Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (27 page)

12
Williams,
Descartes
, p. 89.

13
René Descartes, “Meditation III,” in
The Philosophical Works of Descartes
, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover, 1955), 1:165.

14
The arguments I have merely outlined are examined in detail by Williams,
Descartes
, pp. 130-62, and Copleston,
History of Philosophy
, 4:92-115.

15
Descartes, “Meditation V,” 1:184.

16
This may be more rhetorical than accurate. It is difficult to believe that Descartes suffered what twentieth-century existentialists would call angst. Still, it was no mere game; Descartes based his whole philosophy on the
cogito
. If he is wrong here, his entire philosophical enterprise is in question. Descartes himself says, “The destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice” (Descartes, “Meditation I,” 1:145).

17
John Cottingham, “Descartes, René,” in
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 195.

18
Leszek Kolakowski, critiquing Edmund Husserl’s attempt to solve the problem posed by the inadequacy of Descartes’s
cogito
argument, puts it this way: “Husserl’s monodology is for me another example of the logical hopelessness of all philosophical endeavors which start from subjectivity and try to restore the path toward the common world” (
Husserl and the Search for Certitude
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], p. 79).

19
Augustine,
On Free Choice of the Will
, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 12 (1.7).

20
Augustine,
The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love
, ed. Henry Paolucci (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1961), pp. 26-27 (20).

21
Cottingham, “Descartes,” p. 195.

22
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
, in
The Basic Writings of Nietzsche
, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1969), sec. 54, p. 257.

23
Kolakowski echoes Nietzsche’s critique: “Descartes’s blunder consists in his decision that he could doubt the existence of the world but not his own existence—that his Ego was given him in absolute immediacy and he was thus a thinking substance. But in pure phenomena no thinking substance appears. Therefore we have to eliminate the substantial Ego as well. . . . This phenomena is given, but not so the fact that it is ‘mine’” (
Husserl
, p. 38).

24
Miguel de Unamuno is similarly critical of Descartes’s
cogito
: “The defect of Descartes’s
Discourses of Method
lies not in the antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he might be a mere thinker—that is, an abstraction. But the real man returned and thrust himself into philosophy” (
The Tragic Sense of Life
, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch [New York: Dover, 1954], p. 34). He continues: “The
ego
implicit in this enthymeme,
ego cogito, ergo ego sum
, is an unreal—that is, an ideal—
ego
or I, and its
sum
, its existence, something unreal also. ‘I think, therefore I am a thinker’; this being of the ‘I am,’ which deduced from ‘I think,’ is merely a knowing; this being is knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living” (p. 35).

25
Richard Rorty,
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 17.

26
Rorty writes, “The temptation to look for criteria is a species of the more general temptation to think of the world, or the human self, as possessing an intrinsic nature, and essence. . . . But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, or sentences” (ibid., p. 7).

27
Ibid., p. 27. Rorty also credits Wittgenstein with a similar notion, noting that “Wittgenstein’s insistence that vocabularies—all vocabularies, even those which contain the words which we take most seriously, the ones essential to our self-descriptions—are human creations, tools for creation of such other human artifacts as poems, utopian societies, scientific theories, and future generations” (Rorty,
Contingency
, p. 53). Rorty’s reduction of knowledge to language itself has come under severe criticism; see, for example, Alvin Goldman,
Knowledge in a Social World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 10-12, 26-28; Donald Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated,” in
Rorty and His Critics
, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 65-74; and Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in
Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (and Beyond)
, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 257-75.

28
Rorty,
Contingency
, p. 7.

29
Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
, p. 214.

30
Of course, what a person or a society does is an indication of what worldview a person or a society actually holds, as we will see below.

31
David Naugle, “On the Liturgical Consummation of a Christian Worldview: Worldview, Worship, and Way of Life,” in
Thriving in Babylon: Essays in Honor of A. J. Conyers
, Princeton Theological Monograph, ed. David B. Capes (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), pp.121-25. Reflecting on the priority of worldview to worship and practice, Naugle now comments that it might be better to say that the balance may shift, “each taking the lead in a certain situation, depending on many factors—denomination, learning style, cultural setting, etc.” (personal correspondence).

32
E. L. Mascall explains this cleverly: “One of the drawbacks of being a mere creature is that you see everything the wrong way round; you look at things from man’s standpoint and not from God’s. The order in which things ultimately exist, the
ordo essendi
, is usually the precise opposite of the order in which we come to know them, the
ordo cognoscendi
; and this is specially true of that which is of all beings the most fundamental, namely God himself.” As we grow up we learn about God in our home or community, perhaps even engaging in devotional activity. “The logical order is the reverse of this: God comes first; then Christ, who is God incarnate in human flesh; and last of all, the faith and devotion of the Church which Christ founded. And this is, in fact, the order adopted by both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds, which begin with God the Father, then summarize the facts of the Incarnation and of Redemption, and only at the end mention the inspired Scriptures, the Church and Baptism” (
He Who Is,
p. 1).

