The term "worldview" is an adaptation of the German Weltanschauung (Welt, "world", and anschauen, "observe"), an expression introduced by the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in his work Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften ("Introduction to Human Sciences)", (1914). Dilthey, a member of the hermeneutical school, held that life experience was founded (not only intellectually, but also emotionally and morally), on the set of principles of the society and culture in which it had been formed. The relationships, sensations and emotions produced by the peculiar experience of the world within a given environment would contribute to shaping an individual worldview. All cultural or artistic products would in turn be expressions of the worldview that created them;the hermeneutical task would be to recreate the author's world in the reader's mind. The term was quickly adopted in the social sciences and in philosophy, where it is used both translated and in the original German form (1).
A worldview would not be a particular theory about the operation of any particular entity, but a series of common principles that would inspire theories or models at all levels: an idea of the structure of the world, which creates the framework or paradigm for the remaining ideas. Thus, it belongs to the field of philosophy traditionally called metaphysics (although traditionally anti-metaphysical doctrines, such as positivism or Marxism may constitute a worldview for its adherents). However, a worldview is not an explicit philosophical elaboration, nor does it depend on one; it can be more or less rigorous, finished and intellectually coherent.
Philosophical systems, religions or political systems can constitute worldviews, since they provide an interpretive framework from which their adherents and followers elaborate intellectual and ethical doctrines. Examples are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Socialism, Marxism, Scientism, Humanism, National Socialism, Nationalism, or Capitalism. Worldviews are complex and resistant to change; they can therefore integrate divergent and even contradictory elements. The uncompromising and authoritative affirmation of the worldview itself is fundamentalism.
Philosophical worldviews
At some stage of our life and / or "existential crises", we invariably come to ask ourselves: Who am I ?, Where do I come from ?, Where am I going ?, What was I before I existed ?, What am I doing here? What is the purpose of my existence? What will become of me? When I die… What will happen to me? etc., It is a theme that walks on the edge of the tangible and intangible. Of what is certain and not, of belief and certainty., Since each human being has countless possibilities in his way of seeing himself with respect to the world. And by asking us these questions, each one finds “their answers” according to their perception of their reality, thus creating their own worldview.
Philosophy and its main worldviews is essential in human thought. So essential are the causes that provide answers.
We are thinking beings with needs to understand what happens to us, what surrounds us, what we live, feel and do, and we see the world from our own point of view, that is, from our own history, culture, education, etc. sayings and popular sayings account for it with; "Everyone talks according to how things are going at the fair", "each head is a world", "Everything is according to the glass with which you look at it", etc.
The role of philosophy and its main worldviews is a fundamental element in the formation of the sciences because from the philosophizing of the human being through the ages, we start with the questions that are subsequently investigated, experienced and answered, thus they have gone gradually creating the sciences, from beliefs to certainties, that is, from knowledge to scientific knowledge. The topic is very broad and I would like to guide it along the lines that the different worldviews add up, contribute, multiply, add to and intertwine each other.
Philosophy, as a Concept of Man, the World and Life
The word Weltanschauung, which literally means worldview. This word is very significant, since it expresses what is ordinarily understood by Philosophy, that is, a general vision of the world, a kind of skeleton or intellectual structure in which the main concepts and institutions about man, the world and life.
In this sense, it is how it can be said that everyone has their own philosophy. Even the illiterate has a certain way of thinking, a certain "criterion" with which he usually judges the events that surround him.
The constituent elements of the National Socialist State are the result of ideological positions with deep historical roots. These form the framework of the National Socialist Weltanschauung, which contains the main postulates and the specific body of the National Socialist value system.
These are the German need to definitively structure their nation, this was represented by the German impetus to give a natural foundation to the organization of political power within an entity that merged between State and nation; race, giving bases to extreme German nationalism reinterpreted as a »race of lords» of peoples of non-European lineage, which in turn is taken up to purify it, eliminating or subordinating inferior races, raising it, the Aryan, as the "superior race" Among the existing races, and to justify their racist and militaristic postulates, the Aryan race was structured through racism (especially anti-Semitism), creation of the Lebensborn, anti-Slavism and superiority of the Aryan race (German and Nordic); euthanasia and eugenics for the purpose of racial hygiene; social Darwinism,natural laws are implacable, the weak is destroyed by the strong, the weak have no place in the order of the great and powerful; action, the Volk has the historical obligation to proclaim itself as a center of hegemonic control within the globe; anti-Marxism, anti-communism, anti-Bolshevism (of Jewish creation and provenance); denial of democracy (with the consequent prohibition of the existence of political parties and unions), since it represents the weakness and decline of the West; authority and leadership, represented in the Führerprinzip, by an absolute belief in the leader (ascending responsibility and descending authority); strong display of local culture; regeneration of art; love of nature and the creation of nature reserves and nature protection laws; front and battle;defense of the "Blut und Boden" (Blood and Earth) (idea represented by the colors of the National Socialist flag: red: blood, black: earth and white: purity); the village community (Volksgeer- Schaft).
