Abstract

Despite the usual genealogies of hermeneutics, Heidegger’s appropriation of Dilthey’s philosophy only deals marginally with hermeneutics. Nevertheless, this paper aims to shed light on elements in favour of an implicit continuity in hermeneutics from Dilthey to Heidegger. Against the general background of the conception of life as self-interpretation, which allows the ontological radicalisation of Dilthey’s hermeneutical concepts, some diltheyan historical and aesthetical paradigms prove to be at work in Heidegger’s first phenomenology of life. “Destruction” itself, the very core of Heidegger’s concept of hermeneutics, can be partially traced back to diltheyan sources.