WORLDVIEWS, REALITY AND DESIGN

by daniel christian wahl

Humanity has achieved incredible advances in the differentiation of consciousness … differentiation has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment.
But the complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with entities around us without losing our hard won individuality.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Benjamin & Hanes, 2000, p.196)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, suggests in his book The Evolving Self (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993): “To know ourselves is the greatest achievement of our species.” He argues that in order to understand ourselves “ what we are made of, what motivates and drives us, and what goals we dream of — involves, first of all an understanding of our evolutionary past;” we need to reflect “on the network of relationships that bind us to each other and to the natural environment” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p.xvii). He acknowledges the importance of the emergence of self-reflective consciousness and its role in freeing us from genetic and cultural determinism.

Csikszentmihalyi believes that the next big evolutionary change in human consciousness may simultaneously acknowledge the self as separate from and fundamentally interconnected with the complexity from which it emerges. The individual, its culture, and the natural environment are simultaneously differentiated from each other and united into a larger complexity. He writes:

If it is true that at this point in history the emergence of complexity is the best ‘story’ we can tell about the past and the future, and if it is true that without it our half-formed self runs the risk of destroying the planet and our budding consciousness along with it, then how can we help to realize the potential inherent in the cosmos? When the self consciously accepts its role in the process of evolution, life acquires a transcendent meaning. Whatever happens to our individual existences, we will become one with the power that is the universe.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, p.xviii

Csikszentmihalyi speaks of the need to form a ‘fellowship for the future’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993, pp.281). Such a network would be dedicated to facilitating the continued evolution of life and consciousness towards higher and more differentiated levels of complexity and diversity, but fully conscious of the universe’s underlying unity.

Human goals and aspirations, the fundamental intentionality behind all our designs and actions will change drastically, if we stop to see ourselves as individual survival units competing against each other and the rest of life on earth, and begin to understand that the survival of individuals and communities, of the human species as a whole, depends on the health and flourishing of the wider whole in which we participate (our ecosystems, the biosphere, the conscious universe). What I am describing is a radical change in our fundamental assumptions about the relationship between nature and culture, a change in worldview.

This thesis argues that such a change in worldview is the most fundamental act of design humans are capable of. The pressing social, economic and ecological challenges humanity faces at this point in human history, will not be solved by technological fixes, a free market economy, or accelerated biological evolution. The only way to effectively respond to these challenges and problems is through cultural transformation and the associated change in consciousness and worldview.

Problems and their solutions will appear in an entirely different light if we dare to re- examine some of our most rigidly and dogmatically held assumptions about the nature of our own existence, of life, and the process we call universe (or the divine). Albert Einstein hinted at this necessary shift in worldview, when he warned that problems could not be solved in the mindset that created them in the first place.

In this section, I will discuss how our basic assumptions and value systems influence our perception of ourselves, and the world in which we participate. I will argue that the most effective design responses to the challenges of sustainability (or the current un-sustainability) are those that affect our worldview and therefore our life-styles. I will refer to these up-stream changes in human culture as meta-design, and introduce the concept of ‘organizing ideas’ to explain how crucially fundamental assumptions affect our perception of the world and all subsequent actions.

Furthermore, I will introduce a dynamic map of possible value-systems and worldviews that have so far been expressed in human consciousness. I suggest that such a map may help us to carefully approach what appropriate participation in natural process may actually mean by integrating the contributions of multiple perspectives and value systems.

The creation of a sustainable human civilization will be based on such a trans-disciplinary, trans-epistemological, and trans-ontological multi-perspective. It will have to celebrate the wisdom of diversity, while acknowledging fundamental unity and interdependence, pointing towards a need for increased co-operation, synergy and symbiosis. Let me begin by exploring the concept of ‘worldview’ in some more detail.

James Sire defines the worldview concept as “a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world” (Sire, 2004, p.19).

The term worldview has been translated from the German word Weltanschauung, which was coined by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his Critique of Judgment, published in 1790. Naugle suggests: “Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy, with its emphasis on the knowing and willing self as the cognitive and moral centre of the universe, created the conceptual space in which the notion of worldview could flourish” (Naugle, 2002, p.59). The German Idealist and Romanticist considered a worldview to describe “a set of beliefs that underlie and shape all human thought and action” (Sire, 2004, p.23).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) made an early attempt to unify the individuated, rational self with the wider whole from which it emerges, without denying its unique identity as an individual who is both separated from and part of community, culture, nature and the “Kosmos.” Hegel tried to formulate a holistic and participatory expression of theWeltanschauung concept:

Reason [consciousness] then unites this objective totality with the opposite subjective totality to form the infinite world-intuition (unendliche Weltanschauung), whose expansion has at the same time contracted into the richest and simplest identity.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (in Naugle, 2002, p.69).