Now, to define ideology (understood on a political level only), I must indicate that it comes from ideas worked towards concepts and beliefs worked towards concrete doctrines, from a political party or other similar organization and that relates directly to its members. This relationship occurs, in the first instance, by an individual, unique attitude that is inserted into the social body that gives life to ideology:
An attitude, as defined by the dictionary, is a posture or a form of behavior that indicates a belief or a feeling or a willingness to act. In this broad sense of the word, animals and not only man, although they do not strictly speaking have no beliefs, they do have attitudes; They have feelings and dispositions to act and we can know what they are by observing their behavior. But the attitudes we refer to are human; they are the attitudes of creatures that use concepts and express beliefs. The feelings and dispositions they indicate are particular to these creatures; they come from beliefs or, better, they arise in situations where beliefs are an essential part. What is more, the behavior that indicates them is predominantly verbal. Juan, when he gets mad at Pedro,You can adopt a threatening attitude without saying a word. Certainly, you can be an idiot unable to speak or think on a human level, and take a threatening attitude like a dog can. But when slaves or servants take a threatening attitude toward their social superiors, they almost always use words to do so; and to use words is to use ideas. (two)
John Plamenatz points out that there is an ideology of a "broad" type within a group or community made up of those who share the ideology. He calls this broad-type ideology, Plamenatz, "world view" or "total ideology," which for the Germans represents Weltanschauung. (3) Plamenatz, equates Weltanschauung or "world view" with "total ideology". (4)
The French philosopher Louis Althusser defined ideology as opposed to science, since for the former, unlike scientific thought, practical-social functions are more important than theoretical ones: “Ideology is an organic part of any social whole. Human societies secrete ideology as the indispensable element and atmosphere for their historical life and breathing ”. (5) Ideology is for Althusser the product of a common economic activity, of a particular political organization, and of the religious, ethical, philosophical and artistic tradition of a society. That is, of everything that does not fall within the sphere of the purely scientific. Ideologies are not responses to the human need to acquire knowledge and are not intended to be absolute truths. For his part,Horst von Maltitz defines Weltanschauung as the relationship between the individual and a particular ordered and comprehensive conception of the scheme of things. Von Maltitz indicates:
the main components of National Socialist ideology - racial theories, Lebensraum doctrine, anti-Semitism, German culture, Romanticism, nationalism, and militarism. Taken together, it is an ideological building of considerable size - it is a building where the German average found ample room to move and expand. He could feel at home and safe in it. For him, ideology was a true Weltanschauung, that is, an understandable ordered conception of the planning of things and of their relation to it. Ideology told the German average authoritatively what it was he wanted to know: where he came from, where he was. positioned, where she was going, and also what his expectation was in order to reach her. This search for identity had come to an end.He had "found himself." (6)
It is due to the context that the previous quote represents, the following: "The German average, it was not so difficult to accept the irrational premises on which many of the ideological contents were based". (7) Hitler, in his Mein Kampf work, indicates that the Weltanschauung never compromises, it is intolerant, dogmatic and fanatical: “The political parties are always ready to negotiate; a theory of the world never is. Political parties agree with their opponents; the theories of the world proclaim their own infallibility ”. (8)
The National Socialist Weltanschauung, therefore, was in a battle to the death with the different worldviews. And, based on the definitions of ideology quoted, I conclude that Weltanschauung composes National Socialism in an ideology.
As I have been indicating, National Socialist ideology acquires its structure through a set of ideas from various currents of German thought during the 19th century. This ideology, with its components, was born with the separation that the German Geist (spirit) had from Western reason from the French Revolution, and especially with the arrival of romanticism, interpreted in Germany as a reaction to the Enlightenment. At the beginning of the 20th century, Weltanschauung was antagonistic to the rational philosophies that prevailed in the West; there was a Weltanschauung that denied both the inviolability of the individual and the sacredness of absolute values, exalted German uniqueness over others, making particularity a factor of superiority,and of the Germanisch (Germanic) an attribute that granted per se the automatic understanding of all absolute values. In this way the concepts of good and evil disappear: truth, justice, are inherent in the Volk.
