Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) was a German philosopher and one of the central figures of historicism. He held chairs at Basel, Kiel, Breslau and, finally, Berlin, where he spent the rest of his career. His central question was whether the methods of the natural sciences could also serve to study history, law, religion and art. He answered no: the human sciences needed their own foundation. For this reason his work remains important for hermeneutics, the theory of history, and the reflection on psychology and sociology.

Born in 1833 in Biebrich, in the Duchy of Nassau, he was the son of a Protestant pastor. He began studying theology out of loyalty to his father rather than from religious vocation, but soon turned towards history, philology and philosophy. He later recalled that reading Kant's Logic at sixteen awakened his passion for philosophy. He studied at Heidelberg and then in Berlin, where he came into contact with leading historians and philologists. His first major project was a biography of Schleiermacher, whose first volume appeared in 1870. That work drew him into hermeneutics, the art of interpreting texts, which Schleiermacher had renewed.

In his mature writings he developed the distinction between explaining and understanding. The natural sciences explain phenomena through cause and effect; the human sciences understand human expressions through the relation between the whole and its parts. Understanding therefore requires reconstructing the cultural and historical context in which a text or work arose. From this came his idea of the hermeneutic circle: each part is understood from the whole, and the whole from its parts. Dilthey also held that all knowledge must be read historically, since human life is historical and cannot be grasped by introspection alone. He proposed a typology of the great worldviews, such as naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism, and he criticised the evolutionary optimism of Comte and Spencer.

His main works include the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894), Poetry and Experience (1906) and The Structure of the Historical World (1910). His descriptive psychology, which sought to describe the structural connection of psychic life rather than explain it causally, was sharply criticised in his time. He died in 1911 while on holiday in the Tyrol, leaving the Schleiermacher biography unfinished.

His influence was considerable. Although Gadamer later criticised his hermeneutics as too subjective and too method-oriented, his ideas shaped the philosophy of life, Heidegger's early hermeneutics and debates on interpretive sociology. Today he is regarded as a key figure in understanding how, at the end of the nineteenth century, two great modes of knowing came to be separated: that of nature and that of humankind.