Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (6 page)

Worldview as a Matter of Worldview

Before beginning the present study of worldviews, I had the distinct sensation that how one conceived of a worldview depended on one’s worldview. This brief survey confirms that suspicion.

The secular story.
What we see in the sequence from Kant and Dilthey to Foucault is the shift from modernity to postmodernity. The concept of a worldview itself arises at the height of modernity as represented by Kant, who extended the autonomy of human reason to its peak. For him the very nature of any reality that can be known is tied inextricably to the nature of the human mind. Total reality consists of the noumenal (a transcendent realm) and the phenomenal (an immanent realm). The noumenal is inaccessible to the human mind. But the phenomenal can be known, because the human mind contains the categories by which the phenomenal can be structured and thus understood.

It is this basic conception that stands behind Dilthey’s understanding of worldview. For Dilthey, in my words, a worldview is
a set of mental categories arising from deeply lived experience which essentially determine how a person understands, feels and responds in action to what he or she perceives of the surrounding world and the riddles it presents.

What we know is determined by the pretheoretical categories we use to know. So while a worldview may result in a set of ideas or beliefs about fundamental reality, the worldview itself is composed of the categories by which we see.

Kant was a
modern
philosopher. Like Descartes he assumed a universality in human nature. The categories were understood to be universal constants. The riddles of life are the same for all: death, cruelty, transitoriness. One’s worldview results from the struggle to understand these and other existential conundrums. One’s view of the world, then, is shaped by encounter with life. In his early work Dilthey, like Kant, seems to have believed that this provided the basis for an understanding of reality that was universal.

Later Dilthey recognized that this is not the case. As Naugle says, worldviews “are developed under radically different conditions by radically different kinds of people.”
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So they become as numerous as the number of people in the world. Dilthey thus became a historicist; he came to see human knowledge as inextricably bound to time, place and culture.
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With this insight we are at the doorway to postmodernity.

With Nietzsche we are there. For Nietzsche, worldviews—all claims to knowledge and understanding—are perspectival. Truth itself is a “mobile army of metaphors.” Nothing can be stated that does not depend on a point of view that is no more likely to be related to reality than any other point of view.

In his early work, Wittgenstein was as modern as Descartes. But in his later work he steps into the postmodern world: The solid, objective world of people and things becomes linguistic. We invent ways of using language (language games), he says, that allow us to move about in a world we do not directly know. Our language allows us to act with some success in getting what we want.

It is not that there
is
nothing but language. There are many things that are not language, and they are important. It is just that claims to knowledge cannot be confirmed by checking those claims against reality. They can be evaluated only by how well they work. We may seem to know, but what we seem to know has been constructed for us by the language we use.

Foucault takes us to the final consequences of postmodernity. He adds the notion that all language is a claim to power. Any worldview as a statement about reality is neither true nor false in any objective sense. Its truth lies solely in its ability to secure power for oneself or the community of people who affirm it.

The irony is that any notion that a worldview forms a foundation for what we really know undermines itself. Even Foucault’s implicit claim to know how language functions is undermined. If all language is solely a power play, then so is the language by which Foucault explains language. Therefore, unless one wants to play the language game on the side of Foucault and by so doing secure whatever power one can, there is no particular reason to agree with Foucault.

In any case, if this were the only story in the history of the concept of worldview, the history would end in the death of the concept—or at least the death of any significance to the concept. Nihilism, however, does not stop intellectuals from writing, only from making sense.

The Christian story.
The history of the worldview concept has another story—one deriving from its employment by Christian thinkers from the end of the nineteenth century on into the twenty-first. This story begins with James Orr.

By his own admission Orr borrowed the bulk of his concept from German Idealists such as Wilhelm Dilthey and the Scottish Idealist Edward Caird. Caird, whom he quotes, speaks of a “general
conception
of the world” (which sounds idealist). Orr says a worldview is “the widest view which the mind can take of things” (which sounds idealist), but adds, “in an effort to grasp them together as a whole” (which sounds realist), and further, “from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology” (which again sounds idealist).

But Orr’s focus is on the world that is to be grasped, not the nature of the grasp itself (and that is realist). There is “one set of laws,” and “one order reigns through all.” There is a “grouping and grasping of things together in their unity” (again realist). Moreover, as Orr develops the particularly Christian worldview, he is not interested in the categories by which the world is grasped but in the character of the world itself. When Orr turns to the elaboration of the Christian worldview in nine brief sections, each of them begins with “The Christian view affirms . . .”
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For example:

This sentence makes an ontological claim. So does the following:

The same thing is true of Abraham Kuyper. His “life system” concerned “three fundamental relations” considered as such, relations that were taken to exist in reality, not just in our “picture” of reality. Quite striking is Kuyper’s notion of a
sensus divinitatis
that is present in each of us and allows a direct access to God. God, then, “enters
into immediate fellowship with the creature
.”
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Neither theoretical thought nor language intervenes. “At every moment of our existence, our entire spiritual life rests in God himself.”
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One can’t get more realistic, more ontological, than that.

