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Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)

Dilthey argued that the study of human life needs a method of its own. The natural sciences explain: they subsume events under causal laws. The human sciences — history, philology, the study of art, religion, law, and society — do something different. They understand: they grasp meaning from the inside, reading the inner life of others through the expressions it leaves behind. Dilthey named this contrast Verstehen against Erklären, understanding against explanation, and made it the basis of an argument for the autonomy of the Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of spirit. His lifelong project was a “critique of historical reason” — an account, parallel to Kant’s critique of pure reason, of how knowledge of the historical world is possible. He stands as the figure who took Schleiermacher’s general art of understanding and made it the foundation of a whole class of disciplines, and as the immediate forerunner of twentieth-century hermeneutics.

Life

Born 19 November 1833 in Biebrich on the Rhine, the son of a Reformed pastor. He began in theology at Heidelberg, then moved to Berlin and turned to philosophy and history, taking his doctorate and habilitation there in 1864. He held chairs at Basel, Kiel, and Breslau before returning to Berlin in 1882 to take the chair of philosophy that had once been Hegel’s, succeeding Hermann Lotze. He remained in Berlin for the rest of his career. A long friendship and correspondence with Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, published only after both men were dead, became one of the documents through which his thought reached the next generation. He died on 1 October 1911 while on holiday at Seis am Schlern in the South Tyrol.

His was an immense, often unfinished output. Major works were left as first volumes without sequels, as essays, as drafts; the Gesammelte Schriften run to twenty-six volumes, much of it assembled by students from his manuscripts. The pattern is not incidental — Dilthey kept reopening foundations he had thought settled.

The human sciences and their method

Dilthey’s central claim is that the Geisteswissenschaften — the humanities and social sciences together — cannot be modelled on the natural sciences without losing their object. Nature is given to us from outside, as a set of appearances we connect by hypothesis into causal laws. Human life is given from inside, as something lived. To remake the study of history or society on the template of physics is to substitute an external, explanatory account for the understanding that the subject matter actually calls for.

He compressed the contrast into a formula: “Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir” — nature we explain, the life of the mind we understand. Erklären, explanation, works by intellect alone, subsuming the particular under general law. Verstehen, understanding, draws on the whole of the mind and grasps a meaning — it reaches the inner life of another not by inference to hidden causes but by interpreting its outward expressions.

Lived experience, expression, understanding. The unit Dilthey starts from is Erlebnis, lived experience — life as it is undergone before it is theorised. Lived experience comes to Ausdruck, expression, in everything human beings make and do: gestures, words, works, institutions, whole cultures are the deposits of inner life made outward. Verstehen is the movement back the other way — understanding the experience by reading its expressions. We do not have direct access to another mind; we have its expressions, and we understand the mind through them. This triad — experience, expression, understanding — is the circuit the human sciences move within.

The critique of historical reason. Dilthey described his project, extending Kant, as a Kritik der historischen Vernunft. Kant had asked how knowledge of nature is possible and found the conditions in the structure of the understanding. Dilthey asked the parallel question for history: how is knowledge of the human-historical world possible, given that the knower is himself a historical being, inside the very life he is trying to know? The question — how a historically conditioned mind can attain knowledge of the historical world — set the agenda for everything that followed and was never brought to a system.

From psychology to objective spirit

Dilthey’s first attempt to ground the human sciences ran through psychology. In Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894) he distinguished a descriptive psychology — which describes the connected whole of mental life as it is actually lived — from an explanatory psychology that builds the mind up hypothetically from elements on the natural-science model. The descriptive kind, he argued, could supply the foundation the human sciences needed. The proposal drew a long, sharp critique from the experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who held that Dilthey’s descriptive psychology still rested on hypotheses and that the gulf he claimed was overstated.

Partly in response, Dilthey’s later work shifted ground. From around 1900 — the essay The Rise of Hermeneutics marks the turn — he moved from individual psychology toward what he called objective spirit (objektiver Geist): meaning is not locked in private minds but laid down in the shared, objective structures of culture, language, law, art, and institutions. Understanding others is mediated by these common forms, not achieved by a leap into another’s interior. His most important book, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910), develops this later position — understanding as the grasp of meaning embedded in the objectifications of life.

Worldviews. Late in his life Dilthey turned to the recurrence of basic philosophical outlooks. Across the history of thought he found a small number of recurring Weltanschauungen — typically three: naturalism; the idealism of freedom; and objective idealism. Each is a coherent total stance, rooted in life rather than deduced, and the types are incommensurable: no one of them, and no metaphysics built on one, can claim more than relative validity. This typology pressed Dilthey hard against the problem he is often said to have bequeathed rather than solved — the threat that if every outlook is historically conditioned, knowledge of the historical world dissolves into relativism.

Reception

Dilthey gave hermeneutics its modern reach, and the philosophers who took up his work also turned against parts of it. Husserl, whom Dilthey admired, attacked worldview philosophy in Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) as a slide into historicism; Dilthey protested that he had been misread, the two corresponded in his final months, and Husserl later softened the charge. Heidegger engaged Dilthey and the Dilthey–Yorck correspondence directly in Being and Time (1927), taking over the notion of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) while recasting it. Gadamer built on Dilthey and criticised him in the same motion. Through these readings, and through Max Weber’s interpretive sociology and the wider currents of historicism, Dilthey became one of the decisive sources of twentieth-century thought about meaning and history.

Where Dilthey stops

Dilthey framed understanding as a problem of knowledge. His question was epistemological and methodological: how can the human sciences attain valid, objective knowledge of historical life, on a footing with the natural sciences but by their own means? Understanding, on this framing, is a method — the procedure proper to one family of disciplines — and the difficulty is to secure its objectivity against the fact that the knower is himself historically situated.

The step his successors took was to deny that understanding is a method at all. For Heidegger and Gadamer, understanding is not a procedure that a certain class of sciences employs but the way a human being exists — always already in a world, always already interpreting, before any science begins. On that view Dilthey remained inside the framework he was trying to ground: he sought the conditions of historical knowledge while still treating knowledge on the model the natural sciences had set, and his struggle with relativism is the symptom of that residue. Whether the human sciences need an epistemological foundation of the kind Dilthey sought, or whether the demand for one is itself the error, is the question his work hands forward unanswered.

Key works

See also: Hermeneutics · Schleiermacher · Heidegger · Gadamer