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This paper analyses Dilthey’s unpublished lecture from 1890. In the anthropological and ethical reflections, a pre-predicative form of expression is pointed out as a dynamic fundament of inner life. In the second part of the lecture, expression as this inner dynamic of life is further connected with Dilthey’s “forming ethics”, i.e. with an approach that takes the inner interplay of high- and low-level processes of consciousness as the essential basis of an integrated and solidary social life. In the context of such a social ethics, expression plays a fundamental role thus gaining a broader meaning for a philosophy of life also concerned with ethical issues.