This realist emphasis re-emerges in Olthuis, Wolters and Nash. In fact, the focus of most, if not all, of the evangelical Christian definitions of
worldview
is never on the
categories
by which we grasp God, humanity and the world but on what God, humanity and the world actually, objectively (i.e., outside our thought life) are. So in one sense the story of Christian worldview thinking from Orr to the present has no plot. The concept of a worldview is largely frozen in time. Or would be if it were not for David Naugle. Because he adds a unique flavor, we will look more deeply at his work.

A new synthesis: David Naugle.
With Naugle the Christian story of worldview enters a new phase. On the one hand, like other Christian worldview thinkers, Naugle grounds his definition of the Christian worldview in ontology. On the other hand, he acknowledges the shift in perspective from ontology to hermeneutics, adding to his definition the notion that a worldview is characterized by a “semiotic system of narrative signs.”
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First, observe the ontological foundation. Other worldview analysts such as Olthuis and Holmes are conscious of the close links between their notion of worldview and that of the nineteenth-century Idealist philosophers, but they have done little to address the potential danger of this link. Naugle has taken the threat seriously—especially the subjective character of worldviews and the resulting relativism.

It is one thing for Dilthey to begin with the Enlightenment trust in the unity of truth and the autonomy of human reason, and then to find the former undermined by the latter. The question of “whose reason” or “whose rationality” inevitably arises when different reasoners address the same issue and come to contradictory conclusions. Reason itself, so it comes to be seen, is tied to time and place and person. For one who does not believe in a God who reveals truth to his creation, relativism may be an unwanted result of the autonomy of human reason, but it does not conflict with anything but human desire.

For a Christian, relativism challenges the very heart of Christian commitment. It is not just that Christians, like everyone (as Aristotle would say), desire to know the truth. It is not that they must believe they have a full grasp of the truth; they know that sin has a negative noetic effect. But Christians do believe that part of the truth about truth is that truth is one. Two contradictory statements can’t both be true. There is an exclusivity to truth.

This notion is implicit in the Hebrew Scriptures, but it becomes startlingly explicit in the teaching of Jesus. Take the notion of what happens after death.

When he knew that he did not have long to live, Jesus told his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me” (Jn 14:1). Then he told them that there is a life after death for them, that he is going away to make a place for them with his Father, that he is doing this so that eventually they can be with him.

When Thomas, one of his disciples, was confused, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6).

This is neither the language nor the concept of relativism. It is a direct claim to truth that cannot rationally be countered or balanced by its opposite. What Jesus said is either true or false. It may not be easy to assemble evidence for its truth or falsity, but that does not change the nature of the claim itself.

If the concept of worldview commits one to relativism, it cannot be used as a tool within the workshop of a Christian mind. Naugle knows this and counters it directly in the first proposition of his definition of worldview from a Christian standpoint:

For Naugle the first fundamental presupposition of the Christian faith is ontological—a statement about what is, about the really real. Naugle is not alone in placing ontology first in order. That has been the case for Christian worldview thinkers from Orr to the present. Naugle presents his position clearly:

There is, therefore, what Naugle calls a creational objectivity to the Christian tradition, “an absolutist perspective on life that is real, true, and good.”
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Second, harking back to the German Idealists, Naugle acknowledges the subjective nature of worldviews:

Naugle, so far as I have been able to determine, is the first worldview analyst to emphasize the striking similarity between the biblical concept of the heart and the worldview concept. It is an insight worth lauding, for this refutes the charge that the German Idealist source of the worldview concept necessarily imports Idealism into Christian thought. Rather it illustrates a motif long recognized in Christian history, the spoiling of the Egyptians—that is, accessing the true insights of the pagan world for the development of Christian theology. Truth is truth wherever it is found.
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The ancient Hebrews before Christ and the Christians afterward saw the heart as the core of the human personality. In the Hebrew Scriptures the word itself (
leb, lebab
) occurs 855 times. It is used to denote not only the physical organ but “the central, defining element of the human person. In short it is seen as the seat of the intellectual, . . . affective, . . . volitional, . . . and religious life of a human being.”
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A few examples cited by Naugle are in order:

       
and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. (Prov 2:6, 10)

In the New Testament “the heart is the psychic center of human affections, . . . the source of the spiritual life, . . . and the seat of the intellect and the will.”
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