbrmulated, that reality discloses itself like a text, is the most promising aspect of his thought..." (p. '~). She spells out this notion as follows: "Reality is not a mute object, but an autonomous source of meaning, an act of self-disclosure; knowledge of reality is therefore not the product of actions performed by an active subject upon a passive object, but a communicative interaction between two subjects. What is known--reality at large or an aspect of it--is never a world out there, existing independently from the observer; reality speaks to us and gives itself to our understanding" (p. 1). This broad approach to epistemology is later contradicted and narrowed down in the book. It turns out that the "text" is the "cultural world" or the "human world"-and not reality as such (see pp. 59, 65)- As Bulhof later observes (interpreting Dilthey correctly this time), "natural life histories are meaningless" (p. i 18). The "hermeneutic approach" is not, after all, extended to nature. Bulhof's unevenness on this point is further reflected in her discussion of Dilthey's conception of objectivity. Early in the book we read that Dilthey "modeled his conception of objectivity after that of the natural sciences" (p. 9) and that he "... attempted to defeat historicism by devising a study of the mind-created human 258 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY world that was as empirical and as objective as natural science" (p. 7). Later we are told that Dilthey realized "the impossibility of objective historical knowledge" (p. 53)For more on the objectivity issue as dealt with by Bulhof, see pp. 3o, 32, 53-4, 67-8, 7o-2, 75-8, lo8- 9, 118-22, 124, and 144-6. (For some strange reason, the key concept of objectivity is not included in the book's index.) Because Bulhof holds out for a stronger conception of objectivity than Dihhey's writings seem to me to allow, she misses his irrationalism. We read that he "... could not live with the thought that everything in the world is not destined to be known and mastered by reason" (p. xxo). She does refer to the "riddle" or enigma with which we are confronted in experience, according to Dilthey, but she argues that "... the origin of the riddle is in us--in our finiteness...