Weltanschauung

Weltanschauung (pronounced velt-ahn-shou-oong)

A worldview.

1868 (in English): From the German Weltanschauung, the construct being Welt (world) + anschauung (view, conception, perception).  Welt was from the Middle High German wëlt, an assimilative contraction of the older wërlt, from the Old High German weralt, from Proto-the West Germanic weraldi, from the Proto-Germanic weraldiz; it was cognate to the English world, the Dutch wereld and the Swedish värld.  Anschauung was from the Middle High German anschouwunge, a calque of the Latin vīsiō (seeing, sight, vision, view); the construct being ansch(auen) (to look at; to behold; to observe (visually); to view) +‎ (a phonetic) -ouwu- + -ung (the suffix used to form nouns from verbs).  Weltanschauung is a noun and weltanschaulich is an adjective; the noun plural is plural Weltanschauungen.

In English, the word is used as an un-adapted borrowing from the German (although often without the initial capital German nouns demand), the descendants from the German in other languages including the Afrikaans wêreldbeskouing (calque), the Bulgarian светоглед (svetogled) (calque), the Estonian maailmavaade (calque), the Finnish maailmankatsomus (calque), the Hungarian világnézet (calque), the Japanese 世界観 (calque), the Chinese 世界觀／世界观 (shìjièguān), the Korean 세계관 (segyegwan), the Vietnamese thế giới quan, the Polish światopogląd (calque), the Romanian weltanschauung, the Russian мировосприя́тие (mirovosprijátije) (calque), the Swedish världsåskådning (calque) and the Ukrainian світосприйняття́ (svitospryjnjattjá) (calque).

One of those compound nouns at which Germans excel in forming, Weltanschauung seems first to have been used by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment (1790)).  Kant used the word (which translates literally as “worldview”) to describe the capacity of man to achieve a unified perspective on the world; to illustrate the concept he referenced the matter of aesthetic judgment and the contemplation of nature, emphasizing how aesthetic experience enables people to form a coherent and meaningful view of the world as a whole.  For Kant, a Weltanschauung was essential were an individual to experience the sublime and the role of imagination & reason in aesthetic experience but the term doesn’t dominate the text, acting instead as a kind of structural underpinning, providing the framework with which people can move beyond fragmented sensory impressions to grasp a harmonious vision of nature and the cosmos.  For Kant, the very purpose of philosophy was a uniting of the faculties of understanding, reason, and sensibility, itself a worldview which makes his work at once so rewarding and so difficult.

His examples though were compellingly simple: It was through encounters with the sublime (the stars above, the deep forest, the grandeur of the mountains etc) that humans could transcend their limited empirical experiences and begin to sense unity and order (though perhaps not purpose, Kant inclined to sit on the fence on that one) in nature.  Importantly though, Kant did explain this was a serious business and one’s Weltanschauung was a thing to be arrived at through a process of reflecting upon the relationship between humanity, nature and the infinite; it was not something upon which one just stumbled.  So it was a matter of human imagination and reason operating together to synthesize sensory data and from this process would emerge a conception of universal principles: the world as an ordered and meaningful whole.  Kant not only asked much from the universe, he expected much from us.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

Despite his reputation (especially, one imagines, among puzzled students), Kant was not devoted to abstractions and was a practical philosopher; his intent was to write the sort of texts the philosophers of antiquity might have produced in an attempt to help people live better lives.  Kant wrote with moral and sometimes teleological themes and he was a great influence on later German philosophers including Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)) and it was his use of Weltanschauung in Critique of Judgment which provided the early foundation for the term.  His focus was on neither a subjective or cultural worldview but rather the universal human capacity to achieve a harmonious and meaningful perception of the world, grounded in aesthetic and teleological judgment.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1906), posthumous oil on canvas by Edvard Munch (1863-1944).  In the popular imagination, Nietzsche's Weltanschauung remains probably the best remembered German worldview of the nineteenth century.

It spread too to the English-speaking world and the influence on British & US writers of eighteenth & nineteenth century German philosophers was profound, tied to a shared concern with romanticism and idealism which was a challenge to the English tradition of empiricism.  In 1868, the US philosopher & psychologist William James (1842–1910) used weltanschauung in an essay titled The Sentiment of Rationality, published in The North American Review.  Very much in the tradition of Kant’s “worldview”, the essay explored the nature of belief, rationality and the human tendency to seek coherent perspectives on existence: intellectual commitments, emotional and practical needs.  What James wrote would have been familiar to those schooled in Kant but he expressed things in a more accessible way, explaining a worldview as the product of one’s quest for an intellectual unity which resolves apparent contradictions or ambiguities in one’s understanding of the world.  The essay in 1868 was an early work but James’ concept of Weltanschauung appears also in his major works including The Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); his interest in how individuals and societies construct meaning was life-long.  Probably, in English, the use of weltanschauung usually isn’t necessary because unlike other German borrowings like Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) or schadenfreude (taking pleasure form another's misfortune) which express in one word what in English takes a phrase, the literal translation “worldview” does the job.  However, it’s handy for those who wish to suggest and an outlook something in the vein of nineteenth century German philosophical thought, especially if accompanied by an apprehension of dread though definitely it doesn’t convey: “a certain Teutonic je ne sais quoi”.

