Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (4 page)

Nietzsche’s conception of a worldview as such is not exceptional. It is his radical insistence that all worldviews are relative to their time and place and circumstance that is significant. Nietzsche’s historicism is no different in some ways from that of Dilthey, but one senses in Dilthey a longing for stability that is completely missing in Nietzsche, who, rather, positions himself at the controls of a train that, having entered a tunnel, will never emerge into the light. With his will as the headlight, the train plunges ever deeper into a cavernous nothingness.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, like Hegel and Heidegger, is infamous for being cryptic and obscure. His early work bears the mark of modernity—the attempt to get one’s views precisely lined up with reality. As a radical rejection of this hope, his later, postmodern work settles for “a multiplicity of mutually exclusive world pictures, forms of life, and language games.” He thereby becomes “a central figure in the transition to postmodernity in which the struggle of worldviews over one and the same world is replaced by a variety of noncompetitive, linguistic constructions of reality.”
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“Whereas Plato upheld ontology and Descartes submitted epistemology as the primary concern, Wittgenstein nominated grammar and language as governing principles.”
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In short, Wittgenstein rejected the validity of any worldview as such, for each and every one of them pretends to what is impossible—an intellectual grasp of reality as it really is. What we have instead is “an approach to the world that consists of unverifiable models of life, language, culture and meaning.”
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We meet here a problem in terminology. In one important sense—a sense I want to maintain—everyone, including Wittgenstein, has a worldview. Any rejection of that notion is self-refuting. It’s like saying, “There are no absolutes; everything is relative,” a statement that, if true, is false, in other words, self-referentially incoherent. Wittgenstein clearly makes statements about reality, even if the reality the statements describe is solely linguistic or the statements are only to be judged by their usefulness for getting what one wants. That is, his statements about the nature of language are not just truth claims to be placed noncombatively against opposite truth claims, as if one claim were as true as the other. Rather, they are statements about the actual nature of language. If they are not, they assert nothing and do not need to be taken seriously by anyone.

Put another way, Wittgenstein rejects the notion that anyone can have knowledge about any nonlinguistic reality. In other words, Wittgenstein takes no “view” of either ontology (“what is”) or epistemology (“how one can know”); he has only a hermeneutic (“how one can understand and use language”).

Perhaps we can state Wittgenstein’s worldview (though he would not call it a worldview) like this:
A worldview is a way of thinking about reality that rejects the notion that one can have “knowledge” of objective reality (that is, know any “truth” about any nonlinguistic reality) and thus limits knowable reality to the language one finds useful in getting what one wants.

Instead of worldview (
Weltanschauung
) Wittgenstein prefers to speak of “world picture” (
Weltbild
). Nonetheless,
world picture
as he uses the term seems synonymous with
worldview
.

However we are to understand Wittgenstein’s complicated views, it is clear that he has rejected their ability to give us a clear foundation for knowledge of the surrounding world. Constructed of language, they in turn construct reality for us. We see what they allow us to see.

Michel Foucault
.
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) uses the terms
episteme
and
worldview
, sometimes in contrast, sometimes almost as synonyms. The distinction is probably important in understanding the nuances of his philosophy, but I will treat his remarks about one to include his views of the other. He writes, “Episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that all men of a particular period cannot escape—a great body of legislation written once and for all by some autonomous hand.”
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An episteme involves “an inescapable set of rules and regulations, a way of reasoning, a pattern of thinking, a body of laws that generate and govern all patterns of knowing.”
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What makes his understanding of worldviews worth our attention here is the connection he makes between them and power:

Foucault has no time for truth about objective reality. There are only discourses, and each of them is a play for power.

“In skeptical Foucaultian terms, worldviews are merely the linguistic constructions of a power elite. They are the façades of an absentee reality, and function as effective means of social oppression.”
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Or, in other words, “worldviews are nothing but pseudointerpretations of an ultimate reality all dressed up in a linguistic power suit.”
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Survey of Christian Worldview Definitions

With these definitions in the background, let us turn to a few Christian thinkers who found the worldview concept especially valuable: James Orr, Abraham Kuyper, Herman Dooyeweerd, James Olthuis, Al Wolters, Ronald Nash and John Kok. The insights of Brian J. Walsh and Richard J. Middleton will be considered later (chapter five).

