ABSTRACT
Historical understanding, which has to deal with complex phenomena, may conveniently be approached via the understanding of individual persons. This is encountered in autobiography—the literary expression of a person’s understanding of his own life—and in biography—the comprehension of another man’s life. The advantages of biography over autobiography are that the life under consideration is completed and can be looked at detachedly and critically. Dilthey’s emphasis on the understanding of the individual, on autobiography and biography, illuminates his whole conception of history. He considers it the chief task of history to present us with a panorama of what human beings were like and how they acted. Autobiography is the highest and most instructive form in which the understanding of life confronts us. Biography can avail itself of statements about awareness of what is meaningful as a basis for understanding. Biography is limited by the fact that universal movements intersect in the individual life.
