ABSTRACT
A key element of Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) is his project of a descriptive and analytic psychology. It stands in opposition to the ruling, scientifically oriented psychology of the second half of the nineteenth century that Dilthey called explanatory or constructive psychology. In contrast to the explanatory psychology that tries to explain the psychic functioning in its elements, forces, and laws in the same way in which physics and chemistry explain the physical world, the descriptive psychology should describe the structural nexus (Strukturzusammenhang) of psychic life. While the explanatory psychology claims to explain the connections by causal relationship, whereby it starts from a limited number of clearly certain psychic elements, the descriptive and analytic psychology has to understand the psychic life by referring it to the experienced psychic nexus. This kind of psychology that Dilthey had already postulated in the first volume of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883) as a necessary element of his theory of the humanities, finds its final version in the great programmatic essay Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie (1894). These ideas are elaborated in the direction of a comparative psychology in the so-called “Abhandlung von 1895” Über vergleiche Psychologie. The basic idea of the Ideen will be presented in this chapter.
