Read Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept Online
Authors: James W. Sire
Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (23 page)
This essay done as a class assignment illustrates a number of elements of good worldview analysis. Ms. Lu captures the personal and emotional tone of her understanding of her own worldview. She has seen it in light of several alternatives, and she has sensed the significance it has for her own life in a pluralistic world. Would we all could do as well as she!
Analysis of the Worldviews of Others
Worldview analysis is also helpful for our understanding of the thought of other individuals. In fact, in listening to Lu, we have begun to do so with her. If we were to go further, we might read other things she has written, discover something about how she spends her time and generally get to know her better. If we could talk with her, we could ask if she still thinks this essay represents her views. Where has she changed? What has become more settled for her? Where is she most puzzled?
If we wish to understand the movements afoot—past and present—in our culture, one of the best ways is to read the works of those whose thoughts, words and actions have influenced and are influencing our world. We can, of course, rely on the analysis of others, reading, as it were, essays on the essayists. Doing this is often helpful in discovering who is worth reading directly. Intellectual critics like Paul Johnson in
Intellectuals
or Bryan Magee in
Men of Ideas
and
Confessions of a Philosopher
or Jacques Barzun in
From Dawn to Decadence
can point one in the right direction.
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Following up on the footnotes to
The Universe Next Door
can be helpful as well, as can the suggestions for reading in the appendix of my
How to Read Slowly
.
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One will never run out of books worth reading.
A case in point: Václav Havel.
Worldview analysis of people and their books can be quite straightforward. One simply reads with the seven worldview questions present, if not consciously, at least at ready recall. The most important question is always, What does the author say or imply about the really real? Begin to read, for example, the fascinating plays, essays, speeches and letters of former Czech president Václav Havel.
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It will not be long before Havel’s answers to key worldview questions come to the fore. Consider a brief paragraph from his address to the joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives in early 1990, just after taking office.
The only genuine backbone of all our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.
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Two worldview issues are directly addressed, the first being most important. Havel’s phrase “order of Being” is, of course, his name for the “really real.” And for him, as for Christianity, Islam and traditional Judaism, the “really real” is the foundation for ethics.
What other characteristics does Havel attribute to “the order of Being”? A reading of Havel’s published letters to his wife, written when he was in prison as a political dissident in Czechoslovakia, answers the question.
Being . . . is not, therefore, simply a kind of nail on which everything hangs, but is itself the absoluteness of all “hanging”; it is the essence of the existence of everything that exists; it is what joins everything that exists together, its order and its memory, its source, its will and its aim, what holds it “together,” as it were, and makes it participatory in its unity, its “uniqueness” and its meaningfulness.
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Havel here is alluding to some complex ideas one finds in Heidegger. He is more clear when he writes about his encounter with the order of Being on a tram late at night. He reflects on why he feels that he must put a crown in the slot even though it is late at night and no conductor is there to see him. A voice, he says, seems to address him, calling him to pay the fare:
Who, then, is in fact conversing with me? Obviously someone I hold in higher regard than the transport commission, than my best friends (this would come out when the voice would take issue with their opinions), and higher in some regards than myself, that is, myself as subject of my existence-in-the-world and the carrier of my “existential” interests (one of which is the rather natural effort to save a crown). Someone who “knows everything” (and is therefore omniscient), is everywhere (and therefore omnipresent) and remembers everything; someone who, though infinitely understanding, is entirely incorruptible; who is for me, the highest and utterly unequivocal authority in all moral questions and who is thus Law itself; someone eternal, who through himself makes me eternal as well, so that I cannot imagine the arrival of a moment when everything will come to an end, thus terminating my dependence on him as well; someone to whom I relate entirely and for whom, ultimately, I would do everything. At the same time, this “someone” addresses me directly and personally (not merely as an anonymous public passenger, as the transport commission does).
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These reflections are close, if not identical, to a fully theistic conception of God. Surely some Being that is omniscient, omnipresent and good, and who addresses you directly and personally, must himself (
itself
just doesn’t fit these criteria) be personal.
Havel too sees this. And yet he draws back from the conclusion:
But who is it? God? There are many subtle reasons why I’m reluctant to use that word; one factor here is a certain sense of shame (I don’t know exactly for what, why and before whom), but the main thing, I suppose, is a fear that with this all too specific designation (or rather assertion) that “God is,” I would be projecting an experience that is entirely personal and vague (never mind how profound and urgent it may be), too single-mindedly “outward,” onto that problem-fraught screen called “objective reality,” and thus I would go too far beyond it.
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It is clear, then, that Havel’s worldview is not so theistic as one might first have thought. Though he acknowledges the theistic-like way that Being itself appears to him, he doubts—perhaps rejects—the objectivity of these phenomena that he subjectively perceives. Havel has much more to say about his notion of “the really real,” the nature of the external universe, human beings, epistemology, ethics and the meaning of history. But this is sufficient to illustrate the kind of evidence one can often find for identifying another person’s worldview.
The exercise need not be just intellectual curiosity on our part. Knowing a person’s general take on life helps us understand the reasons behind what people do and how they deal with specific practical issues. And that helps us relate to them in daily life.
A second case: Matsuo Bashō
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Discovering Havel’s worldview is relatively straightforward because he talks about his fundamental commitments. What about writers who do not readily do so? This task can be illustrated by the analysis of a literary work from outside our Western world. Let us look at a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō, a late seventeenth-century poet.
This is a deceptively simple poem, often learned and imitated by children in America as well as Japan. It is deceptive because from our Western worldview it appears to be a simple picture. It seems to carry no profound meaning at all. We may just as well be looking at a brief video clip. The scene is spare; the action is quickly over. What else is there?
