Wilhelm Dilthey
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Wilhelm Dilthey (November 19, 1833 – October 1, 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, student of hermeneutics, and philosopher.
Dilthey could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism common in Germany at the time, but his empirical work differs from British empiricism in its central epistemological assumptions, drawn from the German tradition from Kant onwards.
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[edit] Hermeneutics
Dilthey was inspired by the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher on hermeneutics, which had been neglected. Both philosophers are linked to German Romanticism. 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 called to the process of inquiry Schleiermacher had founded 'the Hermeneutic circle'. The "general hermeneutics" that Schleiermacher proposed was a combination of the hermeneutics used to interpret Sacred Scriptures (e.g. the Pauline epistles) and the hermeneutics used by Classicists (e.g. Plato's philosophy). Dilthey saw its relevance for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in particular, as opposed to the natural sciences.
Dilthey's work influenced Martin Heidegger's approach to hermenutics in Being and Time, although Heidegger more thoroughly 'temporalized' the possibilities of interpretation.
In Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), Hans Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as insufficiently historical; the interpreter and his interpretations are not outside of history but occupy a particular position, have a temporal horizon, within it.
[edit] Sociology
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, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. 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 owing to anti-Semitism and in part because Simmel did not conform to the academic formalities of the day in some of his published work.)
J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that 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.
[edit] Distinction between natural science and "human" science
A life-long concern was to establish a proper theoretical and methodological foundation for the 'human sciences' (e.g. history, law, literary criticism), distinct from, but equally 'scientific' as, the 'natural sciences' (e.g. physics, chemistry). He suggested that all human experience divides naturally into two parts: that of the surrounding natural world, in which "objective necessity" rules, and that of inner experience, characterized by "sovereignity of the will, responsibility for actions, a capacity to subject everything to thinking and to resist everything within the fortress of freedom of his/her own person".<ref>Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, ISBN 3-535-30301-7, p.6</ref>
Dilthey strongly rejected using a model formed exclusively from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and instead proposed developing a separate model for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). His argument centered around the idea that in the natural sciences we seek to explain phenomena in terms of cause and effect, or the general and the particular; in contrast, in the human sciences, we seek to understand in terms of the relations of the part and the whole. (In the social sciences we may also combine the two approaches, a point stressed by Max Weber.) His principles, a general theory of Understanding (Verstehen) could, he asserted, 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 defended his use of the term "spiritual science" by pointing out that any other term (e.g. "social science") is equally one-sided, but that the human spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are perceived and to which all are related.<ref>ibid.</ref>
[edit] Weltanschauungen
Dilthey developed a typology of the three basic Weltanschauungen, or World-Views, which he considered were the common ways of conceiving of man's relation to Nature. In Naturalism, represented by Epicureans of all times and places, man sees himself as determined by nature; in the Idealism of Freedom, represented by Schiller and Kant, man is conscious of his separation from nature by his free will; in Objective Idealism, represented by Hegel, Spinoza, and Giordano Bruno, man is conscious of his harmony with nature. This and other of Dilthey's ideas influenced Rudolf iner.<ref>Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom</ref>
[edit] Neo-Kantians
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 had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which influenced his thinking.
[edit] Further reading
H. A. Hodges provides one of the most accessible introductions in English. The Selected Works of Wilhelm Dilthey are being edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi.
[edit] References
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[edit] See also
- Exegesis
- Geistesgeschichte
- Hermeneutics
- Literary criticism
- Literary theory
- Romanticism
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- John Stuart Millca:Wilhelm Dilthey
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