To respond to Andy, I knew that I was getting myself into some trouble by oversimplifying and over-generalizing philosophy and breaking it down into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I was lumping things, like logic into epistemology and aesthetics into ethics (which I probably would have been better off calling values theory.) I also regret using the phrase “complete” to describe a philosophical system when in fact “closed” would have better conveyed what I meant.
The point that I was making still intrigues me and it has to do with the nature of what a worldview is. In my last post I argued that if a philosophy dictates “what is real,” “how you determine what is real,” and “how you value what is real,” then it is a closed system. Internally it will be completely consistent, and as long as you “believe” in these three pillars everything (to lift a phrase from Carl) on the inside will look like non-fiction (ie. true) and everything on the outside will look like fiction (ie. not true.)
A worldview is not only a set of ideas or beliefs about the world; it is a complete psycho-emotional mental filter of the world. It is a 360 panoramic view of the real. Your worldview dictates how you think about the world, how you feel about the world and how you respond to the world. It envelops us so that the world from inside what worldview looks and feels completely different than the world seen from inside another.
As I study philosophy I like to try to get inside – to the extent possible – different worldviews and drink them up, appreciating each on its own merit before comparing them one to another. If I read enough and think enough there seems to be a point where I get a glimpse of the world from inside that worldview.
Recently, I have been reading the romantic poets, philosophers and scientists and sometimes I really seem to get a sense of the world they were looking at. It was a world of open and unlimited possibility in which strangely marvelous and unseen natural forces were guiding the movement of life. These natural invisible movements were continuously revealing themselves and there was a sense of awe and wonder at the marvel of life and reality. The Romantic mind has an aversion to too much control over the forces of nature. They prefer a kind of philosophical/spiritual/emotional aikido. They attempt to feel the underlying currents of life and match them in speed and intensity and allow the power of those deeper forces to move them so that they become an instrument of life.
It was this romantic spirit that was so alive in the work of the American Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the other brilliant lights of Concord and New England were blazing Romantic spirits. And look at the wondrous result! Almost all of American culture can be traced to some aspect of their genius. There are four houses on two streets in Concord in which a huge amount of greater American literature was created. We might look at them through a modern lens and find much of their thinking lacking. The question remains if we will be as influential on our future as they have proved to be on theirs.
Rare Personal Aside: I was married this past weekend in the Hillside Chapel that in the late 1800’s housed The Concord School of Philosophy. That school, which ran for 10 consecutive summers, was a gathering place of great minds from across America. My wife (Amy) and I gave a brief talk to all who gathered expressing some of the ways in which we have both been inspired by their romantic pioneering spirit. And so I am thinking a great deal about these romantic thinkers and the world they lived in.
Catherine
/ September 16, 2009Dear Jeff,
congratulations to Amy and you for your marriage ! let me just have a secret wish for both of you, coming from my personal worldview … when it will realize itself I will tell you !
This was a typical example of magical thinking, but a Marriage is Magical, no ?
As a scientist, it is always Ok for me to simplify things. Even if the simplification is too radical, you can always come back on it later, so no problem with this. The great Soviet Scientist Lev landau ( one of the very few who was so great that he got a Nobel Prize in the middle of the cold war, when Soviet Scientists got almost no recognition from the West) was saying
-“ I am the Great Trivializer” ( the big Ego was no a problem for him apparently!)
My comment on the blog. You write:
“Your worldview dictates how you think about the world, how you feel about the world and how you respond to the world. It envelops us so that the world from inside what worldview looks and feels completely different than the world from inside another.”
This sentence gave me very much to think. It happens to all of us that we feel that our vision of things, the color they take, the emotions that they generate is completely different than what other people feel.
When this happens to me I am always cautious that this sensation of difference, of separation, is the mark of the Ego.
Indeed the Ego says: “Nobody can understand how I feel”. By this separation the we are prisoners of our Ego Worldviews.
For me we transcend the Ego when our personal Worldview can be shared. But then they become non personal ( or they couldn’t be shared) .
And what makes it possible to share our Worldviews ?
I don’t know. It is a question for all of you.
David Noel Lynch
/ September 16, 2009Six years ago today as my world view crashed and burned, abstract photography began to spill out of my soul. The world around me became molten. Simplistic views like, “good bad”, “left right”, “in out”, “fiction non-fiction” could no longer explain my view of the world.
What I needed was a tool to help me see a tri-nary world, “left middle right”, “Thesis Synthesis Anti-Thesis”, “Birth Life Death”. Over the next year an equation emerged that in the spirit of Hegel uses Socrates, Newton, and Einstein to describe a moment of time.. At that point, I became burdened with a message that I could not deliver.
