Before we delve into this subject, which I will open with the last lecture that Freud gave in 1932 seminar and which will be our reference text, we will contextualize so that we can be “on board” with what is at stake.

Perhaps it is a good idea to read the summary of it and leave its exploration in detail to the post which follows through:

“Lecture XXXV: A Philosophy of Life” (1932; published in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, 1933).

Summary (English)

Freud opens by asking whether psychoanalysis leads to a Weltanschauung—a unified “world-view” that answers the major questions of existence. He argues that psychoanalysis, as a specialized scientific discipline, cannot and should not generate its own total world-view; it must adopt the broader scientific worldview, which is cautious, provisional, and limited to what can be known through verified observation and research.

He then defends science against the criticism that it is “empty” because it neglects spiritual needs. Freud insists that mind and spirit are legitimate objects of scientific study, and that psychoanalysis specifically extends scientific inquiry into mental life (especially the unconscious). He sharply distinguishes knowledge from illusion—wishes and emotional demands (often satisfied in art, religion, and philosophy) that should not be treated as sources of truth about reality.

Freud compares science with religion and philosophy as competing worldviews. Philosophy, he says, tends to overestimate pure reasoning and sometimes admits intuition as a source of knowledge, producing grand systems that collapse with new discoveries. Religion, by contrast, is the major rival because it powerfully combines (1) explanation of the universe, (2) consolation and promises of protection, and (3) moral commandments backed by authority. Freud offers a psychoanalytic “genetic” account of religion: the image of a creator-God is interpreted as an exalted projection of the childhood father, and religious morality and reward/punishment are traced to early family dynamics and the longing for protection.

In the closing, Freud concedes that a scientific worldview can feel emotionally unsatisfying because it rejects comforting illusions. Still, he maintains that science’s commitment to truth and critique is non-negotiable: those who seek consolation elsewhere may do so, but psychoanalysis and science cannot supply a consoling metaphysical system without abandoning their method.

I asked Chat GPT: Weltanschauung and world view are the same thing? which are the differences?

They’re close, and in many contexts people use them as equivalents—but they’re not always the same thing in flavor or scope.

What they share

Both mean a person’s (or a culture’s) overall orientation toward reality: what the world is like, what counts as knowledge, what matters, what humans are, etc.

So yes: “worldview” is the standard English rendering of Weltanschauung.

Key differences in nuance

1) “Worldview” is broader and more everyday

In English, worldview can be pretty loose:

• “My worldview is optimistic.”
• “Their worldview is shaped by religion.”
  It can mean anything from a deep philosophy to a general outlook.

2) Weltanschauung carries a more “system” and “intellectual tradition” vibe

In German philosophical writing (especially 19th–early 20th century), Weltanschauung often suggests a comprehensive, quasi-systematic stance—something closer to:

• an integrated framework (metaphysics + values + method)
• sometimes associated with “big” philosophies (idealism, materialism, positivism, etc.)

So it can feel more “programmatic” or “doctrinal” than the casual English worldview.

3) The literal parts matter: Welt + Anschauung

• Welt = world
• Anschauung = “viewing,” “intuition,” “contemplation,” even “how something is grasped”
  That second word can hint at how reality is apprehended, not just what one believes about it.

English worldview is more neutral; it doesn’t naturally carry that subtle sense of mode of apprehension.

4) In Freud’s usage (relevant to this text)

Freud treats Weltanschauung as a totalizing doctrine that claims to answer “the big questions” as a unified whole. He argues psychoanalysis shouldn’t try to be that; it should stay within a scientific stance.

In English, if you translate Weltanschauung simply as worldview, you might miss that Freud is aiming at “a complete, closed philosophy of life,” not just “a general outlook.”

Practical rule of thumb

• Use worldview when you mean “overall outlook / perspective” (common speech).
• Use Weltanschauung (or “comprehensive worldview”) when you mean “a more system-like, self-contained orientation” typical of philosophy/cultural theory.

What did you mean by flavor when you said that Weltanschauung and world view they’re not always the same thing in flavor or scope?

Chat GPT: By “flavor” I meant the feel / connotation / implied tone of the word—what it suggests beyond the bare dictionary meaning.

(flavor = American English flavour = British and most Commonwealth English)

• “worldview” (English) has an everyday, flexible flavor. It can mean a general outlook, attitude, or set of assumptions—sometimes quite informal: “her worldview is optimistic,” “their worldview is shaped by travel.”
• “Weltanschauung” has a more “philosophy-book” flavor. It often suggests a more comprehensive, systematic stance—almost a doctrine or an integrated framework about reality, knowledge, and values, the kind of thing associated with philosophical or cultural movements.

