DILTHEY, Wilhelm. - German philosopher, born 19 Nov. 1833 at Biebrich, died 10 Oct. 1911 at Siusi (Bolzano). He was professor at Basel, Kiel, Breslau; in 1882 he succeeded Lotze in Berlin.
Dilthey’s speculative work aims at establishing a critique of historical reason that, excluding any metaphysical foundation of the human sciences, presents itself 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 affirmed in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, of which only the first volume appeared (Leipzig 1883), later completed in Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910). Dissatisfied with the analytical method of positivist sociologists and historians of philosophy, with whom he shares a spiritual attitude, he seeks to highlight the totality of the soul (Totalität des Gemütes). The method of the human sciences differs entirely from that of the natural sciences: the historical spiritual world is not disclosed by sensory perception or pure thought; its objects arise in understanding (verstehen), a particular spiritual act that presupposes as its condition an immediate experience (Erlebnis). In this way, descriptive psychology, an auxiliary tool of the human sciences, differs greatly from explanatory psychology of a naturalistic character. Its task, as Dilthey shows in the essay Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894), is to elucidate the individual types of human beings and their works. Only a typological, individual, and historical consideration allows us to grasp the philosophical conditions of the world, to which no absolute value can be attributed. This idea, fully developed in Typen der Weltanschauung (1911), decisively inclines Dilthey’s conception toward a theoretical relativism that leaves the human problem unresolved.
Dilthey also dealt 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 essay: Über die Möglichkeit einer allgemeingültigen pädagogischen Wissenschaft, in Sitzber. d. Berliner Akad. 2 (1888), pp. 807-32.
(from C. Decold, Vintra und Behalten, Beiträge Leipzig 188, p. 10)
Diluvio - Fragment of a clay tablet from Quüünndia containing a passage from the Babylonian account of the flood. - London, British Museum.