A Symposium on Worldview
To address Wolfe’s critique of “worldview,” the best starting point is to go back to the source and distinguish the term as it was originally used. Anyone who works in philosophy understands the problem of Kant versus the Kantians or Marx versus the Marxists, and this should be sorted out before proceeding further. Wilhelm Dilthey is one of the philosophers to coin weltanschauung or what in English is usually translated worldview. He derived the concept as an attempt to address the late 19th-century conflict of philosophical systems that he feared promoted general skepticism. The growing historical record of different societies and perspectives undermines the claims to a single natural law by revealing the extent to which past natural law theorists attempted to absolutize the contingent cultural characteristics of their own time and place.
Worldview philosophy grounds itself on the realization that people do not think in terms of abstracts and theoretics except in the exceptional case when attention is drawn away from everyday life, but our minds are dominated by in-the-moment intentions. The aggregate of life experiences forms a general disposition toward life called worldview. Worldview is structured as a mental model of existence, a microcosm, which assigns meaning to raw perceptions. Via the model, human beings comprehend the vast quantity of data around them, formulate goals, strategize behavior, and bring experience together under a comprehensive life plan.
Worldviews are simultaneously the product of experience and formative of experience. They are passively absorbed through social interaction and altered by experiences that strongly contradict pre-existing expectations. Yet once absorbed, they gently conform experience to a set of mental categories, assimilating perceptions to regularized expectations. The child’s ubiquitous question, “What’s that?” becomes the everyday norm taken for granted by the adult.
Worldview philosophy seeks to recenter religion on the kinds of experiences it engenders. Dilthey describes the source of a religious worldview as feelings dealing with the “invisible order” of existence, including the nature of death. He finds three worldview types in religion, each grounded on a master symbol to which orders experiences. Orthodoxy points to a higher truth, mysticism seeks reality inside oneself, and naturalism is a will-to-power destroying any truth that the individual can’t independently confirm.
The battle of worldviews is fundamentally a battle over historical consciousness. Each system is grounded in its development over time out of the life needs of its members in a generational project of establishing a metanarrative of meaning for the world. This metanarrative explains the origin, meaning, and goal of society as a whole. For this reason, he defines religion as an intramundane flow that adapts to the changing situation of humanity and is united across time only by the ambiguously worded geist.
The argument against the Naturalist worldview, from the beginning of philosophy, has been the fact that naturalism reduces Man to a mere animal. Dilthey cites the Apostle Paul as a good example of anti-naturalist apologetics. Naturalism takes the fact that attention is dominated by bodily acts to reduce persons to bodies. All human experience is explained in terms of mechanics and biological function, with the primary aim of debunking religious arguments. It suffers from an internal split between rationalists, who claim that thought alone outstrips nature, and sensualists, who deny this.
The emphasis of anti-naturalist apologetics should be the way that naturalism fails to satisfy the conditions of human life and contradicts the experiences of ordinary people. The accidental failure of religion to come to terms with the legitimate demands of secular life, including poetry, science, and philosophy, created a temporary presumption in favor of naturalism in the Enlightenment. Only Protestantism, he argued, returned to the source of Christ as an emergent freedom in this world, permitting individual experience with God. The final authority for faith shifted from the Hierarchy and the Bible to an experience of inner light. There is no universal religion in this shift to mysticism, he argues, but a plethora of ways to be oriented toward the Divine relative to one’s worldview. The result is a split in historical Protestantism between two worldviews, the orthodox and the mystic. The former is grounded on the Who of the religious experience, the latter on the What of the experience itself. Resolving this problem involves the human sciences, especially philosophy and epistemology. Interestingly, Dilthey agrees with Wolfe that if worldview philosophy is abandoned to theologians, it will fail because theology abandons all things human to Naturalism.
While there are plenty of theological arguments against Dilthey’s account of religion and worldviews, this paper will bracket those to address the issue of worldview itself. To what extent is worldview a relevant methodology in the social sciences? Is Wolfe right that the concept permits a reduction of complicated ideas to simplistic “presuppositions”?
In Catholic philosopher Max Scheler’s monumental text, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values, the notion of worldview plays a major role in Scheler’s attempt to understand why people believe what they do. It directly addresses Dilthey on several occasions and levels a number of major critiques of the concept. Scheler uses the term ethos as a substitution for worldview to differentiate the way that he understands the process by which humans build and utilize belief systems from Dilthey and his successors.
The most fundamental error in worldview theory is the way it mistakes ad hoc arrangements of contingent beliefs for an intellectualized comprehensive belief system. Dilthey’s warning that worldview primarily manifests in practice, not intellect, is insufficient to address this problem. Worldview implies a consistency to beliefs and attitudes that isn’t justified by the way people live in the attitude of everydayness or ordinary, non-contemplative life. In our everydayness, values are taken as mere signs performing a function that satisfies a practical need or interest. Our value judgments are not directed toward a code or system of beliefs but to the in-the-moment interactions of habit and desire.
