Briefwechsel, Band I: 1852–1882 (review)

Wilhelm Dilthey lived a long life. He was born in 1833, and he died in 1911, a few weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday. The publication of his Gesammelte Schriften, however, which began in 1914 and was only completed in 2006, has taken even longer than Dilthey’s own long life. Three volumes of selected correspondence are scheduled to appear as an appendix to his collected writings. The volume under review here is the first of these. Just under half of the letters reprinted here were published decades ago, though in relatively inaccessible places; others were collected by Dilthey’s student and son-in-law, Georg Misch; and the remainder have been laboriously culled from the papers of Dilthey’s diverse correspondents by the editors, who also did yeoman’s labor in tracking down virtually all of the people and places whose identities are crucial to the readability of the letters collected here.

The volume begins with Dilthey’s years as a student in Heidelberg and Berlin and then follows him through his brief stint as a Gymnasium instructor, his early studies of medieval philosophy, his editorial labors on Schleiermacher’s correspondence, the composition of his prize-winning essay on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics (1859–1860), the agonizing and drawn-out composition of the first volume of his Leben Schleiermachers, and his first professorial appointments in Basel, Kiel, and Breslau. It concludes in 1882 with the completion of the first volume of the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften and Dilthey’s appointment to a chair in Berlin.

First of all, the volume offers important insights into the development of Dilthey’s distinctive historical-critical approach to the study of religion and philosophy. For example, in an 1856 letter to his younger brother, who was contemplating following Dilthey into the theological faculty, Dilthey explained that reflection on the truth of Christianity could only be productive when it was based on the specialized, empirical investigation of a particular domain of experience, and he warned his brother that “the investigation of the fortunes suffered by this eternal truth, and its conceptual formulation according to the needs of the age—for this is the business of theology—does not penetrate more deeply into this truth than do other scientific undertakings” such as philology, history, or the natural sciences (55). Ultimately, Dilthey decided to pursue his Habilitation in the philosophical, rather than the theological, faculty (206).

Dilthey never was a mandarin of the kind described by Fritz Ringer. His correspondence from the late 1850s on documents his engagement on behalf of the liberal cause. In 1862, Rudolf Haym offered Dilthey the opportunity to take over as editor of the Preußische Jahrbücher, the leading liberal publication of the day (258, 278, 281). Dilthey ultimately declined the offer. However, he supported the monarchy and Prussia’s military calling in the Germanies, and his political views became increasingly close to those of his friend Heinrich von Treitschke (347, 359–63, 561).

Dilthey’s scholarly trajectory during the 1860s provides a perfect example of how not to pursue an academic career. Dilthey had originally hoped to publish his ideas on Schleiermacher in the form of a lengthy introduction to Schleiermacher’s correspondence. However, Dilthey’s interpretive differences with the guardians of Schleiermacher’s legacy left him holding both the short end of the stick and a thick manuscript that became the basis of his Leben Schleiermachers (189ff., 226ff.). For the remainder of the decade, Dilthey was constantly sending sections of the book to his publisher, revising them, and then withdrawing them while he recast the parts yet to come. It is hard to know whom to pity more—Dilthey or his publisher! But behind this stop-and-go scholarship, Dilthey’s understanding of his own methodology was beginning to crystallize (526, 555). The problem was that, as Dilthey’s archival and theoretical research progressed, the project became bigger and bigger; he became...