In my interpretation, what Hegel hints at here is how once Kant’s knowing and willing self has conceptually been separated from the whole through the power of his or her own rational judgment, it will eventually have to come to realize that its own subjective experience of an apparently objective other is only possible through the pattern of consciousness that unites them into a fundamentally interconnected unity. Hegel’s “reason” is better understood as cognition or consciousness. It transcends dualistic logic of mutually exclusive opposites and is quite distinct from Kant’s use of the word reason.

Since then, others have taken up the concept of worldview and developed it in their own ways. Sire reports that Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) was the first to use the concept as the central focus of his discourse, and both Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) employed the worldview concept in their philosophical work (Sire, 2004, p.23). I will refrain from a deeper exploration of their work here. My central focus is to establish how crucially our worldview affects our responses to the world we perceive through it. I agree with Sire’s assertion that “how we view life affects the life we live” (Sire, 2004, p.99). This simple fact lies at the root of all human intentionality and therefore all our designs.

Sire highlights one important aspect of how worldviews are expressed and formulated. We are not always fully conscious of the worldview that guides our perception and action. Sire suggests that “our worldview is not precisely what we may state it to be”, rather “it is what is actualised in our behaviour.” Worldviews are thus primarily modes of participation in the wider whole. Their conceptual formulation is crucial for making us consciously aware of the worldview we are expressing through our actions, but whether we are conscious of our worldview or not it fundamentally influences our behaviour. Sire argues that “we live our worldview or it isn’t our worldview”, since “what we actually hold … about the nature of fundamental reality may not be what we say” (Sire, 2004, p.133).

This points at an important caveat when working with the concept of worldview. What fundamentally matters are our actions, our lifestyles, how we relate to each other and our wider environment, how we participate in natural process. Formulating and comparing worldviews can help us to integrate multiple perspectives. This may facilitate the process of reaching a consensus about what appropriate participation in natural process may be. Nevertheless, what we need to change to make a difference are our actions and not just how we talk about them. Conceptual escapism currently dominates the debate on sustainable development.

It is this danger of loosing ourselves in endless discussions and formulations of new and possible worldviews that made the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) reject the notion altogether. For him, it was not the task of philosophy to construct worldviews. He actually considered them “unphilosophical” and a “primary obstacle to philosophy’s true identity” (Naugle, 2002, p.134). Heidegger expressed his true idea of philosophy (phenomenology) by contrasting it to the worldview concept:

Phenomenology is the investigation of life itself. Despite the appearance of a philosophy of life, it is really the opposite of a worldview. A worldview is an objectification and immobilization of life at a certain point in the life of a culture. In contrast, phenomenology is never closed off; it is always provisional in its absolute immersion in life as such. In it no theories are in dispute, but only genuine insights versus the ungenuine. The genuine ones can be obtained only by an honest and unreserved immersion in life itself in its genuineness, and this is ultimately possible only through the genuineness of a personal life.

— Martin Heidegger (in Naugle, 2002, p.135).

While I fully agree with Heidegger that it is possible to become trapped in too classificatory an understanding of the worldview concept, I still believe that behind all human actions and perceptions there is a set of fundamental believes and assumptions that can be usefully referred to as a worldview. To discuss the concept too rigidly and draw up different worldviews as mutually exclusive categories is yet another case of mistaking the map for the territory. Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology tries to get at the territory itself, but by verbalizing it, writing about it, and practising it, he inadvertently turns it into what I would refer to as a worldview.

What we need is a dynamic map of possible worldviews to facilitate communication between people who see the world from different perspectives. Holding such a map lightly, always reminding ourselves not to confuse it with the territory of our collective participation in the same living process, may help us to reach a more dynamic, holistic and participatory understanding that allows us to integrate the perspectives offered by diverse worldviews into the actually daily practice of responsible and appropriate participation.

Heidegger himself wrote: “A world-view is related in its meaning to the particular contemporary Dasein at any given time. In this relationship to the Dasein the world-view is a guide to it and a source of strength under pressure” (in Naugle, 2002, p.137). What Heidegger points to here is the potential that worldviews can have in affecting our mode or participation.