As John Duns Scotus teaches, no concept forms naturally in the intellect except that which motivates the intellect. Beliefs accrue as people come across new desires and circumstances and are not a product of necessary or logical deduction. The internal consistency of those desires never rises to the level of logic until a need arises to logically defend one’s actions; they are simply assumed to be consistent with one’s previous actions. In Edmund Husserl’s language, every ethical judging is a judging-of and a judging-for because intentionality belongs primordially to willing and perception and only to reasoning post hoc. Scheler reiterates this by saying that value judgments as first felt and only later intellectualized and systematized, if ever.
This is why Scheler argues that scientific ethical arguments have no significance outside of academic debate. All decisions about values and ethics emerge out of the immediate givenness of ethos to the contingencies of everyday life. Ethos is gut instinct, and worldview principles are a false attempt to impose intellectual content on non-contemplative action. Thinkers from Aristotle to Duns Scotus all acknowledge the epistemological principle that no science of the contingent as contingent is possible. There is no absolute necessity in contingent properties, like worldviews, and so it is impossible to determine any consistency to worldviews beyond the contingent libido.
Husserl tells us that it is tempting for social scientists to objectify things that aren’t objects because pure action is nearly impossible to control. The basis of the empirical attitude is the will to power over nature through the exercise of sciences that provide leverage. The problem is that there is little to no leverage that social scientists can utilize to make quick changes to the ethos of an individual, and so worldview provides something to “grasp” in the act of scientific-technical manipulation. The pre-given life-world of the individual is inherently subjective, and communication of ethical meaning is intuitive; neither is primarily conceptual; therefore, neither is subject to conceptual manipulation. The social science of behavior is good at teaching individuals to repeat back a symbol to the instructor but has little way to ensure that the symbol becomes meaningful and integrated into lived experience. “Don’t do that” is immediately comprehensible in terms of life practices in a way that the Categorical Imperative or presuppositional arguments are not.
That dismissive attitude of worldview theorists, described by Wolfe, to resistance offered against their arguments is a psychological coping mechanism for the inability of conceptual thinkers to penetrate the life world of their interlocutors. Their arguments simply don’t matter because they never delve into the lived experience of everydayness. Dismissal of counter-evidence based on arguments about presuppositions begs the question of intentionality and sidesteps the experiential evidence for a behavior, imposing a “don’t think that” command in the place of understanding. However, the resort to this kind of rigid nomism in the face of incomprehension is a defense mechanism demonstrating that worldview theorists can’t defend their values or make them meaningful to those they seek to persuade.
Logical arguments in moral discourse are a semantic trick and are perceived rightly as such. Scheler argues that the only way to reason with someone is through an individual relationship defined by love. Love of the other is a kind of light that penetrates value distortions and reveals the true moral state of the other. Unlike psychiatry, which disregards the person and takes them as a bundle of drives, love seeks the immanent human personality and reciprocally reveals its own essence to the other. Scheler argues that it is only the appearance of Christ in mutual love, not practiced arguments, that changes a person’s fundamental beliefs.
How, then, can we understand an individual’s ethos? In Scheler’s book, The Place of Man in the Cosmos, he defined Man as the theomorphic being who becomes what he holds as his highest moral value. The more we take possession of our value structure and live in the spirit, the less opaque these representations become. The more we live in our stomachs, the more opaque they become until they are reduced to debased rationales for sensual desire and corrupt motives. Envy and ressentiment, not worldview presuppositions, lie at the bottom of modern social ethics. Opaque values are mere objectifications of lust and hatred that give the Ego permission to indulge in those behaviors. This is why Scheler argues that appeals to conscience, in fact, frequently justify evil. By replacing moral cognition with personal conscience as the source of moral judgment, the individual is absolved of the responsibility to consider their actions beyond the fleeting feeling of the moment, in what he names “[Pascal’s] désordre du coeur raised to a moral principle.” In the words of Paul Ricouer, belief systems cannot escape the human libidinal system, only obscure the roots of a belief as a rational judgment.
For this reason, the problem of understanding the relationship between a person’s beliefs and actions is not of intellectualizing a logical order of value structures but determining the degree to which a person’s ability to perceive value in the world has become corrupted by Man’s fallen nature. Dilthey frequently cites William James, and shares in his error of seeing bad value judgments as empty voids awaiting good ones rather than substantive beliefs with their own grip on the soul. Both fall victim to the error of assuming that inner perception is unbiased. In fact, the heart, deceitful above all things, is the organ most likely to deceive about the contents of its perception. Scheler describes Blaise Pascal’s ordre du couer as an a priori ordering of feeling and valuing, an ordo amoris, accessing objective values of existence beyond rational calculation. Dilthey and James are wrong to see feeling as chaos; Pascal tells us that the heart does have a raison of its own.
