Answer to Question #232907 in Philosophy for Lerato

Question

What is the nature and characteristics of worldview

Answer 1

On the Nature and Significance of the Concept Worldview

Synthesis of Olthuis' Thesis

 - Olthuis defines worldviews as the way that individuals

answer some of the most basic and most important questions about life and the world. He

presents three aspects of the anatomy of worldviews: source, structure and function. He claims

that the model of how worldviews are formed must be integrated and multi-dimensional in order

to be comprehensive and flexible enough to allow for the existence of such the vast amount of

worldviews many of which have competing claims and are outright contradictory. Worldviews

themselves also need to be multi-dimensional so they can interface with the persons basic beliefs,

 personal experiences as well as any other societal influences that are integral to the person's

reality. Finally, Olthuis looks at how the individual and their worldview travel down the road of

life together as they help to shape and form each other and their world.

Who am I? Where am I and where am I going? Is there a god? What are good and evil?

What's it all about? What am I to do? How can I live and die happily? Answering these basic

questions about life results in “comprehensive and unified systems of thought” that may or may

not function on an individual's conscious level. There are several sources that worldviews spring

from, primarily faith, but also from areas of understanding, some of which have arisen recently:

 psychology, socio-economics, philosophy, ethics and biophysics. Philosophers have supported

the concept that once formed, these systems of thought can spawn ideas that then lead to action

and therefore become the prime movers of the historical process. Other philosophers, such as

Marx, have not been in agreement and have tried to put the cart before the horse in claiming that

actions lead to ideas. The question can degenerate into the classical question of which came first,

the chicken or the egg, but I think that it is safe to say that ideas came first, since God had to have

an Idea in Mind before He could speak the Universe into existence, and thus started the chain

reaction down to today, that is of ideas leading to actions and actions inspiring more ideas, etc.,

 

ad nausiam.Worldviews are frameworks through which a person views the world as well as their calling

and future in it. Although held by individuals, these frameworks can pull people together and

create community while also helping define the differences that separate communities. Olthuis

holds that for individuals and communities, worldviews can be both descriptive and normative.

Worldviews become a measuring rod, a mental exemplar or model of reality, by which one is able

to state that this is the way things are and this is the way things should be. He holds this is why

faith is the primary source for the formation of worldviews, even if it is not the only source.

Olthuis not only sees any such worldview as having the dual focus of showing how the

world is and how it ought to be, but he also sees in it a dual function in that it receives

assumptions from faith by which it takes its initial shape, but then he ascribes to that worldview

the ability to project its resulting mental model of cosmic order onto the experiences of the

individual holding it. Therefore, as life experiences bump up against and no not match up with a

worldview, they can help to modify it as well as the faith that helped to form it. A healthy

worldview needs to be a dynamic, living and ever changing system of thought that is subject to an

endless cycle of formation, deformation and transformation. If the individual stubbornly holds

onto their worldview, which they have canonized, this can cause any of a myriad of schisms and

 problems. First of all illusions can arise as the worldview causes the individual to be divorced

from reality in order to protect the person from having to face painful truths. According to Freud

this is an unhealthy situation in which the person needs to be calmly and securely allowed to face

these truths and thereby dissolve the illusions. The individual can also become schizophrenic,

that is their actions might no longer reflect their system of beliefs and therefore stop functioning

as a well integrated person. Olthuis also claims that worldviews can degenerate into ideologies

that are nothing more than blinders that keep people from seeing reality and allowing them to buy

 into an unhealthy worldview or else hiding ulterior motives from those outside the ideology. Any

of these situations can create potentially dangerous situations in which eventually the worldview

will come crashing into some reality at full speed. Olthuis shows his colors, flying the flags of

relativism and subjectivity, thereby making the above claim purely utilitarian as well as the only

standard that Olthuis appears to countenance: how well does the worldview seem to be

functioning for the person holding it? According to Olthuis, worldviews are a type of interface through which people understand,

relate to and interact with the world. They are a two-way bridge of information and

transformative power that can change the person, the world and even itself. Just as any electronic peripheral appliance, such as a printer or webcam, needs a proper interface to communicate with its computer and function in harmony with that computer, people need healthy worldviews in order to properly understand, relate to and function in the world at large.