A History of Weltanschauung

A bit on the history of the term weltanschauung: The English term “worldview” is a calque (a direct translation of a term in another language, with the translation used in the same way) of the German word. Though the elements of the German term come from Old German, the term was almost certainly coined in its philosophical sense by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 work Critique of Judgment.

Naugle points out two things: first, the term was only used once by Kant. He refers to it (in translation) in the quoted excerpt from the Critique, as “our intuition of the world,” “the substrate underlying what is mere appearance.”

Second, Wilhelm G. F. Hegel, one of Kant's immediate successors in the philosophy of Idealism, was the first to attempt a thoroughgoing definition of the concept, connecting it to his concept of the Zeitgeist of historical periods.

Now I see Kant's primary contribution to the history of philosophy as follows: he pointed out that we are imprisoned in our heads; we only know phenomena (appearances) rather than the numinous world (the world as it is). Our senses mediate our perceptions, making the contents of our minds radically perspectival. Kant attempted to mediate this personal relativism of perception by positing structures of mind/categories of thought that he thought were universal, and which he called synthetic a prioris.

Hegel pushed this insight farther, and called into question the unified subject. He pointed out that we only know ourselves in relation to our impressions of something outside ourselves. What are we, he asks, outside of our perceptions of something other than we are? Thus, our perception of ourselves is actually a process--the space between the perceiving self and the perceived other.

I figure for this blog, I'll chronicle my activities, and start with some informal musings on the concept of worldview, which I'm creating a faculty training for at my university. It's clear to me that worldview ends up having a particular power in a postmodern context. It's also clear to me that this solves the problem of the "Enlightenment Project," which attempts to construct an indubitable ground of certainty for human knowledge. The message of postmodern epistemology is that it can't be done, and I agree.

But the failure of the Enlightenment Project has consequences for faith-based worldviews like the Christian one, I think. Next, a little history of the term and concept, digesting and restating some material from David Naugle's Worldview: History of a Concept.