David Naugle serves as professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University, Dallas, Texas. He has contributed a great deal to the study and history of philosophy. His book Worldview: The History of a Concept guides the reader through a development of the idea of worldview. This review examines the first six chapters, summarizing, critiquing, and interacting with each.
Chapter 1Naugle begins in chapter 1 by tracing the development of worldview throughout protestant evangelicalism. He asserts from the outset, “Conceiving of Christianity as a worldview has been one of the most significant developments in the recent history of the church (4).” Christians have always had a grand view of how the world worked, but only in recent history have they thought in terms of a worldview. Naugle examines this development by summarizing the writings of James Orr and Abraham Kuyper.
James Orr first presented the idea of viewing Christianity as a worldview when he delivered the 1891 Kerr lectures at the Presbyterian Theological College in Edinburgh, later published as The Christian View of God and the World. In these lectures he stated that Christianity must be defended as a whole and not simply in a piece mill fashion. This defense must be centered on a solid orthodox Christology. He rightly views Christ as the creator, sustainer, and climax of history. Viewing Christianity as a worldview provided Orr with the opportunity to engage unbelievers on every level. Orr’s lectures had a great impact on many great thinkers including Abraham Kuyper.
Abraham Kuyper set forth his understanding of Christianity as a worldview when he delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton University. Kuyper specifically focuses on viewing Calvinism as a worldview in his lectures. He rejects traditional apologetics and says that they do not advance the gospel one bit. He discusses in his lectures how Calvinism can bring insight to the three big ideas everyone deals with: God, man, and the world. Where Orr focused more on viewing Christ as the center of everything, Cuyper directed his attention to establishing Calvinism as a worldview.
Naugle further develops Kuyper’s thought by focusing on one of his disciples, Herman Dooyeweerd. Two different aspects of his understanding of worldview can be seen. At first he followed in the footsteps of Kuyper, but later on he questioned the validity of Kuyper’s approach. According to Dooyeweerd one must first “expose the under lying religious condition that is determinative of all theoretical activity and cultural endeavor (26).” The condition of the human heart for Dooyeweerd is the only precondition for philosophy. The state of one’s heart will determine how he or she views the world. Dooyeweerd finally concludes that religion and philosophy differ in several ways; therefore, one’s religious convictions are not his worldview.
The chapter then concludes with a discussion of Francis A. Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s main contribution was that everyone had a worldview. Everyone had to have a worldview in order to function in the world. He asserted that the Christian worldview is the only one which will stand up to all of the questions facing the world. These four thinkers, for Naugle, shaped the protestant evangelical understanding of worldview.
Chapter 2Chapter two traces the development of Christianity as a worldview through Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Lawrence Cunningham explains a Catholic worldview by discussing four themes. First, he sees the world as a gift. God created the world and has given it to humans to manage and enjoy. Second, he deals with the Catholic view of sin. All of the wickedness and evil present in the world flows directly out of the original sin committed by Adam. Because of this original sin wickedness is a part of the human condition. Third, he examines the idea of Christian realism. This notion attempts to bridge the gap between the goodness of creation and the wickedness of the human heart. Fourth, he summarizes an understanding of the Christian’s experience with time. He sees God acting in special terms throughout history. History is moving towards something. In recent years these ideas have been made accessible to the broader Catholic community. People are encouraged to adopt a worldview that is distinctly Catholic.
The worldview of the Eastern Orthodox church presented in Naugle’s book centers on the theme of food. The human is seen as a hungry being and the world is set before him as the provision for his need. In Eastern Orthodoxy the simple act of eating is seen to be communion with God. Humans can reobtain their priestly position by taking the Lord’s Supper.
Chapter 3In chapter three Naugle traces the history of the word weltanschauung. Immanuel Kant coined the term in his work Critique of Judgment. Kant understood the word to be the sense perception of the world. Weltanschauung was quickly adopted by many German and other European thinkers, and its definition began to broaden.
The chapter next turns its attention to the development of the word in German and other European languages. Fichte applied the word using Kant’s original understanding; however, his younger colleague Shelling began to alter the meaning. Schelling saw weltanschauung to be the product of the unconscious intellect. The term was taken up by many German thinkers to mean many different things. It was seen to be a companion to philosophy. In the early twentieth-century the word reached its climax.
When the word reached the English speaking world it was seen as both a lone word and a copy word. In many ways it is seen to be equal with the term worldview. Weltanschauung as its own word has not received much interest from the philosophical world in recent years. Most of its development has taken place among the social-sciences. This chapter provided a brief, but helpful, summery of how the word developed throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
Chapter 4Chapter four shifts from talking about the history of a word and begins to discuss the philosophical history of worldview. This chapter focuses on the development of weltanschauung in nineteenth-century Europe by examining the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Hegel formulated the ides of the absolute spirit and alternative conceptual frameworks. According to him both individuals and nations have weltanschauungs. Every individual and nation has some understanding of the nature of the universe and how people function within this understanding. It would be interesting to hear what Hegel would say about contemporary America. Does America have a national weltanschauung that incorporates everyone? It seems that the answer to that is no. Hegel would say that the worldviews of Americans are developed through the culture in which they live.
