Wilhelm Dilthey (; ; 19 November 1833 – 1 October 1911) was a German philosopher who held Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher working in the emerging modern research university, Dilthey aimed to establish the methodological foundations of the human sciences, including history, hermeneutics, and nascent psychology, in relation to the natural sciences.
Dilthey's account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential is drawn from the traditions of German philosophy and literature, and differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions. But he emphasized experience and historical evidence, and has sometimes been styled an empiricistHans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey, Pioneer of the Human Studies, University of California Press, 1979, p. 53. by contrast to then prevailing idealism.
Life
Dilthey was born in 1833 as the son of a Reformed pastor in the village of Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, now in Hesse, Germany. As a young man he followed family traditions by studying theology at Heidelberg University, where his teachers included the young Kuno Fischer. He then moved to the University of Berlin and was taught by, amongst others, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Böckh, both former pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In January 1864,Iris Därmann, Fremde Monde der Vernunft: die ethnologische Provokation der Philosophie, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005, p. 285. he received his doctorate from Berlin with a thesis in Latin on Schleiermacher's ethics, and in June of the same year he also earned his habilitation with a thesis on moral consciousness. He became a Privatdozent at Berlin in 1865.
In 1859, he edited Schleiermacher's letters and soon after he was also commissioned to write a biography—the first volume of which was eventually published in 1870. In 1867 he took up a professorship at the University of Basel, but later—in 1882—he returned to Berlin where he held the prestigious chair in philosophy at the university.
In 1874, he married Katherine Puttmann, and the couple had one son and two daughters.
He died in 1911.Makkreel, Rudolf, "Wilhelm Dilthey", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
Work
Hermeneutics Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to German Romanticism.Ramberg, Bjørn and Gjesdal, Kristin, "Hermeneutics," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Schleiermacher was strongly influenced by German Romanticism which led him to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by Droysen and Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. He argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' (erklären) must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the humanities—a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career.
The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters—a "living" rather than a Cartesian dualism or "theoretical" subject—use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' (), which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts. However, Dilthey remains distinct from other German Romantics and life philosophers through his emphasis on "historicality." Dilthey understood man as a historical being. However, history is not described in terms of an object of the past, but "a series of world views."Palmer, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. p. 117. Man cannot understand himself through reflection or introspection, but only through what "history can tell him…never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being." Dilthey wants to emphasize the "intrinsic temporality of all understanding," that man's understanding is dependent on past worldviews, interpretations, and a shared world.Palmer, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. pp. 117–118.
The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called the hermeneutic circle—the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. Schleiermacher saw the approaches to interpreting sacred scriptures (for example, the Pauline epistles) and Classical texts (e.g. Plato's philosophy) as more specific forms of what he proposed as "general hermeneutics" (allgemeine Hermeneutik). Schleiermacher approached hermeneutics as the "art of understanding" and recognized both the importance of language, and the thoughts of an author, to interpreting a text.Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. "The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures," New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Literary Hermeneutics (Autumn, 1978), 1–2.
Dilthey saw understanding as the key for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences. The natural sciences observe and explain nature, but the humanities understand human expressions of life.Palmer, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. p. 105. So long as a science is "accessible to us through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life, expression, and understanding", Dilthey considered it a part of the human sciences.Palmer, Richard (1969). Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. p. 107.
Along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Henri Bergson, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie and Existenzphilosophie. Dilthey's students included Bernard Groethuysen, Hans Lipps, Herman Nohl, Theodor Litt, Eduard Spranger, Georg Misch and Erich Rothacker. Dilthey's philosophy also influenced the religious philosopher Martin Buber.Martin Buber at http://dibb.de ."Martin Buber (1878—1965) ." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 20 October 2015.
Dilthey's works informed the early Martin Heidegger's approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life," and in Being and Time (1927). But Heidegger grew increasingly critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence.
In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method, 1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
Psychology Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his work Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894),Full text online on gleichsatz.de. he introduced a distinction between explanatory psychology (erklärende Psychologie; also explanative psychology) and descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie; also analytic psychology, zergliedernde Psychologie): in his terminology, explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality, while descriptive psychology is a discipline that attempts to explicate how different mental processes converge in the "structural nexus of consciousness."
The distinction is based on the more general distinction between explanatory/explanative sciences (erklärende Wissenschaften), on the one hand, and interpretive sciences (beschreibende Wissenschaften or verstehende Wissenschaften, that is, the sciences which are based on the Verstehen method), on the other—see below.
In his later work (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910), he used the alternative term structural psychology (Strukturpsychologie) for descriptive psychology.W. Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 16–7 and 38–9; Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 290.
Sociology Dilthey was also interested in what some would call sociology in the 21st century, although he strongly objected to being labelled as such, as the sociology of his time was mainly that of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. He objected to their dialectical/evolutionist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Comte's idea of positivism was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. Dilthey did however have good things to say about the neo-Kantian sociology of Georg Simmel, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin.See Addenda to Vol. I of the Gesammelte Schriften in Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences trans. Ramon J. Betanoz, 'Appendix: Supplementary Material from the Manuscripts', 1988, pp. 3314–. Simmel himself was later an associate of Max Weber, the primary founder of sociological antipositivism. J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of nonpositivist verstehende sociology and the Verstehen method.
Distinction between natural sciences and human sciences A lifelong concern was to establish a proper theoretical and methodological foundation for the "human sciences" (e.g. history, law, literary criticism), distinct from, but equally "scientific" as, the "natural sciences" (e.g. physics, chemistry). He suggested that all human experience divides naturally into two parts: that of the surrounding natural world, in which "objective necessity" rules, and that of inner experience, characterized by "sovereignty of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject everything to thinking and to resist everything within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person".W. Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1972, p. 6.
Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand (verstehen) in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by German sociologist Max Weber. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension (Verstehen) could, he asserted, be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century.