Editor’s note: This article is part one of a ten-part series of practical philosophy, entitled Worldview: The Essence of All Cultures.
Worldviews are similar to opinions. Just as every person has an opinion, every person has a worldview, whether they know it or not. It is the intellectual belief system or overriding general framework for virtually all personal opinions, attitudes, values, perceptions, beliefs, and ideas. Arguably the most crucial component of every individual’s worldview, the component with the greatest influence over it, is that person’s view of the “truth.” It is an implicit assertion about what constitutes reality, its nature, and its meaning.
A worldview is what and how we think about reality. What we think is important or trivial, right or wrong, meaningful or pointless, true or false. Whether we like it or not, each and every one of us has a worldview, a personal practical philosophy of life and for living. Hardly a moment goes by in our daily lives where our worldview, our personal philosophy, isn’t involved.
There are many influences that contribute to our more deliberate, or explicit, worldview as well as to our more subtle, or implicit, worldview. The most significant source for our individual philosophy and implicit worldview comes through culture. Culture, too, encompasses beliefs, ideas, values, and moral principles, even the meaning and purpose of life. Culture reaches into life’s moment-to-moment perceptions and decisions we encounter.
Given your inevitable and ubiquitous explicit and implicit use of your personal worldview in all matters, trivial and important, it would be both wise and necessary that you take the time to more deliberately examine the crucial questions and convictions that your worldview depends upon for its legitimacy and its practicality. This examination is the purpose of this article and the coming ten-part series.
Having a worldview that accurately reflects the true realities of life is, or should be, the goal of every person, most particularly from adolescence on. The goal should be not just to construct a personal worldview that affirms your current beliefs and priorities; the goal should be to build or modify your worldview on the truths of reality. Scientific truths and logical truths. Moral truths and aesthetic truths. Relational truths and societal truths. Philosophical truths, religious truths, and truths about life’s immediate and ultimate meaning and purpose.
Nowadays that personal reflection and analysis is a real challenge for most. In the modern West, we live in an era of conflict and confusion about what the most profound philosophical ideas and truths mean and what they require both practically and morally.
This conflict also involves issues of power in our many levels of culture, dominated by a strong sense of cultural conformity. That is what “political correctness” is all about. It is a form of cultural coercion intended to influence or alter your worldview.
From the family to the local community, from the immediate institutions to those on the national and international level, we have witnessed relentless debate, continual cultural clashes about dominance and difference and how and to what degree these can or should be compromised. It has affected how we distinguish public and private rights and values, truth and error, and even the essence of freedom and biological certainties.
The proof of this decades-long conflict is what the word “truth” has come to mean in common conversation and as a foundational cultural tenet. Nowadays, “truth” has become a matter of perception—individual and shared perception. Now, truth is merely personal: “my truth,” “your truth,” “our truth.” Oddly, the self-contradicting and almost universal belief is that “the truth is that there is no truth.”
Just think about the solitary truth that all truth is merely personal, merely perceptual. Think about that idea’s prevalence, its power, and its popularity in our modern world. It’s as ubiquitous as any scientific certainty or common cultural conviction.
Perhaps the only concession of the modern idea of truth are those defined by science and mathematics. But everything beyond those realms are merely matters of opinion, regardless of how widespread any such ideas may be in our culture, regardless of their practicality or their universal belief across history, nationality, and culture.
It is here that this series on worldview will examine the nature of any worldview and its relation to truth in the personal and perceptual sense, as well as its relation to the more traditional sense of objective, rational truth beyond the limits of science and mathematics.
The traditional, historical idea of universal truth across time and circumstance was not just a heritage of false and outmoded, primitive and naïve, simplistic and even sinister ideas and beliefs. It drew its power not from cultural acceptance but from its rational and logical certitude. Its power and influence flowed not from social and political support but from its requirements of analysis and criticism, from its rational, and where appropriate, scientific evidence, from its capacity to stand firmly in the face of skeptical scrutiny.
The next article will begin to make the case that a worldview must not be accepted just because it is someone’s worldview. Every assertion of truth requires rigorous and rational evidence before any credence is granted. While everyone does have an explicit and implicit worldview, that fact alone does not make it right or true.
Legitimacy of every personal worldview is not a function of personal sincerity or their strength of will. It is a function of evidence. In the absence or inconsistency of evidence, personal worldview is a mistake, erroneous and even dangerous.
Personal perception and preference must meet the demands of reason and reality. So too with anyone’s personal worldview. Next week’s article, entitled “Evidence Is Everything” will make this crucial point clear. The legitimacy of a person’s worldview is not a matter of preference or perception; in the end, it is, was, and always will be a matter of evidence.
Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash
