Dilthey, Wilhelm
DILTHEY, WILHELM (1833–1911), German philosopher of history and intellectual historian. Dilthey was born in Biebrich am Rhein, where his father, a liberal Calvinist theologian, was court chaplain to the duke of Nassau. Following graduation at the head of his Gymnasium class in nearby Wiesbaden, he enrolled at Heidelberg in 1852 to study theology. After only a year, however, he left for Berlin and there began to concentrate on history and philosophy, studying with some of the greatest representatives of German historical scholarship: Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Jakob Grimm, August Boeckh, Franz Bopp, and Karl Ritter. In philosophy, his principal mentor was the Aristotelian F. A. Trendelenburg. Dilthey's interest in the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher also stems from this Berlin period. In 1860, his essay on Schleiermacher's hermeneutics was awarded two prizes by the Schleiermacher Society and was followed by a commission to complete an edition of Schleiermacher's correspondence and write his biography. Dilthey defended his doctoral dissertation on Schleiermacher's moral principles in 1864. In the same year he presented a monograph on the analysis of moral consciousness that served as his Habilitationsschrift, the thesis that qualified him for university teaching. After a brief period of teaching at Berlin, he was called to Basel in 1867, and then to Kiel in 1868.
In 1870, Dilthey published the initial volume of his Leben Schleiermachers (Life of Schleiermacher), the first of several ambitious projects that would remain unfinished. In 1871, he accepted a chair at Breslau, where his main efforts were devoted to the problem of the nature and methods of the human sciences. In 1883, he published the first part of his major philosophical work, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences). In 1883, Dilthey also returned to Berlin to succeed Hermann Lotze in the chair that had once been occupied by Hegel. Election to the Prussian Academy of the Sciences followed in 1897. In 1900, he gave up his seminars, and in 1907 he retired from teaching altogether in order to develop more systematically the philosophical ideas put forward in the Einleitung. Dilthey died while on a working holiday in the Austrian Tyrol in 1911.
Dilthey's research on Schleiermacher and his account of the process of understanding the activity of a religious thinker constituted an important component of his work on the theory and practice of intellectual history. Yet his major contribution to religious studies lies in his theory of the human studies and its implications for the scientific investigation of religion.
Dilthey's theory of the human studies may be understood as an attempt to establish the idea that these disciplines have a distinctive subject matter and method that differentiate them from the natural sciences. The difference in subject matter is not grounded in two different modes of being but is, rather, based on two different ways of experiencing the world. Each is empirical, and each has its own definitive scientific objectivity and validity. The distinctive subject matter of the natural sciences is the world as given in the abstractions of sense perception and structured by reference to causal laws. The distinctive subject matter of the human sciences is the world as the person actually experiences it: the historically constituted ensemble of meanings and values that are the objects of his practical projects and interests. Because the artifacts of this historical world are all expressions of the human spirit, or Geist, the human sciences are the Geisteswissenschaften, the disciplines that investigate expressions of the human spirit.
Verstehen, or understanding, the distinctive method of these disciplines, is a consequence of the attitude that defines their subject matter. Because the actions and artifacts that express the human spirit are meaningful entities, a kind of knowledge is possible in the human sciences that cannot be reduced to explanation, or knowledge of the nomological structure of natural phenomena. Verstehen identifies the meaningful content of expressions of the spirit and the structures in which they are implicated. Much of Dilthey's work in the philosophy of the human sciences was concerned with the elucidation of this process of understanding and its distinctive epistemological quality, which he called the hermeneutic circle. An interpretation of the Romantic movement, for example, presupposes prior knowledge of which persons, actions, and artifacts fall within it. However, the latter are identifiable only on the basis of a general criterion that defines the features of romanticism. Thus knowledge of the whole rests on knowledge of the parts, which in turn presupposes knowledge of the whole.
The main aim of Dilthey's philosophical work was to develop a critique of historical reason that would resolve the question of how knowledge in the human sciences is possible. Dilthey struggled with this enterprise for more than forty years in the attempt to identify a basic or foundational science for the human sciences. In his writings of the 1880s and the early 1890s, he seems to have envisaged a descriptive, analytical, and phenomenological psychology as this foundation. Beginning in 1895, however, he stressed hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, as the basis for a valid theory of knowledge on which the human sciences can be grounded. Nevertheless, in his last works Dilthey retained intact many of the psychological theses of his earlier writings; moreover, the hermeneutic doctrines of his later work are also present in his earlier writings. As a result, the relationship between psychology and hermeneutics in the development of Dilthey's thought remains one of the most controverted issues among scholars who have attempted to understand his project of a critique of historical reason.
Bibliography
The standard edition of Dilthey's works is the Gesammelte Schriften, 2d ed. (Stuttgart, 1957–), of which twenty-three volumes, prepared by various editors, have appeared. Also being published is a six-volume English edition of selected works by Dilthey. Under the general editorship of Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, five volumes have so far been issued. Major works on Dilthey in English include Makkreel's Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975), Michael Ermarth's Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), H. P. Rickman's Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies (Berkeley, 1979), and Theodore Plantinga's Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto, 1980). For extant English translations of Dilthey's works, see Plantinga's bibliography. Since 1983 there has also been a scholarly journal devoted to Dilthey's work, with some articles in English and current bibliography: Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen).
New Sources
Bambach, Charles R. Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca, 1995.
Makkreel, Rudolf A., and John Scanlon. Dilthey and Phenomenology. Washington, D.C., 1987.
Owensby, Jacob. Dilthey and the Narrative of History. Ithaca, 1994.
Rickman, H. P. Dilthey Today: A Critical Appraisal of the Contemporary Relevance of his Work. New York, 1988.
Tuttle, Howard N. The Dawn of Historical Reason: The Historicality of Human Existence in the Thought of Dilthey, Heidegger, and Ortega y Gasset. New York, 1994.
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