Wilhelm Dilthey argued that science explains nature, but only understanding grasps people
Physics can explain a falling stone, but can it explain a poem, a revolution or a grieving friend? Wilhelm Dilthey, who sat in Hegel's old chair in Berlin, spent his career insisting that the human sciences need their own method: understanding, rooted in lived experience and history, rather than cold explanation.
Dilthey was born in 1833 in Biebrich, in the Duchy of Nassau, the son of a Reformed pastor. Following family custom he studied theology at Heidelberg before moving to Berlin, where his teachers had themselves been pupils of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In January 1864 he took his doctorate with a Latin thesis on Schleiermacher's ethics, qualified to lecture that June, and in 1870 published the first volume of a biography of him. After a professorship at Basel from 1867, he returned to Berlin in 1882 to hold its prestigious philosophy chair.
His central distinction was between explaining and understanding. Natural science observes and explains; the humanities, or Geisteswissenschaften, grasp expressions of human life through Verstehen, a mix of psychological and social-historical interpretation. Any field built on the link between life, expression and understanding belonged, for him, to the human sciences. He helped revive Schleiermacher's hermeneutics and gave a name to the hermeneutic circle: the back-and-forth between a detail and the whole it belongs to.
What set him apart from other Romantic thinkers was his stress on historicality. People, he argued, cannot know themselves by introspection alone, only through what history, understood as a sequence of world views, reveals in living experience. All understanding is shaped by time and by inherited interpretations. Although rooted in German rather than British traditions, his focus on experience and evidence led some to call him an empiricist.
Alongside Nietzsche, Simmel and Bergson, he shaped early 20th-century philosophies of life and existence, and influenced Martin Buber. The young Martin Heidegger drew on him before turning critical. Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) went further, faulting Dilthey for treating interpretation as a method while neglecting how every interpreter stands inside a tradition.
Source: Wilhelm Dilthey
