Wilhelm Dilthey

Historian

1833-11-19

Quotes by Wilhelm Dilthey

• The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

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• However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.

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• The lived experiences which could not find adequate scientific expression in the substance doctrine of rational psychology were now validated in light of new and better methods.

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• The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

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• Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

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• If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.

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• Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.

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• All science is experiential; but all experience must be related back to and derives its its validity from the conditions and context of consciousness in which it arises, i.e., the totality of our nature.

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• No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

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• On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

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