The word Worldview is what is known as a loanword. It is an English version of a German word Weltanschuung. It literally means “World” and “Perception.” (Naugle, 64). In 1790 Immanuel Kant coined the word to describe our perception of the world that we experience through our senses. (Naugle, 59) Kant only used it once. What is important to note was that Kant was not attempting a theory of Worldview. He did not elaborate. It was coined in passing. While Kant did not unpack the idea, his student, Johann Gottlieb Fitche (1762-1814) did. Fitche employed the word in his first work, contrasting the human and the Divine’s perception of reality. (Naugle, 60). He was basically contrasting the human sense of reality to what he imagined was God’s sense of reality. I want to hold this conceptualization of Worldview up as a product of the Enlightenment’s commitment to Reason. Experience is necessary and is good, but it is limited. It is particular to a person. However, with the work of Reason, sense can be made of experience.1 Even sense, on the scale of eternity, can be grasped. Thus a philosopher, such a Fitche, has the boldness to use Reason, to explore the experiences, the Worldview, of Divinity.
A second meaning of Worldview was developed by a friend of Fitche, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) who took the idea and ran with it, and in the process changed its meaning. In this view, Worldview shares the structures of rationalism, yet does not have access to the universal. According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Schelling transformed the word to mean “a self-realized, productive as well conscious way of apprehending and interpreting the universe of beings.”(quoted in Naugle, 60). Note three things. First: self-realized, productivity. For Schelling, Worldview was subjective and active. Secondly: consciousness. For Schelling, the activity was known to the person. This then makes it the product of reflection. It puts in the category of philosophy and hence subject to rationality. Meaning, you can examine it and seek to comprehend it. Thirdly, “apprehension” AND “interpretation.” Here we find that Worldview is not just experiences which intellect must manage and order, but rather the experiences directly influence the intellect. This is an important change, for in a period of less than fifty years, Worldview is being used to challenge the extreme Rationalism of the Enlightenment. I take this to signify a recognition that Rationalism had failed to account for Absolute Knowledge. From Schelling, the world spread throughout the philosophers of Europe and over the course of 50 years Worldview was heavily debated. Most notable were the treatments by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Goethe, Dilthey and Neitzsche.
Kierkegaard’s interaction with Weltanshuuang is worth noting. Kierkegaard was deeply disturbed by the Rationalistic claims to absolute Knowledge. His view was that the realm of Absolute knowledge was Faith. Reason, he concluded, had little access to Faith. Indeed, Reason’s attempts to access Faith were deemed destructive to Faith. However, Experience was different. Experience did have access to Faith. And so Reason could only get at Faith in a productive way through Experience. Therefore, Kierkegaard considered Worldview as a way to legitimate the claims of Faith. After Kierkegaard, then, philosophers began to treat rationalistic ideas, such as scientific thought, with their claims to universality, as coming from the Realm of Reason. In contrast, Worldview becomes an Experiential domain, one that is seen containing the relative, the personal and the historical. (Wolters, 1989, 15)
I previously mentioned Marten Heidegger (1889-1976), but now I want to return to him, for his contribution is significant. Heideggar wanted to interact with Things in of themselves; he wanted to know and experience pure Being. The difficulty was that interaction is two-sided. It involves Him. And It involved The Other. His attempts to access pure Being were always thwarted because he was always brought his preconceptions to the interaction. His preconception impose on the Other. What Heideggar wanted was a non-imposing way of taking the Other into consideration. He therefore rejected Reason as way to Pure Knowledge because thought always imposed structure. Science, which has asserted itself as synonymous with philosophy, was the epitome of an imposing structure. Following Kierkegaard, Heidegger differentiated Philosophy from Worldview, but rejected Worldview as well. Yes, Worldview is relative, historically and culturally influenced. Yes, it was open to Faith. But ultimately, it contained the seed of structures. I read Heideggar as someone who differentiated between spirit and religion. Spirit, like Being, was pure, while Religion was dogmatic and institutional. And Wordview is where the religiosity of faith dwelt. And so Worldview was both controlling and limiting. In contrast to Worldview, Heideggar promoted Phenomenology, a hope and method of seeing things truly as themselves, as a way of breaking free from the entrapment of both Science and Worldview. (Naugle, 135).