33
John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, 1.1-13.

34
“That there exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all men to a man, being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service” (Calvin,
Institutes
, 1.3.1). See Alvin Plantinga’s discussion of the
sensus divinitatus
in
Warranted Christian Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 167-98. My view of direct knowledge of God is found in
Apologetics Beyond Reason
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), pp. 41-52.

35
Peter Medawar, “On ‘the Effecting of All Things Possible,’”
The Listener
, October 2, 1969, p. 438.

36
Some evangelical apologists do assume that some key aspects of the Christian faith can, for all intents and purposes, be proved or at least adequately defended through human reason. Aquinas’s famous five reasons still appear in modern form in Catholic and Protestant apologetics. So do proofs for Jesus’ divinity or the resurrection. Still, it seems to me that the most effective apologetic does not start with positive proofs but answers to objections—whatever they are (naturalistic or postmodern)—the most common of which are the problem of evil, the belief in God as arising from psychological or sociological causes, the origin of the orderly universe by a combination of chance and determinism, the evolutionary origin of human beings through natural causes, and the notion of the relativity of all truth claims. When these are disposed of—or before, if possible—attention should be directed to the best evidence for God in any place or time: Jesus himself. The focus should be on Jesus’ character, teaching, life, death and resurrection. The idea of this apologetic evangelism is to turn attention to Jesus as the incarnation of God, that is as Being himself. It is the living God who breaks through by being He Who Is. In the final analysis, even if the order of knowing (
ordo cognoscendi
) in human time precedes the order of being (
ordo essendi
), He Who Is has already preceded we who are and has done so both in time and in presence.

37
David Naugle,
Worldview: The History of a Concept
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 253.

38
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in
The Portable Nietzsche
, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 46.

39
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
125, in
Portable Nietzsche
, p. 95.

40
For Richard Rorty’s elaboration of Harold Bloom’s notion of “strong poet,” see Rorty,
Contingency
, pp. 23-42.

41
Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in
The Foucault Reader
, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 74.

42
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 184.

43
C. S. Lewis,
The Great Divorce
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946), pp. 27-29.

44
Naugle,
Worldview
, p. 296.

45
Alexander Schmemann,
For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963); and Timothy Ware,
The Orthodox Church
(New York: Penguin, 1964). See Naugle,
Worldview,
pp. 44-52.

46
Ware,
Orthodox Church
, p. 271, as quoted by Naugle
, Worldview
, p. 45.

47
Western Christians should not find this matter of paradigms foreign. Note the differences between Reformed and Catholic and Pentecostal understandings of sanctification, grace and works, the sacraments and gifts of the Spirit.

48
I have tried to describe this in slightly more detail in my comments on Bashō’s “ancient pond” haiku (pp. 171-74).

49
Jonah M. Schupach appears to understand my view of
ontology
as the “studies” of being and knowing. See his online review of the present book in the
Denver Journal
7
(2004):
www .denverseminary.edu/resources/news-and-articles/naming-the-elephant-worldview-as-a-concept
. Others of his criticisms also rest on misreadings.

Chapter 4: Flesh and Bones

1
Wilhelm Dilthey, quoted in David Naugle,
Worldview: The History of a Concept
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 82-83.

2
Naugle’s summary first of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s view (ibid., p. 61), then that of Ludwig Wittgenstein (p. 160).

3
Quoted in ibid., p. 225. Lovejoy does not use the word
worldview
, but his description of the sorts of ideas that intellectual historians should consider sounds very much like those constituting a worldview: “There are, first, implicit or incompletely explicit
assumptions
, or more or less
unconscious mental habits
, operating in the thought of an individual or a generation. It is the beliefs which are so much a matter of course that they are rather tacitly presupposed than formally expressed and argued for, the ways of thinking which seem so natural and inevitable that they are not scrutinized with the eye of logical self-consciousness, that often are most decisive of the character of a philosopher’s doctrine, and still oftener of the dominant intellectual tendencies of an age” (A. O. Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being: The Study of the History of an Idea
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933], p. 7).

4
Charles H. Kraft,
Worldviews for Christian Witness
(Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008), 13.

5
N. T. Wright,
The New Testament and the People of God
, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), p. 122.

6
Charles Taylor,
A Secular Age
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 14, 25.

7
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), sec. 217, quoted by James Olthuis, “On Worldviews,” in
Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science
, ed. Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen and Richard J. Mouw (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), p. 31.

8
I am aware that there are other ways of defining
presuppositional
. Arthur Holmes notes that a presupposition has also been defined as a “logical prior proposition, as in presuppositionalist apologetics, especially Gordon Clark and Carl Henry’s kind of evangelical foundationalism” (personal communication). I want to emphasize not so much the clear intellectual content of this aspect of a worldview as its root in intuition and its function in commitment.