Branson reading on Worldview

Branson provides us with a handful of concepts and terms to help us first recognize and then to navigate worldview differences. A worldview is that web of beliefs usually residing in the subconscious background that shapes how cultures and individuals see the nature, super-nature, human beings and time—it is something every culture has and each individual has, and in our society many worldviews coexist side by side. Branson introduces the concepts of lifeworld and world concepts from Habermas. A lifeworld is fairly similar to a worldview, something that is preconscious and usually not recognized by the people living in it. World concepts help to “problematize” the lifeworld, slowly bringing it into view. These world concepts fit into three different worlds, the objective world, subjective world, and the social (ethical) world. To achieve communicative competence, says Habermas, one must be able to address each of these worlds with integrity.

The most distinct interaction between radically different worldviews that I can recall was in my undergraduate Metaphysics class at Calvin College. One of my fellow students was from Indonesia, visiting on a one-year program the philosophy department ran for Asian students. In class he brought up cases of supernatural events, demon possession, hexes and so on that he very strongly believed he saw in the world. He said that he knew someone who had been turned into a pig by a witch-doctor, and also recounted a time of spiritual warfare (in the most literal sense) at the seminary where he taught back in Indonesia. “I could see the demons around our building, like a siege. We had to stop everything for a week to fast and pray.” Our professor was a materialist, but very much intrigued by these accounts and respectful of the students worldview, however neither he nor most of the rest of us students could really come to believe that such things happened. There are no categories for such events in our western, scientific worldview, but most of us had no doubt that our friend really did see these things.

This example only addresses the difference between worldviews, and doesn’t shed much light on navigating those differences, which is what Habermas and Branson want to encourage. In my Metaphysics class, we could set aside some of the urgency that such differences create and simply listen to the different accounts. At the end of the day we didn’t have to agree on some collective course of action. But imagine that the situation was a church meeting, where a significant portion of the congregation was Indonesian (or some culture with a similar worldview) and another significant portion was more scientific/western in their worldview. The Indonesians feel there is some form of demonic oppression and the church needs to fast and pray, but the westerners are completely baffled because they do not see or sense anything. In such a case it would be helpful to keep the three worlds of Habermas in mind, the objective, subjective and social. Assuming we are all receiving the same raw data, we might begin to address the issues of the objective world by seeking to articulate more clearly what we see and how we see it. This will be very difficult, because both the eastern and western groups will tend insist “don’t you just see/not see it?” But perhaps there are certain connections that are being made between different events and objects. If we can identify these we can begin to make sense of each other. We would also need to turn to scripture, to remind the westerners that most of the bible was written by people who had a worldview perhaps more similar to that of the Indonesians than the westerners; there are demons and witches in the biblical text. Finally, it would be helpful to have each group articulate their personal (subjective) concerns. The westerners may well be concerned that once you admit a demon in one place people will be “seeing” demons everywhere. But the Indonesians may be deeply concerned about ignoring the demonic because they have known people who were possessed by demons—they know the price of ignoring the warning signs. Such a discussion would be difficult, but might help this group begin to understand each other better, perhaps even see a little of the world through the lens of the other.