For the Romantics, hermeneutics is not unlike dating (they are Romantic, after all). You listen to your date chat about all sorts of topics, not because you’re interested in knowing about them, but rather because you want to get to know the person sitting across the table from you. You’re aiming to get a sense of who this person is, and whether they’re worthy of date #2, based on what this person says.
Dilthey argued that if you could get the methodology right, you could come to a pretty good understanding of the mental life of an author. This methodological understanding would give human sciences like literary criticism or history true legitimacy! Imagine the humanities being prove-able to a degree comparable with what we associate with things like biology or chemistry. Why not?
Well, it’s harder than it sounds. It would mean skirting the whole “objectivity” thing—for Dilthey, it’s not enough to say that a historical account is factual, as if history were merely the statement of what happened. History always involves the interpretation of facts.
Why do you think Dilthey and the gang were so intent on giving the human sciences a good name? Would it have been so awful if, say, historical interpretation didn’t have rules upon which historians generally agreed?