Psalm 46 2020-21

 God is our refuge and strength,

an ever-present help in trouble.

Therefore we shall not fear

though contagion burns the country like wildfire (though the earth give way)

and the hospitals are overwhelmed; (and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea)

Though death and illness haunt the air (Though its waters roar and foam)

and the people shun the presence of those they love. (and the mountains quake with their surging.)

____________________

There is a river whose streams

make glad the community of God; (. . . the city of God)

the holy place where the Most High dwells.

God is within it, it will not fall;

God will help it at break of day.

Nations are in uproar; kingdoms fall

He lifts His voice, the earth melts.

The Lord Almighty is with us;

The God of Jacob is our fortress.

_____________________

Come and see the works of the Lord,

the desolations He has brought on the earth.

He makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth,

He breaks the tank and shatters the missile; (He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;)

he burns the launch sites with fire. (He burns the shields with fire.)

Be still and know that I am God

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted on the earth.

The Lord Almighty is with us;

The God of Jacob is our fortress.

I've spent about six months with this psalm, memorizing it and reading it multiple times carefully (lectio Divina).  One of the exercises is putting oneself into the situation of the passage being read.  Doing that with the initial wording was intense: in the original, the Earth is giving way, and the mountains are at least quaking, and at most, falling into the heart of the sea (depending on the translation).  The whole environment is crumbling, an almost unimaginable catastrophe.  There's absolutely no human way to feel safe, to be without fear, in that situation.  But the psalmist calls for me to feel safe and strong in that situation.  I'm far from that place.  Nature gives way to chaos, and human beings certainly do.  I'm having a hard time just seeing past the social strife and cultural fear, to find refuge in God.  The picture of the original psalm is much worse than anything we're experiencing now, though.  I don't feel especially afraid of death by COVID, but I do want to keep others safe.  I'm not sure why the social strife troubles me even more than the disease--I expect it's because humans could come together against the disease, but violence, grievance, and revenge tear us apart.  Lord, help us.

"There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God . . ."  What a contrast in these verses! The well-watered city of God (I live in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area), surrounded by destruction and chaos. There's the constant contrast in this psalm:  chaos and destruction all around the safe, protected city of God.  And God seems to be the author of this destruction ("He lifts his voice, the Earth melts . . .)  But--"Like a river (whose streams make glad the city of God) glorious is God's perfect peace" (the God of Jacob is our fortress).

So, it's OK if things fall apart; the city of God is secure.  But what is the city of God for me, today?  My soul?  The church (which seems to have its own turmoil)?

"He makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth . . ."  "Be still and know that I am God . I will be exalted among the nations . . ."

This last section of the psalm paints a strange picture--the "works of the Lord" create "desolations" upon the earth.  That's the prologue to "He makes wars to cease . . ."  After the shalom of the previous stanza, this sounds like the aftermath of a devastating battle (God "breaks the bow, and shatters the spear.  He burns the shields with fire.").  Total destruction of the means to make war.

So, "be still and know that I am God" may be directed to the "nations in uproar" of the previous section.  This psalm is a contrast--the peaceful Jerusalem is surrounded and menaced by the outside world of chaos, but "the Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress."  What does this mean for us (as individuals, the church, the nation)?

I can only think of Martin Luther, who apparently used this psalm as inspiration for "A Mighty Fortress is Our God."  "Let goods and kindred go; this mortal life also.  The body they may kill; God's truth abideth still.  His kingdom is forever."  Can I be fearless and reverently still?

N. Scott Momaday, quoted by Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams) on Place

 "Once in his life, a man  ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it.

                                                             ________________

He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.

                                                           _________________

He ought to imagine all the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon, and the colors of the dawn and dusk."

M. Scott Momaday

Cycling Books for Father's Day (1)

My daughter and her boyfriend (both competitive cyclists) bought me two books for Father's Day:  Pro Cycling on $10 a Day (Phil Gaimon) (PCO$10), and Land of Second Chances:  The impossible rise of Rwanda's cycling team (Tim Lewis) (LSC).  Both are great reads, and both raise some interesting questions.  (I noticed that this is getting long, so I'll just talk about Gaimon here and save LSC for later.)