Hegemony

Hegemony (pronounced hi-jem-uh-nee or hej-uh-moh-nee)

(1) Leadership or predominant influence exercised by one nation over others, as in a confederation.

(2) Aggression or expansionism by large nations in an effort to achieve world domination (especially among smaller nations).

(3) As cultural hegemony, ascendancy or domination of one (class, ethnic, linguistic etc) group over others.

1560–1570: From the Ancient Greek ἡγεμονία (hēgemonía) (leadership, authority, supremacy), the construct being ἡγεμών (hēgemon-) (stem of hēgemṓn) (leader) + -ia (the suffix forming abstract nouns of feminine gender, from the New Latin, from the Classical Latin -ia and the Ancient Greek -ία (-ía) & -εια (-eia)); the rarer form was ἡγέομαι (hēgeisthai) (to lead).  The root of hēgeisthai is unknown but a link has been suggested to "to track down," from the primitive Indo-European sag-eyo- from the root sag- (to seek out, track down, trace).  The forms antihegemonic & counterhegemonic were creations in political science to describe the tactics and strategies adopted to oppose a hegemon.  Hegemony, hegemon, hegemonization & hegemonist are nouns, hegemonized, hegemonizing & hegemonize are verbs, hegemonic is an adjective and hegemonically is an adverb; the noun plural is hegemonies.

The noun hegemonism dates from 1965 and refers to a policy of political domination, based to some extent on the model of imperialism.  The noun hegemonist was first used in 1898 in a discussion of the particular role of Prussia in the German (con)federation (the joke of the time being that while there were many states with an army, Prussia was an army with a state).  The noun hegemon had been used a year earlier, describing the unique position of Great Britain in the world as a maritime power with a far-flung world-wide empire, quite distinct historically from the models of the previous two millennia which had tended to be continental or at least contiguous.  The adjective hegemonic had emerged as early as the 1650s and was older still, noted in oral use in the 1610s.

Gramsci's legacy

Hegemons at lunch.

Mean Girls (2004) has been analysed as a series of case-studies deconstructing the ways an individual or group can asset a cultural hegemony but it's also been subject to the critique that as a piece of cinema, it's emblematic of the way the industry reinforces white supremacy and white privilege.  The original sense of hegemony, dating from the 1560s, was in reference to the predominance of one city state over another in Ancient Greece and was used also to mean the literal authority or sovereignty of one city-state over a number of others, as Athens in Attica or Thebes in Boeotia and generally to the Hellenic League (338 BC), a federation of Greek city–states created by Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BC; king (basileus) of Macedonia 359-336) to facilitate his access to and use of Greek armies against the Persian empire.  It was first used in a modern sense in geo-politics during the 1850s to describe the position of Prussia in relation to other German states and came to be applied, sometime misleadingly, to the European colonialism imposed upon the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.  In the twentieth century, political scientists (not only those from the left although the idea was most developed by neo-Marxists) extended the denotation of hegemony to include cultural imperialism, the domination, by a ruling class (or culture), in a socially stratified society.  The core of the theory was that by manipulating cultural values and mores, thereby constructing a dominant ideology, the ruling class intellectually can dominate the other classes by imposing a worldview (Weltanschauung) that, ideologically and structurally, justifies the social, political, and economic status quo to the point where it’s viewed as normal, inevitable and perpetual, with no possible alternative.

Antonio Gramsci

It was Italian politician and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) discussions in the 1920s of the nature of hegemony which provided the framework upon which others built their theories.  Gramsci was interested in the survival, indeed the flourishing of the capitalist state in the most advanced Western countries, despite the social and economic convulsions which earlier theorists had suggested should have threatened the system’s survival.  Gramsci understood the supremacy of a class and that the reproduction of its associated mode of production could be obtained by brute domination or coercion but his key observation was that in advanced capitalist societies, the perpetuation of class rule was achieved largely through consensual means.  A hegemonic class is thus one able to attain the consent of other social forces, and the retention of this consent is an ongoing project.  His work continues to underpin most critical analysis of apparently disparate systems such as The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US, systems in which tiny ruling classes (the Communist Party (CCP) in the former and the (somewhat misleadingly named) one percent in the latter), maintain and enhance a system entirely in their own interest with support from the masses ranging mostly from resigned acquiescence to actual enthusiasm.  In the CCP, this manifests as most of the population supporting the suppression of their political rights; in the US, they’re convinced to act against their own economic interests.  Under capitalism (ie the system used by both PRC and the US), Gramsci observed the relentless contribution of the institutions of civil society to the shaping of mass cognitions.

Gramsci wasn’t a theorist only of structures but was interested also in revolutionary strategy.  He noted the acquisition of consent prior to gaining power as an obvious implication but this he refined by offering a distinction a war of manoeuvre (the full frontal assault on the bourgeois state) and one of position (engagement with and subversion of the mechanisms of bourgeois ideological domination).  Others were taken with the concept, notably German-American political theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and German Marxist sociologist Rudi Dutschke (1940–1979), best remembered for the idea, inspired by Gramsci, of a “long march through the institutions”.  The strategy was inspired, the tactics flawed.  The institutions through which the revolutionaries were allowed (some say encouraged) to march turned out to be art galleries, theatre trusts and other structures on the margins.  The institutions which controlled the economy and the security of the state remained under the control of the hegemon.