Value distortions are not an authentic value system but an emotional reaction against an authentic system. Value inversion turns a positive value into a negative value. A very common form of value inversion that Scheler discusses is the apostate type, whose anti-faith is an excuse for spite against his old faith. In Stephen Bullivant’s book Nonverts, he discusses the nature of people who apostatized from their Christian faith and adopted an identity that inverts their previous faith. This is not a change in worldview or even an authentic expression of new value judgments. Their professed beliefs are simply the exact same beliefs they held prior to apostasy, with the affective signifier reversed. The total moral heteronomy of nonverts is the source of their extremism and hatred, Bullivant argues, because they remain trapped within Christian values in a degenerate mode.
Another example of a distortion is a value deception, which pathologizes a value by inverting the affective valence of a value judgment. Value deceptions replace a positive valuation of a good with a negative valuation of anything that is not that good. An excellent example is how pseudo-Christian hatred of the rich which corrupts the love for the poor. Christ’s love for the poor implies no value judgment against the wealthy-as-wealthy. It only negatively values abuse of the poor. Pseudo-Christian hatred of the rich is described by Scheler as a ressentiment and a value deception that displaces and destroys Christian caritas. Value-deception actively denigrates expressions of vital goods like beauty, virtue, honor, and excellence, falsely branding these as un-Christian, yet fails in practice to show a preference for the higher goods by which they justify their beliefs. Christian cosmopolitanism is the most common expression of this kind of distortion, a pretense to care for the distant rationalizing an actualized hatred of the near.
A final example of a value distortion is a general dampening of life values. Christian asceticism, Scheler argues, is a product of an overflowing abundance of spiritual goods that becomes heedless of life in its great joy. There is no denigration of life in Christianity but a recognition that the wonder and bliss of spiritual unity with Christ has the power to captivate the whole of one’s personality. To the spiritually dumb, or worse, spiritually self-mutilated, there is a void in the place of Christian bliss; to fill this void, they replace true religion with a moralistic cargo cult. Rather than seeking after spiritual blessedness, this moralism suppresses the vital values of this life. The result is self-mutilation and erosion of the capacity to experience vital goodness. Loss of vital sensitivity has the side-effect of dampening the sensitivity to life disvalues: disgust, shame, and aversion. What is taken for an alternative worldview or belief in tolerance is frequently merely insensitivity to higher value strata.
Worldview theories fail to address the role of pneumological brokenness and emotional disorder at the root of many variations in belief in the modern world. Value distortions don’t emerge out of different presuppositions or prior assumptions but frequently are a result of suppressed self-hatred; the act of inversion and the drive toward self-destruction point in their negation to the same fundamental value structure of the healthy person. These emotional copes at the root of value deceptions are not touched by argumentation, nor will argumentation shift a person whose professed beliefs rationalize immorality or identity-based antagonisms. Men bury their interests in value statements. It is exactly the autonomy of moral judgment that makes it tempting to smuggle self-interest into moral praise and blame. Values are frequently held because of the benefits they accrue and the ability to manipulate others. Moral disorders must be recognized as pathologies and not different opinions; freedom of conscience has had the side effect of disguising wickedness as opinion. Eric Voegelin, whose early work was inspired by Scheler, makes the argument that Scheler’s moral pathology, the amour de soi, will to power, and libido dominandi are basically equivalent concepts. A moral philosophy that takes fallenness seriously cannot avoid this topic.
To give a final thought in response to Wolfe’s comments, the notion of worldview has become harmful beyond its mere flaws because it is, as Husserl argued, too tempting to use as a hammer and a pry bar. It is an error, Scheler tells us, to believe that because the Church is capable of encompassing humanity, there must be only one Christian ethos. Just as Duns Scotus demonstrates that nature cannot exist unless manifested in an individual instance, so too the Church has no ethos except in its manifestation within a given life-community. A Church that attempts to expunge particularity and manifest an impossible universalist worldview will drown in society’s dominant ethos, be absorbed by its cultural consensus, and ultimately degenerate into a figment of herd-life mass culture. The collective ethos of a group is simply a generalization of the state of the majority of members, a rough pattern in feeling and moral preference within a social context, not an object to be scientifically manipulated. Theologians have shown themselves to be incapable of distinguishing between inequivalent value judgments and alternative articulations of value judgments. They simply look for the leverage point from which they can push.
To paraphrase Voegelin, the contingency of ethical symbols and representations of Christ in society does not imply that the experience of Christ is also contingent. The fundamental claim of the Christian faith is that Christ lives, not as a metaphor or a feeling about invisible order, but as the living Lord. Postmodern theologians attempt to use contingency of representations to deny the primacy and objectivity of the Christ experience, while conservatives have blindly reacted by denying all contingency in the name of an imaginary Christian uniculture that looks far too much like 20th Century imperial cosmopolitanism. Both misuse worldview in their desire for control of the ways people express Christian values. Best to let the idea die.
