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Weltanschauung is a German word that often is translated as “worldview” or “world outlook” but just as frequently is treated as a calque or left untranslated. A Weltanschauung is a comprehensive conception or theory of the world and the place of humanity within it. It is an intellectual construct that provides both a unified method of analysis for and a set of solutions to the problems of existence. The concept of a Weltanschauung has played an important role in the development of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century hermeneutics.
Weltanschauung is connected closely to the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who wanted to provide for the human sciences what Immanuel Kant (17241804) had provided for the natural sciences. Kant had established the possibility of objective and certain knowledge for natural science (Naturwissenschaft) in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Dilthey intended to fashion a critique of reason on behalf of the historical human or cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaft). For Dilthey the goal of natural science was causal explanation, whereas the goal of human sciences was to achieve understanding by means of interpretation. Every interpretation, he reasoned, takes place within a larger understanding of the world (i.e., a Weltanschauung), which itself is historically conditioned. Thus, interpreters of human history and culture must recognize their immersion in a particular historical situation and tradition and in that process come to terms with the finitude of their perspective. The irony of Dilthey’s historicist conclusions lies in the fact that they undermine his original goal of establishing universal validity for judgment in the human sciences. This split or contradiction resulted in differing orientations to the concept of the Weltanschauung among thinkers such as Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer.
For Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) the age of modernity was the coming into being of the rational or scientific Weltanschauung and the subsequent decline or eclipse of alternative religious or philosophical Weltanschauungen. The scientific Weltanschauung sees both the natural world and the cultural world as being ultimately transparent to the power of human cognition. Therefore, it consciously supplants world outlooks that place certain phenomena beyond the reach of human understanding. In Freud’s view psychoanalysis represented the last contribution to the criticism of nonscientific Weltanschauungen (for instance, by tracing the origin of religion to the persistence of the wishes and needs of childhood into maturity). The arrival of the scientific Weltanschauung, which Freud described as still being in its infancy, would resolve the paradox left behind by Dilthey. This was a historically conditioned view of the world, but because it represented the endpoint or terminus of human cognition, it could provide objective and certain knowledge for all human activities and endeavors.
A more direct successor to Dilthey was Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). In rejecting the strong claims of scientific rationalism, Husserl argued that objects are experienced by the observer only from within an intentional horizon of consciousness, or “life-world” (Lebenswelt). In other words, objects are not located in objective or autonomous space and time; they do not exist outside a detached observer who can come to know them objectively and finally. For Husserl meaning does not exist “out there” but resides only where subject and world meet. The goal is to strip away the preconceptions of history and science so that consciousness can understand the object as it really is.
Husserl, however, like Freud, ignored the historical nature of Dilthey’s account. The very possibility of ahistorical meaning was challenged by Husserl’s successors in phenomenology and hermeneutics, including Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-2002).
Heidegger emphasized the finitude of all historical and cultural interpretation at the expense of ahistorical accounts. For Heidegger hermeneutics, as the theory and practice of interpretation, must remain cognizant of different Weltanschauungs operating in certain historical contexts. One can know an object only from within one’s peculiar and historically conditioned Weltanschauung or (Heidegger’s favored term) Weltbild (world-picture). As interpreters of the world around them, people always find themselves within a particular language and culture. People cannot bracket the presuppositions of their Weltanschauung in order to explicate reality; in fact, those presuppositions become part of the very existence that demands explication.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose 1975 work Truth and Method represents the major thrust of contemporary hermeneutics, extended the Heideggerian critique of ahistorical interpretation in many ways. For Gadamer understanding involves an interpretive dialogue with the Weltanschauung in which one finds oneself. People’s modes of understanding (their “methods”) are at one and the same time the means of interpretation and objects that require interpretation. Gadamer reconnects to the histori-cist conclusions of Dilthey with his assertion that understanding can be achieved only with reference to the Weltanschauung in which that understanding is taking place. Unlike Dilthey and Heidegger, however, Gadamer posits that there can be no final interpretation of reality because new life-worlds or world pictures will cause future interpreters to see and experience the world differently.
Bibliography:
- Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1996. Selected Works. Vol. IV: Hermeneutics and the Study of History, eds. Rudolf A. Marrkkreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Freud, Sigmund. 1933. Lecture XXXV: A Philosophy of Life. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Trans.
- J. H. Sprott. New York: W. W. Norton. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and Method. London: Sheed & Ward.
- Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper.
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