Gaimon's memoir is alternately funny and inspiring, in a post-modern sort of way:  got to love the grossness and obscenity of some of the stuff that goes on among the riders in practice, races, and training, and it's interesting to see Gaimon work through his emotions about the injustices that necessarily attend when someone is pursuing a labor of love in the context of a money-making sports environment. (Of course, ultimately he is on the cusp of getting what he set out to accomplish.  Uplifting.)

But it's most interesting to see a young one with postmodern ethics attempting to navigate the moral ambiguities of the cycling scene.  Gaimon has one ethical principle that comes to the fore:  ride clean (of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)).  So, we get a lot of Lance lancing (don't read this book, Armstrong, it'll make you mad).  Lance is Satan.  I understand this issue, to a point:  certainly the sport of cycling has lost much of its popularity in the U.S. thanks to this, and, to be honest, for me it's not so much Lance's actual drug use (I'm willing to give him a pass to an extent on it anyway; EPO was a survival tool during his treatment).  Instead, it's the bullying, the stonewalling, the abandonment of friends and subordinates, and the cultivated cult of personality that are ultimately the most off-putting, for me personally.  Lance's (can I say tragic? Professionally fatal?) flaw (and he has been capable of great good with the Livestrong foundation) was thus interpersonal and not behavioral.

But what Phil focuses on is the drugging.  I understand this, I understand the soap tattoo, I understand the problems of being an effective teetotaler in the company of the addicted.  And he HATES the hypocrisy of the main user pontificating self-righteously.  I get it--hypocrisy is the worst.

Phil is an example of the uniquely American moralist; American moralists run the gamut from social liberals to conservatives (and have, through American history), some tied to traditional religion, some not.  The Puritans get a bad rap, but primarily because we don't believe in the specific moral principles that they are aggressively forwarding.  But their primary moral characteristics, collectively--censoriousness and legal perfectionism--are mirrored in the discussion of almost every social issue of the last two hundred years in the nation.

This is an accident of history:  it so happens that we had a supreme and heinous evil woven into the fabric of the nation before nationhood--slavery.  That monstrous evil was fought from a moral perspective by Abolitionists of all stripes, who all tied themselves to this principle: that slavery is wrong and must be abolished.  Their methods differed:  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book, Thoreau wrote an essay, harbored fugitive slaves, and spent a night in jail, John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry and was hanged.  That was the great moral principle that divided the nation, and led to 620,000 soldier casualties, besides the unrecorded number of slaves and civilians who died in the war and the centuries of slavery.  Rightly, it is a watershed moral issue, and those on the wrong side of it were (and are) vilified as monsters or despicable.

Of course, we did that with alcohol too (Prohibition), and women's suffrage, and civil rights, and gay marriage, and drugs, and speech, and names, and feminism, and smoking, and global warming (climate change?) . . . and the list goes on.  Feel free to add your own items.  One might be forgiven for thinking that some of these causes are more important than others.

But in every case, there's what I guess I'll call the rhetoric of censoriousness and dismissal.  Just think about how people talk about smokers and tobacco companies, and you get my point.  (It is, of course, the unpardonable sin [registering irony here; I have smoked a bit myself]).

Oops.  Anyhow, back to Phil:  he spends most of the book in the moralist position, but at the end is forced to confront the fact that those who were fighting alongside him on the PED issue were themselves often implicated in PED use.  I would say (as Greg Lemond has said, I think) that it was impossible to remain at the top levels of cycling any time between the mid 1980s and pretty much 2013, and not be involved in the doping scandal somehow.  I applaud Gaimon for his final reflection on the issue.

But I'm old; I was inspired by Lemond, and by Jock Boyer, Lon Haldeman, Susan Notorangelo, and others in the '80s.  I've seen a lot of ups and downs.  But that's grist for my next review.

