This article uses Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutic theory of worldviews to decode post-humanist anthropologies and interspecies ethnographies as returns to Lebensphilosophie that express a romantic longing for re-union of nature and culture, matter and mind, humans, animals and sprits. The article proposes to actualize cultural hermeneutics in a reverse anthropology of the present along two lines: First, it considers Philippe Descola’s structuralist anthropology as a critique of Western naturalism that points to other worldviews beyond science and, secondly, it submits some of the tropes of Marxism (fetishism, reification) to a critique that shows how it remains indebted to modern conceptions of the human, the animal and the thing. The article concludes with an invocation of humanism and calls for an enlarged anthropocentrism in the age of the Anthropocene