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in response to this question is this: Yes. When world-viewing is acclaimed as fundamentally an activity of faith, playing a valuable role in the formation of God-and-neighbourhonouring embodied practices and habits in which the goal is not right thinking but right living, worldview is still a crucial and serviceable concept. Understanding a worldview as a faith-qualified, psychically founded configuration places the emphasis on its sensory foundation rather than on ideas and concepts. In world-viewing, the always present logical distinguishing is subsumed and tacit rather than explicit and conceptually focused. Which means that a host of nonrational, unconscious, and implicit ways of knowing play paramount roles in the formation and function of worldviews. In our postmodern world, it is the role of these implicit ways of knowing that require more focused attention.
Implicit knowledge
World-viewing or visioning is a complex, developmental two-way learning process. A worldview is the pre-conceptual orienting lens or glasses in and through which we reach out to the world even as the world impinges on us. Coming into the world in interaction with parents and environment, children learn how to see in order to make their way in the world. Through their eyes, children not only learn to take in the world as they learn to focus, identify and recognise a host of shapes and things, but simultaneously, they develop expectancy filters that crucially affect not only how and what they identify and recognise, but how they respond and react to what they see. In other words, a worldview is not only a vision of the world, but it is at the same time a vision for the world. If our eyes are myopic, if our eyes are teary or our glasses are tinted, what we see will be myopic and tinted – even if we are unaware of the tint, tears, or myopia.
Moreover – and this is our main point – it is important to
recognise that world-viewing and worldviews are about much more than seeing and vision. All of our senses are involved. We see, but also feel, touch, smell our way through the world. An intuitive sensorium – a panoply of senses –
develops which implicitly aids and abets our orienting.
Indeed, even if it is implicit, operating largely beneath our
conscious awareness, we sense our way through the world as much, if not more, than we think our way through. Thus, what we have called a worldview is as much a matter of the imagination as of the intellect, as much unconscious as conscious, involving world-feeling, world-touching, world-smelling and world-hearing. It is by our implicit, often inarticulate awareness of our intuition – Heidegger’s
Befindlichkeit – by our bodily attunement, by our learned
physical, emotional and moral reflexes, that we make our way in the world. Recognising the role of all our senses in
finding our way in the world suggests that we would do well to talk of world-orienting rather than world-viewing.
The importance of attending to the sensory foundation of
worldview formation is today underlined by the most recent
developments in the area of brain research. Neuroscientists
have discovered that we process knowledge in our brain in at least two ways - what has been called the ‘high road’ of words and logic and the ‘low road’ of emotions which involve
different circuits in the brain (Goleman 2006; LeDoux 1996).
The low road, involving the bottom and right part of the
brain, processes in a non-linear, sub-symbolic code. In other
words, we actually know a lot more than we can say in words.
The high road, involving in particular the cortex, or top part
of the brain, is linear, logical, language-based and conscious. These two ‘roads’, the conscious and unconscious, relate and interrelate in a knowledge spiral. For example: one can end up feeling totally stuck in efforts to solve a problem logically, only to experience a breakthrough when turning away, letting go and giving up. Letting go lets the unconscious do its work, prepared by all the analytic work. Then, one takes the breakthrough and works it through consciously, testing it, calibrating it in a process of integration. And even as there is implicit and explicit knowledge, there is implicit and explicit memory. Gut-level memory is recorded or packaged in a non-verbal code of emotions, perceptions and bodily sensations. To mention one example, our bodies remember how to ride a bicycle without conscious attention.
In similar fashion, much of our relational knowledge is
encoded in emotional meaning-patterns which act as expectancy models or attachment filters that henceforth predispose how we experience relationships automatically and without our even knowing it. We are aware of what we experience, but not of the filter itself through which we experience. Psychologists have identified four common attachment filters (Coe & Hall 2010:240−259): Secure (able to trust others and be open to the world), Pre-occupied (engrossed in efforts to get their needs met, inattentive to the needs of others), Dismissing (expect nothing, disconnected from self and others) and Fearful (needs closeness, afraid of closeness). These attachment filters, acting below our conscious awareness, giving shape to how we feel about ourselves, helping us make sense of our lives, God and others are, in fact, what we call worldviews. When, as a young infant, I feel seen and heard as lovable and worthy, I develop a secure attachment and I am primed to be open to the world. However, when things go seriously wrong developmentally, I do not feel seen and heard and negative attachment filters develop which make me ‘naturally’, reflexively, even if unawares, pre-occupied, dismissive, or fearful.
These fundamental moods, patternings, or filters formed in early childhood experience, continue to to play an indispensable and inextricable role in our later efforts to
explicitly thematise and conceptualise our worldviews. If
early formation is good enough, if the attachment filters are
‘secure’, there will tend to be a good-enough, continually
recalibrating, mutually interactive fit between the explicit
knowledge of a love-oriented, other-affirming worldview and our implicit gut knowledge. There will develop a double two-way movement: the implicit and explicit worldviews will interact dynamically and integrate in a positive growth
spiral. The expressed and confessed worldviews will not only find embodied resonance in the implicit gut knowledge,
http://www.koersjournal.org.za | doi:10.4102/koers.v77i1.28