Time, Education, and the Liturgical Year

I got back from our church's Easter early-morning (not sunrise at 7:30) service a couple of hours ago. The theme was "Scarred," a carry-over from a sermon series which will continue next week. The service was held in the darkened sanctuary, and the activities, which included liturgical dance (a sinner and the devil) and a sermon on the scars of "Good" Friday, did not end in light (physically in the sanctuary), though the Resurrection was, of course, invoked.

As we exited, Chris pointed out that she would have preferred to have a joyful Easter service on Easter, instead of an amalgam of Good Friday and Easter on Sunday morning. That continued some thoughts that I've had over the past few years concerning the importance of time and rhythm as an element of education. I now understand the importance of the traditional liturgical year in this way as well.

One of the things contemporary American culture seems to value is compression--compression of activities, compression of our awareness into a continuous active present of stimulation (consider Tweeting, Smart Phones, and connectivity in this regard). We've become accustomed to that in our church activities as well: I have not done a survey, but it does seem that fewer churches offer a differentiated round of services during Holy Week (Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday). Instead, we worship as though Easter comes out of nowhere (and, yes, in a sense it does) and has no context in Palm Sunday, Passover, and Good Friday. Certainly our church has moved in that direction over the last couple of years. I miss the rhythm of the liturgical year, which mirrors the rhythm of the natural year that we also tend to ignore.

So what does this have to do with education? I believe we ignore the rhythms of real education in the same way. Over a decade ago, I advanced the idea (at GCU) that there was a rhythm to higher education, which I defined as "knowledge acquisition, knowledge application, and reflection on knowledge." Of these three elements, we concentrate on acquisition, and occasionally on application (in internships), but have given little to no attention to reflection. That pattern has only intensified at the university, and in higher education in general over the last decade. I believe that we miss important elements of the educational experience, and important elements of the rhythm of life when we ignore reflection, especially.

Historic Churches in Scotland

Well, standing at John Knox's house in Edinburgh is an interesting experience. Knox--Scottish reformer, friend of John Calvin, revolutionary, political activist, founder of the Presbyterian Church--is one of the pivotal figures in the history of the Protestant Reformation. He steered the Scottish church (the Kirk) away from Anglicanism, though he got some strategic support from reformers in England under Elizabeth I. But he had written a misogynist attack against Mary of Guise and her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women," that offended Elizabeth I. He took intransigent and sometimes contradictory political positions, depending on the situation in which he found himself.

That may explain the difference I saw between historic churches in Scotland and those in Britain, though I really don't have enough evidence to pronounce anything definitively. In Britain, as my video blog shows, churches still have standing as places of worship, and the interpretive material connected with them really makes their devotional purpose explicit. In the Scottish historic churches I visited, there is really no attempt to describe or explain the reformation in Scotland. One gets little sense of the history or development of Protestant Christianity.

I am at a loss to explain this. Reform in Scotland was a messier, yet more theological, process than in Britain. Yet, from all I see, Scotland is a more secular place even than Britain, one of the most secular societies in Europe. But then again, I didn't go to Saint Andrews, and didn't visit any Highland churches.

Meeting Jesus at University

The first thing that strikes the reader about this book is that this is a graduate thesis or dissertation in sociology. That being the case, Edward Dutton uses plenty of academic terminology and attempts to cultivate an objective stance. But he’s clearly engaged in a sociological project, unlike Samuel Schuman in Seeing the Light. I would say that Dutton is less sympathetic to Christian and religiously-based collegiate life than Schuman seems to be. But he is looking at different things.

Dutton is interested in the subculture of evangelical Christian groups at European universities; he looks specifically at Oxford, Aberdeen University, Durham University, and universities in Holland, the U.S., and the Caribbean.

