Dilthey Wilhelm (1833–1911), German philosopher and historian whose main project was to establish the conditions of historical knowledge, much as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had for our knowledge of nature. He studied theology, history, and philosophy at Heidelberg and Berlin and in 1882 accepted the chair earlier held by Hegel at the University of Berlin.
Dilthey’s first attempt at a critique of historical reason is found in the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), the last in the Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910). He is also a recognized contributor to hermeneutics, literary criticism, and worldview theory. His Life of Schleiermacher and essays on the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Hegel are model works of Geistesgeschichte, in which philosophical ideas are analyzed in relation to their social and cultural milieu. Dilthey holds that life is the ultimate nexus of reality behind which we cannot go. Life is viewed, not primarily in biological terms as in Nietzsche and Bergson, but as the historical totality of human experience. The basic categories whereby we reflect on life provide the background for the epistemological categories of the sciences. According to Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and suffering is rooted in prescientific experience, which is then explicated as the category of efficacy or influence (Wirkung) in the human sciences and as the category of cause (Ursache) in the natural sciences. Our understanding of influence in the human sciences is less removed from the full reality of life than are the causal explanations arrived at in the natural sciences. To this extent the human sciences can claim a priority over the natural sciences. Whereas we have direct access to the real elements of the historical world (psychophysical human beings), the elements of the natural world are merely hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural sciences deal with outer experiences, while the human sciences are based on inner experience. Inner experience is reflexive and implicitly self-aware, but need not be introspective or explicitly self-conscious. In fact, we often have inner experiences of the same objects that outer experience is about. An outer experience of an object focuses on its physical properties; an inner experience of it on our felt responses to it. A lived experience (Erlebnis) of it includes both. The distinction between the natural and the human sciences is also related to the methodological difference between explanation and understanding. The natural sciences seek causal explanations of nature – connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalizations. The human sciences aim at an understanding (Verstehen) that articulates the typical structures of life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that Husserl recognized as anticipating phenomenological psychology. In Ideas (1894) Dilthey argued that descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later hermeneutical writings, which influenced Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he rejected the possibility of a foundational discipline or method. In the Formation, he asserted that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the ‘objectifications of life,’ the external expressions of human experience and activity. The understanding of others is mediated by these common objectifications and not immediately available through empathy (Einfühlung). Moreover, to fully understand myself I must interpret the expressions of my life just as I interpret the expressions of others.
Whereas the natural sciences aim at ever broader generalizations, the human sciences place equal weight on understanding individuality and universality. Dilthey regarded individuals as points of intersection of the social and cultural systems in which they participate. Any psychological contribution to understanding human life must be integrated into this more public framework. Although universal laws of history are rejected, particular human sciences can establish uniformities limited to specific social and cultural systems.
In a set of sketches (1911) supplementing the Formation, Dilthey further developed the categories of life in relation to the human sciences. After analyzing formal categories such as the part–whole relation shared by all the sciences, he distinguished the real categories of the human sciences from those of the natural sciences. The most important human science categories are value, purpose, and meaning, but they by no means exhaust the concepts needed to reflect on the ultimate sense of our existence. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in a worldview (Weltanschauung), such as the worldviews developed in religion, art, and philosophy. A worldview constitutes an overall perspective on life that sums up what we know about the world, how we evaluate it emotionally, and how we respond to it volitionally. Since Dilthey distinguished three exclusive and recurrent types of worldview naturalism (e.g., Democritus, Hume), the idealism of freedom (e.g., Socrates, Kant), and objective idealism (e.g., Parmenides, Hegel) – he is often regarded as a relativist. But Dilthey thought that both the natural and the human sciences could in their separate ways attain objective truth through a proper sense of method. Metaphysical formulations of worldviews are relative only because they attempt an impossible synthesis of all truth. See also EINFÜHLUNG , ERLEBNIS , HEGEL , HERMENEUTICS , NIETZSCHE , PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. R.A.M.