Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (born Nov. 19, 1833, Biebrich, near Wiesbaden, Nassau—died Oct. 1, 1911, Seis am Schlern, near Bozen, South Tirol, Austria-Hungary) was a German philosopher who made important contributions to a methodology of the humanities and other human sciences. He objected to the pervasive influence of the natural sciences and developed a philosophy of life that perceived man in his historical contingency and changeability. Dilthey established a comprehensive treatment of history from the cultural viewpoint that has been of great consequence, particularly to the study of literature.

Dilthey was the son of a Reformed Church theologian. After he finished grammar school in Wiesbaden, he began to study theology, first at Heidelberg, then at Berlin, where he soon transferred to philosophy. After completing exams in theology and philosophy, he taught for some time at secondary schools in Berlin but soon abandoned this to dedicate himself fully to scholarly endeavours.

During these years he was bursting with energy, and his investigations led him into diverse directions. In addition to extensive studies on the history of early Christianity and on the history of philosophy and literature, he had a strong interest in music, and he was eager to absorb everything that was being discovered in the unfolding empirical sciences of man: sociology and ethnology, psychology and physiology. Hundreds of reviews and essays testify to an almost inexhaustible productivity.

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In 1864 he took his doctorate at Berlin and obtained the right to lecture. He was appointed to a chair at the University of Basel in 1866; appointments to Kiel, in 1868, and Breslau, in 1871, followed. In 1882 he succeeded R.H. Lotze at the University of Berlin, where he spent the remainder of his life.

During these years Dilthey led the quiet life of a scholar, devoid of great external excitement and in total dedication to his work. He searched for the philosophical foundation of what he first and rather vaguely summarized as the “sciences of man, of society, and the state,” which he later called Geisteswissenschaften (“human sciences”)—a term that eventually gained general recognition to collectively denote the fields of history, philosophy, religion, psychology, art, literature, law, politics, and economics. In 1883, as a result of these studies, the first volume of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (“Introduction to Human Sciences”) appeared. The second volume, on which he worked continually, never did appear. This introductory work yielded a series of important essays; one of these—his “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894; “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology”)—instigated the formation of a cognitive (Verstehen), or structural, psychology. During the last years of his life, Dilthey resumed this work on a new level in his treatise Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910; “The Structure of the Historical World in the Human Sciences”), which was also left unfinished.

Opposed to the trend in the historical and social sciences to approximate the methodological ideal of the natural sciences, Dilthey tried to establish the humanities as interpretative sciences in their own right. In the course of this work he broke new philosophical ground by his study of the relations between personal experience, its realization in creative expression, and the reflective understanding of this experience; the interdependence of self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons; and, finally, the logical development from these to the understanding of social groups and historical processes. The subject matter of the historical and social sciences is the human mind, not as it is enjoyed in immediate experience nor as it is analyzed in psychological theory, but as it manifests or “objectifies” itself in languages and literatures, actions, and institutions. Dilthey emphasized that the essence of human beings cannot be grasped by introspection but only from a knowledge of all of history; this understanding, however, can never be final because history itself never is: “The prototype ‘man’ disintegrates during the process of history.” For this reason, his philosophical works were closely connected to his historical studies. From these works later arose the encompassing scheme of his Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (“Studies Concerning the History of the German Mind”); the notes for this work make up a complete coherent manuscript, but only parts have been published.

Dilthey held that historical consciousness—i.e., the consciousness of the historical relativity of all ideas, attitudes, and institutions—is the most characteristic and challenging fact in the intellectual life of the modern world. It shakes all belief in absolute principles, but it thereby sets people free to understand and appreciate all the diverse possibilities of human experience. Dilthey did not have the ability for definitive formulation; he was suspicious of rationally constructed systems and preferred to leave questions unsettled, realizing that they involved complexity. For a long time, therefore, he was regarded primarily as a sensitive cultural historian who lacked the power of systematic thought. Only posthumously, through the editorial and interpretative work of his disciples, did the significance of the methodology of his historical philosophy of life emerge.

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