Stratford, Dunwich, and Southwold

We did the annual trip to Stratford and Warwick on Thursday of last week, then Chris and I took the bikes to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast for Friday and Saturday nights, coming home Sunday evening.

Warwick is an under-rated town, I think. I spent some time in the churchyard of Saint Mary's College Church, which I think is the largest parish church in England, though I may be wrong. I'm especially interested in this church since it is the place where Robert Dudley, the first first Earl of Leicester (yes, that should be two "first"s because I've seen another first Earl of Leicester that wasn't him). One thing that began to strike me, as it struck me also in Dunwich and Southwold, is that these parish churches were centers of their communities in ways that modern churches aren't. Each church has an attached graveyard, with stones dating back two and three hundred years. (In another off-the-wall observation, outside gravestones seem to only remain legible for about 300 years without special cleaning. I've not seen one yet whose inscriptions I can read that dates from before the 18th century. That's not the case with inside markers.) Oh, another difference--people are actually buried in the church: under the floor, in the walls, in the crypt below. Not only is Robert Dudley buried there, but there's also mention of his secret ex-wife Douglass Sheffield, who became Hakluyt's patroness of Wetheringsett. Anyhow, one gets the sense that churches were actually about the end, as well as the beginning, of life. One gets less of a sense of that from modern churches, at least in America.

The Shakespeare production, The Winter's Tale, was well done, but I can't say that I really like the play itself. As well, some of the scenery and costuming (making the pastoral landscape out of fallen books, for example) had a kind of ambiguous symbolic significance. Before the production, we had dinner with Paul and Wendy Hartle, and Diane Facinelli. Ginny Grainger from the RSC also stopped by to see us, in the interval of a conference with some Ohio teachers. The play ended at about 11:15 p.m., then we walked back to the bus. We didn't get into Cambridge until 1 a.m.

This made getting up, packing and getting out to the train station by 8:45 kind of a chore. Because we hadn't bought tickets in advance, we had to wait until 9:45 anyway. It was raining as we left, and rained more fiercely all the way into Suffolk. After a final burst, it stopped at about the time we got off the train to ride to Southwold. We rode to Southwold with a British family group that has a house in the town. I'll primarily give some pictures here to show the town, but it's generally unspoiled and more upscale than Brighton. We were some of the few non-Britons in town, you know, the "odd Americans" that one of the service staff at a pub where we ate said the town gets. ("We get mostly British people here; just the odd American.") So I said that he was right, that we are pretty odd. He was embarrassed. Anyhow, I'll paste some pictures below, which will describe better than anything I can say. We visited Dunwich, which had been an important medieval town before it began crumbling into the sea. I think some early Romantic woman sonneteer wrote about this town and the poignancy of its crumbling, but I can't remember her name. I (though not Chris) went up in the lighthouse in the center of the town, and got a good panorama.





















































Besides the panorama from the lighthouse, there are two views of Southwold from the pier, one of which shows our B&B, the Avondale (good place to stay). The gravestone is right on the edge of the sand cliff in Dunwich, and that's me with my feet in the North Sea, and Chris at the ruined priory in Dunwich, now being used as a horse pasture and chicken shelter.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we had great weather during our stay in Southwold, and did a loop out to some nature preserves by Dunwich on Saturday. As we got about half-way back to Cambridge, it began to rain. We got home at about 9 p.m. after pedaling in rain to get there.

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).

Week 3 and the SPRI

Week three has begun auspiciously--no real computer problems, good media in the classroom, and a visit to the Scot Polar Research Institute library. This year, the institute museum is being completely refurbished, so we looked at our materials to the accompaniment of hammer drills. It was still great, and it is exciting to see some of the students get excited over the historical and archaeological materials. One student began to ask more general questions about the institute and evidenced a more general interest in things polar. Here we are with the materials, and here I am with one of Frobisher's returned samples.





This will also be my first real post about the weather; the weekend ended up rainy, as did most of the day Monday and Tuesday morning. This has now been the coldest summer we've spent here so far (I've worn few of my short-sleeve shirts), all the more ironic because until we got here, it was unseasonably hot and dry. Between rain and wind, there's been little temptation to set up badminton.

We did have an interesting lunch with the Bjorks and Robert Wardie (Classics professor at Saint Catharine's, and a fellow bicyclist), along with a number of Mary and Bob Bjork's students. We went to a sandwich shop off the market square at 12:30, and faced a 45 minute wait for an inside table. Sensing a letup in the rain, we decided on some umbrella-covered outside tables. Of course, as soon as we got our sandwiches, the downpour began again in earnest. Oh, well.

To Brandon and Thetford Forest

Today, Chris figured out a great trip to Brandon and Thetford Forest (above see her by a mausoleum built by one of the estate owners. He's not buried there any more). We started late in the morning, and only needed to take 20 minutes by train. The forest itself is bisected (kind of) by one B road (B1106), which separates the Brandon Country Park from the forest proper. I just tried to upload the PDF map, but it didn't work. For some reason I can't get a link to work either. Just try Thetford Forest bicycle map, if you're interested.