The gist of his question is this: he had been exposed to and participated in the activities of an evangelical student group at his university (Durham), and wondered why these groups seemed much more active (as he saw it) at universities like Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, than at the other colleges his friends had gone to. His hypothesis is that there is something different at the three universities above that encourages the development of “fundamentalist” [his term] evangelical Christian groups. The analysis is going to depend on a number of somewhat arcane terms: “leveling” rituals, liminal experiences, rites of passage, communitas, contestation. Some definitions might help here: leveling rituals bring people of various backgrounds together in a single experience, or set of experiences, during which the differences of these backgrounds (especially in terms of social status) are broken down. “Liminal” (in psychological terms) has to do with threshold or intermediate experiences. “Communitas” is a “feeling of togetherness and bonding in which social distinctions break down, often brought on by a rite of passage” (6). Rites of passage end up being rituals designed to bring people through a liminal phase in their lives. The other possibility in a rite of passage is contestation, in which participants in an experience create new boundaries, which the experience of “communitas” attempts to break down.

The most interesting part of Dutton’s book is his description of the evangelical groups he studied at Durham and Oxford. He doesn’t really have enough information about U.S. and Caribbean universities to make any firm conclusions, since he relies on others’ research for it. For the rites of passage he has experienced, he describes well the things that evangelical student groups do, concluding that the more intellectually and socially demanding the environment, the more students gravitate to groups that will re-establish some kind of structure for their lives. Other students are also attracted to religious groups, he theorizes, because of the innate stress of this “liminal” experience and rite of passage that college is perceived to be.

If you want the most efficient way to read this book, the chapters to focus on would be 1, 2, 4 (because of the research he cites on American Christian colleges), and 8, his short conclusion. In addition, his bibliography shows some interesting titles that might be worth pursuing.

The interesting thing is that this research doesn’t “go anywhere.” Dutton doesn’t do any more than note that this type of thing happens in situations that constitute rites of passage. One might theorize (if one were an evangelist) that this study suggests the specific receptivity of campus students, away from home for the first time, to making significant changes in their behavior and worldview, simply because of the nature of the experience. Whether one would see that as good or bad would depend on the nature of one’s own commitments.

Christian Worldview and Christian Perspectives

It has been a while since I've posted; three months, in fact. Much water under the bridge, but also much work that continues.

Here are some notes on the next phase of worldview training here at school. It will be important for instructors here to understand, if not accept, the basic history and priorities of Christianity, so that they can respect historically held and tested Christian perspectives. What follows is the beginning of a list of learning topics for the next possible phase of faculty training, realizing that the ultimate goal is to provide teaching and a curriculum that operates from a Christian perspective.

Christianity sees as central the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Alister McGrath explains the significance of Christ in three points:

"1. Jesus tells us and shows us what God is like.
2. Jesus makes a new relationship with God possible.
3. Jesus himself lives out a God-focused life, which Christians are encouraged to imitate" (4-5).

It does seem that these three points encapsulate a distinctively Christian point of view on the person of Christ. This fleshes out the Power Point element in the original presentation to faculty.

Of the various points that McGrath makes about the person of Jesus, the most germane to a Christian worldview seem to be the importance of his teaching, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. Probably each of these should be unpacked, and the importance of the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection further explained.

I saw the new movie Knowledge, starring Nick Cage. (Note: there may be plot spoilers coming, so if you want to see the movie, stop reading.) On principle, I have a problem with apocalyptic movies. Armageddon (Bruce Willis) was good, at least in part because the threatened apocalypse did not come about. The Left Behind series of movies was problematic because there's just a generic problem with apocalypse movies, as there is with the "evolutionary" kind of science fiction (you know, when humanity transforms into something other, with concomitant millennial consequences). I think the issue is that in general, audiences identify and sympathize with the hero, and when the hero dies, it produces the tragic effect. However, when the whole of humanity is wiped out, it goes beyond tragedy, as sci-fi goes beyond romance when humanity changes beyond recognition.

I am, however, interested in the repackaging of religious themes in contemporary movies, and Knowledge had that in abundance--Left Behind meets Erich von Daniken meets Armageddon.

So, why am I intrigued, though not completely sold on, Knowledge, while dissing the Left Behind series? I don't really know, if one leaves out better CGI. I suspect that apocalypse is a problem because there's an end to all tension if everyone's dead. Even if a new Eden or millennial existence results for a few, there's something inconceivable about humanity, essentially as we know it, suddenly coming to a complete end (maybe more than 5 billion of the earth's 6 billion being wiped out in an instant, with maybe a few thousand saved? There's a Schindler's List for you). Plus, for Left Behind, if one reads biblical prophecy, there's a millennial existence and Heaven at the end. John struggled to describe it, and such an existence would almost certainly be impossible to describe adequately by an earth-bound human. Literature is based on tension and conflict, so it's not clear where that goes.