I would argue that a flexibly evolving, multi-perspective worldview could emerge out of the collective integration of a wide diversity of intrinsically valid and at the same time limited worldviews. When I speak of a holistic or participatory worldview I am not referring to yet another category of worldview, I am referring to a dynamic synthesis rather than a newly formulated antithesis of other worldviews.

If we take the lessons of fundamental interconnectedness and unpredictability, as well as our inescapably participatory role in the continued evolution of natural process seriously, we will have to find a way to integrate various, sometimes contradictory, but more fundamentaly complementary points of view.

Rather than relying on the exclusive notion of scientific objectivity, as ultimate arbiter of what is ‘real’, we may more effectively sustain our continued participation in an unpredictable and uncontrollable process by exploring new ways to reach a form of inter- subjective consensus based on a wide variety of different disciplines, worldviews, and epistemologies. Such holistic, multi-perspective based integration is much more likely to guide us towards appropriate participation and sustainability.

The Hungarian scientist Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) highlighted a dangerous caveat of dualistic, objective science and its associate worldview. He provided a critique of “the ideal of scientific detachment” and suggested that it “falsifies our whole outlook far beyond the domain of science.” (in Naugle, 2002, p.188).

Polanyi proposed an alternative ideal of knowledge that acknowledged the uniqueness of every individual’s subjective and embodied perspective. He referred to this conception of knowledge as “personal knowledge” and emphasized how it acknowledges “that into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection but a vital component of this knowledge.” Polanyi explains:

For as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the experiences of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.

— Michael Polanyi (in Naugle, 2002, p.189).

While the detached, reductionist science approach to understanding reality has many useful practical applications, it does not provide a map of reality that has some form of exclusive access to fundamental truths. As with any form of observation, traditional science has a significant observational blind spot. It ignores the observer’s fundamental interconnectedness with the objects of its observations.

Our human tendency to mistake the map for the territory has lead us to adopting a worldview that separates the self from the world, and humanity from nature. The current un- sustainability of humanity’s participation in natural process is a direct result of almost three hundred years during which the reductionist, dualist worldview has become culturally dominant and informed human intentionality in such a way that the majority of our designs and actions have become thoroughly unsustainable.

Polanyi has offered a second major conceptual contribution to understanding the challenges of becoming fully conscious of our dominant knowledge system and its underlying worldview. Naugle explains Polanyi’s idea of the “tacid dimension” through analogy with an iceberg: “Typical accounts of knowledge focus exclusively on what lies above the waterline. From Polanyi’s perspective, however, the greater part of knowledge is hidden from view. It lies so to speak below the waterline. And yet it is enormously influential in shaping the knowing process. There is an unobserved background structure of thought…” Naugle, 2002, p.189).

As previously emphasized, our worldviews are often far more complex than our verbalisation or formulation of them. This holds true for the now out-dated scientific worldview, just as for all other descriptions of a particular worldview that claims to describe an entirely ‘objective’ point of view.

There are hidden patterns of thought and fundamental assumptions that are often not explicit, but nevertheless constitute the meta-design which shape our worldview and through it our dominant knowledge system and mode of participation. Naugle reports: “Polanyi’s alternative epistemological vision … blends objective and subjective factors as the best way of accessing reality” (Naugle, 2002, p.190). Polanyi explained:

Such is the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is denied as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.

— Michael Polanyi (in Naugle, 2002, p.191).

The notion of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as the notion of reality itself are all entangled in such a way that it is very difficult to separate them out by verbal description without being caught in the same philosophical dilemma that has plagued the Western mind for more than two and a half millennia.

The metaphor and analogy of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement comes to mind. Quantum theory in its exploration of subatomic particles — the ultimate and most extreme reductionism seeking to explore the fundamental parts of a mechanistically understood and explained universe — discovered at the end of all its separating the universe into constituent parts that they are all fundamentally entangled, not only with each other, but also with the observer who separated them out in the first place, by naming, observing, and describing them.

Like depicted by the ancient alchemical Uroboros, the snake of reductionist analysis came to bite its own tail and turned many of the great physicists at the beginning of the 20th century into mystical holists (e.g.: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and Einstein). Some of the brightest minds, trained in the methods of reductionist science and logical reasoning, reached a point in their inquiry where the self and the world, subject and object dissolve their identity as mutually exclusive categories and reveal themselves as a set of relationships united in consciousness.

