Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (13 page)

Yes, one can quite rightly understand Jesus’ actions in this way. But it is not the symbols that were at stake. It was the reality the symbols symbolized. It was not God as he really is that was being worshiped. So while Christians recognize the symbolic nature of reality, we also realize the substantiality of that which is symbolized. A postmodern can answer, “It’s language all the way down.” A Christian ought not.

Worship First

So far as I know, it has not occurred to Western worldview analysts that worship might be the first “thing” about worldviews. But with the inclusion of biblical issues, and especially with the work of James K. A. Smith and David Naugle, I can imagine that it could become an issue. Moreover, in the East, religious liturgy and ritual is indeed a first thing in Eastern Orthodoxy and in the pantheistic religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.

First, Eastern Orthodoxy is a worldview with worship at its core.
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It is difficult for a Western Christian mind either to accept this Orthodox “reading” of the Christian faith or to find fault with it. As a Westerner I am wary of understanding the Christian faith through religious ritual and liturgy. I want my faith cast in the form of propositions that can be evaluated for their truth. On the other hand, when I try to understand how Orthodox theology intellectually unpacks Orthodox worship, I find little to criticize. When, for example, I hear them talk about the divination of humans as a goal, I know they do not mean what I would mean if I used the term
divination
. Divination is rather their way of casting what I understand as the utterly new life in Christ received as the kingdom of God is finally realized. As we Western Christians try to understand our Orthodox brothers and sisters, we must recognize the difference in our master
paradigms
—how we in our different “languages” slice the pie of reality.
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I do not know how to determine what God thinks of these two master paradigms. I do know that both Eastern and Western Christians need to welcome each other as fellow believers in Christ.

Still, as I work in my own Western paradigm, I believe it is important to evaluate our worship and our practice by the “rule and law of Orandi,” a rule and law expressed in a form that can be evaluated by our intellect. Who God is precedes how will we worship and obey him. We are too clever by far to let our creative schemes of evangelism, service and worship come first. Ontology is still the first thing.

But what about nontheistic/pantheistic Eastern religions? Here clearly non-Christian forms of worship embody non-Christian worldviews. Hinduism and Buddhism start their trek toward illumination (one term to describe their notion of salvation) with meditation. For though there are many differences within them and between them, ritual and liturgy are seen as paths toward the “really real.” In Advaita Vedanta Hinduism the goal is unification with the One. In Zen Buddhism the goal is the realization of the Self as Not-self.
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In both, the seeker of the “really real,” the goal of life, discovers this really real by an act that is more like worship than service.

I am less than an amateur when I say this, so I only suggest it. Is it not possible that the practice of Eastern forms of meditation or perhaps even of martial arts will put an otherwise Western-minded person in the “way” of becoming less and less aware of the personal character of the transcendent? Some Christians have been reticent to engage in yoga-type meditation even when the Master insists that it is not religious, but merely a relaxing technique, a way to avoid the effects of stress or to bring peace of mind. Personally, I have been in two minds about this. What would make me of one mind? If I meditated on a mantra, I wonder if my mind would become one with the One, probably the wrong One? Or would I abandon the notion that reality is rational? If so, then more power to the notion I have been emphasizing throughout this book. Ontology must be the first thing.

Conclusion

I have taken a long and circuitous way to justify my simple conclusion. But the point is important. Ontology must precede epistemology in worldview formulation. Or, more specifically and to avoid confusion, it is not the study of ontology that precedes the study of epistemology, but that being itself logically precedes the act of knowing. This clarification I think answers Jonah M. Schupach’s criticism of ontology first.
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If it does not, we are basing our whole worldview on the fragile structure of the human ego, that is, on the autonomy of human reason, which really means the autonomy of each person’s human ego or each community’s sense of reason. To do this is dangerous. The justification of our worldview must not be autonomous human reason, even if it is reason as represented by the Christian tradition. The biblical priority of Being—God as Being—is replaced with epistemology or, more accurately, hermeneutics. The Christian worldview under these conditions becomes not just modern but postmodern.

Let me simply say it again: Ontology precedes epistemology and hermeneutics—and whatever else there may be.

4

Flesh and Bones

Theoretical and Pretheoretical

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies his dignity and
his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.

Blaise Pascal,
Pensées

W
hen the boy asks his father
about what holds up the world, he is already doing so from a basic worldview. He understands up and down. He sees a model of the solar system in which bodies seem to hang in space.

Within the framework of the boy’s worldview, the question is natural. How it is answered, however, may serve to alter or enhance the dimensions of that worldview. Both the worldview that lies behind the boy’s question and the more detailed worldview implicit in the father’s answer are deeply involved with the society in which the boy and the father live. Their whole discourse is embedded in a worldview community.

