The Historicity of the A Priori
The contemporary analysis of human existence fills us all with a sense of fragility, with the power of dark instincts, with the suffering caused by mysteries and illusions, and with the finitude shown by all that is living, even where the highest creations of communal life arise from it.—Wilhelm Dilthey Browsing in a used bookstore in Berkeley, California around the time my close collaborator, George Atwood, and I had begun working on an ambitious project tentatively entitled ‘‘The Tragic and the Metaphysical,’’ I happened upon de Mul’s (2004) book, The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life—a chance encounter that proved to be highly relevant to our nascent project. This chance encounter and its relevance provide an example of what is perhaps the central theme in de Mul’s interpretation of Dilthey’s philosophy—the radical finitude and factical contingency of human life and of the philosophies that seek to comprehend it. In The Tragedy of Finitude, de Mul seeks to reconstruct Wilhelm Dilthey’s life project, his uncompleted Critique of Historical Reason, from texts appearing in his Collective Writings, published more than six decades after his death in 1911. In the process, de Mul both explicates centrally important though little-known aspects of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of human life and shows how these aspects presage later ideas in hermeneutic phenomenology, including especially those developed by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida. De Mul, in my view, succeeds admirably in his aim, and his book is a magnificent, invaluable piece of philosophical and historical scholarship.