Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

1. Foundation of the human sciences

Dilthey initially studied theology at Heidelberg and Berlin, but increasingly devoted his attention to history and philosophy. Before completing his dissertation on Schleiermacher’s ethics in 1864, he had already written a long prize-essay, ‘Das hermeneutische System Schleiermachers in der Auseinandersetzung mit der älteren protestantischen Hermeneutik’ (Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic, A System in Relation to Earlier Protestant Hermeneutics) (see Schleiermacher, F.D.E.). After teaching at Basel, Kiel and Breslau, Dilthey was appointed in 1882 to the chair in philosophy in Berlin that Hegel had once occupied. His more empirical approach to the understanding of history departs from Hegel in being radically multidisciplinary. Dilthey’s contributions to cultural and social history, to literary criticism and to the history of the human sciences in general found their philosophical grounding in a major, although unfinished, theoretical work, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences) (1883, 1982).

In 1883, Dilthey published the first of two projected volumes of this work. Book One of the Einleitung was devoted to an overview of the human sciences; Book Two to a history of the rise and fall of metaphysics in relation to the project of grounding the natural and human sciences. At the end of this history he maintains that both metaphysics and the modern natural sciences have established false models for the human sciences by constructing abstract intelligible worlds independent of lived experience. A new epistemology is needed which will show that the modern scientific conception of nature is a mere phenomenal abstraction from the more inclusive reality of life. Dilthey introduces the idea of a life-nexus (Zusammenhang des Lebens) as the original matrix of reality, not only for the human sciences, but also for the natural sciences. If the natural sciences find it useful to explain phenomena by means of elemental entities and universal mechanistic laws, this does not entail that they possess a more ultimate reality than the human sciences or that the latter should be constrained to drop the idea of purposiveness from their understanding of history and society.

Dilthey shows that in the past the human sciences were blinded by the success of natural science to adopt its mechanistic approach. Inspired by the ideas of Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume, a natural system of the human sciences was formed (see Hobbes, T. §2; Hume, D. §1; Spinoza, B.). A theoretical analysis of human nature was to establish ‘a few general psychic elements to explain the facts of human historical life’. These psychological elements and a finite number of non-teleological laws, like that of self-preservation, were supposed to explain the mysteries of life, the intricacies of human action, and the complexities of social interaction.

Even more problematic than the reductive character of this natural system of the human sciences is the fact that from the traditional epistemological perspective the separate foundations of the natural and the human sciences mark a division within theory alone. This has the unfortunate effect of relegating practical philosophy to a secondary concern. Dilthey disapproves of the abstract way in which a purely theoretical approach to the human sciences seeks the explanative basis for the value judgments and the imperatives that regulate the life of the individual and society. The proper foundation of the system of the sciences must be located in ‘self-reflection’ in contrast to ‘theory of knowledge’. Self-reflection based on our experience of life provides the foundation for action as well as for thought. This philosophical self-reflection renders theory and practice equiprimordial.

The real task of founding both the natural and the human sciences was left for the second volume of the Einleitung, but Dilthey did not publish it during his lifetime. He did, however, work out a large part of it, which first appeared in 1982 in Volume 19 of the Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Works). Dilthey examines the conditions of consciousness involved in our prescientific awareness of reality. He begins Book Four with a first principle, that of phenomenality, according to which everything real is accessible as a fact of consciousness without being reduced to a mere representation of consciousness. It is important to point out that Dilthey’s conception of phenomenality should be contrasted to phenomenalism, which reduces all reality to facts of consciousness (see Phenomenalism). Nor is it to be confused with the view that facts of consciousness are mere phenomena as distinct from external reality. Dilthey shows how the facts of our consciousness possess a primordial reality that already contains a reference to things beyond consciousness. When we become aware of something as a fact of consciousness we possess what Dilthey calls Innewerden or ‘reflexive awareness’. This reflexive awareness is pre-reflective and involves a felt self-givenness but no explicit sense of self. Innewerden is thus not to be equated with an objectifying self-consciousness, for it precedes any subject–object, act–content distinction. Reflexive awareness is proto-intentional in that it is oriented towards the world even if the world is not yet thematized as an external objective domain. It is this sense of being already a part of the world that is lost in the natural sciences, but must be preserved in the human sciences. Dilthey’s initial descriptions of the facts of consciousness constitute an empirical phenomenology and are at the level of prescientific Wissen or immediate knowledge.

