Diltheyan hermeneutics of the socio-historical world
Dilthey sought to distinguish the uniqueness of the socio-historical world and of its accumulated knowledge in relation to the methodology of natural sciences. If, in the life of an individual, the interweaving of the various dimensions of our world justifies the attention devoted to the study of biography, Dilthey maintains that our conscious understanding of an individual or collective subject is contingent on the ways in which we acknowledge this subject to have evolved over time. For him, the substance of every individual is essentially socio-historical, and it is with this backdrop that the thesis according to which the foundation of the humanities and social sciences is intrinsically “psychological” must be understood. Insofar as the phenomena of the socio-historical world are meaningful and that these meanings are the expression of the power relationships between and among individuals, it follows that the recognition of these relationships in the humanities and social sciences is a matter of hermeneutics.