Now, I will go on to write the political context that was lived in Europe and that had consequences on the Weltanschauung; concluding, years later, with the rise and implementation of the National Socialist regime in the III Reich in Germany (1933-1945). Germany was not constituted by national unification. Europe lived a political construction represented by the union of autonomous and ethnically originating peoples in a nation-state.
Germany did not follow that path and, for the Germans, the fault lay with the West, France specifically, through the philosophy called rationalism. It is the European era where romanticism is born, and in Germany it is retaken and enlarged, especially in one of its manifestations: political romanticism. This German political romanticism pits romantic Weltanschauung against the West.
The Main Philosophical Worldviews
Plato's idealistic worldview
Plato's central idea is the existence of two opposite mutes.
That of ideas, which are spiritual, eternal, perfect and immutable, and that of material and sensible things, which is a shadow of the former.
Man participates in both worlds, debases himself with matter and ennobles himself with a greater participation in that of ideas.
In this Platonic statement, I would say that one experiences with matter. I am convinced that I come to this world to experiment with material things and between them my body.
We all learned to write, read, speak, walk, dance, and for this we did it by trying and made miscalculations in movements, diction, pronunciation, reading, etc.
Therefore, for me, man is not debased with the world of matter, he experiences, contributes, nurtures, grows and above all lives.
Aristotle's realistic worldview
The theory of hilemorphism unites the two Platonic worlds into one.
The essence of each thing is made up of two poles:
Matter and form. In man, the soul is the spiritual form or structure that gives matter and body unity and life.
Abstraction consists of capturing the form of things, with which the universal concept originates.
The theocentric worldview of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
God is the creator of the entire universe; it is the origin and the end of man.
The maximum virtue of the human being is love or charity, by which he realizes his unity with God and with his fellow men.
I could add that also the maximum virtue of the human being is gratitude, since the best way to thank life is to live it fully, since God created me, gave me life, by denying it, I deny my creator, that is to say: –You are wrong, this is not perfect–, however if I am grateful, it is because I am satisfied with what I receive, I have and above all what I am. (9)
Schopenhauer's pessimistic worldview.
Man is unhappy by his own nature.
The essence of man is will, desire, and therefore he will always feel incomplete and frustrated. But through art, compassion, and asceticism, it is possible to lessen the weight of misfortune for the human species.
The man is unhappy by his own nature, only if he compares himself with God (Although in truth the man is unhappy also if he compares himself with the neighbor).
As for the essence of man I would add, it is also thoughts, emotions, feelings and energy…
Nietzsche's Dionysian worldview.
The Apollonian is rational, luminous, static. The Dionysiac is dynamic, vigorous, powerful.
Man participates in these two poles.
Ethics, religions, science and metaphysics have invented a static, Apollonian world that is the worst enemy of human evolution. The Superman, full of qualities, will be in charge of restoring the true values.
Personally, I would bring to this worldview the ingredients of emotions and feelings.
The concept of Super man would be for me the one who has super senses, that is, the one who speaks, listens, more than the physical., The one who has a vision and a holistic existence.
The revolutionary worldview of Marxism.
Matter comes before spirit. This is a brain creation.
God does not exist: Man has created his concept and has submitted to an imaginary God. This is an alienation. The fight against alienations (economic, religious, social and philosophical) is the goal of the class struggle.
Interesting worldview, polarizing and revolutionary at the time and misinterpreted and applied by Lenin.
The fight against economic, religious, social and philosophical alienations is the goal so that there are no classes, which would consequently bring apathy in personal growth, aspirations, goals, dreams, desires, etc., that is, it would bring statism, conformity, frustration, dissatisfaction.
Sartre's existentialist worldview.
The proper thing of the human being is his freedom. From this it follows that God does not exist; neither are the objective values.
Man is a useless passion; is condemning to failure.
Love consists in making yourself fascinating for the other and thus capturing their freedom.
There is no good faith. People are cowards and lead an inauthentic existence from the moment they reject their own freedom, which causes them anguish. This feeling is the sign of the authentic man.