Charles Darwin at the Cambridge University Library

I just went to see the exhibit of manuscripts, letters, and specimens from the voyage of the Beagle, a trip of almost 5 years (1831-36) from which Charles Darwin derived the data that would result in the theory of evolution 20 years later. One tends to think of theorizers as people who sit in laboratories or libraries and write, but it's clear that Darwin used what the exhibit called his "gap year" to exhaustively examine the botany, biology and geology of especially South America, but also the Pacific. He managed to understand the importance of the ecosystem as environment.

When one considers the tensions arising from the theory of evolution through natural selection, it's interesting to think that it stands on such a wealth of observation, maybe the most comprehensive in the history of biology. And to see family letters, drawings, and specimens, as well as travel diaries, gives a sense of the richness of this episode in Darwin's life (as well as a sense of richness and complexity for the viewer of the exhibit). It's especially interesting that he almost didn't go; his father, a doctor, was against the idea at first. Darwin himself also saw it as a large and perhaps fruitless investment of time.

The Concept of Worldview in the Natural and Social Sciences

Here are a few titles of books about how the concept of worldview has been incorporated into both the physical sciences and the social sciences. It is worth noting that the physical sciences have paid less attention to the perspectival nature of knowledge than have the social sciences, philosophy and the other humanities.

The most important book, really for both the social and natural sciences: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Also, Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy.

For the social sciences, Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.

Also, Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard J. Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science.

Freud wrote about worldview (weltanschaaung), as did Jung. In sociology, Karl Mannheim explored the topic; Berger and Luckmann have already been mentioned. Marx and Engels wrote on the interface between worldview and ideology.

In anthropology, Robert Redfield contrasts what he calls the "primitive" and "modern" worldviews.

Just one more quotation from Naugle, in regard to worldview and ideology as analyzed by Marxists: "Marx and Engels identified dialectical materialism as the true scientific Weltanschauung, and pointed out the role of ideology in class warfare and cultural combat. . . . Christian thinkers must recognize the total implications of the biblical vision under the all-encompassing sovereignty of God. Christianity is more than a church polity, theological system, or pietistic program, but is in fact a view of the entire cosmos with something significant to say about everything" (251).

"Worldview" Cognates and the Philosophers Who Go With Them

Hegel: not just worldview (weltanschauung), but “infinite world-intuition” (unendlichen weltanschauung) and “a moral outlook on the world" (moralische weltanschauung). Hegel seems to connect worldview largely with moral experience, somewhat with religious experience, and less with academic philosophy, which is more conscious, and structures worldviews and religion. He also points up the cultural specificity of worldview. I believe he also popularized “zeitgeist,” or "spirit of the age," which roughly aligns with worldview at the cultural and historical level. The issue here is that worldview is not only personal, it also encompasses cultural and (academic) disciplinary narratives and assertions.

Kierkegaard: Both worldview and its cognate for him, "lifeview," are basic to his existentialist philosophy. These are both about the individual knowing him- or herself, and thus knowing how to act. In fact, he says that the goal of existential philosophizing is to actualize a lifeview, giving meaning to existence.

Wilhelm Dilthey: his pioneering work on theories of the human sciences and hermeneutics cohere with his attempt to systematize a theory of worldview. He wanted as well to formulate “an objective epistemology for the human sciences.” He wanted to get beyond “historicism,” believing that worldview was the form in which the meaning of life was to be grasped. He subdivided worldviews into types: religious, poetic, and metaphysical. He also subdivides these types, gives primacy to the metaphysical version, but realizes the problem of naturalism—the gulf between the subjective and objective. Dilthey attempts an “objective idealism” that attempts to bridge this gap (and thus get behind worldviews to some agreed-upon foundation for meaning). It is useful to quote Naugle (Worldview, 97) here: “Dilthey’s simple recognition of the conflict of philosophic systems and the increasing awareness of the historical condition of humanity led to the skeptical conclusion that there is no absolute, scientific, metaphysical construct which defines the nature of reality with finality. In other words, metaphysics does not have the answers. What are available, however, are worldviews—worldviews which are rooted in the contingencies of human and historical experience and which seek to elucidate the riddle of life.”

