[Also on Substack] Recently, my philosophy sparring partner and friend, William F. Vallicella, PhD, gave me an excuse to clear up a misunderstanding to which academic philosophers are susceptible, one that systematically impedes understanding what I’m up to in Philosophy after Christ. At first, it may strike one as a “chicken-or-egg” dilemma: Which comes first? Argument? Or worldview? Is asking one’s interlocutor for his worldview a forensic dodge?
The serious thinker is self-critical [Bill writes]: his examination of life, without which his life is not worth living, is a self-examination, even unto a painful thinking against himself. . . . He is not an apologist for a ready-made worldview. He toes no party line. His watchword is ‘inquiry,’ not ‘worldview.’ He would have a worldview if he could, but he must inquire to find one.[1]
By nature, however, Bill cannot help but have a worldview, which is not a proposition or a series of propositions arranged syllogistically. A worldview is the view of God, man, and the cosmos that one brings, self-consciously or not, to a proposition. He can, if he is epistemologically self-conscious, “trade” it up or down for another. What is not available to anyone “above the age of reason,” however, is a worldview-free existence. One’s worldview can be rendered in propositions that are then criticized, modified, or reinforced, but it is not equivalent to them. It is the way one views or gazes upon the world.
It is good to recall that the German word 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. The Greek theoreō (θεωρέω) means to look at; gaze; spectate; form a picture. “Theory” comes from the noun for “spectacle” and the verb “to behold,” theaomai (θεάομαι), from which we get “theater.” A theoros is a spectator. “When all the people who had gathered to witness this spectacle (θεωρίαν, theōrian) saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away” (Luke 23:48). “He [Jesus] beholds (θεωρεῖ) a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly” (Mark 5:38).
As it pertains to the ontology of epistemology—its existence and the
conditions of our theorizing about knowledge—worldview precedes the latter: it comes first. It is “under the floorboards” of any framing of the problem of epistemology.[2] Therefore, I’m not going to argue for the primacy of worldview but rather disclose it by indulging in the guilty pleasure of self-quotation. You may have a better way of expressing my insight, but here is how I tried to do it in my book, to whose pages parenthetical numbers refer. Bill says the “watchword is [or should be] ‘inquiry.’”
I beg to differ: Continue reading “Worldview “versus” Inquiry?”
