Hermeneutics Dilthey took some of his inspiration from the works of
Friedrich Schleiermacher on
hermeneutics, which he helped revive. Both figures are linked to
German Romanticism. Schleiermacher was strongly influenced by German Romanticism which led him to place more emphasis on human emotion and the imagination. Dilthey, in his turn, as the author of a vast monograph on Schleiermacher, responds to the questions raised by
Droysen and
Ranke about the philosophical legitimation of the human sciences. He argues that 'scientific explanation of nature' (
erklären) must be completed with a theory of how the world is given to human beings through symbolically mediated practices. To provide such a theory is the aim of the philosophy of the
humanities—a field of study to which Dilthey dedicated his entire academic career. The school of Romantic hermeneutics stressed that historically embedded interpreters—a "living" rather than a
Cartesian dualism or "theoretical" subject—use 'understanding' and 'interpretation' (
Verstehen), which combine individual-psychological and social-historical description and analysis, to gain a greater knowledge of texts and authors in their contexts. However, Dilthey remains distinct from other German Romantics and life philosophers through his emphasis on "historicality." Dilthey understood man as a historical being. However, history is not described in terms of an object of the past, but "a series of world views." Man cannot understand himself through reflection or introspection, but only through what "history can tell him…never in objective concepts but always only in the living experience which springs up out of the depths of his own being." The process of interpretive inquiry established by Schleiermacher involved what Dilthey called the
hermeneutic circle—the recurring movement between the implicit and the explicit, the particular and the whole. Schleiermacher saw the approaches to interpreting sacred scriptures (for example, the Pauline epistles) and Classical texts (e.g.
Plato's philosophy) as more specific forms of what he proposed as "general hermeneutics" (
allgemeine Hermeneutik). Schleiermacher approached hermeneutics as the "art of understanding" and recognized both the importance of language, and the thoughts of an author, to interpreting a text. Dilthey saw understanding as the key for the
human sciences (
Geisteswissenschaften) in contrast with the natural sciences. The natural sciences observe and explain nature, but the humanities understand human expressions of life. So long as a science is "accessible to us through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life, expression, and understanding" Dilthey considered it a part of the human sciences. Along with
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Georg Simmel and
Henri Bergson, Dilthey's work influenced early twentieth-century
Lebensphilosophie and
Existenzphilosophie. Dilthey's students included
Bernhard Groethuysen,
Hans Lipps,
Herman Nohl,
Theodor Litt,
Eduard Spranger,
Georg Misch and
Erich Rothacker. Dilthey's philosophy also influenced the religious philosopher
Martin Buber. Dilthey's works informed the early
Martin Heidegger's approach to hermeneutics in his early lecture courses, in which he developed a "hermeneutics of factical life," and in
Being and Time (1927). But Heidegger grew increasingly critical of Dilthey, arguing for a more radical "temporalization" of the possibilities of interpretation and human existence. In
Wahrheit und Methode (
Truth and Method, 1960),
Hans-Georg Gadamer, influenced by Heidegger, criticised Dilthey's approach to hermeneutics as both overly aesthetic and subjective as well as method-oriented and "positivistic." According to Gadamer, Dilthey's hermeneutics is insufficiently concerned with the ontological event of truth and inadequately considers the implications of how the interpreter and the interpreter's interpretations are not outside of tradition but occupy a particular position within it, i.e., have a temporal horizon.
Psychology Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his work
Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (
Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894), he introduced a distinction between
explanatory psychology (
erklärende Psychologie; also
explanative psychology) and
descriptive psychology (
beschreibende Psychologie; also
analytic psychology,
zergliedernde Psychologie): in his terminology, explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality, while descriptive psychology is a discipline that attempts to explicate how different mental processes converge in the "structural nexus of
consciousness."
Sociology Dilthey was also interested in what some would call
sociology in the 21st century, although he strongly objected to being labelled as such, as the sociology of his time was mainly that of
Auguste Comte and
Herbert Spencer. He objected to their
dialectical/
evolutionist assumptions about the necessary changes that all societal formations must go through, as well as their narrowly natural-scientific methodology. Comte's idea of
positivism was, according to Dilthey, one-sided and misleading. Dilthey did however have good things to say about the
neo-Kantian sociology of
Georg Simmel, with whom he was a colleague at the University of Berlin. Simmel himself was later an associate of
Max Weber, the primary founder of sociological
antipositivism. J. I. Hans Bakker has argued that Dilthey should be considered one of the classical sociological theorists due to his own influence in the foundation of
nonpositivist verstehende sociology and the
Verstehen method.
Distinction between natural sciences and human sciences A lifelong 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 "sovereignty 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". 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 (
verstehen) 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 German sociologist
Max Weber. His principles, a general theory of understanding or comprehension (
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. Both the natural and human sciences originate in the context or "nexus" of life (
Lebenszusammenhang), a concept which influenced the phenomenological account of the
lifeworld (
Lebenswelt), but are differentiated in how they relate to their life-context. Whereas the natural sciences abstract away from it, it becomes the primary object of inquiry in the human sciences. Dilthey defended his use of the term
Geisteswissenschaft (literally, "science of the mind" or "spiritual knowledge") by pointing out that other terms such as "social science" and "cultural sciences" are equally one-sided and that the human mind or spirit is the central phenomenon from which all others are derived and analyzable. • in
Naturalism, represented by
Epicureans of all times and places, humans see themselves as determined by nature • in the Idealism of Freedom (or
Subjective Idealism), represented by
Friedrich Schiller and
Immanuel Kant, humans are conscious of their separation from nature by their free will • in
Objective Idealism, represented by
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Baruch Spinoza, and
Giordano Bruno, humans are conscious of their harmony with nature. This approach influenced
Karl Jaspers'
Psychology of Worldviews as well as
Rudolf Steiner's
Philosophy of Freedom.
Comparison with the 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, but had a profound knowledge of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which deeply influenced his thinking. But whereas neo-Kantianism was primarily interested in epistemology on the basis of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, Dilthey took Kant's
Critique of Judgment as his point of departure (especially for aesthetics, reflective judgment, and hermeneutics). An important debate between Dilthey and the neo-Kantians concerned the "human" as opposed to "cultural" sciences, with the neo-Kantians arguing for the exclusion of psychology from the cultural sciences and Dilthey for its inclusion as a human science. ==Editorial work==