As Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 150) explains, Dilthey like every other theorist of historical hermeneutics is haunted by the Hegelian ghost he tries to escape. For Dilthey, the problem is to prove the coherence and unity of history. He points to experience: We don’t experience atoms of life but life as a coherent flow. Problem is, it is hard to see how that works at a macro-level: We don’t experience history-in-general at all, much less as a coherent unity.

To make his anti-Hegelian historicism work, Dilthey leans back to Hegel: “To explain the possibility of understanding the larger wholes that no historical individual can understand, Dilthey is forced to posit a ‘logical’ subject of experience instead of actual individual subjects.” That puts him back in “speculative idealism,” but Weinsheimer doesn’t think he ever really left: “the foundation of his historical theory is the identity of subject and object [the historian who studies history is himself historical], which is the premise of idealism.”

Does every notion of a historical “whole” require a transcendent “logical subject”? Do we have here a historicist proof for the existence of God?