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The term <i>Weltanschauung</i>, literally, "view of the world," had a very specific meaning for Freud, who defined it in the New Introductory Lecture as follows: "A <i>Weltanschauung</i> is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place" (1933a [1932], p. 158).
Indeed Freud had already used this concept as a stick with which to beat philosophies and religions—both lambasted, for example, in his <i>Future of an Illusion</i> (1927c). In 1933, however, he broadened the notion, bringing science too under its aegis; this with the proviso, though, that "the <i>Weltanschauung</i> of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfillment of which is relegated to the future." (pp. 158-159). The fact was that the notion of <i>Weltanschauung</i> usefully supplemented that of culture, for it helped specify culture's different spheres and point up their underlying emotional raisons d'être.
Freud extolled and defended the virtues of an intolerance that refused, in the name of "truth," to consider all domains of human intellectual activity to be of equal value: "It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it" (p. 160). It has to be said, therefore, that Freud's views on religion and especially on philosophy were rather narrow—judging, as he did, that they were totally closed to doubt. On the other hand, his opposition to dogmatism is much easier to comprehend if one bears in mind that dogmatism constitutes the major temptation for any theoretician, and no doubt for Freud himself with respect to psychoanalysis. And it was certainly for the sake of psychoanalysis that he defended the ideal of scientific ascesis.
Apropos of the religious <i>Weltanschauung</i>, in 1933 Freud articulated ideas he had expressed in <i>Totem and Taboo</i> (1912-13a) on the formation of religions, while restating, in essence, some themes of <i>The Future of an Illusion</i> concerning the way religion panders to humanity's "desire for knowledge" and to its infantile need for protection. To emphasize how risky a religious view of the world is to thought, which it limits through its interdictions, he also revisited the ideas expressed in "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" (1908d). Most of Freud's observations on the notion of <i>Weltanschauung</i> were in fact concerned with religion, but he did also mention art, which for him was "almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion" (1933a [1932], p. 160), and philosophy, about which he wrote: "Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent" (p. 160).
