抄録
This paper explores the political role of human sciences in a nation state by interpreting the thoughts of Wilhelm Dilthey, who is a founder of the philosophy of human sciences, and Watsuji Testuro, who is an exponent of ethics and cultural history in Japan and a follower of Dilthey’s hermeneutical philosophy. The works of Dilthey and Watsuji are sometimes criticized for trying to give their own nation state legitimacy. Such criticisms are not so much due to their ideological stands as to the characteristic of the hermeneutical human sciences. The hermeneutical human sciences rest on the premise that the external facts have internal meanings that people can interpret from them and with which they feel their own identities. These sciences are apt to play the role that religions have formerly played to states. Dilthey has constructed the German spirit from the words of poets and philosophers from the late 18th century to the early 19th century and has formed the conceptual arrangement of human sciences especially on the basis of the religious thought of Schleiermacher. Watsuji has written the history of thought on the reverence for the Emperor in Japan and has founded the ethics of human relationship. Historians and philosophers, who pursue human sciences, must be called to account their own political role because of their works that are needed to compensate nation states for their lack of legitimacy with hermeneutical meanings.
