Wilhelm Dilthey

German philosopher (1833–1911), Schleiermacher's biographer, and the great theorist of the "critique of historical reason" who sought to ground the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in life. In Gadamer's genealogy he is the central protagonist-as-cautionary-tale: the thinker who saw the epistemological problem of historicism most sharply but remained "entangled in [its] aporias" through an "unresolved Cartesianism."

Key Points

  • Grounding the human sciences in life. Dilthey grounds understanding in Erlebnis (lived experience), structure, and significance (legitimated via Husserl's Logical Investigations): "life itself ... is ordered toward the formation of enduring units of significance. Life interprets itself."
  • The entanglement in historicism. Dilthey demands that historical consciousness "rise above its own relativity" to a science-like objectivity of results — yet his starting point in Erlebnis makes this impossible. The two starting points are "not really compatible"; this is his "unresolved Cartesianism."
  • History as a text to be deciphered. Dilthey "transposes hermeneutics to the study of history" so that "historical reality itself is a text" — and thereby, Gadamer charges, "conceives inquiring into the historical past as deciphering and not as historical experience."
  • Interpreter of the historical school. Dilthey "is only the interpreter of the historical school," making explicit the romantic whole-part schema that Ranke and Droysen used implicitly.

Details

Dilthey is the figure Heidegger "liberates": where Dilthey returned to the self-givenness of life (and remained caught in the epistemological framing inherited from Descartes and the neo-Kantians), Heidegger grounds understanding in the facticity of Dasein, turning Dilthey's philosophical intention toward an ontology of understanding. Gadamer's own hermeneutics inherits Dilthey's problem — the historicity of the knower — while rejecting his solution: the finite *Erfahrung* that replaces Dilthey's Erlebnis, and the belonging (*Zugehörigkeit*) that replaces his "homogeneity" of subject and object, are the precise corrections.

Connections

  • is the central cautionary case of philosophical hermeneutics — the historicist aporia Gadamer's project answers.
  • is corrected by *Erfahrung* (vs. Erlebnis) and belonging (vs. homogeneity).
  • is "liberated" by Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity.
  • is the interpreter of the historical school (Ranke, Droysen); the missing link to Heidegger is supplied by Count Yorck.
  • belongs to the Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy) tradition (with Simmel, Bergson).

Open Questions

  • This page reflects Dilthey as Gadamer reads him (a polemical reconstruction); a fuller treatment (the Introduction to the Human Sciences, the Formation of the Historical World, the Erlebnis und die Dichtung) is not yet ingested. confidence: medium accordingly.
  • Dilthey's role in the wiki's broader account of Bildung/Erlebnis and the philosophy of the human sciences is a natural cross-reference for a future pass.

Sources

  • gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 3: "Dilthey's entanglement in the aporias of historicism," "The conflict between science and life-philosophy in Dilthey's analysis of historical consciousness" (pp. 223–245); also Ch 1 (the conceptual Erlebnis).