DILTHEY, WILHELM (1833–1911)

The turn of the century witnessed the birth of a philosophy focusing on the idea and concept of ‘life’ with its characteristics of the flowing, the irrational, the individualistic, unrepeatable. In France its most famous protagonist was BERGSON with his biologistic- metaphysical concept of élan vital, stressing that nothing ‘is’ but everything ‘becomes’. In Germany it was most notably the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey whose Lebens- philosophie —philosophy of life—referred to all of man’s mental states, processes and activities, be they conscious or unconscious, and investigated all manifestations of life in the realm of the ‘human sciences’, i.e. those sciences covering the reality of history and

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society, and not pertaining to the realm of natural sciences. Dilthey tried to come to an understanding of ‘phenomena of the mind’ as represented in philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, literature, art or history. Contending that all reality was nothing but life and that life could only be understood out of life, he concluded that man’s understanding of himself needed to be based not just on his intellect but his whole being. Within this conceptual framework he analysed the process of ‘understanding’ the ‘meaning’ of the phenomena of the human mind, developing a theory of hermeneutics without taking refuge to any a priori, metaphysical or moral preconditions. He put history at the very centre of his philosophy: ‘The human being knows itself only in history.’ This pre- eminence of history in the life of man was the nucleus of Dilthey’s ‘historicism’, which saw life as being historically conditioned and thus subject to variability and relativity of values: history as the story of the creative struggle of man to come to terms with reality. Dilthey’s thinking has had a profound influence on German philosophy in the twentieth century, particularly on existentialists such as Jaspers and Heidegger, and on thinkers in the realm of hermeneutics such as Gadamer.

Dilthey was born in the Rhineland, as the son of a Protestant clergyman. He felt strongly drawn towards philosophy, history and questions of epistemology, of processes of attaining knowledge. Decisive impulses came from KANT, Goethe, COMTE and Schleiermacher. His academic career as a professor of philosophy started in Basel in 1867, from where he moved to the universities of Kiel, Breslau and finally Berlin, where

he taught from 1882 until 1905. His life-long occupation was to write a Critique of Historical Reason, an undertaking that he never completed but which can be pieced together from a number of works published during his life-time and a multitude of fragments. Dilthey never created a fully fledged philosophical system but made countless contributions to the theory of knowledge, to moral philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, psychology and the philosophy of history. His collected writings comprise twelve volumes (Gesammelte Schriften, partly trans. as Selected Works, 1985–2002). Amongst his major works are the Introduction to the Human Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaftand der Geschichte, 1883, trans. 1988) and Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910, trans. 1996).

How to get knowledge of the human-historical world: this side of epistemology, both the science and art of hermeneutics, became Dilthey’s major concern, with the concept of ‘understanding’ as leitmotif. To him, hermeneutics was not just the interpretation of written records but of all fixed and enduring expressions of mind. Since ‘meaning’ was the relationship between ‘sign’ and ‘signified’, such an ‘understanding’ required a deciphering of the signs. Interpretation—grammatical, linguistic and historical—was based on ‘understanding’ as a projection of the self into the other, which he saw as an imaginative act: as a ‘rediscovery of the I in the Thou’, encompassing both thinking and feeling of the understanding subject. To understand, says Dilthey, is to reproduce (nachbilden) someone else’s experience in one’s own consciousness and thus to relive it (nacherleben): despite the relativity of values through the ages man can do so because all men share the same mental structure and general psychological make-up, someone else’s actual experiences being one’s own potential experiences that, in turn, can be actualized via the process of ‘understanding’ and thus enrich the life of the understanding subject.

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Dilthey deemed each period of history to be centred upon itself (akin to LEOPOLD VON RANKE’S dictum of each period being ‘immediate to God’), not to be a merely preliminary stage to our own time. In Dilthey’s eyes, history was not a victorious march of liberal progressivism, nor was it the unfolding of a divine plan or the metaphysical process of an absolute transcendental subject coming to self-consciousness. History, like all the other human sciences, was not governed by deterministic laws as was the case in the natural sciences. Natural phenomena could be ‘explained’ in terms of causality by means of outer observation and experiment, whereas phenomena of the human realm were to be ‘understood’, requiring in addition to outer observation and classification a certain insight from within. He would, however, concede that certain explanations in the realm of history could be made, based on the findings of natural sciences or statistics— but never on historical laws as such. Dilthey’s ‘philosophy of understanding’ was the foundation for both grasping history’s individualistic and unique character and following Leopold von Ranke’s tenet of depicting history ‘as it actually was’. Dilthey asked the historian to conduct his research in a mindset of ‘empathy’ and base it on historical sources, and then come to an ‘understanding’ via three stages: first to understand events from the point of view of the original actors, then to understand the meaning which their actions had on their contemporaries, and finally to assess this meaning in the light of the historian’s own age, taking into account the effects actions had for subsequent historical times and thus circumventing the danger of an excessive antiquarian compilation of facts. The historian would thus serve as a mirror in which the minds and experiences of historical protagonists are reflected.

DILTHEY, WILHELM (1833–1911)