Wilhelm Dilthey

Origins and education

Wilhelm Dilthey was born on 19 November 1833 in Biebrich am Rhein, in the Duchy of Nassau, now in the German state of Hesse. He was the son of a Reformed pastor and, out of loyalty to his father more than religious vocation, began by studying theology at Heidelberg University. His real interest, however, lay in history, philology and philosophy. He later recalled that his passion for philosophy began at the age of sixteen, when he read Immanuel Kant's Logic. At Heidelberg he first encountered neo-Kantianism through the lectures of Kuno Fischer, one of its precursors.

In 1853 he moved to Berlin, where he came into contact with leading figures of German historical scholarship and philology, among them Ranke, Ritter, Mommsen, Grimm and Boeckh. His teachers included Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Böckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He completed his studies in 1856 and had a brief period teaching in secondary schools before devoting himself fully to research.

Doctorate and early work

His early research concerned the history of the Church. It was then that he discovered the work of the theologian and philosopher Schleiermacher, which would shape the rest of his theoretical output. In 1864 he received his doctorate in Berlin with a Latin thesis on Schleiermacher's ethics and, the same year, his habilitation with a work on moral consciousness. In 1859 he had edited Schleiermacher's letters, and soon afterwards he was commissioned to write a biography of him; the first volume appeared in 1870 as Life of Schleiermacher. With this project Dilthey became one of the thinkers of the hermeneutic circle.

Academic career

His academic career advanced quickly. He was a Privatdozent in Berlin from 1865 and in 1866 was called to Basel to take up a chair. A year later he moved to Kiel, in 1871 to Breslau, and in 1882 he returned to Berlin to hold the prestigious chair in philosophy once occupied by Hegel, where he remained until his death. In 1874 he married Katherine Puttmann, and the couple had one son and two daughters.

Principal works

It was in Berlin that his best-known publications began to appear. In 1883 he published the first volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences, whose announced second part never appeared. In 1890 he published a study on the origin and legitimacy of our belief in the external world. In 1894 came Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology, which drew harsh criticism from experimental psychology. After this setback he published nothing for a long period. In 1905 The Youth of Hegel appeared, and in 1906 Experience and Poetry, a collection of studies on Lessing, Goethe, Novalis and Hölderlin that brought him fame and public attention. There followed The Essence of Philosophy (1907), The Structure of the Historical World (1910) and The Types of World-View and Their Development in Metaphysical Systems (1911). While on holiday at Seis in the Tyrol he died suddenly on 1 October 1911, leaving the second volume of his biography of Schleiermacher unfinished.

Hermeneutics and the human sciences

Dilthey took up the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, an author then largely forgotten and associated with German Romanticism. In the Romantic tradition, the interpreter combines understanding with knowledge of the cultural and historical context of a text in order to recover its original meaning. Dilthey never abandoned the aspiration to an objective and universally valid interpretation of texts, an ambition that was abandoned long after his death, above all after the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The process of interpretive inquiry founded by Schleiermacher received from Dilthey the name hermeneutic circle: the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole, whose meanings depend on one another.

The core of his thought is the distinction between the sciences. Dilthey rejected applying the model of the natural sciences to the humanities. Whereas the natural sciences explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, the human sciences, such as history, law, philology and religion, seek to understand the relation between parts and whole. For him, human study involves the interplay of personal experience, reflective understanding of that experience, and its expression in gesture, word and art. Every form of knowledge, in his view, must be analysed in the light of history, since without that perspective understanding can only be partial.

Psychology, sociology and worldviews

Dilthey distinguished explanatory psychology, which studies phenomena from outside and subordinates them to causality, from descriptive psychology, which attempts to show how mental processes converge within the structural nexus of consciousness. In his later work he called the latter structural psychology.

He was also interested in what would later be called sociology, though he objected to the label because it was associated with Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. He criticised their evolutionist assumptions, according to which society must necessarily move towards better forms, and their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. He did, however, value the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel, his colleague in Berlin.

Dilthey also developed a typology of three basic worldviews, regarded as typical in a sense comparable to Max Weber's ideal types: naturalism, which sees man as determined by nature; the idealism of freedom, which sees him separated from nature by his free will; and objective idealism, which understands him in harmony with nature. This classification influenced Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Steiner.

Reception and legacy

His work influenced the philosophy of life and the existentialist currents of the early twentieth century, alongside Nietzsche, Simmel and Bergson. His students included Bernard Groethuysen, Herman Nohl, Eduard Spranger and Georg Misch, and his thought also influenced Martin Buber. Heidegger built on his work to develop a hermeneutics of factical life, though he later distanced himself from Dilthey, calling for a more radical temporalisation. Gadamer, in Truth and Method (1960), criticised his hermeneutics as excessively aesthetic, subjective and method-oriented. Nevertheless, Dilthey is now regarded as one of the founders of modern hermeneutics and of understanding (Verstehen) as the method of the human sciences.