Research on Diltheys Hermeneutics of Life

Dilthey propounds human sciences in his critique of traditional metaphysics and natural sciences. The hermeneutics of life, the essential approach in the inquiry of human sciences, focuses on human life to construct the interrelations among lived experience, understanding, and expression. The idea that life is an organism is introduced based on the connection between the individual life and the universal life of general human beings. There are three hierarchical forms of manifestation of life: concepts, judgments, and larger thought-formations, actions, and the expression of lived experience. There is a proximity between the expression of lived experience and the nature of life, of which the expression of lived experience is the most significant manifestation of life in the human sciences. Lived experience has an immediacy that delivers direct and immediate access to reality, whereas understanding is indirect and requires further mediation. Understanding has two forms: the elementary and the higher. Based on the hermeneutics of life, Diltheys human sciences can be approached as a reply to the contemporary cultural crisis.