(b Biebrich, nr Wiesbaden, 19 Nov 1833; d Seis, nr Bozen [Bolzano], 1 Oct 1911). German philosopher and writer on music. He studied theology at Heidelberg for one year, then philosophy at the University of Berlin (Habilitation 1864), with the classical philologist P.A. Boeckh, the historian Leopold von Ranke and the philosopher F.A. Trendelenburg. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Basle (alongside Jakob Burkhardt, 1867–8), at Kiel (1868–71), Breslau (1871–82) and Berlin (1882–1905). Dilthey contributed to metaphysics, moral philosophy and the theory of knowledge; he wrote on the Renaissance, the Reformation, the German Enlightenment and German Idealism, and his studies of poetry influenced 20th-century literary criticism.
Whereas his writings on German composers and music are primarily of historical interest, his contributions to hermeneutics, including his essay ‘On Understanding Music’ (c1906), are highly significant for musicology. Moreover, the resistance to positivism in late 20th-century thought, not least in music, has its roots in Dilthey’s general philosophy, making it of compelling interest today.
Dilthey fought against the ascendancy of the natural sciences in his time by asserting the independent existence of the ‘human sciences’ (Geisteswissenschaften), which included history and philosophy. These are based in the primacy of human experience. Whereas the laws of science are abstractions from objects, the ultimate (‘primordial’) reality consists of the ‘lived experiences’ (Erlebnisse) of objects within our consciousness. The theatre of operations of such experience is the ‘life-nexus’ (Lebenszusammenhang), within which our sense of the world interacts with our sense of self, and perceptions (in the context of self-awareness) become experiences. In the course of this discussion (Introduction to the Human Sciences, i, 1883) the duality of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ becomes prominent. By 1867–8 Dilthey had begun to deploy a distinction between ‘explanation’ (Erklärung) and ‘understanding’ (Verstehen), appropriated from J.G. Droysen, which was to become the cornerstone of his hermeneutics: ‘to explain’ is to give an account of the effects of something (e.g. a physical force), whereas ‘to understand’ is to re-create it in one’s psyche, to experience it, to compare it with other experiences and so to understand it (Selected Works, Princeton, 1985–, iv, 229–30). The former is the way of the natural sciences, the latter of the human sciences. The coordination of elementary acts of understanding to grasp a complex expression is called ‘interpretation’ (Auslegung) and its methodology is ‘hermeneutics’.
In The Formation of the Historical World of the Human Sciences (1910), Dilthey conceived actions, texts, works of art and other ‘manifestations of mental content’ as ‘expressions’ (Ausdrücke); these distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences. In the former, ‘we experience human states, give expressions to them and understand these expressions’ (Selected Writings, Cambridge, 1976, p.175). Connecting this to the idea of life-nexus, he remarks: ‘Understanding of other people and their expressions is developed on the basis of experience and self-understanding and the constant interaction between them’ (ibid., 218). Understanding a work of art involves exploring the artist’s ‘mental life and its relation to environment and circumstances’: hence the relation between creation and creator (ibid., 223–4). The interpreter must be aware of the limitations of his own mental experience, and must transport himself into the work of art and its world and so ‘relive’ it. This bridging of the worlds of experience of artist and interpreter through empathy represents the highest form of the hermeneutic process.
Dilthey received early musical instruction from his grandfather, a court Kapellmeister, and enlarged his knowledge of music theory during his student years in Berlin. In the 1870s he wrote reviews of music and music books as well as a number of more extended articles on music. His sketch for an essay ‘On Understanding Music’ survived unpublished as part of the planned continuation of his Formation (1910). In it he robustly declares: ‘No history of music has the slightest idea how experience is converted into music’. In music, there is ‘no dualism of experience and music, no twin worlds, no transference from one to the other …. There is not even a prescribed path’ (Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin and Leipzig, 1914–36, vii, 222). How a succession of notes and rhythms means something other than itself is, he says, an unfathomable mystery. For meaning operates not (as with the written word) between parallel surfaces (to use 20th-century terms) of ‘signified and signifier’ – that is, experience and expression – but between past and present in the stream of musical sound. He tries to articulate this by describing expression as ‘an operation of the imagination wherein experience “shines into” the historically unfolding world of tones’, inserting itself into the stream of musical sound like a beam of light and illuminating it from within.
