Ever since its first usage in 18th century Germany, the term ‘worldview’ has captivated some of the most colossal thinkers in modern European history. In this article, we take a look at how the concept of worldview developed, and why it has had such a substantial impact on the intellectual landscape over the past centuries.
Why does the history of the concept matter, and why is it worth reading about? First of all, seeing how the notion of worldview develops allows us to understand its evolving meaning and significance. Secondly, it puts into focus some of the key characteristics of worldview, as every thinker approaches the notion from a different perspective. Lastly, it sheds light on the reasons why worldview has become such a prominent concept – what needs does it meet, and how can it help us make sense of our current place in history?
The first person to use the term worldview is a thinker whose impact on the modern world is hard to overstate – the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The German counterpart of the English term ‘worldview’ – Weltanschauung – would soon come to occupy an immensely important place in German culture. The significance of the term for Kant himself, however, seems to have been rather limited. In fact, he only mentions the word once in all his work, and even then, it does not carry much weight.1 By Weltanschauung, Kant refers to nothing more than our sensory experience of the world.
And yet, to say that Kant’s role in making worldview such an important notion is limited to coining the term would be to sell him short. One of Kant’s most influential ideas, his Copernican revolution, is pivotal for how anyone after him will come to think about worldview. In a nutshell, Kant proposes that our mind does not simply receive experiences of the world; instead, the mind actively constructs our experience of reality. Just like Copernicus realised that the centre of the universe was not our earth but rather the sun, Kant realised that the subject is only able to form knowledge of the world because the mind shapes it in such a way as to make it knowable. How we perceive and understand the world is not determined by the objective features of the world. On the contrary, our perception and understanding shapes and colours reality. A paradigm shift of immense proportion, Kant’s insight meant that inquiry into reality would henceforth have to start from the experience of the subject.
Naugle rightly writes that “Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy, with its emphasis on the knowing and willing self as the cognitive and moral centre of the universe, created the conceptual space in which the notion of worldview could flourish.”2 The reason why Kant’s Copernican revolution set the stage for the concept of worldview is that worldviews are always grounded in the perspective of the subject. In other words, it is only once we have started to explain reality from the point of view of the individual that the notion of worldview becomes tenable.
After Kant, the German Idealists picked up the thread – the important names here are Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In their hands, Weltanschauung started to become a central philosophical notion. As they wrestled with profound existential questions like ‘how can we make sense of reality?’ or ‘what is the meaning of existence?’, worldviews emerged as a possible response to these unnerving uncertainties. By centering our explanation of the world on the subject, a new set of philosophical questions arose. Worldview was the ideal candidate for dealing with these novel questions since it integrates the individual’s perspective into our understanding of reality and allows for a diverse range of different models of the world.
The German Romanticists further ushered on the shift away from objective accounts of the world towards subjective interpretations of life, as lived through a personal lens. Throughout the 19th century, the term Weltsanschauung spread through Europe like wildfire. At times, the word was used in the German original, while at other occasions it was translated – the Dutch wereldbeschouwing, the Danish verdensanskuelse, and the Polish swiatopoglad are but a few examples. The first English appearance of the term is found in Martineau’s Studies of Christianity in 1858. In less than a century since its coinage, worldview had been translated into dozens of languages and had come to occupy an important position in the European intellectual climate.
A key example hereof is found in the Danish thinker Kierkegaard. He drew on worldview, and the related term life-view, to stress that inquiry into existence could no longer be limited to a merely academic pursuit, divorced from everyday life. Instead, the individual must come to terms with their own existence and try to answer vital questions about the meaning and purpose of their own life. For Kierkegaard, a worldview can provide an underlying coherence to our lives and can help us cope with feelings of purposelessness, providing solid ground to stand on. Worldviews bring consistency and direction into our otherwise chaotic existence.