And by “scope” I meant how big the concept usually is:

• worldview can be broad or relatively modest.
• Weltanschauung more often implies the big, total picture—a “complete view of life/the world.”

In Freud’s text, that difference matters because he’s mostly talking about Weltanschauung in the “big, totalizing system” sense, not just “someone’s personal outlook.”

The meaning of life

Roque, not asking Chat GPT, but explaining this post: My intention is to connect Weltanschauung and World View with the meaning of life, which in a long shot is more or less the following:

“Meaning of life” names a problem-field—questions about purpose, value, and intelligibility of human existence—whereas worldview/Weltanschauung names the framework within which such questions are posed and answered. A worldview typically integrates (i) metaphysical claims (what is real), (ii) epistemic norms (what counts as knowledge), (iii) ethical commitments (what ought to be done), and (iv) anthropological assumptions (what humans are). “Meaning” can be treated as cosmic (objective purpose of existence), moral (norms of a good life), and existential (lived significance under finitude and suffering).

Major families of answers divide along whether meaning is discovered or constructed. Theistic traditions ground meaning in a transcendent source (creation, providence, salvation); classical virtue ethics locates it in human flourishing and excellences of character; Buddhist and related soteriological traditions reinterpret meaning as liberation from craving/ignorance and the cultivation of compassion; secular humanism and pragmatism treat meaning as emergent from human projects, relationships, and practices evaluated by their consequences; existentialism/absurdism deny a pre-given telos and relocate meaning in responsible self-authorship or lucid “revolt” under an indifferent cosmos; nihilism functions as a limiting case that rejects objective meaning and thereby pressures other views to justify their normative and metaphysical commitments. Psychoanalytic and sociological approaches (e.g., Freud; Marx/Weber/Durkheim) shift the question from justification to genealogy, explaining meaning-systems via desire, authority, social integration, and material conditions—often without settling their truth.

Methodologically, examining “all angles” requires distinguishing (a) truth-claims about the world, (b) normative claims about value, and (c) psychosocial functions of meaning (consolation, cohesion, motivation). Many disputes persist because positions answer different sub-questions or trade truth for consolation. A “general approach” is therefore comparative: specify which dimension of meaning is at stake, then assess each worldview by coherence, evidential discipline, ethical plausibility, and existential adequacy.

Weltanschauung & Worldview

(my take, Roque E.de Campos)

When I see a phrase such as this one from Freud above:

Of the three forces which can dispute the position of science, religion alone is a really serious enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent, it does not seek to be anything else but an illusion. Save in the case of a few people who are, one might say, obsessed by art, it never dares to make any attacks on the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves itself as if it were a science, and to a certain extent it makes use of the same methods; but it parts company with science, in that it clings to the illusion that it can produce a complete and coherent picture of the universe, though in fact that picture must fall to pieces with every new advance in our knowledge. Its methodological error lies in the fact that it over-estimates the epistemological value of our logical operations, and to a certain extent admits the validity of other sources of knowledge, such as intuition.

I feel like stopping because certainly there isn’t anything else to add to the question… Specially when I see the dialectics he brings to it when he says:

The scientific Weltanschauung is, however, markedly at variance with our definition. The unified nature of the explanation of the universe is, it is true, accepted by science, but only as a programme whose fulfilment is postponed to the future. Otherwise it is distinguished by negative characteristics, by a limitation to what is, at any given time, knowable, and a categorical rejection of certain elements which are alien to it. It asserts that there is no other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called research, and that no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition or inspiration. It appears that this way of looking at things came very near to receiving general acceptance during the last century or two. It has been reserved for the present century to raise the objection that such a Weltanschauung is both empty and unsatisfying, that it overlooks all the spiritual demands of man, and all the needs of the human mind.

If you understood, there is no need to explain, if you didn’t it is useless to explain…Unfortunately what he criticizes from the last two centuries is very much alive in this 21rst and urging us to follow his advice to squeeze it out of our expectations that progress, science and technology will solve everything and Nietzsche was after all right…

Although Freud sort of pre emptied the subject, and kind of try to fill it out with the science taken under its promesses, he closes the subject with the touch of the genius he was: He strongly goes against anarchism and the moral relativism implied and criticizes the hell out of Marx, even still before WWII, in the mid thirties, when he did this lecture, long before communism exploded.

