World Outlook

Also known as “cosmology”. People’s common basic view of the entire world, of nature, society and human thought. In the process of knowing and reshaping the world, people inevitably form a view of all sorts of things in the world, thus form an overall understanding and fundamental view. World outlook includes aspects such as the conception of nature, history and consciousness. The outlook on life, morality and science are concrete embodiments of a world outlook. Philosophy is a total ideological system about the world formed by a series of concepts, categories, propositions and theoretical arguments, a theoretical and systematic world outlook. When people have different world outlooks, they have different stands, viewpoints and methods in knowing and reshaping the world.

The basic question of the world outlook concerns the relation of consciousness and matter, thinking and being. World outlooks can be divided into two fundamentally opposing types: idealism and materialism. The idealist world outlook interprets the world with the activity of the spirit, of consciousness. The materialist world outlook acknowledges the materiality and objectivity of the world, that the material world moves and changes according to its own laws, that human society is a part of the unified material world, that human consciousness is a dynamic reflection of the objective world, and that human activity is bound to follow these objective laws.

The world outlook of dialectical and historical materialism holds that the objective world is a unity of processes full of contradictions and in constant motion, change and development; the contradictions within things are the root cause of their motion, change and development; human society is the highest product of development of the material world, a historical process of movement with consciousness, ends and conscious agency, made up of human practical activities; man can know and change his surrounding natural world as well as the human society itself through social practice; man’s capacity for knowing and reshaping the world develops constantly with the historical development and the deepening of social practice. Dialectical and historical materialism are the most progressive and the only scientific world outlook in human history.