Dilthey’s second principle, that of self-reflection, allows him to move to the level of scientific Erkenntnis or conceptual knowledge. In reflexive awareness we possess the felt reality of the facts of consciousness, but this does not entitle us to posit their reality conceptually. The move from the first level of prescientific reflexive awareness to conceptualization is one of explication, where the reflexive becomes reflective. The principle of self-reflection explicates the facts of consciousness into an overall nexus that encompasses all aspects of psychic life.

Within this framework of total consciousness, self-reflection then begins to differentiate between facts of self-consciousness and facts of the world. Facts that are perceived as existing in my consciousness are grasped as part of inner perception. Those facts that are independent of my self are considered facts of outer perception. But the distinction between self and world is not one that can be derived from the intellect alone. The reality of the external world is not an inference based on causal hypotheses, but is felt primarily through resistance to the practical impulses of the will.

Dilthey proceeds to show that a reflexive or felt awareness accompanying acts of will provides a crucial step in the process of differentiating self and world. Through the felt tension between efficacy of the will and resistance to it we learn to distinguish the reality of inner perception from outer perception. This dynamic relation to the external world is more fundamental than the static epistemological relation of a representation to an object. Whereas representational consciousness projects the world as a theoretical horizon for objects of natural science, reflexive awareness possesses the world as a temporal nexus in which I participate, but which is also full of things and persons actively resisting my will. A new, reflective epistemology of the human sciences must reclaim our original access to life and thus cannot be merely an extension of the epistemology of the natural sciences.

Book Five again does not restrict itself to the human sciences, but considers the logical conditions that determine all acts of representing reality. It provides Dilthey’s logic, not as a formal logic that abstracts from reality, but as an intermediary between the epistemological and methodological approaches to all the sciences that represent reality. Being representational, thought leaves behind the immediate certainty of reflexive awareness, but gains the capacity to apprehend truth. Thought is the attentive ‘positing of reality’ (das Wirkliche) not simply as that which momentarily resists, but as that which ‘realizes a constant effect’ (das Wirkende). Whereas perception posits as the real the shifting contents of what happens to be present, thought creates a nexus of representations that is in agreement with a system of reality that remains more or less constant.

The sixth and last book of the Einleitung begins with a general discussion of method and how it makes explicit the procedures for grasping reality inherent in the logical operations of thought. Dilthey distinguishes methods recurring in every domain of human knowledge from those peculiar to particular problems. The latter kind of method constitutes what Dilthey calls a higher logic which establishes ‘rules of procedure that arise when a particular set of real conditions is introduced’. Dilthey is still speaking of both natural and human sciences, for he claims that ‘aspects of mathematics, higher criticism, hermeneutics, jurisprudence [and] statistics belong to this higher logic’. It is only at the level of higher logic that we can begin to differentiate methodologically between the natural and the human sciences in specific ways.

The task of analysis and synthesis in the sciences is to simplify reality conceptually and to reorganize it in more systematic terms. Related to the process of analysis is the process of abstraction. The difference is that abstraction starts with a complex whole, ‘singles out one fact and disregards the others, whereas [analysis] seeks to apprehend the majority of the facts that make up the factors of a complex whole’. Abstraction can occur in both the natural and the human sciences, but applies especially to the former. To the extent that analysis moves from a whole to its parts without isolating them from this whole, it can be said to engender understanding in the human sciences.