Wilhelm Dilthey

Dilthey was the son of a Reformed pastor on the Rhine, meant to follow his father, who studied theology at Heidelberg and Berlin, turned to philosophy and history, took his doctorate in 1864, taught at Basel, Kiel and Breslau, and in 1882 succeeded Lotze in the Berlin chair, which he held until his death. He wrote the biography of Schleiermacher, edited Kant's works and studied the whole intellectual history of Germany from the Renaissance to the Romantics, but his main philosophical project remained unfinished all his life.

His problem came from the nineteenth-century situation: the natural sciences had triumphed, positivism wanted to apply their method to history and society, and the historical school insisted on the uniqueness of every age. Dilthey sought a foundation for history and the humanities as firm as that of natural science but different in kind. The first volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883) proposed that the natural sciences 'explain' phenomena from outside by causal laws, while the human sciences 'understand' expressions by re-living from within the life they express.

Understanding is possible because the human being is itself a historical being: it experiences, expresses and understands, and the three form a circle. 'Life' is the ultimate reality; it cannot be grasped by metaphysics, only understood through its own manifestations, in deeds, writings, institutions and art, which make up 'objective spirit'. Biography is the prototype of understanding and autobiography its most direct form. Late in life he broadened Schleiermacher's hermeneutics from a technique for interpreting texts into the methodology of all the human sciences.

He also proposed a 'typology of worldviews': naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism are three basic worldviews, each rooted in an attitude of life, so that the conflicts among philosophical systems cannot be settled by logic. This relativist conclusion troubled him. His influence came after his death: Husserl's life-world, Heidegger's historicity, Gadamer's hermeneutics and the sociology of Weber and Mannheim all start from him. The image he left among his students was of a man forever beginning and never finishing.