Series:
Essay #1:
Synopsis:
Spirits
Worldview
I see the world from within a frame; the perspective that I take determines what I see and the conclusions that I make
My worldview makes sense of the world for me. Reality is a buzzing confusion so I need a worldview to frame it and make it intelligible… but now, within the restrictions of the frame, I can only see what the frame permits. The picture frame reveals some parts of the world and conceals the rest, and worse, I don't know what it's doing because the frame itself is outside my view. In this sense, a worldview is like consciousness: that by which I see the world but which remains hidden from view.
Talking about frames reminds me of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.” Take mathematics, for example. Math doesn’t verify itself, that is, I can use math to predict the trajectory of a cannonball, but my mathematical equation can’t tell me that it’s right. Instead, to find out if my equation is correct, I use my eyes to observe the cannonball’s trajectory. I use a system (sensory perception) that is entirely beyond math to verify if math is accurate.
A worldview is Gödel’s circle, and it can’t prove its own truth. I prove the truth or falsity of a worldview by going outside it, by viewing from the perspective of another worldview.
Take for example the medieval world, what we call the enchanted world. They believed in God and that angels and demons walked the Earth. To us moderns on the outside, their worldview looks like a house of cards built on a faulty assumption. From the inside, though, the assumption is taken on faith as the first premise of a logical argument. If my first premise is that God is, and spirits and meanings exist outside of me in the real world, if that’s my worldview, then I fill in the circle accordingly. What’s heaven like? Enquiring minds want to know: I want details! So I read Dante for his great vision of the circle all filled in.
Faith and assumption are the first premise of every logical argument (and every worldview), and if we laugh at Dante’s assumptions, someone will be laughing at us. To which you respond, "Slow your roll, homey: they’ll laugh at us for what assumptions?-- please be specific." Here’s one: the modern assumption that science is the only way to rock-solid truth. A hundred years ago, the logical positivists posited science as the only legitimate way of seeing truth. Their standard was the “verification principle,” which says that a statement is meaningful only if we can prove it by empirical observation. Their goal was to quiet the philosophers who, according to the positivists, were talking meaningless trash that they couldn’t prove. Then folks asked the positivists to prove their assumption, that is, what empirical evidence proves the verification principle? None. There are no sense perceptions available to me that prove that only sense perceptions prove truth, that is, a sense perception can't prove its own truth. Therefore, by its own standard, the verification principle is meaningless.
What is the verification principle? It’s an assumption and a statement of faith that science is the only legitimate way of seeing the world. In the end, the verification principle is a defective statement of truth, but a meaningful statement of faith.
The verification principle is part of our modern worldview, which worldview posits reductive materialism as foundational faith. Witness E.O Wilson from his book, Consilience:
“all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics…. that culture and hence the unique qualities of the human species will make complete sense only when linked in causal explanation to the natural sciences.”
Dr. Wilson’s faith statement is that, “however long and tortuous the sequences,” and however imaginary those sequences may be, everything reduces to particles bouncing off one another in material chains of causation. What a barren faith!
Dr. Wilson is like Lyra in Phillip Pullman’s wonderful novel, The Secret Commonwealth. In the plenitude of reality, both inhabit a worldview that restricts vision to a two-dimensional slice. Lyra learned her reductive materialism at university. When faced with anything interesting, Lyra reduced it to particles and power-relations; she would say of something that “it’s no more than…” or “it’s just…” or “it’s merely….” Lyra’s soul was embodied in a character named Pan, and Pan said to Lyra, “You’re in a world of color and you want to see it in black and white.” Lyra lived in abstract propositions, while Pan lived “in the realm of dreams and thoughts and memories.” Lyra became so insufferable that Pan, her own soul, ran away from her.
Lyra shakes off the materialist worldview after meeting the alchemist/magician Agrippa, who said, “Nothing is only itself….Everything is connected.” Lyra returns to her childhood self, where “everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked.”
The real world is happy to reveal its enchantments and spirits and meanings to anyone happy enough to look. I believe that a good mind can switch among multiple worldviews and perspectives, viewing each worldview from the perspective of the other. Living in one perspective is like sleeping all night in a room with the windows and doors shut (a fart box). Come morning, the air is really bad. I like to experiment on myself by committing to a new social milieu, then watching my belief system change over time. New doors open to light and fresh air, and sometimes I step through the door, like when I began going to church. At my best, I stand on the threshold with one foot on either side, living in two worldviews at the same time. This is who I want to become.