Why? Because the main world view of our day is bounded by fundamental science with its BLeaf in the Big Bang positioned against extreme religion with its BLeaf the return of Jesus. So for a person to say, “the Universe is Hoyle’s steady state”, and, “Jesus cannot return but the spirit of Christ can return”, that person falls outside the main stream world view box and will quickly be labeled and attacked.
A good question is how to deliver a world view changing message to a person without tipping them over the edge into denial or violence before the message has had a chance to alter their current world view. A look at history shows that the person that did the best job of this was Nostradamus.
On a special about Nostradamus, Penn Jillette makes a myopic statement that Nostradamus was evil. That if Nostradamus really could see the future events and he did not clearly warn us, then Nostradamus was the real evil. Nostradamus had to be vague. In our day we are labeled and attacked, in Nostradamus’ day he would have been burnt at the stake.
My conclusion was to use art. Make the image colorful. Place small text and symbols in the colorful background. As the person gets closer and closer the words will become visual. At some point, they observer may reject, but by then their mind has already seen the full message. So to change a world view, one must fall through the cracks.
Thus to be truly great is to be no-one.
Juma
/ September 16, 2009Thanks for the post Jeff and congratulations on your marriage.
It may be unhelpful to use the term ‘worldviews’ when characterizing the values/views/beliefs of others.
The oversimplification lends itself to hubris at best, violence at worst. Beyond, that is, being a very general guide (a point I would concede has some merit in the most general of orientations).
This fixed notion of worldviews is a blunt edge with little nuance, save stacking and measuring blunt edges against one another.
More helpful is to elevate the logical faculty in tandem with imagination to follow the facts and augment this with the recognition/experience of how cultural conditioning – in it’s local, regional and hemispheric dimensions – filters and influences understanding.
At root, having the foundation of a thorough Education – knowledge-based, theologically-informed, imagination-inspired, nature-infused – is the essential key to debunking the awkward composition of ‘worldviews’ and discovering why people and cultures tend to accumulate around common conclusions/beliefs.
The Romantics arose in response to the mechanistic noise of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Their success was in moving to preserve the faculties of imagination and humanity’s relationship to the arts and the natural world. Their failure may have been to not properly preserve the new insights/faculties of this emerging information/revelation. They didn’t follow the facts far enough. They, like the rest of us, were incomplete (but let’s face, a hell of a lot more talented).
It could be argued that where one ceases to follow the facts – due to whatever limitation of education, culture or the like – is where their worldview ‘emerges’. I’m certain there are individual and cultural/collective dimensions to this.
Your ‘getting inside’ the Romantic ‘worldview’ is an empathic exercise of understanding/experiencing their deep truths combined with the limitations.
Since we are an evolving species in an evolving universe, revealing new information and having it revealed to us – by grace! – we are growing through different eras.
Because deep truth can be gleaned from any direction, stratifying worldviews in the cumbersome way that is oft done, tends to marginalize the deep truths of any given era.
The facts on the ground are much more nuanced, complex and indeed mystifying than any worldview model (a post-enlightenment, post-self actualization habit to begin with) can represent.
Better to leverage the gifts graced to us – logic and imagination – to unravel this grand play and hold others to account for doing the same, rather than making ‘worldviews’ an excuse or limitation to this profound imperative.
Shizuka
/ September 17, 2009Q1:What is “world view”,what is the definition?
Q2: What is heart,spirit and grace?
Reading comments, Category seems exist “Mind”(logic,imagination) one hand, “Intuition,Magical,mystic,Romantic spirit,soul,beauty,grace” on the other hand.
I think underneath of discussion is
Evolution of consciousness and deeper understanding of truth are possible to takes one leap beyond mere possibility to actuality by responding inner spiritual impulse coming from Consciousness,Spirit,Itself .
VS,
Leverage our mind (logic,imagination) seems more effective for Evolution of consciousness and deeper understanding of truth.
Personally,it’s not so simple for my own choice and examine the effect of it because
“Money” as the deep held values/views/beliefs and that is my view of world in the culture ,society,so called outer world.From that perspective,I call “Dreamer” the other side.
and I think ,believe ‘Spirituality ” as the most important values/views/beliefs and believe ‘Inherent goodness of the world” at inner world.From this perspective,I call “Egoist,Materialistic” the other side.