Anyhow, we took the green and blue trails around the perimeter of the High Forest Lodge section, and the Brandon Country Park section. It was all good double-track, not too muddy. Judging from the mountain bikers we saw (we were on hybrid bikes), there are some really muddy spots. Chris saw one red deer, and we read that this used to be heath grassland that they actually warrened rabbits on part of. In the early 1800's, the land was enclosed and planted with pines. The picture below lets you know what the forest was like. The ferns in the undergrowth were almost shoulder-height.


















This is the home of flint, since mesolithic times, and for a time was the gunflint capital of Britain (they made flints for flintlock pistols and rifles). Maybe that's why there are so many gun ranges around this part of the country (called the Brecks). This is me, on the right, two feet into the danger zone.

The other interesting thing--the weather. The weather was slated to be cloudy today, with intermittent rain, but nobody said we'd be sleeted on in the middle of July. But it was all good; we had our rain jackets. Then it was sunny. Then it rained a little more. As we crossed through a mountain bike racecourse, it rained hard again. When we got to tea at the Brandon Country Park pavilion at 3, it was sunny. I had my sunglasses out and back in maybe 20 times. A great ride. Brandon (the town) was quiet on a Sunday afternoon, so we waited for the train, and got back to Cambridge in 20 minutes. It took us almost as long to buy groceries for tonight and tomorrow and pedal back to the flat as it did to take the train back from Brandon.

As I began to write this entry, a sudden torrential downpour drenched Cambridge. Lucky it didn't happen 45 minutes earlier.

The End of Week 2: Our Trip to Glastonbury

The week ended interestingly, with a trip to Glastonbury, with a side trip to Stonehenge. At the top is a panorama of the ruined abbey of Glastonbury. Glastonbury itself is an interesting town, in that it has a syncretistic conglomeration of Christian, pagan, and New Age elements. The accretion of legends surrounding the sacred well (probably Druidic, appropriated by Christian pilgrims), the Arthurian legend (pre-Christian, Christianized in the Middle Ages), and the Abbey itself (disbanded with extreme prejudice under Henry VIII) actually validates further something I wrote about in my doctoral dissertation about the accretion of significances to holy sites in pilgrimage narratives.

As a rationalist, I tend to look somewhat disparagingly at uncritical outpourings of mystical feeling, of which there were a lot at Glastonbury. I've got a picture of myself at Arthur's grave, which I didn't mean to be entirely disrespectful to him, but the whole legendary, people-laying-on-Arthur's-grave business got to me a bit.



We climbed a hill above town after seeing the Chalice Well, where the Holy Grail is supposed to be interred (lots of explanation for why the water runs kind of red). The Tor has a tower at the top and supposedly housed a pre-Christian shrine. While we were up there some pretty sickly-looking hippie kid was lying on one of the (possible) sarcophagi up there. Lots of Sedona-like psychic energy vortices, apparently.



Compared to this, Stonehenge was relatively tame, with only one creative anachronism kind of guy keeping vigil. I didn't ask him why, but the National Trust intends to do some significant work at the site, routing the major through road and the access to the site in tunnels, so that the original topography and space can be recreated. I don't know why that was bad, and didn't ask him.

I guess people have gotten out of the idea of Stonehenge being an ancient observatory, as I learned as a kid. Instead it's now thought to be a sacred site of some type, maybe a seasonal temple designed to commemorate the winter and summer solstices and equinoxes. In a book I have about time as a concept (sorry, no title, but it's not here in Britain), the authors talk about the importance to agricultural pre-Christian religion of being in the right place at the right time for celestial happenings. It dovetails very well with the exhibit at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which points out that until the advent of atomic clocks, the concept of time was very much tied to the movement of heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons. Something interesting, I think, to be written on the uses of time in human culture.



Also interesting was the carved glyph by the sacred spring at Glastonbury, which looks like some Native American pictographs I've seen.

The speculative explanations of Stonehenge put me in mind of Circlestone, in the Superstition Mountains. Though the scale is nothing like Stonehenge, the same agriculturally-based orientations obtain, and Circlestone probably had the same function.

"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.

In the Bowels of Week 2

This is probably not the best time to write about my experiences of the last few days. I've had more than my share of technical difficulties today; I'd meant to be remotely present at a committee meeting, and downloaded Skype for that reason, but network connectivity problems (I think) kept blowing me offline. It's a cautionary tale for those who blithely believe that working remotely is always easy. It didn't help that I was having classroom technical difficulties of the same type as well. Teaching with technology is wonderful when it works, but when you can't get connected . . . no maps, no Google Earth . . .

But enough of that. We also did without computers this week on purpose, and the weather cooperated. The two pictures at the top are of our hands-on navigation exercise. I'm hoping it gave students a better sense of what it might have been like for Early Modern seaborne explorers, who were probably lost a good deal of the time. The risks they ran are almost inconceivable to modern people, yet their lives on land were probably not that much safer, what with risks from childhood diseases, infection, plagues, violence, war, and so on. London's population grew exponentially during this period, even though the city's birthrate was far outpaced by its death rate. Lots of immigrants from the country.




Chris also did the program's annual hike to Grantchester, which I had to miss because of my computer work. These are just a few of the students, sipping there. The hikers also managed to find a local youth hangout near the river, complete with informational sign and exhibitionist revelers. No pictures of that, apparently.