Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilhelm Dilthey

Dilthey is taking aim at a kind of intellectual bureaucracy: the version of “rational psychology” that tried to explain the mind by treating it like a substance with stable properties, neatly classifiable, basically legible to the same tools used for physics. His hook is the phrase “lived experiences” (Erlebnis), which signals an insurgent subject matter - the messy, time-bound texture of consciousness that refuses to sit still long enough to become a tidy concept. The sentence reads like an indictment disguised as a progress report.

The intent is strategic. Dilthey isn’t rejecting science out of romantic spite; he’s arguing that the available “scientific expression” was inadequate because it smuggled in metaphysical assumptions (“substance doctrine”) and then congratulated itself for being rigorous. The subtext is that method isn’t neutral: what counts as knowledge depends on the tools you authorize. By saying these experiences were “validated” by “new and better methods,” he’s lobbying for legitimacy for the human sciences - history, hermeneutics, interpretive psychology - against the prestige economy of the natural sciences.

Context matters. Late 19th-century Germany is full of methodological turf wars: positivism rising, experimental psychology emerging, and historians debating whether their work is science or storytelling. Dilthey’s move is to reframe interpretation as method, not mere impression. He wants empathy, understanding (Verstehen), and historical situatedness to count as disciplined ways of knowing. The sentence performs that pivot: it doesn’t beg for permission; it asserts that the methods have improved, so the previously “inexpressible” parts of life can finally enter the record as legitimate knowledge.