Dilthey

If Wilhelm Dilthey were to be identified with an intellectual fatherhood, it could be summarized in a single word whose power is paramount and whose contemporary need is imperative: understanding. For Dilthey understanding is the ability to revive in one's own interior the experience of others. To understand is to understand, to reach, to penetrate, to find justified or natural the acts or feelings of another, but without the need of a causal explanation that shows how the external and internal conditions necessarily led to an action, a passion or a representative figuration. To understand is, rather, to place in one's own soul the feelings, the free will, the imperatives, the circumstances, the representations, the motivations, the history, in short, everything that, like a vital collage of sensations, makes one lower one's head, take one's hand, place oneself next to another, make one's own soul one with that of others and know, without so many reasons, why one acted in such a way. But Dilthey goes further and wants to raise understanding to a methodology for the sciences of the spirit.