Wilhelm Dilthey
born Nov. 19, 1833, Biebrich, near Wiesbaden, Nassau
died Oct. 1, 1911, Seis am Schlern, near Bozen, South Tirol,
Austria-Hungary
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.
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.
Otto Friedrich Bollnow
