ABSTRACT
Psychological discoveries suggest that civilizational worldviews are understandable as historical facts, although scholars familiar with Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West hold that worldviews are incapable of being comprehended by reason. Pitirim Sorokin accords intuitional cognition immense value, but he does not probe intuitions beyond the “self-evident verities,” including scientific empirical facts and theories, the basis of knowledge. When Arnold Schoenberg avoided the definite tonic and the seven-tone scale in some orchestral works, he may have perceived unconsciously a parallel phenomenon to the painter Paul Klee in his elimination of the familiar receding single perspective. From being unconscious, a worldview gains an aesthetic quality, this unconscious quality being particularly vivid in fine arts, as in J. S. Bach’s greatest cantatas. But the worldview also exists in the non-aesthetic experience of civilization. The old Faustian worldview of medieval and modern Western civilization was unconscious.
