Dilthey, Wilhelm

DILTHEY, WILHELM. - German philosopher, b. 19 Nov. 1833 at Biebrich, d. 10 Oct. 1911 at Siusi (Bolzano). He was professor at Basel, Kiel, Breslau; in 1882 he succeeded Lenze at Berlin.

D.'s speculative work aims at the founding of a critique of historical reason which, excluding every metaphysical basis of the sciences of the spirit, sets itself up as a concrete vision of the becoming of human reason in its various and successive individual, social and cultural forms. This idea, hinted at in the essay on Novalis (1865), is asserted in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, a work of which only the first volume appeared (Leipzig 1883) and which received a late completion in Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910). Dissatisfied with the analytical method of the sociologists and positivist philosophers of history, to whom he is nevertheless close in his spiritual attitude, he intends to bring to light the totality in the soul (Totalität des Gemütes). The procedure of the sciences of the spirit differs entirely from that of the sciences of nature: the historical spiritual world is disclosed neither by sense perception nor by pure thought: its objects arise in understanding (verstehen), a particular spiritual act which presupposes as its condition an immediate experience (Erlebnis). In this way descriptive psychology, an auxiliary means of the sciences of the spirit, differs greatly from explanatory psychology of a naturalistic character. Its office, as D. shows in the writing Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894), is to single out the individual types of men and of their works. Only a typological, individual and historical consideration makes it possible to understand the philosophical conditions of the world, to which an absolute value cannot be recognized. This idea, amply developed in Typen der Weltanschauung (1911), makes D.'s conception veer decisively toward a theoretical relativism, which leaves the human problem unsolved.

D. also occupied himself with aesthetics in the works: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1895, 10th ed. 1930) and Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters (1887); and with pedagogy in the work: Über die Möglichkeit einer allgemeingültigen pädagogischen Wissenschaft, in Sitzber. d. Berliner Akad. 2 (1888), pp. 807-32.

Andrea Ferro