Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (3 page)

When stated in such a sequence, these questions boggle the mind. Either the answers are obvious to us and we wonder why anyone would bother to ask such questions, or else we wonder how any of them can be answered with any certainty. If we feel the answers are too obvious to consider, then we have a worldview but have no idea that many others do not share it. We should realize that we live in a pluralistic world. What is obvious to us may be “a lie from hell” to our neighbor next door. If we do not recognize that, we are certainly naive and provincial, and we have much to learn about living in today’s world. Alternatively, if we feel that none of the questions can be answered without cheating or committing intellectual suicide, we have already adopted a sort of worldview—a form of skepticism that in its extreme form leads to nihilism.

The fact is that we cannot avoid assuming some answers to such questions. We will adopt either one stance or another. Refusing to adopt an explicit worldview will turn out to be itself a worldview or at least a philosophic position. In short, we are caught. So long as we live, we will live either the examined or the unexamined life.

Some First Reflections

Reflecting on this definition, one can soon see that a number of relevant issues are not addressed.

What is the history of the concept itself? Who has used it, how and why? Isn’t the concept so tied to its philosophic origins in German Idealism that it imports into Christianity ideas that undermine the Christian faith? Is there any foundation in Scripture for worldview thinking? (This is addressed in chapter two.)

What is the first question a worldview should answer: What is prime reality? Or, How can anyone know anything at all? That is, which is more primary—ontology or epistemology? (This is addressed in chapter three.)

How is a worldview formed? What is the character of the foundational principles a worldview expresses? Where do they come from? Are they theoretical, pretheoretical, presuppositional or a combination of the three? (This is addressed in chapter four.)

Is a worldview primarily an intellectual system, a way of life or a story? (This is addressed in chapter five.)

What are the public and private dimensions of worldviews? What relevance does this have to their objective and subjective character? What part does behavior play in an assessment of the nature of a person’s worldview? (This is addressed in chapter six.)

If the initial definition of a worldview is inadequate, what more adequate one can be given? (This is addressed in chapter seven.)

What role can worldview thinking play in assessing one’s own worldview and those of others, especially in our pluralistic world? (This is addressed in chapter eight.)

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Worldview Definitions

From Dilthey to Naugle

Every person carries in his head a mental model of the world—
a subjective representation of external reality.

Alvin Toffler

W
orldview as a concept
has a rich and elaborate history.
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The term itself is a translation from the German
Weltanschauung
and was first used by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), but only in passing. In German Idealism and Romanticism it was used widely “to denote a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human thought and action.”
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But it was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who first used it as a major focus. In any case, from Kant to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984), the concept has appeared in a variety of contexts and has adapted to or been rejected by a wide variety of worldviews, from German Idealism to Nihilism to Calvinistic Christianity. Moreover, since the events of 9/11, the term
worldview
is often used as a very general label for how people view the cultures with which their culture clashes. This means we must read news accounts and public discourse with a sensitivity to the context in which the term appears.

Indeed, finding clear, coherent and detailed definitions of this concept in the literature is not easy. As philosopher Sander Griffioen says, “The word is used in a great many areas, ranging from the natural sciences to philosophy to theology. Authors who use it often do so without concern for proper definition, and even when definitions are given they tend to be far from precise.” Some even “apologize for the vagueness of the term.”
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Some believe its usefulness actually resides in its vagueness.

In any case, until very recently most would have accepted this vague definition:
A worldview is the fundamental perspective from which one addresses every issue of life.
This definition leaves completely open such questions as whether a worldview is a universal, abstract philosophy or an individual, personal vision; whether finally there is one worldview or many; whether the issues addressed can be understood or not; whether a worldview is pretheoretical or theoretical; whether it is what you say you think or what you show by what you do. These issues will be taken up in later chapters.

The concept of worldview arose first in German Idealism. As such, it bears from the outset a character that Christians, if they are to use the concept, will have to either ignore or challenge. First I will summarize and review four of the salient ways worldviews have been understood by primarily secular philosophers. Then I will survey the definitions of a few key Christian worldview thinkers. From this, several important observations—perhaps conclusions—about the concept will be obvious.