Nietzsche: Again, to quote Naugle (106). “For Nietzsche, God is dead, only nature exists, and history reigns. On this basis, he conceived of worldviews as reified cultural constructs and idiosyncratic perspectives on life, artificial to be sure, but necessary for human survival in an ultimately chaotic, unnavigable world.”

Edmund Husserl: he rejected the concept of worldview as foundational, and attempted to establish a rigorous, “scientific,” basis for philosophy. He posited an alternative concept, "lebenswelt" (lifeworld), which is difficult to decipher. It appears to be a pre-rational picture, way of living, or intuition that exists in the mind a priori. How this escapes the historicized relativism of worldview is unclear, except that Husserl believed in a “transcendental substrate” that is accessible universally. (I guess. I’m just throwing something out here.)

Karl Jaspers: attempts a “psychology of worldviews” (the title of his book).

Martin Heidegger: in an attempt at existentialist phenomenology, Heidegger says that “a philosophical worldview is not just the casual byproduct of the discipline of philosophy, but is its very goal and nature. ‘It seems to be without question,’ Heidegger observes, ‘that philosophy has as its goal the formation of a world-view.’” (Naugle, 137) Heidegger also introduced the concept of the “world-picture.” This differs from world-view for him in that it is more of a structural image than a complex of functions. I would explain world-picture as how the world would look to a person who held particular world-view understandings. (Naugle’s questions for Christian philosophers on page 147 bear investigation. The issue here is the subject/object or fact/value distinction that bedevils modernism. By accepting a certain definition of the concept of worldview, Naugle asks, does philosophy then commit itself to accepting the objective/subjective distinction of modernism? What would the implications of that acceptance be?)

See the earlier entry on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Davidson for some detailed discussion on his and Davidson’s concepts.

The post-modernists: one doesn’t know what to say. Deconstruction is a profoundly skeptical project, and in many ways appears to be self-contradictory. It isn’t really tenable as a way to approach either life or scholarship, as witness Derrida himself. Toward the end of his life, he became embroiled in a dispute over the interpretation of his writing. This theorist, who had gleefully deconstructed various other authors, including the living author John Searle (in a series of dialectical articles in Glyph in the 1970's or early 1980’s), was affronted when others attempted to interpret deconstruction in a way he felt was not proper. If others' words are open to free play, as Derrida asserted (so far as he asserted anything) in his writing, then Derrida himself is in the free play language game, and can’t complain about the rules he helped codify.

Michel Foucault is another matter. There are continuing disputes over his scholarly method, and possible falsification of data that he used to construct his theories. However, if God is dead and all there is, is power, then his theories of knowledge formation have real power. But notice the post-modern assumption here, that there really is no reality outside the text. Just because humans cannot achieve epistemological certainty about the world doesn’t mean that the world really isn’t out there.

Peter Berger and Donald Luckmann have a more trenchant critique of worldview, one that’s echoed by gender critics, especially feminist scholars. Berger and Luckmann claim (as I’ve said earlier) that worldview notions are “reified” (treated as objectively existing entities outside of the human inventor) by individuals and societies, and become coercive meta-texts, that purport to explain reality. This is an important critique because of Western culture's history of using ideas and political structures to oppress others. However, I believe that most of these theorists miss the implication of this view: whenever any ideology constructs a coherent narrative and set of assertions that functions as a world view, it coerces (that is, it labels certain acts/thoughts/expressions as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”). When a meta-narrative/ideology/worldview gets powerful enough to impose social sanctions on discourse, then doesn’t it too become a coercive meta-text? [witness “political correctness."]

