Life’s Story

This chapter starts from Stein’s claim that Darwin was the key intellectual figure of her youth. In Darwin, Stein found an exciting open historical impulse. She also, however, critiqued the evolutionary framework for not thinking that through and constructing a closed narrative. The idea of the history of life as an open system that interested Stein was, however, part of a different discipline, the field of theoretical history. Via William James, with whom Stein had studied, the chapter shows the affinities between Stein’s early project and a hermeneutics of life, as developed by Wilhelm Dilthey. It situates Dilthey’s work in the context of the crisis of historicism and traces the links between that largely European debate and the American intellectual context in which Stein grew up and started writing.