Another prominent figure that advances the notion of worldview in the 19th century is Wilhelm Dilthey. He is the first thinker that tried to elevate worldview theory to a comprehensive level. Worldview, for Dilthey, was the lens through which the biggest intellectual challenges of the time could be tackled. Dilthey was convinced that metaphysics, or the attempt to find the eternal certainties of reality, had failed. One glance at history should be enough to make us realise this, he thought, for the simple reason that one comes across many competing metaphysical systems throughout time. As Naugle puts it: “The historically proven fact of a multitude of mutually exclusive metaphysical systems, each claiming universal validity, produces a tension of almost unbearable proportions.”3
For Dilthey, then, humans are historical beings, and any attempt at coming up with an absolute account of the world will always be crushed by the passing of time. To account for this historical element, Dilthey thought we needed to leave behind metaphysics and the search for ultimate truth. At the same time, he understood that living in unhinged relativism, where any account of the world is as good as the next and any agreement on truth is basically impossible, is just as misguided – and likely more dangerous. The task he set himself was therefore to find the middle way between absolutist metaphysics and relativism. The path he found was the path of worldviews.
Dilthey writes that “every true world-view is an intuition which emerges from the standing-in-the-middle-of-life.”4 Worldviews, for Dilthey, are deeply individual, since they are only accessible from the personal perspective – one can only really know one’s own worldview. They are, in addition, comprehensive: one’s worldview informs every aspect of how one thinks and acts. Worldviews seek to strike the balance between the limits imposed by reality on the one hand, and the liberty of interpretation on the other. In other words, although there ought to be some restrictions to how wild one’s worldview can get, there is a lot of freedom left to interpret reality in a plurality of ways.
This brings us to one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century – Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche does not write a lot about worldviews directly, but there’s no doubt that the concept is a cornerstone in his project. One of Nietzsche’s central aims is overcoming nihilism. Much like Dilthey, Nietzsche had recognized the end of metaphysics – or, in his prophetic terms, the death of God. As such, the threat of nihilism loomed large. Without metaphysical and religious anchors to hold onto, Nietzsche thought, humans fall into a type of nihilism where all solid ground withers away and Truth and Morality are destroyed. In response to this daunting fate, Nietzsche urged us to recreate ourselves by fashioning our own worldviews. To withstand the perils of nihilism, we must shape our own lives by discovering our own values and meaning of existence.
Interestingly, Nietzsche believed that there is no world beyond the different worldviews. Rather, there are only the perspectives and interpretations that shape subjective experience; there is no objective reality ‘behind’ it. Nietzsche thus lets go of the modern notion that we share an objective world, and instead urged us to think only in terms of perspectives and worldviews. The inherently subjective element of reality that Nietzsche introduces may sound like relativism, but Nietzsche too sought to find the balance between relativism and absolutism. His answer was perspectivism, or the belief that the world is made up of an infinite array of different perspectives – and nothing else. Given the lack of a shared world, Nietzsche acknowledges that an infinite array of perspectives, interpretations and worldviews is possible.
It should be mentioned that the term worldview is not without its critics. One of the most sustained arguments against the concept comes from a surprising corner: the father of phenomenology Edmund Husserl. Since phenomenology is the philosophical pursuit to ground our understanding of reality in first-person experience, one might think that Husserl would be sympathetic to the notion of worldview. And yet, he insisted that worldviews could not help us to form an account of reality because they lack universality. Husserl believed that philosophy should strive to find eternally valid answers and disagreed strongly with Dilthey that history had shown this ambition to be flawed. In fact, Husserl devoted his life to finding absolute certainties with scientific rigour and did everything he could to separate philosophy from worldview thinking.