Worldview analysis, however, encourages us not just to look at what first appears but to ask what mindset lies behind the picture. If it is a Western mindset, then indeed we have just what we first noticed: an image of a frog jumping into an old pond with an accompanying plop. But if we examine the worldview background of Bashō himself, we will find something very different. Bashō was a Zen Buddhist priest with a Zen mind. We will not be able to see what his haiku is doing until we examine his worldview.
The Zen mind is a Zen moment, a concentration of attention on a chronologically dimensionless present. It is the timeless intersection between past and future. It is and is not, neither one nor the other, yet both at once. Try thinking of the present in any other way. There is consciousness; yet this consciousness is always in motion. What one is conscious of at one instant is gone when one thinks about what it is.
Now all of this seems simply descriptive of consciousness. It is always conscious of something, but what it is conscious of is constantly changing. Consciousness itself is not a consciousness of itself; it is always of the other, and the other changes. What Zen does is exalt this insight into a worldview. Zen proclaims that because consciousness is always conscious of change and never of permanence, change is all that is permanent; in other words, nothing is permanent. This is raised to a philosophic principle. The only permanent “thing” is not a “thing” at all. It is an absence of “thingishness.” It is the Void.
Here we meet the crucial claim in Zen: human beings are capable of grasping all the reality there is. Nothing could be more opposite to the Christian worldview than that. Christians hold that there is much more to reality than can be directly perceived by our consciousness or dreamt of in Zen philosophy. God is there as the Creator of both our consciousness and the world of which it is conscious—and only partially conscious of at best.
What Bashō does in a multitude of his haiku poems is to create in us the realization of the nature of what he takes to be the “really real.” How does he do this? Read it again:
An ancient pond
A frog leaps in
The sound of water
Like many of Bashō’s haikus, this one is pure image—image of sight and sound. The sight: an ancient pond and a frog leaping in. The sound: the sound of water. Not much. Indeed, but enough to encompass the whole of reality as Zen views it.
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The “ancient pond” is first of all a pond, not a symbol of anything. But it is ancient; it’s been around for a long time; it carries the past in its present. The frog is first of all a frog, again not a symbol of anything; it is in the present. So both the frog and the pond together are in the present. The frog leaping is first of all a frog leaping, not a symbol of anything; the present moves. Then “the sound of water” is first of all the sound water makes when a frog leaps in—not a “plop” or a “bloop,” though that is the way it is sometimes translated. In the Japanese the phrase is not onomatopoetic; it is just a phrase like “the sound of water.” And that’s important, for “the sound of water” makes no waterlike sound. The physical sound of the frog entering the water is not the sound of the words “the sound of water.” The sound of the intersection of past and present is no sound, for sound takes time, vibrations are matter in motion. The interface between past and present is not itself a part of matter in motion.
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By reading this poem, revisioning its setting and entering into its spirit, we can be teased out of thought. Our aesthetic experience then becomes a glimpse into what I take to be a major part of the experience of satori. So pause again: imbibe, read and reread this haiku. I am not suggesting this because I want to promote a totally Zen view of reality, but because there is an element of truth in it. Like a Zen Buddhist, we live in the present. Often we miss it. Let’s allow ourselves a doorway into recognizing its subtle reality.
Here are several more haikus I have found as doorways into an appreciation of the present. I enjoy Bashō’s haikus because they alert me not to the Void but to God’s marvelous creation and the glories inherent in each moment. After all, there would be no conscious present if God had not created the world to be what it is and we to be what we are. If there are ancient ponds and frogs leaping, if there are crows on branches, if there are seasons, if there are gulls that cry out, then these haiku can help us see them in their presentness to us.
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On the withered branch
A crow has alighted—
Nightfall in autumn.
The sea darkens,
The cries of the sea gulls
Are faintly white.
Such stillness—
The cries of the cicadas
Sink into the rocks.
Still, if we are to be responsible in the way we do our worldview analysis, we must also see these haiku as presentations of Zen. As such they give us a glimpse into the mindset of many other people, not just from Japan but from everywhere that Zen Buddhism has influenced people’s minds and lives.
Cultural Analysis
When we turn to worldview analysis as cultural analysis, we turn from the narrow specificity of one person’s worldview to the broad, much vaguer worldviews that characterize large numbers of people across considerable time and space. As noted above, worldviews have a public as well as a private character. The intent of
The Universe Next Door
has been to isolate the major worldviews that have a cultural embodiment primarily in Europe and the Americas. I have isolated seven such worldviews: Christian theism, deism, naturalism, nihilism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, the New Age and the most recent worldview shift, postmodernism. I have described these in broad strokes and do not need to do that again here.
But I do want to emphasize that these broad strokes both miss the finer points of our individual worldviews and somewhat misrepresent any one person’s worldview. Even the way I have described the Christian worldview may constitute only my version of that worldview. In fact, there are times when I wonder if my description really fits me, for any one person’s worldview is somewhat fluid. It is constantly under the pressure of being
worked
. We often do not live up to our so-called best lights. What we say we believe about prayer does not always represent what we show we believe by how, where and when we pray. Our worldview is also under the pressure of
workability
. Sometimes what we commit ourselves to just won’t work. We then adjust our belief accordingly. Furthermore, our worldview is under the pressure of new information, new facts and new ways of looking at the facts. In short, we change our mind, usually about small matters rather than big ones, but still enough that our worldview itself may be changed at least a little even at its roots. How we understand God as good, for example, is constantly under pressure from continued study of the Bible, from input from those more learned and wise than ourselves, and also from experience. And the presence of evil is always a challenge to our grasp of “the really real.”