Dilthey, Wilhelm

Life

If Kant's work can be said to close the Enlightenment and usher in the nineteenth century, Dilthey's writings may be seen as a watershed between nineteenthand twentiethcentury thought. Like Kant and Hegel, born to a Protestant family, Dilthey seemed destined for a theological career until his interest in history and philosophy turned him toward academics. In 1867, he was appointed professor of Philosophy at Basel, whence he moved to Kiel, Breslau, and finally to Berlin in 1882, where he stayed until his death.

Recognition of Dilthey's importance, and indeed his own period of greatest productivity, began late in his life. Though his Life of Schleiermacher came out in 1870 and the Introduction to the Human Sciences in 1883, the bulk of his works appeared only when he was in his 60s and 70s, from 1893 to 1911. It was also in this period that Dilthey's speculation crystallized into a unified vision of his task. His last years were a fevered rush to define a new logic for the humanities, a Critique of Historical Reason following Kant's critiques of pure and practical reason, which would be “objective” and rigorous yet independent of either natural science or positivism. He spent almost no time either propagating his own work or even defending it from his critics. But despite the incompleteness and disorder of his writings, Dilthey laid out a program and method the depth and influence of which are still unfolding today.

The Nature and Logic of the Human Studies

In The Rise of Hermeneutics (1900 [1996]), Dilthey states the problem he hoped to solve:

Dilthey's solution to this problem was not a checklist of techniques, but rather a part intuitive, part systematic interpretive method that he demonstrated in his historical writings and commented upon extensively throughout his later years. At the heart of this interpretive procedure, or hermeneutic, are the concepts lived experience, objectification, and understanding.

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