The scope of the overall argument presented in this thesis precludes a more detailed exploration of how our notion of reality has changed through the millennia (see e.g. Tarnas, 1996 or Kingsley, 2003). Polanyi, above, speaks of a ‘hidden reality’. This idea has fuelled Western intellectual debate since Plato. It conjures up the unfortunate assumption that what we are directly experiencing through our senses is not the ‘real reality’ and that there is some more perfect reality hidden behind it accessible only through the human powers of reason and logic.

After more than two thousand years of intense debate, wars and murder committed to defend this notion, we are no closer to understanding this hidden reality. I therefore suggest that we abandon this search and rely once again on our senses and direct experiences to describe the reality in which we participate. Let me emphasize though that we should remain open to the possibility that the spiritual or conscious dimension of this reality may be more fundamental than its material expression.

The classics scholar Peter Kingsley’s book, Reality, provides a very incisive account of how the writings of early Greeks like Parmenides and Empedocles have actively been misrepresented, mistranslated and misinterpreted in order to justify the Western mindset of rationalism, from Plato’s own work onwards until the present day (see Kingsley, 2003).

Western intellectual discourse has reached a point where relativism, deconstructivism, radical constructivism, materialism and nihilism are holding the debate about the nature of reality in a perpetual stalemate, and anybody who uses the words ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ has to justify his or her use of these words in front of an angry host of professional academics and intellectuals, who make their living and justify their existence by critical discourse. Solutions or new beginnings are irrelevant from their perspective, since the perpetual stalemate justifies their own existence to continue a basically pointless debate.

The debate is particularly pointless with regard to its ultimate survival value for the human species and the continued evolution of consciousness. These intellectuals have created a physically and biologically detached noosphere as the arena of their jousting. They ignore the fundamental interdependence of nature and culture, and go as far as denying the biological and ecological basis of human existence by postulating that humans and their creations are not part of nature. This, to some extent, justifies and fuels the utter unsustainability of postmodernity.

I regard it as important to draw attention to the fact that the use of language and in particular the use of the written word predisposes us to a classificatory approach to reality, that identifies details by naming things and distinguishing them from what they are not. The real problem begins when we turn words, as reductions of the overall complexity of reality, and the supposedly separate objects and concepts described by these words, into exclusive categories and apply dualistic logic and rationality to them. We create a purely intellectual territory (maybe the self-fulfilling prophecy of Plato’s hidden reality) and begin to confuse the map with the territory.

To clarify my own position: I believe that there is only one reality and only one truth that can be accessed by everybody through their direct experience. Yet reality in all its complexity of interpenetrating scales is too complex to be fully comprehended by any single perspective. The complexity of the process as a whole is beyond the reach of any individual’s reasoning, logic, and intellectual comprehension. Nevertheless, how we think about reality, and the resulting relationships and interactions we engage in have creative efficacy. Consciousness is an emergent property of reality and simultaneously reality recreates itself in consciousness.

The maps we can create of reality will always be provisional since the immutability and permanence of the whole is expressed through constant change and transformation of the interactions and relationships it contains [the paradox is intentional].

The act of describing that whole from within — as a participator in its process of transformation — creates an observational position and with it an observational blind spot. Within our individual conscious awareness, I believe reality is best experienced as a conscious universal process experiencing itself through our own participation.

Each point of view is a unique and valid approximation of the whole from within the whole through one of its parts. The act of observation implies and reflects the whole. A more comprehensive awareness of the whole can be reached when we begin to engage in a collective dialogue aiming to integrate the multitude of individual viewpoints on reality, by understanding them as reflections of a fundamentally unified reality and truth experiencing itself through diverse individuals.

Such a dialogue that celebrates the contributions of multiple perspectives may help humanity to approach the ground of being in which it recognizes itself as an expression of nature, the universe and the divine. Through the realization, or revelation, that we are the eyes of the universe, of reality, becoming conscious of itself, individual awareness can reach the point where the individual self and its identification with ego, body, community, culture, species, life, Earth, universe or Kosmos dissolves into the self-realization of our own divine nature.

In the years to come, as humanity embarks on its desperate struggle, to undo the spells of its own incantation, as the movement aiming to create a sustainable civilization faces drastic climate change, environmental and social disintegration, as well as the results of irresponsible application of our own technological capabilities, it will be a potential consolation to be able to access this more fundamental ground of being, where consciousness connects everything into the unified whole that is reality.

From ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ D.C. Wahl 2006

Originally published on Noteworthy.

Daniel Christian Wahl is the author of “Designing Regenerative Cultures”. He is a catalyst for transformative innovation, cultural co-creation, whole systems design, and bioregional regeneration. You can find out more about his work on Medium.