Knowledge and Social Structure (RLE Social Theory) by Peter Hamilton

Author:Peter Hamilton [Hamilton, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317634997
Google: eSxHBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-13T05:00:26+00:00

Scheler’s sociology of knowledge also proceeds from another direction as a response to Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘Weltanschauungs-philosophie’ which had been so influential in German social science and philosophy from about 1890 to 1930, and which was an attempt to see the intellectual world in terms of a limited number of Weltanschauungen. These Weltanschauungen formed the bases of all philosophical systems and were founded in the lived experience of the thinker, so that any philosophy or intellectual position would only be understood as an expression of one of the basic Weltanschauungen and that it was only true in so far as it was contingently true in relation to the lived experience of its author or authors. Dilthey thus raised relativism to the level of a philosophical system which negated absolute truth. Scheler, though he accepted the concept of a limited number of Weltanschauungen, operated consistently (due to his Catholicism) with a concept of absolute truth which he employed to alter the very notion of ‘Weltanschauung’ itself. What Dilthey had observed, he argued, were in fact artificial constructions (Bildungs Weltanschauungen) produced by a conscious intellectual process; these constructions varied according to the ‘basic cultural mentalities’ of the societies of the world, or as Scheler termed them—the ‘relatively natural Weltenschauungen’,4 which lay behind them. These relatively natural world-views were closely related to the fundamental ‘organic’ basis of the culture they supported and consequently changed only very slowly over time. Dilthey’s Weltanschauungen were culturally specific and related only to the European cultural world: what was needed was a wider typology of both relatively natural and artificial world-views. The foundations of both of these, relativistic, world-views, Scheler said, lay in a constant and absolutely unchanging world-view beyond historical or social determination. Hence there was an absolute realm of truth behind history and society, and which Scheler believed could be apprehended as the essence of human thought and knowledge by phenomenological methods. Consequently, rather than subsuming philosophical analysis of Weltanschauungen under science, as Weber had done,5 Scheler argues that philosophy could posit and determine the objective cognitive value of Weltanschauungen, by its employment of a particular methodological and substantive mode of analysis: the sociology of knowledge. To Scheler, then, sociology of knowledge arose partly out of his confrontation with Dilthean relativism (and constituted a form of epistemology). But, as we have said before, it also is rooted in his critique of the bourgeois ethos of science and Comtean positivism. It is possible to find a third influential element, in Marxism, and it is clear that Scheler’s careful discrimination between ‘Realfaktoren’ and ‘Idealfaktoren’ is a consequence of his reading of Marx and particularly Lukács, as well as his contacts with Marxists working in the field of the sociology of knowledge.

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