Breaking Up With Hegel Summary

We have metaphorically entitled the second section (II) Breaking-up with Hegel. As we already said, the separation dates back in the years the German philosopher taught at the University of Berlin, being caused, besides the rational confrontation of ideas, by vanity disputes. Under the title Historism and Hermeneutics without Speculative Thinking, we resumed the confrontations carried against the absolute idealism by Schleiermacher, Leopold von Ranke and Wilhelm Dilthey.
They are followed by another series initiated during the famous Conflict of Methods (Methodenstreit). The Neo-Kantian School from Baden had a substantial role in the development of the sciences of spirit, providing for them a critical orientation centred on the very possibility

The proposed alternative, meant to replace Hegel’s dialectics, was the logic-axiological theory of knowledge. Hermann Lotze set forth the idea of comprehending the world by the instrumentality of values. He conceived his axiology based on the generic form of aesthetic judgments and on the paradigmatic value of beauty. Moreover, he vehemently rejected the idea of the system and refused to make use of the speculative reason, which he considered to be an artificial construct.
Yet, the impact of his philosophy was narrower than he hoped. The next generation borrowed from him only the generic concept of value, completely renouncing to its aesthetic components. We discussed, in the fourth chapter (Objectivity in the Sciences of Spirit), the way Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert and Max Weber chose to develop this new intellectual direction. Yet, we should not neglect that the interpretations these

Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the last chapter of this section. The connection the German philosopher makes between the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the speculative dialectic is essential for the contemporaneous development of the sciences of culture. Philosophical hermeneutics aims the act of comprehension. Yet, Gadamer has explained from the outset that we cannot achieve this goal by making use of some mechanical procedures borrowed from the outside. The conjunction from the title Truth and Method, if Method designates the process of technical objectification, rather suggest the expression Truth without Method. Removed from the epistemic influence, the meaning of the concept of truth also changes. Truth without Method no longer signifies truth-correspondence (adaequatio rei et intellectus) without method, but something entirely different. The path which the subject crossed in its attempt to comprehend the hermeneutic phenomenon is that of experience. Its ontological-speculative structures exclude the arbitrariness of interpretation. Let us think about the “circle of understanding” or about the double question which guides the comprehension (the question asked by the subject (the motivation of understanding) and the interrogation which made the object to be brought into existence). We defined, in the first part, the notion of hermeneutic equilibrium and employed it in order to explain the fact that our