Introduction to Volume Ii

The writings that have been collected in this volume are closely related to Wilhelm Dilthey’s efforts to complete the second volume of the Introduction to the Human Sciences. Dilthey himself pub­ lished the first volume (Books One and Two) of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften in 1883. He never completed Books Three to Six. Drafts for Books Four to Six did exist, but were only published posthumously and not until 1982. Our English edition of the Introduction1 includes almost all of these drafts. The essays in this volume deal with some of the important back­ ground issues that needed to be resolved in order to complete the Introduction. In these writings from the 1890s, Dilthey contributes to a theory of the human sciences by addressing the epistemological and psychological crises of his day. Although they do not yet arrive at the overall position that Dilthey developed in the first decade of the twentieth century,2 they provide a richness of detail that adds much to an understanding of the human world. Near the end of his life, Dilthey agreed to write a preface for most of the essays that make up this volume. In this brief preface he reiterates his allegiance to the empirical principle that limits human knowledge to what is capable of being experienced. This principle, which Kant had applied to the natural sciences, must also be ex­ tended to the human sciences. But for this extension to be success­ ful, the Kantian assumption that all experience is phenomenal needs to be questioned. To consider human historical life an ap­ pearance is a contradiction in terms according to Dilthey. “Within the course of life itself—in what develops from the past and stretches into the future—lie the realities that constitute the pro­ ductive nexus and the value of our life” (3). Historical life can be experienced and shown to be what is functionally real in the things we perceive.