WILHELM DILTHEY

WILHELM DILTHEY

“The knife of historical relativism…which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing. Only we need to be thorough. We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern.”
“The human being knows itself only in history, never through introspection; indeed, we all seek it in history. Or, to put it more generally, we seek what is human in it, such as religion, and so on. We want to know what it is. If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context. The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision. The human being is only given to us at all in terms of its realized possibilities.”
– Wilhelm Dilthey