It seems to me a logical worldview, however, until today I want to continue believing in reincarnation or, in other words, in something else after death.
In a didactic therapy with my therapist Dr. Salama, we talked about JP Sartre's Nausea book (by the way, I was nauseous when reading it), specifically if there was anything else after death, the opinions were polarized, since I Back then I firmly believed in reincarnation, Héctor told me that there is nothing else after death, and that is why man lives in eternal anguish, due to fear of death. When faced with that worldview, I decided to consider it and still continue to believe in reincarnation, making use of the fact that “Man lives what he believes in”, in the end, my belief is just that a belief, although it is not reality, a belief not It is a certainty, that is, "The map is not the territory", so I avoid living with some anxiety.
The conceptual or categorical mechanism implies that knowing is interpreting.
The man applies his cognitive glasses without realizing it.
Each one makes its own world, different from that of the neighbor, and hence the constant differences and discussions.
Holistic knowledge leads us to the authentic capture of beauty, values, morality, understanding of other people and creativity.
Deep meditation is the best instrument to promote holistic knowledge that ultimately fosters human happiness.
conclusion
I am in favor of adding, that is to say, taking the best that a worldview can bring me and adding it to my own. To build from what you have and every concept is good to find an explanation for things and causes.
For this reason, I conclude by saying that it is vitally important to debate and confront every worldview taking the position of respect, responsibility, honesty, tolerance and understanding with respect to each and every one of the worldviews, since in the end what it is about is find answers, don't hide questions.
1.-Dilthey, W. (1914). Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Leinen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
2.- John Plamenatz. The ideology. Economic Culture Fund: Mexico, 1983. p.18.
3.- The term «worldview» is an adaptation of the German language Weltanschauung (from Welt, “world”, and anschauen, “observe”), an expression introduced by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey in his work Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Sciences of the Culture, 1914). Dilthey, a member of the hermeneutical school, maintained that the life experience was founded (not only intellectually, but also emotionally and morally) on the set of principles of the society and culture in which it had been formed. The relationships, sensations and emotions produced by the specific experience of the world within a given environment would contribute to shaping an individual worldview. All cultural or artistic products would in turn be expressions of the worldview that created them;the hermeneutical task would be to recreate the author's world in the reader's mind. Weltanschauung as a definition of ideology, and not as a different concept, is the German worldview, represented as the set of opinions and beliefs that make up the general image or concept of the world that a person, time or culture has, from which interprets its own nature and that of everything that exists. The Weltanschauung defines common notions that apply to all fields of life, from politics, economics, or science to religion, morals, or philosophy. The Weltanschauung would not be a particular theory about the operation of any particular entity, but a series of common principles that would inspire theories or models at all levels: an idea of the structure of the world,which creates the framework for the remaining ideas, as is the National Socialist ideology. Thus, it belongs to the field of philosophy called "metaphysics". The uncompromising and authoritative affirmation of the worldview itself is fundamentalism. Wilhelm Dilthey. Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Leinen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1914.
4.- "A world view or total ideology is a sophisticated thing that only a few members of a community or social group can have." Plamenatz. Op. Cit. p.19.
5. - Althusser, in Raymond Boudon. The Analysis of Ideology. Polity Press: Chicago, 1989. p. 18.
6. - Horst von Maltitz. The Evolution of Hitler's Germany: The Ideology, The Personality, The Moment. McGraw-Hill: New York, 1973. p. 268.
One time talking to my job manager at my city's Refinery, another inspection and security engineer interrupted us, addressing my boss saying, “Ing. Valle, ing. Antillón just made a short circuit and took the entire refinery out of service. - My boss raised his hand, taking his chin, frowning, looking at infinity, as if reflecting, after a few moments, he directed his gaze at ing. inspection and security responding, - Yes ing. Antillón made a short circuit, he put his hands in and yes he put his hands in, he was working. The ING. Inspection widened his eyes surprised at the unexpected response, retreating with it.; After ing. Valle looks at me and I look at him as if asking. More than the answer and he only said to me: - "simple mental induction" -.Over time I understood the "simple" mental induction. "He who does not experiment with the world of matter does not make mistakes, but neither does he learn."
7.- Ibid.
8.- Adolf Hitler. My struggle. Editors: Barcelona, 1980. p. 217.
9.-Gutiérrez Sáenz Raúl, Introduction to Philosophy, Editorial Esfinge, 1992.
