Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911)

Wilhelm Dilthey saw his work as contributing to a ‘Critique of Historical Reason’, which would expand the scope of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by offering philosophical guidelines for the human sciences as well as the natural sciences. Both kinds of science take their departure from how we experience reality, but whereas the natural sciences seek to focus on the way things behave independently of our human involvement, the human sciences take account of this very involvement. The natural sciences use external observation and measurement to construct an objective domain of nature that is abstracted from the fullness of lived experience. Dilthey’s human sciences (Geisteswissenchaften), which include the humanities and social sciences, aim to make sense of the historical world and its cultural achievements. By examining inner as well as outer experience and rooting them in lived experience, the human sciences preserve a more direct link with our original sense of life than do the natural sciences. Whereas the natural sciences seek explanations of nature, connecting the discrete representations of outer experience through hypothetical generalisations and causal laws, the human sciences aim at a more comprehensive understanding that articulates the fundamental structures of historical life given in lived experience. Finding lived experience to be inherently connected and meaningful, Dilthey opposed traditional atomistic and associationist psychologies and developed a descriptive psychology that has been recognised as anticipating phenomenology.

Dilthey first thought that this descriptive psychology could provide a neutral foundation for the other human sciences, but in his later hermeneutical writings he rejected the idea of a foundational discipline or method. Thus, he ends by claiming that all the human sciences are interpretive and mutually dependent. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding is a process of interpreting the ‘objectifications of life’, which include what humans produce, how they express their emotions and thoughts, and how they manifest their will in deeds and historical events. Interpersonal understanding is attained by analysing these objectifications and not just directly through feelings like empathy, as some have thought. Moreover, to fully understand ourselves we must analyse our own expressions in the same way that we analyse the expressions of others.

Not every aspect of life can be captured within the respective limits of the natural and the human sciences. Dilthey’s philosophy of life also leaves room for a kind of anthropological reflection whereby we attempt to do justice to the ultimate riddles of life and death. Such reflection receives its fullest expression in worldviews, which are overall perspectives on life encompassing the way we perceive and conceive the world, evaluate it aesthetically and respond to it in action. Dilthey discerned many typical worldviews in art and religion, but in Western philosophy he distinguished three recurrent types: the worldviews of naturalism, the idealism of freedom, and objective idealism.