1) His Biography and Main Works:
Wilhelm Dilthey, who held the G. W. F. Hegel Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin, was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher who lived from 19 November 1833 to 1 October 1911. Dilthey was a polymathic philosopher who worked in a cutting-edge research university. His areas of interest included scientific method, historical evidence, and the status of history as a science. His account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism that was prevalent in Germany at the time.
In the village of Biebrich in the Duchy of Nassau, now in the German state of Hesse, Dilthey was born in 1833 as the son of a Reformed pastor. He continued family tradition as a young man by majoring in theology at Heidelberg University, where one of his professors was Kuno Fischer. Later, he relocated to the University of Berlin, where he studied under a number of professors, including Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg and August Boeckh, both of whom had studied under Friedrich Schleiermacher. With a Latin thesis on Schleiermacher’s ethics, he won his doctorate from Berlin in January 1864. That same year, he also received his habilitation with a thesis on moral consciousness. In Berlin, he was appointed a Privatdozent in 1865.
He compiled Schleiermacher’s correspondence in 1859, and shortly thereafter he was hired to write a biography, the first book of which was eventually released in 1870. He began teaching at the University of Basel in 1867, but in 1882 he moved back to Berlin and assumed the esteemed position of university professor of philosophy. He wed Katherine Puttmann in 1874, and the two of them had one son and two daughters. 1911 saw his passing.
2) Main Themes:
Hermeneutics:
Dilthey was influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher’s works on hermeneutics, which he helped revive, in part. Both individuals are associated with German Romanticism. The school of Romantic hermeneutics emphasised the use of “understanding” and “interpretation,” which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to better understand texts and authors in their contexts. These interpreters, who are historically embedded, are referred to as “living” subjects rather than Cartesian or “theoretical” ones.
What Dilthey referred to as “the Hermeneutic circle,” or the recurrent movement between the implicit and the explicit, the specific and the total, was a component of the Schleiermacherian process of interpretative inquiry. Schleiermacher’s “general hermeneutics” combined the hermeneutics employed by Classicists (such as Plato’s philosophy) with those employed to understand Sacred Scriptures (such as the Pauline epistles). In contrast to the natural sciences, Dilthey found its importance for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).
Sociology:
Dilthey was particularly interested in what we now refer to as sociology, but he strenuously objected to the name “sociologist” because Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer dominated the field at the time. He disagreed with their narrowly natural-scientific methodology as well as their evolutionist presumptions regarding the essential changes that all society formations must go through. Additionally, because sociology covered so many different topics, it tended to be employed as a sort of umbrella phrase and lacked analytical precision.
Dilthey argued that Comte’s conception of positivism was biased and deceptive. However, he did praise the sociological interpretations of his colleague Georg Simmel. Due to his significant contribution to the discussion of Verstehen and his effect on interpretive sociology more broadly, J. I. Hans Bakker has suggested that Dilthey should be regarded as one of the classic sociological theorists.
Distinction between Natural Science and “Human” Science:
Establishing a good theoretical and methodological framework for the “human sciences” (such as history, law, and literary criticism), which differ from the “natural sciences” (e.g. physics, chemistry) but are just as “scientific,” was a lifelong goal. All human experience, according to Dilthey, naturally divides into two categories: that of the external natural world, where “objective necessity” governs, and that of the inner experience, which is marked by sovereignty of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject all things to thought, and to resist all things within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person.
Dilthey recommended creating a separate model for the human sciences in place of relying solely on a model derived from the natural sciences. His main point was that whereas in the human sciences we try to understand in terms of the relationships between the part and the whole, in the natural sciences we try to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular. According to German sociologist Max Weber, we can also integrate the two methodologies in the social sciences.
He claimed that his principles—a broad theory of comprehension (Verstehen)—could be applied to all kinds of interpretation, including that of ancient writings, works of art, religious texts, and even the law. His analysis of various aesthetic ideas from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries served as a prelude to his predictions about the shape aesthetic theory would take in the twenty-first century.
The human spirit is the core phenomena from which all others are perceived and to which all are related, according to Dilthey, who defended his usage of the term “spiritual science” by pointing out that any other term (such as “social science” and “cultural sciences”) is equally one-sided. According to Dilthey, “spirit” must be understood in the context of the specific social-historical lives of individuals rather than being an abstract or disembodied concept.
Weltanschauungen:
Dilthey created a typology of the three fundamental Weltanschauungen, or World-Views, that he believed to be “typical” (similar to Max Weber’s idea of “ideal types”) and opposing conceptions of how man should relate to nature. Man perceives himself as being determined by nature in naturalism, which is represented by Epicureans of all eras and places; in the idealism of freedom, which is represented by Schiller and Kant; and in objective idealism, which is represented by Hegel, Spinoza, and Giordano Bruno; man is aware of his harmony with nature. This strategy impacted Rudolf Steiner and Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews.
Neo-Kantians:
It is important to compare and contrast Dilthey’s ideas with those of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, two other members of the Baden School of Neo-Kantianism. Although Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian, his understanding of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy had a significant impact on his thinking. However, whereas Neo-Kantianism began with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and focused mostly on epistemology, Dilthey started with the Critique of Judgment. A significant disagreement between Dilthey and the Neo-Kantians’ concerns the distinction between “human” and “cultural” sciences, with Dilthey advocating for psychology’s inclusion as a human science and the Neo-Kantians pushing for its exclusion.
Psychology:
Dilthey had a passion for psychology. He established a distinction between explanatory psychology (also known as explanative psychology) and descriptive psychology (also known as analytic psychology) in his essay, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (1894). In his terminology, descriptive psychology is a field that aims to explain how various mental processes come together in the “structural nexus of consciousness,” whereas explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality.
The divide is based on the more general division between interpretive sciences (beschreibende Wissenschaften or verstehende Wissenschaften, that is, the sciences which are based on the Verstehen method) and erklärende Wissenschaften (explanatory/explanative sciences). He used the term structural psychology (Strukturpsychologie) for descriptive psychology in his later work (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910).
3) His Influence on Later Thinkers:
Numerous other thinkers, including Husserl, Heidegger, Cassirer, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, were affected by Dilthey’s reflections on the human sciences, historical contextualization, and hermeneutics. Recently, there has been some focus on how Carnap’s early attempts to reject metaphysics in favour of more analytical approaches were influenced by Dilthey’s empirical approach to experience.
Dilthey’s writings had an impact on early 20th-century “Lebensphilosophie” and “Existenzphilosophie,” along with Nietzsche, Simmel, and Bergson. Martin Heidegger drew inspiration from Dilthey for his early lecture classes, when he established a “hermeneutics of factual life,” and for Being and Time. Heidegger argued for a more radical “temporalization” of the possibilities of interpretation and human experience, becoming more and more critical of Dilthey.
Hans Georg Gadamer, who was influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey’s hermeneutics in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), calling it both method- and “positivistic” and unduly aesthetic and subjective. Gadamer contends that Dilthey’s hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and fails to appropriately take into account the consequences of the interpreter and her interpretations existing inside tradition rather than outside of it, i.e., having a temporal horizon.