Carl
/ September 17, 2009Jeff,
I’m not sure how much this aligns with Juma’s thoughts, but as I read your post, I couldn’t help but think of the cultural value sets or memes that I first learned about from Don Beck. In those terms, your description of the Romantics sounds like a throwback to the Purple meme — mystical, magical, very pre-modern, sort of like much of the New Age throwback that happened again more recently. Sitting as I am in Korea at this moment, it’s hard not to see a worldview as a combination of values — in the Korean case a soup of Confucian, Christian, Buddhist and modern scientific/logical thinking and values.
It seems to me that our discussion of world views, if understood in these terms, reflects the kind of chaos theory moment of transition in which we are trying to move from an exclusive attachment to one or another set of “first tier” value sets — mystical/magical, or scientific/logical, or postmodern — to a “second tier” view that embraces all of the previous value sets and applies them in their appropriate contexts. In this case it seems as thought we are trying to move toward a world view that recognizes the value of advancing scientific understanding while recognizing that we need to integrate that with a more intuitive approach to life rather than being forced to choose one or the other.
I am sadly lacking in my ability and knowledge for applying such memetic analysis, but in any case it sure seems to me that a big part of this discussion is about value sets and either holding on to one or another or figuring out how to move further toward a greater integration, which is why the “pragmatists” of today are probably going to be quite different from the Pragmatists of an earlier era.
Brian
/ September 17, 2009Jeff, Thanks for test driving different worldviews, surely a useful undertaking for spiral wizardry. Your role as a worldview mentor allows for it. Maybe next you’ll consider the migrant farmer worldview or the aboriginal australian worldview and tell what you find. The rest of us may have to pick one and live by it, adjusting as we go.
Shizuka
/ September 18, 2009Step on the side
To Carl
Re:”In the Korean case a soup of Confucian, Christian, Buddhist and modern scientific/logical thinking and values.”
That’s so cool !,because you may be able to see more objectively than Korean.I myself Japanese -grown up so called eastern culture.
One of the reason,I feel the potential in US is diversity.By seeing my kid in school, their parents are migrant from so many different countries.
Frank Luke
/ May 15, 2010Is it too judgemental and religiously incorrect to posit that some of the religions now currently practiced are centuries old and founded on beliefs that really need to be questioned, re-evaluated and scrapped? What kind of arguments can more modern and conscious faiths and peoples present to these religions to forsake intolerance, cruelty and out-moded errant thinking that fly in the face of human rights, universal spiritual truths (not Western ideas , universally recognized)?
vanessar
/ October 4, 2010jeff I have a whole new insight into philosphy after reading this piece and may actually look into a philosphy course in the future. i think that you have touched some very controvesal topics in this piece which are very scary for many people to write about as they are unsure about the repsonse and what may happen when people read this. it is true that many people do judge soley on thier believe and their religion and their moral values instead of taking into consideration the whole topic or all the ideas of everyone and taking them into consideration with analysis and then saying well this is true because this is that fact rather than this is true because the bible says so so it has to be. one question i have is why you choose only Emerson, Fuller, Alcott, Thoureau, and Hawthrone and you say that they,are the basis of american culture why do you use them as an example.
Brittany F
/ October 4, 2010Jeff I now view philosophy in a different way. I hav encountered a lot of diversity because of where I’m from so I can relate to your post because New York is very diverse and different. I don’t agree with everyones view but I dont ignore then either. I’m open to everything.
Branavi N.
/ October 4, 2010Hey Jeff,
I thought your article was very interesting and it opened my mind to different views. After reading this I had questions like why is that we all have different views and believes about the world and how would the world be like if we all thought, felt and believed in the same things? I didn’t get what you meant when you were talking about 360 panoramic view of the real. It would be really helpful if you can expand or define it for me. We all have different opinions and thoughts because of our culture, religion, education, where and how we grew up and our own personal experiences. This all shapes what kind of people we are and we all have different views on choosing something we believe in.
“Do you think worldviews can be shared?” –Catherine’s post. I thought that it was a very interesting question and I totally agreed with her. I think it would lead to world peace if we all let go of our egos and shared our worldviews with one another. We don’t need to argue but to accept other people’s opinions. This would cause no wars or fights. But would this ever happen? I don’t think this so unless we’re all turned into robots or something.
In a way I think life would be boring if we didn’t have our own opinions and views. We would all just agree to everything and I can’t imagine that. “Test Drive a World View” is a great piece of work and I’m glad I have read this blog. It’s really inspiring and as a college student I’m looking to learn more on different worldviews.
Pooja P.
/ October 5, 2010I think the point you brought up about worldview was valid, however the view you talked about, is that possible? With so many different religions and ideas is it possible to have a unified worldview? A worldview is how one feels about themselves, so why can’t we have a unified world view?
Overall, this was a wonderful piece =)