Outlook on the World/Speech About the World

Abstract

The article examines some salient points in the historical usage of “worldview” and “picture of the world” as concepts that were developed in various versions by European thinkers and scholars during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Although the common, non-technical use of those terms may differ from the scholarly one and even illuminate it in a new way, that task is set aside.) The article’s analysis of the construction of the concepts in texts by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Karl Mannheim, Lucien Goldmann, Vladimir Bibikhin and other authors employs three conceptual axes: totality/plurality, individual/intersubjective, and vision/speech. The conclusion is that as these concepts evolved, philosophy and the humanities increasingly emphasized the communicative aspect of a worldview, which is interpreted no longer as the product of a single consciousness, but as an object of exchange and discussion between different subjects. At the same time, the “visual” inner form of these concepts is explicated and criticized. The visibility of the world implied in the concept of it as a picture is called into question; the world appears not so much as an object of contemplation from the outside but as a problematic “orientation” within it. The critique of authoritarian rationalism in the twentieth century eventually deconstructed the visual grounding of the worldview concept, which came to be associated with non-theoretical moments of inner life. Traces of it are found in ruined forms (as fragmentary features of a work of art), and it is criticized for being bound to the pictorial or objective representation of the world that was characteristic of modern European civilization. The visual perspective of the worldview is turned inside out — the subject of vision becomes its object.