If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context.
Category Archive: Wilhelm Dilthey
In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.
From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.
Thus there arose in me both a need and a plan for the foundation of the human sciences.
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.
We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.
Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.
A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society’s resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization.
If we conceive all the changes in the physical world as reducible to the motion of atoms, motions generated by means of the fixed nuclear forces of those atoms, the whole of the world could thus be known by means of the natural sciences.
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.