If Kretzschmar’s celebrated paper ‘A Stimulus to Promote a Hermeneutics of Music’ (1902, 1905) was prompted by Dilthey’s work, then ‘On Understanding Music’ is perhaps a rejection of Kretzschmar’s programme, for he states firmly: ‘There is no psychological correlation between states of mind and a representation of them in the imagination: anyone who pursues this is barking up the wrong tree’, concluding (ibid., 223):
The edifice of music history as it stands today needs to be completed with a theory of musical meaning. This is the missing link which should connect the other theoretical branches of musicology with creativity, and ultimately with the life of the composer and the formation of musical schools – a relational system between the two, the site of the true secret of the musical imagination.
Whereas Dilthey contributed significantly to the critical literature on poetry, which for him exemplified the workings of the human sciences, he made no similar major contribution to music. Nevertheless, his writings on music are well informed, disciplined and deeply thought. The long essays on individuals take the personality of the composer, in the light of cultural and artistic milieu, and explore the nature of his creativity through a study of selected works: in Bach’s case particular cantatas, oratorios and passions, in Mozart’s case three late operas. As ‘Beginnings of Great German Music’ makes clear, Dilthey believed that with Bach and Handel mastery of the art of music had passed from the Italians and French to the Germans, where it had rested for more than two centuries in a steady development unrivalled by any of the other arts.
See also Hermeneutics and Philosophy of music.
(on music)
Lebenskämpfe und Lebensfriede, Westermann's Jb der illustrirten deutschen Monatshefte, xxii (1867), 241–65 [musical novella pubd under pseud. Friedrich Welden]
‘Richard Wagner’, Westermann's Jb der illustrirten deutschen Monatshefte, xxxix (1875–6), 421–32 [pubd under pseud. Karl Elkan]
‘Die drei Epochen der modernen Aesthetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe’, Deutsche Rundschau, lxxii (1892), 200–36
‘Leibniz und sein Zeitalter’, Wilhelm Diltheys gesammelte Schriften (Berlin and Leipzig, 1914–36), iii, 1–80 [incl. discussion of opera, sacred music and Schütz]
‘Das musikalische Verstehen’ (c1906), ibid., vii, 220–24; trans. in Music in European Thought 1851–1912, ed. B. Bujić (Cambridge, 1988), 370–74
‘Die grosse deutsche Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts’ (c1906–7), Von deutscher Dichtung und Musik: aus den Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes, ed. H. Nohl and G. Misch (Leipzig, 1933/R), 189–298 [comprising ‘Die Anfänge der grossen deutschen Musik’, ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’, ‘Händel’, ‘Haydn’, ‘Mozart’, ‘Beethovens Fidelio und neunte Sinfonie’]
Reviews [anon.] in Westermann's Jb der illustrirten deutschen Monatshefte, xxxvii (1874–5), 595 only [Rietz edn of Mendelssohn songs]; xli (1876–7), 335 only [letters of M. Hauptmann to Spohr, ed. F. Hiller; F. Hiller: Musikalisches und Persönliches]; xlii (1877), 370 only [H.A. Köstlin: Geschichte der Musik im Umriss]; xliii (1877–8), 557–8 [C.F. Pohl: Joseph Haydn, i; Mozart letters, ed. L. Nohl]; xliv (1878), 221–2 [A. von Dommer: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte]; xlvi (1879), 512–3 [W.J. von Wasielewski: Geschichte der Instrumentalmusik im XVI. Jahrhundert; F. Liszt: Chopin]
H.A. Hodges: Wilhelm Dilthey: an Introduction (Oxford, 1944)
H.A. Hodges: The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (London, 1952)
P.L. Frank: ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Contribution to the Aesthetics of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xv (1956–7), 477–80
H.P. Rickman: Dilthey Today: a Critical Appraisal of the Contemporary Relevance of his Work (New York, 1988)
I. Bent, ed.: Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), ii, 8–26
IAN D. BENT