Husserl was a deeply modern thinker who believed in objective truth, so perhaps his scepticism towards worldviews was to be expected – as we’ve seen so far, worldview carries with it a sense of history and subjectivity that doesn’t sit well with the pursuit for absolute certainties. Interestingly, Wittgenstein also criticised the notion of worldview, but for the opposite reason. Reinterpreting the concept, Wittgenstein took Weltanschauung to represent an essentially Kantian position, in which there can be many different views, but all views are essentially of the same singular world. Wittgenstein thought we had no justification for positing such an underlying reality, thus siding with Nietzsche in claiming that all we really have is the plurality of views and perspectives. To shift the discussion, Wittgenstein tried to replace Weltanschauung with Weltbild, or “world picture”, which he understood to form a groundless substratum for all knowledge and beliefs, itself unverifiable but at the root of everything else. A Weltbild, in other words, is the framework through which we understand the world, but the framework itself is implicit – it informs our common sense but is itself invisible. Thus, whether we take something to be true or false depends in large part on the Weltbild installed in us through our parents, education and culture. For Wittgenstein, our view of the world is deeply subjective and shaped by historical and cultural forces beyond our control.
Two key figures that were no strangers to thinking in terms of forces beyond our conscious control are Freud and Jung. As one might expect, these key characters of psychology were most interested in the therapeutic significance of worldviews. Freud realised, like Nietzsche, that living without a worldview can be an unnerving prospect. Freud believed that worldviews could relieve some of the existential anxieties around death and the meaning of life – worldviews are therefore highly desirable. At the same time, Freud stressed that the need for a worldview reveals a kind of weakness of the mind – only those who are too fearful to live without a pre-given road map would seek out a worldview. Freud additionally thought that only modern science would have the making of a comprehensive worldview. Religion, art and philosophy all fail to provide rigorous accounts of reality grounded in naturalism and empiricism. Still, even science can’t quite meet the demands of a truly comprehensive worldview and ultimately fails to alleviate our existential anxieties. The pursuit to find a worldview is therefore regrettably futile, according to Freud.
Jung was markedly less sceptical of the quest for a worldview. Indeed, he considered the formation of a worldview paramount to giving a direction to our lives. Jung thought that psychoanalysis should be as comprehensible as possible. The psychoanalyst should strive to uncover the worldview of the patient, to see whether some elements of their worldview may be contributing to their mental malaise. Jung thereby underscores the idea that a worldview is not merely a representation of reality – it is deeply entangled with individual wellbeing. Its significance in matters like meaning and belonging entails that an inadequate worldview lies at the root of psychological issues. Jung realised that worldviews, and thereby entire societies and cultures who share the same worldview, can be maladaptive.
Once one understands worldviews as shared social phenomena, it is not a big leap to see worldviews as means to social control. If worldviews are largely subconscious and likewise have a substantial impact on how we think and act, then there is the obvious risk of malignant leaders employing them as tools of mass manipulation. This is where the link between worldview and ideology becomes apparent; predictably, we have Marx and Engels to thank for this insight. Lies instilled by rulers can lead to the formation of a worldview within a society. Breaking the spell of ideological lies and replacing it with a new worldview is seen as crucial in the struggle for political and economic revolution.
It goes without saying that the preceding is only a superficial overview of these thinkers’ reflections on worldview, and the list is by no means comprehensive. Rest assured, some of these thinkers, as well as others, will be dealt with more extensively in later articles.
In closing, it has become clear how all the thinkers that we looked at toil with questions surrounding objective reality on the one hand, and the role of the subject in making sense of the world on the other hand. While they evidently emphasise different aspects of worldview, they seem to converge on the idea that we need to make sense of reality to make existence bearable. Whenever this is attempted from the vantage point of the subject, the concept of worldview has shown to be highly expedient.
Further Reading
For a more in-depth historical overview, Naugle’s Worldview - The History of a Concept is a great place to start.
On the necessity and challenges of creating one’s own worldview, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Nietzsche’s Human all too Human are both helpful texts - though it should be noted that they do not deal with the concept of worldview explicitly.
For the link between worldview and therapy/mental wellbeing, Jung’s Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life comes recommended.
If you’re interested in the ideological aspects of worldview, have a look at The German Ideology by Marx and Engels.
Naugle, Worldview - The History of a Concept, 59
Ibid., 9
Ibid., 85
Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, 9:00