Why  “Weltanschauung” and not Worldview

Because Weltanschaauung became the Zeitgeist !
Another germanicism…
I take it from English Language & Usage:

Weltanschauung is used as an English word, from the German because the English worldview is too vague and not comprehensive enough. (For anschauen = to look at, rather with the meaning “to take a good look at”, for schau = to show, display, as opposed to blicken = to look, or aussehen from sehen = to see).

Primarily it means a way a person looks at the phenomenon of life as a whole. Some people (particularly those who have not lived very long) have not formed any broad (inclusive, even “sophisticated”) view of life. Others consider a large number of factors before forming their overall view — maybe in their seventies — of the phenomenon of human existence. Typically a person’s Weltanschauung (as an English word we drop the capital letter required of all German nouns) would include a person’s philosophic, moral, and religious conclusions — including e.g. the duality of spirit and matter — and perhaps their conclusions about the origins of the universe and of the development of life. They would also have conclusions about the state, society, politics and economic activity. I suggest def. “A person’s conclusions about existence (however tentative) at a particular time of life, after taking a good look at everything they have come across about”.

To what I should add: “The meaning of life”. Which obviously has an even more open answer, because perhaps the best answer was given by Aristotle. who said: “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

Post truth and objective truth

 Roque E. de Campos  Uncategorized  October 17, 2019 2 Minutes

George Orwell, which made accessible to our minds with his 1984 and Animal Farm two of perhaps best examples of what came to be known as post truth, said, and I quote, when he first discovered that there is no genuinely non-political language, from his trip to Spain in 1936: “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie…. This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

In 1984 he imagined a time when, no longer an instrument, language might become the exemplification of a lie that had gotten beyond any man’s control.

In Animal Farm, Pig Napoleon’s famous motto that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Orwell kept emphasizing that there is a truth to all things, that this truth is often so simple that it is we who are too sophisticated to see it, “that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.” And he would tolerate no suggestion that consciousness might be ambiguous. Orwell sought a style of writing in which it would be impossible to lie without knowing it. He worked with what was conscious, to keep it that way. 

Believe it or not the above introduction was taken from an article written in 1957 by Jonathan Beecher. This article is highly readable and motivates us to read his lesser known work In Homage to Catalonia.

Post Truth nowadays, as of 2019

If you live in an English speaking environment, specially the US and the UK, it is generally accepted that the “post truth” exploded to public attention with the election by the Oxford Dictionary as the 2016 word of the year. The Brexit with its Brexiteers and their buses with $350 millions pounds outdoors of weekly expense to the EC from the UK, was a good contender. The winner of post truth was the election of Donald Trump, with his schemes, which do not need to be repeated. Should Brazil represent anything the idea that President Dilma Roussef’s impeachment was a coup and the imprisonment of President Lula was political, were by far the very essence of post truth and makes George Orwell an optimist…

The Oxford Dictionaries define “post truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” They also underline that the prefix “post” is meant to indicate the idea that it is a “past truth in a temporal sense, such as “postwar”, but in the sense that the real truth has been eclipsed and became irrelevant.  

Actually Post truth is a rip off from “truthiness”, defined back em 2005, by Stephen Colbert as:

“Truthiness (noun) the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the factss will support”

Take a look at the video where Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” (defined as being persuaded by whether something feels true, even if it is no necessarily backed by facts) in response to George W.Bush’s excesses in relying on his “gut” for big decisions such as the nomination of Harriet Miers for the US Supreme Court or going to war in Iraq without adequate proof of weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, what started as a big joke, doesn’t make people laugh anymore.  

Last but not least: The Internet Effect

Perhaps it should better be called: The Technology effect, because we should not forget the personal computer, the IPhone and TV.

To make a long story short, what we are seeing today is the same which happened when Gutenberg invented the printed press and gave birth to Books and printed matters which inaugurated the printed culture which is being replaced by a new form of culture which differs from the oral and printed cultures, which from the lack of a better name, we will culture Internet Culture.

What Victor Hugo understood can be explained in detail in the post This Will Kill That

Why the Internet Culture will kill the Printed Word Culture

 Victor Hugo, in a moment of prophetic clarity, watched a new medium dethrone an old one and wrote, “This will kill that.” The printed page, portable and infinitely reproducible, would replace the cathedral as society’s most recognizable and accessible icon which contained the bible and which the oral culture relayed on and maintained alive till it no longer would be needed where ink could speak to millions. 