Next: a list of thinkers in various academic disciplines who treat the concept of worldview for that discipline.

Continuing Thoughts on Worldview

Continuing thoughts on worldview: During the nineteenth century, the concept of worldview was used, under different nomenclature, by both idealists--phenomenologists, who believed that some kind of objective look at the world was possible--and existentialists, who believed that human action created meaning in the world. The phenomenologists-—Dilthey in the nineteenth century, Husserl and Heidigger in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—-wanted to see worldview as subordinate to a “scientific” philosophy, which could put forth an objective sense of what the world was “really” like, apart from particular perspectives on it. Such an approach continues to be attempted, for example by the modern textbook writer Ninian Smart in Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. The existentialists of the nineteenth century who are more direct precursors of twentieth century post-modernism-—Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche-—both stressed the irreducibility of worldview as a category of thought and action, with Kierkegaard calling it a “lifeview” more often than a “worldview.”

Positivist attempts to construct an adequate epistemology failed in the early twentieth century. David Hume’s critique of causality, which comes down to the challenge to “show me what a cause looks like,” has never really been refuted. All one can assert from an empiricist point of view is that events follow one another with more or less regularity. This makes inductive reasoning merely probable instead of indubitable. Phenomenological attempts to construct an objective “scientific” philosophy failed in much the same way.

The stage was set for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who essentially discarded phenomenological attempts to fix the referent of language somewhere “objective.” In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein attempted a rigorous account of reference, in the vein of what Bertrand Russell was attempting for mathematical reference in the Principia Mathematica. In the Philosophical Investigations, however, Wittgenstein abandoned thinking about reference, and instead began considering language as human action. Languages are structured as games, language-games, in fact (Wittgenstein’s nomenclature), whose rules are determined by “forms of life.” For Wittgenstein, forms of life create “world pictures,” his analogue to worldviews. Since Wittgenstein grounds everything in the human action of language (“meaning is use”), forms of life and world pictures are strongly language-dependent. That has led to questions about whether worldviews are completely dependent on the language in which they occur. But languages are inter-translatable, and people do modify their worldviews without necessarily changing their languages.

A History of Weltanschauung

A bit on the history of the term weltanschauung: The English term “worldview” is a calque (a direct translation of a term in another language, with the translation used in the same way) of the German word. Though the elements of the German term come from Old German, the term was almost certainly coined in its philosophical sense by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 work Critique of Judgment.

Naugle points out two things: first, the term was only used once by Kant. He refers to it (in translation) in the quoted excerpt from the Critique, as “our intuition of the world,” “the substrate underlying what is mere appearance.”

Second, Wilhelm G. F. Hegel, one of Kant's immediate successors in the philosophy of Idealism, was the first to attempt a thoroughgoing definition of the concept, connecting it to his concept of the Zeitgeist of historical periods.

Now I see Kant's primary contribution to the history of philosophy as follows: he pointed out that we are imprisoned in our heads; we only know phenomena (appearances) rather than the numinous world (the world as it is). Our senses mediate our perceptions, making the contents of our minds radically perspectival. Kant attempted to mediate this personal relativism of perception by positing structures of mind/categories of thought that he thought were universal, and which he called synthetic a prioris.

Hegel pushed this insight farther, and called into question the unified subject. He pointed out that we only know ourselves in relation to our impressions of something outside ourselves. What are we, he asks, outside of our perceptions of something other than we are? Thus, our perception of ourselves is actually a process--the space between the perceiving self and the perceived other.

I figure for this blog, I'll chronicle my activities, and start with some informal musings on the concept of worldview, which I'm creating a faculty training for at my university. It's clear to me that worldview ends up having a particular power in a postmodern context. It's also clear to me that this solves the problem of the "Enlightenment Project," which attempts to construct an indubitable ground of certainty for human knowledge. The message of postmodern epistemology is that it can't be done, and I agree.

But the failure of the Enlightenment Project has consequences for faith-based worldviews like the Christian one, I think. Next, a little history of the term and concept, digesting and restating some material from David Naugle's Worldview: History of a Concept.