Soren Kierkegaard not only adopted the word weltanschauung but he also began to speak of one’s lifeview. He defined lifeview as, “The duty and importance of the individual to understand himself, his premises and his conclusions, his conditionality and his freedom (74).” He focuses on lifeview because each man must answer as an individual for the existence of the world and the meaning of life. Because man must answer as an individual Kierkegaard does not want people to rely on culture or religion to tell him the answer to life’s biggest questions.
Wilhelm Dilthey wanted to develop a weltanschauung for the human sciences. For him a worldview served to answer the question of life. He challenged people to try and understand life and what their role should be in it. Every worldview must be grounded in life itself. It seems that Dilthey would also say that no worldview is absolute and should not stand above the others. He however, does say that many things in life are common from person to person. For this reason people’s worldviews will have much in common.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw the breakdown of Christianity and the death of God and turned to naturalism. He presents two foci for understanding the world, nature and the ongoing historical process. He says that people are products of, subordinate to, and dependent upon the worldview of their culture. From this worldview one’s perspective on life is developed. For Nietzsche a distinct connection between worldview and perspectivism exist.
Chapter 5Naugle continues his summery of the philosophical history of a worldview by taking a look at its development in the twentieth-century. His summarization of the twentieth-century spans two chapters. Chapter five examines the thought of Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger. Husserl set science above the relativism of worldviews. He saw philosophy to be an objective science and thought that the notion of a worldview threatened this objectivity. He rejects historicism and weltanschauung and sets philosophical science as the standard. He does not realize that his understanding of philosophical science is a weltanschauung.
Jaspers analyzes the concept of a worldview from two perspectives, attitudes and world pictures. Attitudes are, “Formal patterns and structures of mental existence (121).” These include different emotional responses and are developed through one’s culture. World pictures are, “The whole of the objective mental content an individual possesses (121-22).” According to Jaspers a person encounters the objective world through their own personal attitudes and form world pictures about said world.
Heidegger primarily dealt with the ontological question of the nature of being. He has three significant aspects to his understanding of weltanschauung. First, is his review of Jaspers book in which he critiques Jaspers’s understanding of what human beings really are and he sets forth his own understanding of what existence is. Second, he attempts to deal with the problem between philosophical science and weltanschauung. He concludes that all philosophy is worldview philosophy. Third, he tried to assert that the notion of a worldview is a recent development.
Chapter 6Naugle concludes the first half of his book by examining the second part of the twentieth-century. In this chapter he deals with Ludwig wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and other postmodern thinkers. Wittgenstein fully embraced the notion of a holistic worldview. He did not want just another interpretation of the world, so he began to see that one’s worldview is determined by the grammer and language one uses. He wanted to label his approach as a world picture and tried to distance himself from the idea of weltanschauung. He however, could not accomplish this task. Wittgenstein did not want to set forth a worldview because often a weltanschauung presents itself as the way of seeing the world. He was much more postmodern in his approach and just wanted to present a way of seeing the world.
Davidson seeks to understand how different languages or cultures can develop different concepts of seeing the world. He is extremely relative in his approach. He says that something may be true in one concept and not true in another. It seems that he would say that these conflicts would not exist if one could properly translate from one language to another. Somehow he links languages to conceptual schemes and says that if languages can be translated then so can concepts.
The postmodern movement has decided to jettison the whole notion of a worldview. These thinkers reject the ability of one to establish a worldview and say that it is the right way to think. Many of these thinkers attempt to deconstruct language and say that it has no meaning. One postmodern thinker Naugle talks about is Michel Foucault. Foucault states, “Every human discourse is a power play, every social arrangement oppressive, and every cultural setting tyrannical (183).” He saw every interaction among humans as one person trying to gain an advantage over the other. He ultimately says that nothing exists and if it does humans cannot know it. They cannot know because they are constrained by the power plays of people above them. Knowledge and truth are used by people to get what they want.
ConclusionNaugle has provided a brief, but thorough, history of the development of weltanschauung. He follows the formation of the word, and then he examines the philosophical history of the concept. He clearly establishes that the understanding of what a worldview is has changed drastically over the past two centuries. Postmodern thinkers view the world quite differently than did their modernist counterparts. By tracing the history of the weltanschauung Naugle guided his reader through the plethora of writings related to the subject and helped him understand how the concept has arrived at its present state.
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