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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
It is generally agreed by historians of modern thought that, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, philosophers in the German-speaking world identified and defined a type or species of knowledge whose peculiar independent status had hitherto been largely overlooked. It was developed, clarified, and, with a sharpened awareness of its unique possibilities, made to work in practice above all by Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert and their numerous followers; and, to a degree, also by Max Weber. The general name by which it was, and is, most often referred to is ‘Verstehen’—understanding. It has to be admitted that it was from the first, and remains to this day, a highly problematic and hotly disputed concept. Positivists, materialists, behaviourists and monists of all kinds—all those whose ideal is a single structure of organized systematic knowledge—have tended to view it with deep suspicion, and even to deny its existence altogether, claiming that it is wholly illusory and doomed to disappear before the inevitable advance of positive scientific method. However that may be, it will not be my purpose in this paper to enter into these difficult controversies. It may indeed be that no watertight definition of it is possible; that its putative boundaries with other forms or types of knowledge are vague and shifting; and even that there is no ultimate discontinuity in principle between it and the knowledge we gain from other spheres of research and investigation.
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3 The term is Isaiah Berlin's, ‘Vico's Concept of Knowledge’, Against the Current (London: Hogarth Press, 1979), p. 116Google Scholar.
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5 Ibid. Vol. VIII, p. 96.
6 Haym, Rudolf, Herder (Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1954), Vol. II, p. 876.Google Scholar
7 Ibid. Vol. V, p. 503.
8 Ibid. Vol. V, p. 503.
9 Ibid. Vol. X, p. 14.
10 These terms abound throughout his writings.Google Scholar
11 Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder (London and New York: Hogarth Press, 1976), pp. 195–196.Google Scholar
12 In presenting Schleiermacher's views on this topic to an English audience, I have drawn heavily on Dilthey and the work of later German scholars, but quite especially on a most illuminating article by Grab, Wilhelm, ‘Die unendliche Aufgabe des Verstehens’, in Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Lange, D. (Gottingen, 1985) pp. 47–71Google Scholar, to which I am deeply indebted because it opened my eyes to the importance of Schleiermacher. My own contribution is little more than a paraphrase and an extended gloss on this fine essay.
I wish to thank the author for his kind permission to make use of his work in this way.
13 Dilthey, Wilhelm, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V (Leipzig and Berlin, 1921), pp. 317–338.Google Scholar
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23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid. It is altogether too fanciful to detect here, in Schleiermacher's vigilant attention to the connective links in even the most causal everyday processes of human thought, a remote anticipation of a tendency which later came to full flower in Freud?
26 Ibid. p. 131.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid. p. 140.
29 Ibid. p. 132.
