DILTHEY, WILHELM. – German philosopher, born on 19 November 1833 at Biebrich, died on 10 October 1911 at Siusi (Bolzano). He was professor at Basel, Kiel, and Breslau; in 1882 he succeeded Lenze in Berlin.
D.’s speculative work aims at founding a critique of historical reason which, excluding every metaphysical basis for the human sciences, would present itself as a concrete vision of the development of human reason in its various successive individual, social, and cultural forms. This idea, mentioned in the essay on Novalis (1865), was affirmed in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, of which only the first volume appeared (Leipzig 1883), and which received a belated completion in Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (1910). Dissatisfied with the analytical method of the sociologists and philosophers of positivist history, to whom he was nevertheless close in his spiritual attitude, he intended to bring to light totality in the soul (Totalität des Gemätes). The procedure of the human sciences differs entirely from that of the natural sciences: the historical spiritual world is disclosed neither by sense perception nor by 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 means of the human sciences, differs greatly from explanatory psychology of a naturalistic character. Its task, as D. shows in the work Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894), is to delineate the individual types of human beings and their works. Only a typological, individual, and historical consideration makes it possible to understand the philosophical conditions of the world, to which absolute value cannot be attributed. This idea, developed at length in Typen der Weltanschauung (1911), decisively inclined D.’s conception toward a theoretical relativism, which leaves the human problem unresolved.
D. also concerned 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.