Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, ... and Wilhelm Dilthey?
How three Avengers can help us to understand Wilhelm Dilthey's worldview categories
Immanuel Kant seems to have coined the term “worldview.” It was, however, Wilhelm Dilthey who developed the concept beyond Kant’s descriptor of an empirically-derived intuition of the world and turned it into to a full-orbed philosophical taxonomy.
According to Dilthey, an individual’s metaphysical worldview will typically fall into one of the following three categories:
naturalism,
subjective idealism, or
objective idealism.
No worldview is able to achieve anything more—according to Dilthey—than a relative approximation of truth because worldviews are unable to transcend finite human experience.
Regardless of whether Dilthey was right or wrong about worldviews, it’s essential for Christian thinkers to learn each one of these categories when studying worldview theory.
And that’s why I try to make it easier and more enjoyable to remember this taxonomy by connecting each worldview with one of the Avengers.
That’s right.
Marvel’s Avengers can help you to understand and to remember Dilthey’s taxonomy.
Yes, really.
The correspondence isn’t perfect, of course, and I don’t pretend that it is. But it’s close enough to help my students—and me!—to be far more likely to recall each one.
But, before I unpack the connections between these worldviews and Marvel’s Avengers, let’s take a quick look at each of Dilthey’s worldview categories, so that you can understand how he conceptualized worldview theory.
1. Naturalism
In naturalism, the individual’s prime reality is sense perception. Matter is all that ultimately matters. The mind is merely a construal of material reality that arises from physical interaction and experiences. The struggle—the “inner dialectic”—in naturalism is the incapacity to explain all of reality in terms of the material world. If naturalism is your worldview, there are no absolute values, and you may tend toward some form of materialistic determinism. Everything is derived from what can be cognized on the basis of the senses; as a result, reality is perceived in its plurality.
2. Subjective Idealism
Subjective idealism places consciousness and moral will in the position of prime reality. Reality encompasses both spiritual and material aspects. In subjective idealism, the conscious mind tends to matter more than any material reality. According to Dilthey, this worldview tends to reduce reality to what is perceived by the mind. As a result, subjective idealism struggles to provide a sufficient basis for the objective reality of the material world. Dilthey sees this worldview as unavoidably dualistic. If you believe the material world was created by a spiritual reality and that this spiritual reality is the prime reality, you’re most likely a subjective idealist in Dilthey’s estimation.
3. Objective Idealism
Objective idealism synthesizes subjective idealism and naturalism by recognizing empirical reality and the conscious mind as an integrated whole that constitutes a single prime reality. Each particular entity possesses value and reflects the entire macrocosm, binding mind and matter together in a paradox that can never be fully comprehended. According to Dilthey, objective idealism is monistic and sees the universe as an organic reality whose parts reflect the whole and the whole of which is reflected in every part. Objective idealists respond to the cosmos with awe and affirmation.
You probably already see at least a few of the connections between these worldviews and certain superheroes, but in case you don’t, here they are …
Iron Man, the Materialist Naturalist
Tony Stark is a scientist who—to quote Madonna—“lives in a material world.” He flies a Quinjet with a dashboard decal that declares, “Jarvis is my copilot.” Right and wrong are determined by consequences, not by any transcendent beings or ideals. If there are gods, they are material beings that can be destroyed by material means. If it requires the creation of Ultron or the stripping of freedoms to build a “suit of armor around the world,” so be it.
Captain America, the Subjective Idealist
According to Steve Rogers, gods aren’t material beings who fly around in capes. When Thor and Loki are described as deities in Avengers: Assemble, Captain America’s retort hints at the spiritual nature of his prime reality: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” Unseen ideals like liberty and justice drive Steve to risk his life for the sake of others. The transcendental nature of these ideals allows them to remain intact even when the Super Soldier Serum magnifies them.
Thor, the Objective Idealist
“Your ancestors called it magic, but you call it science,” Thor says to Jane, “I come from a land where they are one and the same.” Then, Thor the objective idealist shows her a World Tree that unifies the entire cosmos. This unified cosmos in which the mental and the material are one is Thor’s prime reality, and it elicits awe. Here, however, we also see the failure of objective idealism as a worldview. For Thor, there is no supreme deity separate from the cosmos itself. If objective idealism rightly describes reality, the gods never fully transcend the cosmos. All divine realities are entwined with the cosmos, which means there is no one to reach into time and space with redemption and grace.
“God Is Spirit”
Of course, Christians can and should dispute many aspects of Wilhelm Dilthey’s taxonomy. His claim, for example, that every worldview is necessarily relative should be challenged, and so should a plethora of other claims that he articulated. Still, if we momentarily grant these categories for the sake of our academic study of worldviews, it seems that Christian faith lands closest to the category that Dilthey identified as subjective idealism.
As Christians, our prime reality is neither the cosmos itself nor is it a synthesis of the mental and the material. The material world matters deeply, but our prime reality is “spirit, and those that worship [God] must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Christians value the material world not in spite of but precisely because of the spiritual nature of prime reality. The world is beautiful and full of wonder because the same God who created this material and spiritual universe by his Word has also woven his own glorious goodness within every crest and crevasse of the cosmos.
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Dilthey, Wilhelm. Die Typen der Weltanschauung und ihre Ausbildung in den metaphysischen Systemen, 1911, trans. W. Kluback and M. Weinbaum, Types of Worldview and their Development in Metaphysical Systems, in Dilthey’s Philosophy of Existence, New York: Bookman Associates, 1957.