What is a Worldview? Some Suggestions from the History of the Concept

The word “worldview” is the English translation of the German word “Weltanschauung.” It comes from the field of philosophy and literally means an all‐inclusive “vision of the world.”

Many are the questions related to the concept of worldview and all come from one main question: What is a worldview? From this question, many others come: Is it something innate or artificial, naturally known or socially learned, intuitive or pedagogically transmitted? Does everybody need a worldview? If not, who needs a Weltanschauung?

If taken seriously, these questions are very difficult to answer—not even the philosophers have been able to answer them, even though throughout history, many of them have conceptualized big ideas that encapsulate and systematically order reality. In the cultural discourse, it is not unusual to hear references to a Platonic, Marxist, or “scientific” worldview.

The philosophical origin of the term may have caused initial resistance to its comprehension, as it seemed speculative and unclear. Throughout history, the plurality of philosophical systems has often caused skepticism toward philosophy in general and attitudes of suspicion, irony, or belittling of Weltanschauungen in particular. In common usage, the word has been—and often still is—associated with magniloquent promises and unrealistic expectations; it is often considered an outmoded word with spiritual overtones (see Geuss 2020). In everyday, popular usage, it sounds abstract, pretentious, and bombastic—as only certain philosophical words do. Is this reaction to the word due to a lack of clarity in understanding the concept? Is there equal difficulty in grasping the proper meaning of other words or phrases that could be used instead of “worldview,” namely, “culture,” “civilization,” “state of mind,” “Zeitgeist,” “idea,” or “system of ideas”? For one reason or another, each of these options seems incomplete and insufficient.

What, then, is a worldview?

Moving from the use of “worldview” in popular language and the associated objections and questions, it is clear that a distinction must be drawn between the common use of the word and its scientific—namely, philosophical—meaning. The history of its scientific meaning begins in the German language with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), in which he writes:

Kant is saying here that beyond the perception of world objects and also beyond the numerical quantitative estimation of world objects, there is a comprehensive and imaginative faculty of human reason oriented toward the idea of unity. In this way, he suggests the ability of the individual's imagination to elaborate a comprehensive concept of the world as a valid framework for all the phenomena they experience in and through it.²

Since Kant's first mention of Weltanschauung, the use of the term spread rapidly in everyday German language as well as in other languages. “By the 1840s [Weltanschauung] had become standard in the vocabulary of the educated German, denoting a global outlook on life and the world—akin to philosophy but without its rational pretensions. In the 1830s the notion of Weltanschauung began to penetrate other languages” and “by the end of the nineteenth century (when the word reached a crescendo of popularity in the German‐speaking world) it had made its way into virtually every speech community in the Western world” (Wolters 1983: 15).³

The beginning of the twentieth century marks a crucial point in the development of the concept of worldview.⁴ In the German‐speaking world, many thinkers felt the need to address the meaning of a worldview, among them: the “father” of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (Husserl 1981), the leading representative of the neo‐Kantian school Heinrich Rickert (Rickert 1933), the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (Simmel 2007), and the renowned educationalist and Plato reader Paul Natorp (Natorp 1918). In 1911, the German historian and psychologist Wilhelm Dilthey published Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen, which went on to become a reference text in the field (see Bulhof 1980). The year 1919 was also important for the intellectual history of Weltanschauung, as it was the year that Martin Heidegger, Husserl's “pupil” and the future author of Sein und Zeit (1927), delivered his first lectures at the University of Freiburg, titled “Die Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem” [“The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview”] (Heidegger 1996).

That same year, Karl Jaspers published his book Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Jaspers was understandably influenced by Dilthey but he personalized the thinking about Weltanschauung thanks to his education and his experience and skills as a physician and psychologist.⁵ He set out to describe different types of worldviews in order to create a sort of conceptual map of the possible worldviews and their basic grounds (Garaventa 2017). Through Jaspers' work, it is possible to categorize some general characteristics of the concept of a worldview as it has evolved over time. What Jaspers—like other interpreters and thinkers of his time—makes clear, is the all‐inclusive character of a worldview, which allows us to consider it as a whole.

At the beginning of his book, Jaspers asks the same question that was posed at the beginning of this article: What is a Weltanschauung? His answer: “It is something total and universal at the same time. […] They [worldviews] are the highest and total expressions of the human being, both from the point of view of the subject, as experiences, forces, feelings and from the point of view of the object, as worlds which have been moulded in an objective and concrete way” (Jaspers 2019: 23). This character of the wholeness of worldviews has many implications, four of which are set forth below.

1. A Matter of Life. According to Jaspers, a worldview is more than its intellectual, theoretical, and cognitive values. “It is not a mere form of knowledge, but it shows itself through evaluation, through the hierarchical order of values which one chooses” (Jaspers 2019: 23). Some years later, Jaspers wrote: “What we mean by a world view is indeed more than knowledge. It includes what is sometimes contrasted with it as a ‘view of life’: the way in which an individual will evaluate things, what matters absolutely to him and what has only relative importance, and how, in consequence, he will behave and act” (Jaspers 1969: 251).

