"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"
About this Quote
Dilthey is trying to rescue “reality” from the lab coat. Against the 19th-century temptation to treat the world as something known only through detached measurement, he insists that for an actual person - not a disembodied intellect, but a being who wills, feels, and imagines - the external world arrives with the same basic immediacy as the inner one. The point is not naive realism. It’s a methodological warning: if you start by doubting the world more than you doubt the self, you’ve already chosen a philosophical game that quietly disqualifies most of human life.
The phrase “whole human being” is doing political work inside the discipline. Dilthey, a historian building what he called the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), is staking a claim that history, art, religion, and social life aren’t second-rate domains waiting to be translated into physics. They require a different kind of rigor: understanding (Verstehen) grounded in lived experience, not just causal explanation.
“Simultaneously” is the lever. Self and world are co-given; consciousness is not a sealed room receiving deliveries from outside. That subtext pushes back on the Cartesian fantasy of the mind as an isolated certainty and on the empiricist habit of treating perception as a chain of inferences. Dilthey’s certitude is practical, not metaphysical: we navigate a shared world before we theorize it. For a historian, that’s the difference between reading the past as dead data and encountering it as human life, structured by motives, meanings, and pressures that still rhyme with our own.
The phrase “whole human being” is doing political work inside the discipline. Dilthey, a historian building what he called the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), is staking a claim that history, art, religion, and social life aren’t second-rate domains waiting to be translated into physics. They require a different kind of rigor: understanding (Verstehen) grounded in lived experience, not just causal explanation.
“Simultaneously” is the lever. Self and world are co-given; consciousness is not a sealed room receiving deliveries from outside. That subtext pushes back on the Cartesian fantasy of the mind as an isolated certainty and on the empiricist habit of treating perception as a chain of inferences. Dilthey’s certitude is practical, not metaphysical: we navigate a shared world before we theorize it. For a historian, that’s the difference between reading the past as dead data and encountering it as human life, structured by motives, meanings, and pressures that still rhyme with our own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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