Meaning
A comprehensive philosophy or outlook on the world: the total framework of beliefs and assumptions through which a person or an age interprets life, history, and politics. Formal, often academic or journalistic, and typically capitalised in English. It usually implies something more systematic and intellectually ambitious than the everyday word worldview. Formal, sometimes ironical or pretentious; usually capitalised, and best reserved for contexts where worldview would undersell the claim. Regional use: Formal English (borrowed from German).
Origin
German for 'world view': Welt ('world') joined to Anschauung ('view, outlook, intuition', a word with roots in Middle High German). In German philosophy, Immanuel Kant is credited with the earliest use around 1790, and Hegel popularised the term, after which it became a catchword of German Idealism and Romanticism for an all-embracing conception of existence. Rather than translate the compound, English adopted it whole; Merriam-Webster dates its first known English use to 1868, noting that it initially carried the technical sense of a philosophical apprehension of the universe. It remains a capitalised formal guest-word, with worldview as its naturalised synonym.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- weltanschauung (lowercase)
- Weltanschauungen (German plural)
- weltanschauungs (anglicised plural)
Usage Examples
- Her novels are powered by a bleak Weltanschauung in which progress is always provisional.
- The lecture contrasted the mechanistic Weltanschauung of the 1890s with the relativism that followed.
- You cannot argue someone out of a Weltanschauung they did not argue their way into.