Worldview Diagrams

Simplified explanations of commonly held worldviews.
(a work in progress)

PART 1: The Infinite Intricacies of Being

This worldview is often associated with mysticism and lies at the heart of all the major religions. It is also, as far as I can understand him, an approximation of Heidegger’s view.

There is something. And that something, is everything; it’s infinite, unlimited; it’s everything that already is in the whole universe throughout time; it’s everything that man can think of and will think of and has thought of since the beginning of time and forever. It’s everything. You can call this everything God.

The experience of the intricacies of life is part of that Everything. So man and trees and rocks are all facets of this one unified thing, and we’re all living out the world in our own particular ways as part of the greatness that is God. Even thoughts in our heads are expressions of this everything. They stem from it.

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.
- from “Each Note”, Rumi

It seems to me that for people who pursue this view, the true recognition and heartfelt acceptance of this oneness with everything is the moral purpose to our life. Openness, compassion and forgiveness, a general ‘yes’ness is highly valued because ultimately any barrier or separation or ‘no’ doesn’t really exist.

“Schopenhauer claimed that a person who unconditionally affirms life would do so even if everything that has happened were to happen again repeatedly. . .According to Nietzsche, it would require a sincere Amor Fati (Love of Fate), not simply to endure, but to wish for the eternal recurrence of all events exactly as they occurred—all of the pain and joy, the embarrassment and glory. Nietzsche calls the idea “horrifying and paralyzing”, and he also characterises the burden of this idea as the “heaviest weight” imaginable (das schwerste Gewicht). The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. ” -Wikipedia

Man is seen as a limited version of what truly is, but as containing the capability of transcending himself. For example, science tells us that man can only see a tiny portion of the entire spectrum of light. We refer to this tiny portion as “All the colors of the rainbow.” What seems to us infinite variation is still only a small fraction of what really is. Now think about the “entire spectrum of light” as it is currently defined by physics as being another tiny portion of a much larger phenomena and you’ll see what I mean.

This view is also what is being indicated when, for instance, Native Americans say that man cannot own the Earth. For them, man belongs to the Earth and is part of nature and everything. Everythingness comes “before” man, and whatever man creates or thinks up or describes could only come “after” that.

Heidegger also speaks along these lines. He says that any system of knowledge or framework that man creates for understanding the way things are presupposes this more fundamental understanding of things. He believes that we over-value thinking and conceptualizing; that thinking can only exist within this larger all-inclusive being. And that when you consider a rational articulation of the way things are as the Truth you are forgetting all the other facets of life that allow you to consider in the first place.

Some would argue that this ‘way that things are’ includes all the other ways of looking at the world. And therefore that it must be the ultimate or true way. Nevertheless, here are some more:

PART 2: SCIENCE

The scientific worldview is very common right now. Many people in America seem to hold this view without even knowing it. At the scientific worldview’s core is the subject/object distinction. The idea is that there is something that already exists independently of ourselves (the object) and then there is man who has an internal interpretation of it (the subject). So I am a man and that is a tree. And in some ways we’re the same, in that we’re both made up of the same smallest things like atoms and molecules. BUT we’re also different, because I am something that thinks and has mental stuff and the tree doesn’t. The line between my mental stuff and my tree-similar physical stuff is the subject/object distinction. Now some people will even go a step further and say that the mental stuff in my head is also just physical reactions in my brain that seem to me to be thinking. “Well, really,we’re just protons and quarks bumping around together.” But, unless they’re strict determinists, and at every moment they act as if they have absolutely no control over what they’re doing, then for them, the line between the Will and the brain is where the subject/object distinction lies

For a long time, people have argued about how to bridge the gap between the subject and the object. Some call it the mind/body connection. And many philosophers have attempted to explain how these two things relate to each other. They wanted to know how things in the real world made their way into man’s subjective world, and then how man could tell if he was ever right. This is sometimes known as the quest for Truth.

So scientists agree that certain things are true before they even get started. When an assertion is made about the world, it has to be demonstrable to everyone else, using either logical or empirical proofs. A scientists experiences something (sees it in an experiment, notices it in the world, feels it internally) then he or she builds a bridge using logic to an idea. And when pretty much everyone agrees on it, it is fact. So if I have a different conclusion, and I can show it to work logically or demonstrate it, we’ve got a problem. And I’ve got some convincing to do.

Most scientists are very open to the idea that knowledge is progressive; that what we think we know now, probably isn’t actually right because some guy like Einstein will eventually come along and offer a whole new way of looking at things that trumps the current way. Still many people make the mistake of thinking that the way scientists explain the world is actually the way the world is.

Here’s an example of the scientific worldview encountering the first, more inclusive worldview:

“The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour. . .caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible – and I am afraid the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of characterization – nothing remains but to fallback on the ideational content which is most readily associated with the feeling. If I have understood my friend rightly, he means the same thing by it as the consolation offered by an original and somewhat eccentric dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death. ‘We cannot fall out of this world.’ That is to say, it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole. I may remark that to me this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception, which is not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any other act of thought of equal range. From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling. But this gives me no right to deny that it does in fact occur in other people. The only question is whether it ought to be regarded as fons et origo of the whole need for religion” – Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

PART 3: Subjectivism: The World of Language

So if there is no world out there that we can figure out, then why does it seems like there is?

Some people come to the conclusion that the language we use, the medium through which we communicate with each other determines how we experience the world. This perspective takes the subject/object distinction and discards the object. So there is nothing outside ourselves. Life is the way human beings perceive themselves right now.

This isn’t the whole “we could be a brain in a vat” explanation, where each one of us is trapped inside their own subjective experience, dreaming up everything in the world, including other people. Because that’s solipsism and no one really believes that. That’s just a philosophical optical illusion.