Evaluation, values, will, and choice—these terms suggest that a worldview embraces a set of beliefs, ideas, ideals, views, feelings, and judgments that serve as grounds for individuals to orient themselves in the world. The worldview brings order to the world of the subject by helping them to separate what is a life worthy for them and what is irrelevant, what is fitting for life, and what is not. What emerges is the belief‐oriented and pragmatic value of the individual's worldview. Thus, a worldview is needed not only to know but to live—it implies not only an assessment of the world, but it helps the human being to live meaningfully in it. In more recent years, Mark Koltko‐Rivera has spoken of the worldview as “a belief system” (Koltko‐Rivera 2004: 4).

2. A Complex Mix. According to the philosophical tradition, Weltanschauung is a compound of many parts, including an individual's attitudes and “personality type” (active, contemplative, aesthetic, intuitive, rational, reflective, ascetic, hedonistic, and enthusiastic or unenthusiastic); psychological, cultural, and sensitive leanings (mechanical, natural, historical, and mythical); and grounding “metaphysical conception of the world” (how one thinks about the world with respect to a metaphysical entity). According to Jaspers and reflective of his philosophy, a worldview includes different world orientations, different reactions to life situations as the “limit situations” (such as death, fight, pain, and guilt), and different spiritual types (such as nihilism, skepticism, liberalism, authoritarianism, and the tendency to infinity). So, worldview is chosen not intellectually but existentially by the individual, by acting, feeling, and living. As Jaspers declared: “Das Leben ist das Ganze” (“life is all”) (Jaspers 2019: 292).

What is important to emphasize is the complex and composite nature of a worldview, whose core elements are so highly interrelated that it is almost impossible to speak of one element independently of the others. The intellectual solidity and organic strength and efficaciousness of a worldview are proportional to the constitutive inner coherence and homogeneity between its parts.

This issue has more recently been addressed by thinkers of psychology, who, by trying to classify the components of a worldview, take into account both the “innate proclivities and the objective features of human worlds and lives” (Nilsson 2013: 79). For this purpose, the following factors are listed: the self, the social and material world, epistemic presuppositions and limitations, evil and suffering, freedom of choice, the transience of life (the fact that we are exposed to the flow of time, which makes all things contingent, transitory, and relative), values, and purposes (Nilsson 2013). In the end, it is a complex mix.

3. The Individual and Their World. Since a worldview is not only an intellectual order, it has the power to shape the world of the subject, providing them with grounds for life that make them the person they actually are. The individuals are their worldviews. The involvement of the individual in their worldview is explained by the fact that the worldview works as a source of meaning for them. Each worldview is always a personal one.

More precisely, one's worldview is not something exterior, coming from outside the subject and fixing their life; instead, it develops together with the subject. Its emergence and growth are conditioned through the tuned correspondence between the subject's interior and exterior worlds. This correspondence exists when the two components that are implied by a worldview tally together. According to Jaspers, these components are “both the concrete existence of the soul seen as a whole and the rational doctrines, the imperatives, the objective images which the subject expresses, applies and uses to account for it” (Jaspers 2019: 52).

Eventually, a worldview acquires so much validity and objectivity that it becomes the solid reality of the subject, who gains in this way a real basis for life, for the experiences of life, and action in the world (Alessiato 2011).

4. Concreteness and Authenticity: Claim and Paradox. In Jasper's analysis, all Weltanschauungen are not abstract conceptualizations of the world. Rather, they are concrete; they have content. This content reveals itself in objective historical manifestations including religious doctrines, scientific theories, moral principles or an ethical canon, social habits, past interpretations, mythological narratives, and so on. All of these are outcomes of a process of objectification by which the inner life of the human being moves outside into the world. Without objective, historical, and communicable manifestations, it is as if those life forces engendering and pervading a worldview do not exist.

In line with this view, Jaspers observed: “Our worldview is real for us only in the singular. It enters into communication by way of struggle, of understanding, of discussion with others. In time it appears unfinished, starts moving, and in meeting others seeks itself on its own ground” (Jaspers 1969: 252). A worldview defines itself through a relationship with others. And relationships vary and are not always peaceful and untroubled.

At the level of the historical manifestation of the worldview's content, the potential rivalry and conflictuality between contrary or competing worldviews may develop. In fact, the more that individuals identify themselves with the content of a worldview, the stronger is their attachment to such content. This attachment, often displayed by people who share a worldview, reveals their need for a conceptual framework that provides them with an order of meaning and a set of beliefs. Just having this need makes them ready to claim their own worldview and willing to defend, if necessary, its content. Even if worldviews can show different degrees of conflictuality and tolerance, that tension is not accidental or conditioned to the type of worldview or its content. It is intrinsically related to the complex nature of the worldview, which is in itself—as Jaspers explained— “something total and universal at the same time” (Jaspers 2019: 23).⁶

The risk of conflictuality connected to the worldview's degree of authenticity is the “vitality paradox.” Paradoxically, the mutual conflictuality between worldviews may signify their internal strength and respective vitality. This risk is constitutive for any worldview, and any worldview, regardless of its content, may come to be challenged by competing beliefs and visions of the world. Here the work of the negotiator can begin.