James Orr.
James Orr (1844–1913), a Scottish Presbyterian theologian, first introduced worldview thinking into Christian theology in his 1890–1891 Kerr Lectures at the United Presbyterian College in Edinburgh, published as
The Christian View of God and the World
. Orr was well aware of the German source of the concept and adapted it for his own apologetic purposes.
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His main goal was to provide a complete, coherent, rationally defensible exposition of Christianity, one that would stand up to the intellectual and cultural challenges of his day. The concept of worldview provided precisely the tool of analysis and exposition that fit the task. “It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can be met.”
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Orr then set out to justify Christian belief by showing how the Christian faith addresses all the major issues of concern to human flourishing. “That the Christian faith may be conceived as a christocentric, self-authenticating system of biblical truth characterized by inner integrity, rational coherence, empirical verisimilitude, and existential power is one of his most distinctive contributions.”
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His notion of worldview itself was taken from the general understanding of
Weltanschauung
or
Weltansicht
prevailing at the time. To wit: A worldview is “the widest view which the mind can take of things in an effort to grasp them together as a whole from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology.”
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Orr calls on Edward Caird for an elaboration: “Beneath and beyond all the detail in our ideas of things, there is a certain
esprit d’ensemble
, a general conception of the world without and the world within, in which these details [of experience] gather to a head.”
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Not only do these details come to a head, they do so coherently: “Everywhere the minds of men are opening to the conception that, whatever else the universe is, it is one—one set of laws holds the whole together—one order reigns through all. Everywhere, accordingly, we see a straining after a universal point of view—a grouping and grasping of things together in their unity.”
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Worldviews have their source “deep in the constitution of human nature” and involve both the intellect and the actions we perform. Orr then goes on to discuss at some length the peculiar characteristics of the Christian worldview, doing so in largely theological terms, such as “God,” “human beings,” “sin,” “redemption” and “human destiny,” but focusing throughout and in particular on the incarnation of God in Christ.

Orr’s views have been seminal, helping shape the way the notion of a Christian worldview has developed.

Abraham Kuyper
. Another, perhaps even more important figure standing at the beginning of Christian worldview thinking is Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper (1837–1920) was a contemporary of James Orr and familiar with his work. In his 1889 Stone Foundation Lectures at Princeton University, published as
Lectures on Calvinism
, Kuyper extended Orr’s approach, presenting Calvinist Christianity as a comprehensive worldview or, in Kuyper’s terminology, an all-embracing “life system.” Every worldview, Kuyper holds, must address “three fundamental relations of all human existence: viz., our relation to
God
, to
man
and to the
world
.”
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Kuyper goes on to detail these:

Unlike Orr, however, Kuyper does not follow this with a theology built on this threefold set of relationships. Instead, in the next four lectures he explains how the Christian worldview relates to, illuminates and stimulates culture to its highest peak of perfection in religion, politics, science and art. He concludes with a ringing call to face the future with a Calvinist worldview firmly embedded in our thoughts and life.

One element of Kuyper’s worldview concept is especially important: his notion that every worldview has a single conception from which the whole worldview flows. Kuyper scholar Peter S. Heslam writes that, even before Kuyper gave the Stone Foundation Lectures, Kuyper held that there is a “need for all thought to proceed from a single principle, a ‘fixed point of departure.’”
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The relevance of this to the present study will become apparent later.
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Herman Dooyeweerd.
Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) is perhaps the most philosophic of all Christian worldview thinkers. At the same time, he is the most insistent that theoretical thought does not lie at the basis of one’s worldview. More fundamental than any worldview that can be delineated by ideas and propositions is the religious or faith orientation of the heart. “For Dooyeweerd, all human endeavor stems not from worldview, but from the spiritual commitments of the heart.”
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There are only two basic commitments, leading to two basic conditions of life: “man converted to God” and “man averted from God.” The commitment one makes is “decisive for all life and thought.”
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From the former comes the Christian worldview not so much as a matter of theoretical thought expressed in propositions but as a deeply rooted commitment of the heart: “Theory and practice are a product of the will, not the intellect; of the heart, not the head.”
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Dooyeweerd identifies two religious ground motives that “give contents to the central mainspring of the entire attitude of life and thought.”
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