Survey of Secular Worldview Definitions

Wilhelm Dilthey.
Though the term
worldview
had already been introduced in philosophic discourse by Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Dilthey was the first to expound his own philosophy largely in terms of this concept.
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As Michael Ermarth says, Dilthey provided “a full scale treatment of the genesis, articulation, comparison, and development of world-views.”
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The basic role of a worldview is “to present the relationship of the human mind to the riddle of the world and life.”
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Of course there are many supposed solutions to the riddle of life, each with its own roots in individual men and women as they live and move within the flow of history. These solutions change with the person and the time.

“The ultimate root of any worldview is life itself,” says Dilthey.
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But even though each specific worldview is shaped by the character and temperament of each person, there is a common structure to their psychological life. Certain features are held by everyone—for example, “the certainty of death, the cruelty of the natural process, a general transitoriness.”
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These are the inescapable lived realities, the riddles of life, that a worldview resolves.

A worldview begins as a “cosmic picture,” and then through a complex interrelation between human consciousness and the external world, a more sophisticated and detailed sense of who we are and what is the nature of that which is around us emerges. To that is added a growing sense of values. As layer upon layer of consciousness arises, eventually at the highest level one finds “a highest order of our practical behavior—a comprehensive plan of life, a highest good, the highest norms of action, an ideal of shaping one’s personal life as well as that of society.”
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Naugle gives a helpful summary:

Dilthey’s post-Kantian metaphysics becomes clear here. What a person perceives is primarily dependent on the mind of the perceiver. We do not see what is there in the reality that confronts us; rather we understand that reality through the structures inherent in our own mind. A worldview, then, is the shaping structure of our own autonomous selves. We see what
we
see. We understand what we understand. Though Dilthey held that there is a common human nature and a common reality, it is nonetheless true that our worldview is
ours
, one that may be held in common with others, but only because they are like us.

As a matter of fact, of course, not everyone is like us. As Dilthey says, “World views develop under different conditions, climate, races, nationalities, determined by history and through political organization, the time-bound confines of epochs and eras.”
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So there is a multiplicity of worldviews. If this was true in Dilthey’s day, so much more is it true now.

Naugle concludes, “In brief, worldviews spring from the totality of human psychological existence intellectually in the cognition of reality, affectively in the appraisal of life, and volitionally in the active performance of the will.”
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The goal of all this is stability—a solution to the riddles of life that provides a way of successfully thinking and acting in the world.

Using this notion of worldview, then, Dilthey examines human history and finds three basic kinds of worldviews: religious, poetic and metaphysical. The metaphysical he further divides into naturalism, the idealism of freedom and objective idealism. In the end his initial trust that both reality in general and human nature in particular have significant common features seems mostly to have disappeared. Though he opts for his own form of objective idealism, Dilthey concludes, “Ultimately, nothing remains of all metaphysical systems but a condition of the soul and a world view.”
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His description and elaboration of these worldviews is rich and rewarding, but to follow it would take us too far afield of our major concern, which is to understand just what a worldview itself has been conceived to be.

In short and in my words, Dilthey conceived a worldview to be
a set of mental categories arising from deeply lived experience which essentially determines how a person understands, feels and responds in action to what he or she perceives of the surrounding world and the riddles it presents.

Friedrich Nietzsche.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is the boldest, if not the first, nihilist of the modern world. Reflecting on the intellectual history of his century, seeing the implications of the erosion of vibrant belief in a fully theistic concept of God—specifically the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—he infamously announced the death of God. He now saw humanity floating in an infinite sea with no fixed star by which to navigate, no port to call home, no purpose to the journey. At the same time, Nietzsche was also the boldest, if not the first, existentialist, asserting the centrality and power of the self and its attendant will. He responded to his own nihilism with his concept of the
Übermensch
, the “Superman” or “Overman,” the strong individual who was to function as if he (and it was
he
that Nietzsche meant) were God—creating his own values and imposing them on others, the “last man,” by the strength of his will.

With the death of God, all external standards for the true, the good and the beautiful died as well. Nietzsche was not, of course, declaring that a literal God had really died. There had never been a god of any kind. Rather, he meant that the notion of God was no longer functioning in human imagination, no longer having an effect on how people behaved. People might say they believed in God, but their thoughts and actions betrayed their functional atheism.

For Nietzsche, intellectual history is not the developing story of how people are getting closer and closer to the truth of reality. It is rather a story of changing illusions.

As a result, as Naugle says, “A complete perspectivism is at the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophy.”
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Nietzsche viewed every worldview as a product of its time, place and culture:
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