Weltanschauung

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈvɛlt.ɑːnˌʃaʊ.ʊŋ/

Definitions

  1. A comprehensive perspective or worldview that encompasses beliefs, values, and attitudes towards life and existence
  2. A particular philosophy or conceptual framework that shapes an individual's understanding and interpretation of the world around them
  3. An all-encompassing outlook that informs a person's thoughts and feelings regarding society, culture, and life in general

Etymology: Immanuel Kant coined it in passing, in his Critique of Judgment of 1790, and meant something far narrower than a philosophy of life. For Kant, an "Anschauung" was an intuition, the mind's direct grasp of what the senses present, so a "Weltanschauung" was roughly the world as taken in by perception. It named an act of looking, not a set of beliefs. The parts are plain German. "Welt" is world, a cousin of English "world". "Anschauung" joins "an" (at, upon) to "schauen" (to look, to behold), which shares a Germanic root with English "show". A literal rendering would be "world-looking-at". The philosophers who followed Kant took the word and widened it. Through Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics it came to mean a whole way of seeing reality, and by the later nineteenth century Wilhelm Dilthey was classifying entire philosophies, religions and literatures as competing types of world-view. The word had become the name for the frame through which a person or a people interprets everything. English borrowed it in the later nineteenth century as an unadapted loan, keeping the German spelling, often the German capital letter, and the sense of philosophical weight. A home-grown translation, "world view", circulated alongside it, but the German original kept a heavier air of something systematic and total. That air grew darker in the twentieth century. In 1933 Sigmund Freud devoted a lecture to "The Question of a Weltanschauung", arguing that psychoanalysis needed none beyond the scientific one. The Nazis meanwhile made the word central to their vocabulary, presenting their racial ideology as a complete Weltanschauung that left no room for any other. Kant's quiet term for perception had become a word for a creed.

Synonyms: worldview, philosophy