Hegel: not just worldview (weltanschauung), but “infinite world-intuition” (unendlichen weltanschauung) and “a moral outlook on the world" (moralische weltanschauung). Hegel seems to connect worldview largely with moral experience, somewhat with religious experience, and less with academic philosophy, which is more conscious, and structures worldviews and religion. He also points up the cultural specificity of worldview. I believe he also popularized “zeitgeist,” or "spirit of the age," which roughly aligns with worldview at the cultural and historical level. The issue here is that worldview is not only personal, it also encompasses cultural and (academic) disciplinary narratives and assertions.
Kierkegaard: Both worldview and its cognate for him, "lifeview," are basic to his existentialist philosophy. These are both about the individual knowing him- or herself, and thus knowing how to act. In fact, he says that the goal of existential philosophizing is to actualize a lifeview, giving meaning to existence.
Wilhelm Dilthey: his pioneering work on theories of the human sciences and hermeneutics cohere with his attempt to systematize a theory of worldview. He wanted as well to formulate “an objective epistemology for the human sciences.” He wanted to get beyond “historicism,” believing that worldview was the form in which the meaning of life was to be grasped. He subdivided worldviews into types: religious, poetic, and metaphysical. He also subdivides these types, gives primacy to the metaphysical version, but realizes the problem of naturalism—the gulf between the subjective and objective. Dilthey attempts an “objective idealism” that attempts to bridge this gap (and thus get behind worldviews to some agreed-upon foundation for meaning). It is useful to quote Naugle (Worldview, 97) here: “Dilthey’s simple recognition of the conflict of philosophic systems and the increasing awareness of the historical condition of humanity led to the skeptical conclusion that there is no absolute, scientific, metaphysical construct which defines the nature of reality with finality. In other words, metaphysics does not have the answers. What are available, however, are worldviews—worldviews which are rooted in the contingencies of human and historical experience and which seek to elucidate the riddle of life.”
Nietzsche: Again, to quote Naugle (106). “For Nietzsche, God is dead, only nature exists, and history reigns. On this basis, he conceived of worldviews as reified cultural constructs and idiosyncratic perspectives on life, artificial to be sure, but necessary for human survival in an ultimately chaotic, unnavigable world.”
Edmund Husserl: he rejected the concept of worldview as foundational, and attempted to establish a rigorous, “scientific,” basis for philosophy. He posited an alternative concept, "lebenswelt" (lifeworld), which is difficult to decipher. It appears to be a pre-rational picture, way of living, or intuition that exists in the mind a priori. How this escapes the historicized relativism of worldview is unclear, except that Husserl believed in a “transcendental substrate” that is accessible universally. (I guess. I’m just throwing something out here.)
Karl Jaspers: attempts a “psychology of worldviews” (the title of his book).
Martin Heidegger: in an attempt at existentialist phenomenology, Heidegger says that “a philosophical worldview is not just the casual byproduct of the discipline of philosophy, but is its very goal and nature. ‘It seems to be without question,’ Heidegger observes, ‘that philosophy has as its goal the formation of a world-view.’” (Naugle, 137) Heidegger also introduced the concept of the “world-picture.” This differs from world-view for him in that it is more of a structural image than a complex of functions. I would explain world-picture as how the world would look to a person who held particular world-view understandings. (Naugle’s questions for Christian philosophers on page 147 bear investigation. The issue here is the subject/object or fact/value distinction that bedevils modernism. By accepting a certain definition of the concept of worldview, Naugle asks, does philosophy then commit itself to accepting the objective/subjective distinction of modernism? What would the implications of that acceptance be?)
See the earlier entry on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Davidson for some detailed discussion on his and Davidson’s concepts.
The post-modernists: one doesn’t know what to say. Deconstruction is a profoundly skeptical project, and in many ways appears to be self-contradictory. It isn’t really tenable as a way to approach either life or scholarship, as witness Derrida himself. Toward the end of his life, he became embroiled in a dispute over the interpretation of his writing. This theorist, who had gleefully deconstructed various other authors, including the living author John Searle (in a series of dialectical articles in Glyph in the 1970's or early 1980’s), was affronted when others attempted to interpret deconstruction in a way he felt was not proper. If others' words are open to free play, as Derrida asserted (so far as he asserted anything) in his writing, then Derrida himself is in the free play language game, and can’t complain about the rules he helped codify.
Michel Foucault is another matter. There are continuing disputes over his scholarly method, and possible falsification of data that he used to construct his theories. However, if God is dead and all there is, is power, then his theories of knowledge formation have real power. But notice the post-modern assumption here, that there really is no reality outside the text. Just because humans cannot achieve epistemological certainty about the world doesn’t mean that the world really isn’t out there.
Peter Berger and Donald Luckmann have a more trenchant critique of worldview, one that’s echoed by gender critics, especially feminist scholars. Berger and Luckmann claim (as I’ve said earlier) that worldview notions are “reified” (treated as objectively existing entities outside of the human inventor) by individuals and societies, and become coercive meta-texts, that purport to explain reality. This is an important critique because of Western culture's history of using ideas and political structures to oppress others. However, I believe that most of these theorists miss the implication of this view: whenever any ideology constructs a coherent narrative and set of assertions that functions as a world view, it coerces (that is, it labels certain acts/thoughts/expressions as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”). When a meta-narrative/ideology/worldview gets powerful enough to impose social sanctions on discourse, then doesn’t it too become a coercive meta-text? [witness “political correctness."]
Next: a list of thinkers in various academic disciplines who treat the concept of worldview for that discipline.
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