Our century repeats the scene, but the weapon has changed. The internet does not merely supplant paper the way the book supplanted the edifice; it abolishes the very conditions that made the book sovereign. Print is fixed, slow, solitary, and mute. Networked text is immediate, collective, and responsive. A book is a road with one direction; the internet is a city of intersections. In it, every sentence is linked, indexed, answered, contradicted, amplified, and carried onward by the crowd. Authority itself migrates: statutes, judgments, procedures—once guarded in volumes—now live as the official record in the cloud, not as a copy but as the source

The internet outcompetes books on the dominant social functions of text—authority, timeliness, connectivity, and collective mobilization—so “books are (socially) dead.”

The internet does not merely digitize print; it refunctions textuality from a stable, linear artifact into a networked, real-time, feedback-driven system. In that shift, books lose their historical role as the dominant medium of public opinion and knowledge distribution, surviving primarily where sustained attention and bounded argument remain valuable.

And above all, the public moves there. No bound volume can rise with events as they occur, can gather multitudes in the same instant, can turn information into contagion through feedback and imitation. The book asks for silence and time; the network imposes presence and speed. The printed word is still readable, but it is no longer the place where the world happens.

Thus the new verdict: the internet will not merely “kill” the book by replacing its pages; it kills it by changing what a text is. The book was an object. The network makes text an event. And in the age of events, the object becomes optional, then marginal, then forgotten. This will kill that perhaps already occurred for news papers and magazines and I explain why:

Newspapers and magazines were hit hardest because the internet outcompeted them on the exact functions they were built to monetize:

• Speed and timeliness: print is inherently delayed (write → edit → print → ship). Online is instant and continuously updated, so “news” migrated to where it happens in real time.
• Advertising economics collapsed: print depended on high-margin ads—especially classifieds (jobs, real estate, cars). The internet replaced classifieds with searchable marketplaces and platforms, and replaced brand ads with cheaper, targeted, measurable digital ads.
• Distribution and production costs: paper, printing presses, trucking, returns, and physical retail are expensive. Digital distribution is near-zero marginal cost.
• Unbundling: a newspaper or magazine is a bundle (you buy everything to get a few items). Online, people take only what they want (one article, one topic, one writer) and ignore the rest.
• Search + links beat “issue format”: the web is organized by queries, feeds, and recommendations, not by page layout. Discovery moved from the editor’s front page to search engines and social platforms.
• Network effects and sharing: articles spread through social sharing and platforms; the distribution channel became the social graph, not the newsstand.
• Attention competition: print competed with itself; digital competes with everything (video, games, chat, infinite scroll). That diluted time spent on long-form periodical reading.

Books were affected too, but newspapers and magazines lived and died by freshness + advertising + bundling + physical distribution—all four are areas where the internet has a structural advantage.

How Artificial Intelligence affects technically

AI accelerates that shift by removing the remaining “friction” that print (and even traditional digital journalism) still had:

• Zero-delay production: AI can draft, summarize, translate, headline, and reformat content in seconds, so the cycle “event → publish” gets even shorter than a human newsroom can sustain.
• Personalized packaging at scale: instead of one front page for everyone, AI can generate your version—tailored summaries, topic digests, and explainers—making the old “issue/bundle” model feel even more obsolete.
• Cheaper, faster redistribution: AI can instantly repurpose one report into clips, threads, newsletters, Q&A, and multilingual versions, increasing reach without proportional labor.
• Automation of routine news: sports scores, earnings, weather, local incidents—AI can cover the high-volume, low-margin material that once helped justify print space.
• Search becomes answers: with AI chat/assistants, people ask questions and get synthesized responses instead of browsing articles, which further weakens the magazine/newspaper “container.”

Net effect: AI doesn’t just make digital faster; it makes information production and consumption continuous and individualized, pushing print even farther from the center of public attention.

How Artifical Intelligence affects in the creation of texts

Artificial intelligence accelerates the internet’s displacement of print primarily by automating newsroom labor. By replacing large portions of reporting and editorial work—drafting, copyediting, headline writing, summarization, translation, formatting, and continuous updates—AI compresses what was formerly a sequential production pipeline into near-real-time, parallelized output, enabling 24/7 publication at drastically lower marginal cost. Editorial functions themselves are increasingly algorithmic (prioritization, packaging, A/B testing, personalization), further reducing the human bottleneck that once imposed temporal rhythms on news. The net effect is structural: when content can be produced, adapted, and redistributed continuously and cheaply, print’s economic and temporal constraints become untenable, leaving books and periodicals socially peripheral even where they remain technically viable

Last, but not least, forget for a moment Freud and everything he said, and believe me, he said everything and think about the mechanism that Gramsci discovered that will catalyze all this:

Gramsci

Please read now, attentively and with the patience it requires the lecture that Freud gave in 193