Philosophy – Page 5 – Anthony G. Flood

Worldviews, basic and theorized

For decades I asked, “What is the evidence or argument for this worldview?” (for example, Marxism, Existentialism, or Christianity). It was the wrong question. I had been assuming that “worldview” always means an explicitly held ideology, philosophy, or theology, a system of ideas one is obliged to justify (or counter) with evidence and argument.

One does not, however, argue for one’s worldview, at least not one’s basic worldview. Rather, one’s basic worldview—a network of nonnegotiable beliefs about one’s relationship to others, to the cosmos, and to God—is the foundation upon on which one argues or asks questions. One’s basic worldview is implicated in the effort to argue or justify. It gets expressed in socially and historically conditioned ideologies, philosophies, and theologies. They are many, but the worldview-forming capacity, like the language-forming capacity, is anthropologically one.

One may rationally vindicate one’s theorized worldview by showing its superiority to any other on offer, but the worldview will even supply the criteria of evaluation. As followers of this blog know, I’m developing a manuscript entitled Philosophy after Christ. Today I’m continuing the line of thought sketched in Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident.” I want to develop the idea of a pre-theoretical (yet theorizable) worldview which, without conscious effort, forms as we mature from infancy through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. It forms in tandem with our capacity for language (without which the theorization can’t be expressed).

I’ve come to distinguish between the worldview one spontaneously comes to have and any reflection upon it. I’m also aware of the temptation to conflate the two. That is, having reflected upon one’s basic beliefs, one identifies and labels the result of that reflection. Between the two, the human heart’s imperfect love of truth inserts a wedge. The possibility of faithless, rather than faithful, reflection emerges.

In other words, if worldview-reflection occurs, if we attend to our incorrigible beliefs and then say something about these “nonnegotiables,” we introduce the problem of truth, adherence thereto and suppression thereof.

Let’s consider the distinction between what I’ve called our “birthright” worldview (see, e.g., this and this) and our attempts to articulate and label it (our “ideologies” or “philosophies”). Our linguistic capability is also our birthright: there’s nothing we need to do attain it.

Those attempts, being partly products of our decisions in response to our social and physical environments, may capture the birthright worldview accurately and flesh it out fruitfully. Or, those attempts may distort it and weaken its logical “pull.” Some writers have helped me think this through this problem. One of them is David K. Naugle, Chair of Dallas Baptist University’s Philosophy Department. He bears no responsibility for my imperfect grasp of his work.

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Worldviews, potent and impotent: Noam Chomsky’s “lucky accident”

My work on Philosophy after Christ proceeds; today’s post expresses part of what I mean by philosophy, not only chronologically after Christ’s earthly ministry, but also “according to Christ” (κατὰΧριστόν, kata Christon) (Colossians 2:8).

We all take many things for granted. If, however, we would honor our mental obligations, we ought not to take things for granted, but rather examine their grounds. That is, whoever aspires to pursue wisdom or “philosophize” (which pursuit the linguistic analysis called “philosophical” ought to subserve) should not take taking-for-granted for granted. We ought to ground that habit.

We can do that by examining our worldview to see whether it can bear the weight we put on it. The German for “worldview” is Weltanschauung, a calque of the Greek kosmotheoria. A worldview is a network of first truths that constitute our pretheoretical propensity to see (theoria) the world (kosmos), which includes God, mankind, and nature.[1]

Our worldview-forming capacity is innate. It is a heuristic for making sense of the world, including our sense-making. The Christian claims that the kosmotheoria on display in the Bible alone fills that schema concretely and successfully. It’s our birthright, which except by God’s grace we incline to trade for a pot of message. The history of philosophy is the story of the attempt to put something else in place of God’s Word, the chronicle of the many ways human beings can devalue their inheritance.

The renown linguist and cognitive scientist, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) provides a glaring example of this devaluation. He matter-of-factly consigns science, his intellectual milieu for seven decades, to a meaningless void:

[A] partial congruence [Chomsky writes] between the truth about the world and what the human science-forming capacity produces at a given moment yields science. Notice that it is just blind luck if the human science-forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world.[2]

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Reflections on Ernst Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer

Over the years I have collected several short essays on the great morphologist of the human spirit, Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874—April 13, 1945) by very different thinkers whom I also admire and posted them on my other site. Here I provide links to them and excerpts from them, in the hope that they will stimulate interest in Cassirer and the problems he wrestled with.[1]

In his review of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man, Brand Blanshard sounds a note of disappointment:

It is hard not to think, as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an “essay on man” as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on—what? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is no end, or harmony of ends, toward which all these activities are moving. But then, on Cassirer’s own showing, no philosophy of man would seem to be practicable; there would only be a theory of art, a theory of religion, and so on. This is in fact what he gives us. And an admirable gift it is, for which I, at least, am thankful. Only it is not what he sets out to give, nor all that the reader hoped to gain.

William Schultz, in his Cassirer and Langer on Myth, commented directly on Blanshard’s assessment:

Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must ‘converge’ on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct, for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer’s claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms]. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer’s work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does.

The other subject of Schultz’s study, Susanne Langer (1895-1985), the German-American philosopher whose thought was shaped to a large degree by her early absorption of Cassirer’s writings in the original as they were published, contributed an essay his theory of language and myth to the Library of Living Philosophers volume dedicated to him.

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