Metaphysics and the Hermeneutical Relevance of Worldviews

Philosophy has served multiple purposes over the ages. The most important one is to guide human ethical conduct and to reflect on the nature of the good. It also explores what we can know and how the sciences contribute to that. These efforts have often led philosophers to construct metaphysical systems that provide an overall way of conceiving reality. But metaphysics began to lose its power in the twentieth century because many of its synthetic claims remained speculative. Instead, philosophers embarked on a more analytical and language-oriented path in order to work on more focused epistemological, ethical, and social problems. These efforts to move away from a seemingly endless dialectical progression of metaphysical systems proved to be fruitful in many ways. But they did result in a kind of philosophizing that tends to ignore the larger questions about the meaning of life.

One philosopher who welcomed the decline of metaphysical systems insofar as they claimed to account for everything, but who also thought that it was worthwhile to analyze them for their relevance in providing a perspective on reality, was Wilhelm Dilthey. Thus he extracted a theory of worldviews that could give philosophy a new sociocultural function in reflecting on the overall meaning of life.¹ A worldview (Weltanschauung) in Dilthey’s sense would be meta-physically reflective but stop short of being reified into a metaphysical system. Worldviews would not claim to account for everything that is and legislate what should be but provide ways of understanding things in context and assessing the meaning of life. This, in effect, gives worldviews a hermeneutical function.

In this essay I will consider how philosophical hermeneutics can help to explicate worldviews and why it is important to attend to them, not only to make sense of our own life but also to understand others better. Hermeneutics is generally thought of as the theory of interpretation, and as such it has the clarification of meaning as its task. Interpretation deals, first of all, with verbal and textual forms of communication whose meaning is complex and not directly understood, and therefore requires indirect modes of understanding. But since understanding can apply to what happens in the world and in our sociohistorical interactions as well, interpretation can encompass more than linguistic exegesis. Hermeneutics can be about both the textual ways in which humans communicate and the contextual situations that define human interaction.

Hermeneutics was originally a religious discipline concerned with the interpretation of authoritative messages to be found in oracles, mysterious omens, and biblical texts. These messages from on high, whether conveyed by Hermes to the Greeks or by the Catholic Church to the Western nations more generally, were assumed to assign an ultimate meaning to human existence. With the Renaissance and the strides of the sciences, more critical tools were introduced into hermeneutics by humanistic scholars and philologists. These advances led the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher to expand hermeneutics so that it could explicate both secular and religious texts.

With the rise of historical consciousness in the nineteenth century, interpretation was generalized to take into account all kinds of human manifestations, deeds, and works to determine how they fit into and contribute to their times. This led to the formation of new disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, political economy, and sociology, and raised the general question to what extent their methods should be modeled on those of the natural sciences. Dilthey related these new sociocultural sciences to the traditional humanities and called them all Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences. In his Introduction to the Human Sciences,² published in 1883, Dilthey claimed that whereas the natural sciences were mostly modeled on mechanistic physics and aimed at finding the general laws that could provide the linear causal explanations of natural occurrences, the human sciences are more about understanding how different social and cultural forces converge on historical events. The task of interpretation then becomes that of properly contextualizing human interactions. Dilthey did not rule out the possibility of causal explanations in the human sciences, but they would be based on laws that have a more limited scope than...