POSTMODERN: EXPERIENCE
We are now in the 1930s in our Worldview history lesson. And for the most part, the talk of Worldview dies down. It is being discussed, but not by the philosophical community. I’ll return to that later. I first want to talk about how Worldview made a comeback. Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1970, contributed to the revival of Worldview. (Naugle, 196). In his book, Kuhn posited that major advances in Science should be understood as humans undergoing paradigm shifts. These shifts were best understood not as having uncovered a new level of truth, but as major refinements to the best tool humanity has ever developed, language. Our vocabulary is a storage mechanism for knowledge and our vehicle for knowledge sharing. However, when we find that our language is no longer effective, when we find our vocabulary no longer facilitates our progress, we need to ditch it and develop new. But this hard. Very hard. There are whole conceptions of reality resting on particular vocabularies. Vocabularies carry historical and cultural values. People locate their identity and their experiences within particular vocabularies, and therefore resist abandoning them. Therefore, the heroes of science are the bold individuals, like Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, who were brave enough to ditch old tools when they ceased to work (Rorty, CITE). They were willing to experiment with new vocabularies. They were not afraid to go into uncharted territory. The changes these individuals proposed were fiercely resisted on two sides, by the predominate scientific community and often in the name of religion. Hence we see a relationship of Experience to Reason and Faith. Both Reason and Faith contain structures which are always resistant to change. But Change is what is needed, and Change is brought about by, oddly enough, by those who truly Experiment.
BEYOND KUHN
Kuhn’s thesis was widely accepted, and has been applied outside of science. Indeed, for Rorty, the real heros are not scientists, but rather Poets. Rorty writes “A sense of human history as the history of successful metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.” (CIS 20). Poets are the individuals who are employing their imagination and are creating new vocabularies which eventually trickle their way down in to the nooks and crannies of society. Poets inspire individuals to experience the new and to throw off the old. The story of humanity is the story of beings who have been able to change. Note that this is a complete reversal from Plato’s view, who eyed Poets suspiciously! For Rorty to be structural is to resistant to change. Philosophy contain structures of Rationality and Worldview contain the Dogmatic Structures of Experience. This structure is bound in the language, and so all languages must eventually be ditched.2 However, Faith-based discourse, and religion specifically, is seen as the epitome of destructive force. Religious vocabularies are “archaic and degenerate.” (CITE) Thus, the Postmodern Epistemologist eyes Worldview suspiciously.
—
1.Westphal (1990) elaborates on the extreme nature of Kant’s and Fitche’s epistemic commitment to Reason, arguing that they ultimately came to the conclusion that the moral was best located in the philosophical. (205)
2. Rorty argues “the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essential to the beginning of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies.” (CIS 44)
Worldview: A Brief History
Worldview: Bridging Enlightenment and Postmodern Epistemologies
Weltanschuung
The word Worldview is what is known as a loanword. It is an English version of a German word Weltanschuung. It literally means “World” and “Perception.” (Naugle, 64). In 1790 Immanuel Kant coined the word to describe our perception of the world that we experience through our senses. (Naugle, 59) Kant only used it once. What is important to note was that Kant was not attempting a theory of Worldview. He did not elaborate. It was coined in passing. While Kant did not unpack the idea, his student, Johann Gottlieb Fitche (1762-1814) did. Fitche employed the word in his first work, contrasting the human and the Divine’s perception of reality. (Naugle, 60). He was basically contrasting the human sense of reality to what he imagined was God’s sense of reality. I want to hold this conceptualization of Worldview up as a product of the Enlightenment’s commitment to Reason. Experience is necessary and is good, but it is limited. It is particular to a person. However, with the work of Reason, sense can be made of experience.1 Even sense, on the scale of eternity, can be grasped. Thus a philosopher, such a Fitche, has the boldness to use Reason, to explore the experiences, the Worldview, of Divinity.
A second meaning of Worldview was developed by a friend of Fitche, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) who took the idea and ran with it, and in the process changed its meaning. In this view, Worldview shares the structures of rationalism, yet does not have access to the universal. According to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Schelling transformed the word to mean “a self-realized, productive as well conscious way of apprehending and interpreting the universe of beings.”(quoted in Naugle, 60). Note three things. First: self-realized, productivity. For Schelling, Worldview was subjective and active. Secondly: consciousness. For Schelling, the activity was known to the person. This then makes it the product of reflection. It puts in the category of philosophy and hence subject to rationality. Meaning, you can examine it and seek to comprehend it. Thirdly, “apprehension” AND “interpretation.” Here we find that Worldview is not just experiences which intellect must manage and order, but rather the experiences directly influence the intellect. This is an important change, for in a period of less than fifty years, Worldview is being used to challenge the extreme Rationalism of the Enlightenment. I take this to signify a recognition that Rationalism had failed to account for Absolute Knowledge. From Schelling, the world spread throughout the philosophers of Europe and over the course of 50 years Worldview was heavily debated. Most notable were the treatments by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Goethe, Dilthey and Neitzsche.