There is little argument about the role that social context plays in the formation of one’s worldview. How could it be otherwise? Raised in a Hindu family in Poona, India, a child will take on the culture of his or her life situation. This will largely be done unconsciously. Thousands of tiny thoughts and judgments will become the intimate property of the growing child. If there is little contact with a family outside the Hindu religion, there may be rebellion against some aspects of the society, but there will be few options for a young adult to take. If, on the other hand, the Hindu family is living in Downers Grove, Illinois, the growing child will be exposed to a host of living alternatives, a bevy of conflicting faiths and no-faith, a pluralism of influences. Pluralistic cultures give lots of worldview options. Still, some aspects of worldviews are universal. Here we will deal with one of them—the theoretical, pretheoretical and presuppositional nature of worldviews.

From the first elaboration of the notion, analysts have agreed that worldviews are not first
theoretical
but rather
pretheoretical
(
intuitive
) and/or
presuppositional
. As Wilhelm Dilthey says, “Every worldview is an intuition.”
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That is, the foundational suppositions are those conceptions that we cannot imagine not being characteristic of the world. They are the thoughts we think with when we think anything. David Naugle calls them the “subterranean impressions about the world conceived by an anesthetized yet functioning mind” and “untested, groundless ‘substratum’ for all inquiry and assertions.”
2
For sociologist Karl Mannheim, “worldviews are virtually unconscious phenomena, having risen spontaneously and unintentionally. As deep unformed, germinal entities, they are taken for granted by those who embrace them and yet they are the prime movers in thought and action.”
3
Anthropologist Charles Kraft speaks of “the
deep level
of culture where ‘pattern/structured’ assumptions regarding values are invisible.”
4
N. T. Wright says, “Worldviews have to do with the presuppositional, pre-cognitive stage of a culture or society.”
5
Likewise, so do Charles Taylor’s
social imaginaries.
6

Still, is there no difference between what is signified by these three terms? Is everything that constitutes a worldview totally beyond thoughtful derivation or consideration? That is, is everything in a worldview to be taken intuitively?

As we have seen, we do come to the place where we can no longer give telling reasons for the views we hold. We stand as the father answering his son’s question “What holds up the world?” and all we can do is say—or shout—“It’s Elephant all the way down.” As Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’”
7
We see that final reality is either the material order of the universe itself or something beyond that material order, something or someone supernatural. Even though we have some reason, or even many reasons, for choosing one or the other, our experience in dialogue with others shows us that we cannot prove our worldview beyond the shadow of a doubt. And though we may hold our presuppositions consciously and with a confidence approaching certainty, we also know that we could be wrong. After all, we have changed our mind before. Could we not do so again? So our commitment remains at least in part a matter of faith. In short, our worldview at its heart is presuppositional.

But if our worldview is presuppositional, must it also be pretheoretical? That is, must it be so intuited or given to us that we can’t think any other than the way we do? I think not. The utterly pretheoretical is that without which we cannot think at all. The presuppositional is that which, though we may be able to give reasons for, we cannot, strictly speaking, prove.
8
Nevertheless we believe so profoundly that we commit ourselves to it and live in accord with it. We cannot do otherwise, for we need it in order to give our life enough meaning to keep going.
9
Finally, the
theoretical
is that which arises from the mind’s conscious activity.

Pretheoretical

Let us first examine the utterly pretheoretical. What notions are so basic and so much a part of our mental equipment that if we think at all, we are forced to use them? Aristotle listed ten such categories; among them are substance, quality, quantity, relation, place and time, all of which seem to me to fit this criterion.
10
Descartes thought the notion of truth itself was pretheoretical, even though he could give it a theoretical definition as “the conformity of thought with its object.”
11
It is hard to imagine how we could even begin to think without implicitly using—not thinking about but using—some of these categories.

Two modern cultural anthropologists expand Aristotle’s list. Michael Kearney names the categories of “self and the other, relationship, classification, causality, space and time.”
12
Robert Redfield lists the self (divided into I and me) and the other (divided into human and nonhuman). The human is further divided into young and old, male and female, us and them; the nonhuman is divided into God and nature. Finally, what Redfield calls “everyman’s worldview” includes space and time, birth and death.
13
My guess is that there are many more of these pretheoretical concepts to include, for example, meaning, oughtness, identity and contradiction.

In short, the pretheoretical consists of those notions and recognitions of relationships between notions that precede any thought at all. The pretheoretical is what we think with, not what we think about.

Look again at the young boy’s first question: “What holds up the world?” Already assumed is the difference between his
self
and the
other
of his father, the
substantial
existence (
being
as opposed to
nonbeing
) of the world in
place
and
time
. These concepts are not questioned. Their specific relationship is at issue, but not the notion of relationship itself. What is utterly pretheoretical is the intellectual context in which the boy’s question makes sense.

Presuppositional