Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey (
November 19,
1833â€"
October 1,
1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, student of
hermeneutics, and
philosopher.
Dilthey was inspired by the work of
Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which had been neglected. Both philosophers are linked to
German Romanticism. Dilthey could be considered an
empiricist, but his empirical work differs from
British empiricism in its central epistemological assumptions. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that an interpreter — not necessarily a
Cartesian subject — could use insight, combined with cultural and historical context, to bring about truer understanding of a text.
Dilthey was very interested in what we would call
sociology today, although he strongly objected to being labelled a sociologist because the sociology of his day was mainly that of
Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. He objected to their evolutionist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through. Also, the word tended (and tends) to be used as a kind of
umbrella term; since the term sociology covered so much it had little analytical clarity. Comte's idea of
Positivism was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. He did, however, have good things to say about his colleague
Georg Simmel's versions of sociology. (Simmel was a colleague at the
University of Berlin and Dilthey admired his work even though many academics were opposed to Simmel altogether, in part due to anti-Semitism and in part due to the fact that Simmel did not conform to the academic formalities of the day in some of his published work.)
Dilthey also applied a label to the process of inquiry Schleiermacher had founded, naming it the Hermeneutic circle. The "general hermeneutics" that Schleiermacher suggested was a combination of the hermeneutics used to interpret Sacred Scriptures (e.g. the New Testament) and the hermeneutics used by Classicists. Dilthey saw its relevance for the
Geisteswissenschaften.
Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the
Naturwissenschaften, "
natural sciences," and instead proposed developing a separate model for the
Geisteswissenschaften, "human sciences," e.g., philosophy, psychology, history, philology, sociology, etc. His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect; in contrast, in the human sciences we seek to understand. (In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by
Max Weber.) His principles, he asserted, could be applied to all manner of interpretation ranging from ancient texts to art work, religious works, and even law. His interpretation of different theories of aesthetics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was preliminary to his speculations concerning the form aesthetic theory would take in the twentieth century.
Dilthey's ideas should be examined in terms of his similarities and differences with
Wilhelm Windelband and
Heinrich Rickert, members of the
Baden School of
Neo-Kantianism. Dilthey was not a Neo-Kantian in the strict sense, but he had a profound knowledge of
Immanuel Kant's philosophy.
H. A. Hodges provides one of the most accessible introduction in English. The Selected Works of Wilhelm Dilthey are being edited by
Rudolf A. Makkreel and
Frithjof Rodi.
J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that
Wilhelm Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists because of his important role in discussing
Verstehen and his influence on interpretive sociology generally.
*
Exegesis*
Geistesgeschichte*
Hermeneutics*
Literary criticism *
Literary theory *
Romanticism *
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel *
John Stuart Mill