Kierkegaard’s interaction with Weltanshuuang is worth noting. Kierkegaard was deeply disturbed by the Rationalistic claims to absolute Knowledge. His view was that the realm of Absolute knowledge was Faith. Reason, he concluded, had little access to Faith. Indeed, Reason’s attempts to access Faith were deemed destructive to Faith. However, Experience was different. Experience did have access to Faith. And so Reason could only get at Faith in a productive way through Experience. Therefore, Kierkegaard considered Worldview as a way to legitimate the claims of Faith. After Kierkegaard, then, philosophers began to treat rationalistic ideas, such as scientific thought, with their claims to universality, as coming from the Realm of Reason. In contrast, Worldview becomes an Experiential domain, one that is seen containing the relative, the personal and the historical. (Wolters, 1989, 15)
I previously mentioned Marten Heidegger (1889-1976), but now I want to return to him, for his contribution is significant. Heideggar wanted to interact with Things in of themselves; he wanted to know and experience pure Being. The difficulty was that interaction is two-sided. It involves Him. And It involved The Other. His attempts to access pure Being were always thwarted because he was always brought his preconceptions to the interaction. His preconception impose on the Other. What Heideggar wanted was a non-imposing way of taking the Other into consideration. He therefore rejected Reason as way to Pure Knowledge because thought always imposed structure. Science, which has asserted itself as synonymous with philosophy, was the epitome of an imposing structure. Following Kierkegaard, Heidegger differentiated Philosophy from Worldview, but rejected Worldview as well. Yes, Worldview is relative, historically and culturally influenced. Yes, it was open to Faith. But ultimately, it contained the seed of structures. I read Heideggar as someone who differentiated between spirit and religion. Spirit, like Being, was pure, while Religion was dogmatic and institutional. And Wordview is where the religiosity of faith dwelt. And so Worldview was both controlling and limiting. In contrast to Worldview, Heideggar promoted Phenomenology, a hope and method of seeing things truly as themselves, as a way of breaking free from the entrapment of both Science and Worldview. (Naugle, 135).
POSTMODERN: EXPERIENCE
We are now in the 1930s in our Worldview history lesson. And for the most part, the talk of Worldview dies down. It is being discussed, but not by the philosophical community. I’ll return to that later. I first want to talk about how Worldview made a comeback. Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1970, contributed to the revival of Worldview. (Naugle, 196). In his book, Kuhn posited that major advances in Science should be understood as humans undergoing paradigm shifts. These shifts were best understood not as having uncovered a new level of truth, but as major refinements to the best tool humanity has ever developed, language. Our vocabulary is a storage mechanism for knowledge and our vehicle for knowledge sharing. However, when we find that our language is no longer effective, when we find our vocabulary no longer facilitates our progress, we need to ditch it and develop new. But this hard. Very hard. There are whole conceptions of reality resting on particular vocabularies. Vocabularies carry historical and cultural values. People locate their identity and their experiences within particular vocabularies, and therefore resist abandoning them. Therefore, the heroes of science are the bold individuals, like Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, who were brave enough to ditch old tools when they ceased to work (Rorty, CITE). They were willing to experiment with new vocabularies. They were not afraid to go into uncharted territory. The changes these individuals proposed were fiercely resisted on two sides, by the predominate scientific community and often in the name of religion. Hence we see a relationship of Experience to Reason and Faith. Both Reason and Faith contain structures which are always resistant to change. But Change is what is needed, and Change is brought about by, oddly enough, by those who truly Experiment.
BEYOND KUHN
Kuhn’s thesis was widely accepted, and has been applied outside of science. Indeed, for Rorty, the real heros are not scientists, but rather Poets. Rorty writes “A sense of human history as the history of successful metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species.” (CIS 20). Poets are the individuals who are employing their imagination and are creating new vocabularies which eventually trickle their way down in to the nooks and crannies of society. Poets inspire individuals to experience the new and to throw off the old. The story of humanity is the story of beings who have been able to change. Note that this is a complete reversal from Plato’s view, who eyed Poets suspiciously! For Rorty to be structural is to resistant to change. Philosophy contain structures of Rationality and Worldview contain the Dogmatic Structures of Experience. This structure is bound in the language, and so all languages must eventually be ditched.2 However, Faith-based discourse, and religion specifically, is seen as the epitome of destructive force. Religious vocabularies are “archaic and degenerate.” (CITE) Thus, the Postmodern Epistemologist eyes Worldview suspiciously.
—
1.Westphal (1990) elaborates on the extreme nature of Kant’s and Fitche’s epistemic commitment to Reason, arguing that they ultimately came to the conclusion that the moral was best located in the philosophical. (205)
2. Rorty argues “the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essential to the beginning of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies.” (CIS 44)