Continental · 1833–1911
Wilhelm Dilthey
German historian of ideas who defended the human sciences
Dilthey argued that nature is explained but human life is understood: the human sciences grasp lived experience and its expressions from the inside, through historical understanding rather than causal laws.
Life and thought
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), the son of a Reformed pastor in Nassau, studied theology before turning to history and philosophy, and in 1882 took the Berlin chair once held by Hegel. He wrote a large biography of Schleiermacher and spent his career on a project he never finished: a “critique of historical reason” that would do for the human sciences what Kant had done for natural science.
His central claim is that the human sciences, such as history, law, literature and psychology, have their own method. Nature we explain from outside, by causes and laws; human life we understand from inside, because we share the experiences that actions, texts and institutions express. A historian grasps a letter or a law by re-living its meaning within a wider context, moving back and forth between part and whole. This made hermeneutics the method of the humanities and shaped Heidegger, Gadamer and German sociology.