Read Online Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept by James W. Sire - Free Book Online

objectivity of these phenomena that he subjectively perceives. Havel has much more to say about his notion of “the really real,” the nature of the external universe, human beings, epistemology, ethics and the meaning of history. But this is sufficient to illustrate the kind of evidence one can often find for identifying another person’s worldview.
    The exercise need not be just intellectual curiosity on our part. Knowing a person’s general take on life helps us understand the reasons behind what people do and how they deal with specific practical issues. And that helps us relate to them in daily life.
    A second case: Matsuo Bashō . Discovering Havel’s worldview is relatively straightforward because he talks about his fundamental commitments. What about writers who do not readily do so? This task can be illustrated by the analysis of a literary work from outside our Western world. Let us look at a famous haiku by Matsuo Bashō, a late seventeenth-century poet.
          An ancient pond
          A frog leaps in
          The sound of water 10
    This is a deceptively simple poem, often learned and imitated by children in America as well as Japan. It is deceptive because from our Western worldview it appears to be a simple picture. It seems to carry no profound meaning at all. We may just as well be looking at a brief video clip. The scene is spare; the action is quickly over. What else is there?
    Worldview analysis, however, encourages us not just to look at what first appears but to ask what mindset lies behind the picture. If it is a Western mindset, then indeed we have just what we first noticed: an image of a frog jumping into an old pond with an accompanying plop. But if we examine the worldview background of Bashō himself, we will find something very different. Bashō was a Zen Buddhist priest with a Zen mind. We will not be able to see what his haiku is doing until we examine his worldview.
    The Zen mind is a Zen moment, a concentration of attention on a chronologically dimensionless present. It is the timeless intersection between past and future. It is and is not, neither one nor the other, yet both at once. Try thinking of the present in any other way. There is consciousness; yet this consciousness is always in motion. What one is conscious of at one instant is gone when one thinks about what it is.
    Now all of this seems simply descriptive of consciousness. It is always conscious of something, but what it is conscious of is constantly changing. Consciousness itself is not a consciousness of itself; it is always of the other, and the other changes. What Zen does is exalt this insight into a worldview. Zen proclaims that because consciousness is always conscious of change and never of permanence, change is all that is permanent; in other words, nothing is permanent. This is raised to a philosophic principle. The only permanent “thing” is not a “thing” at all. It is an absence of “thingishness.” It is the Void.
    Here we meet the crucial claim in Zen: human beings are capable of grasping all the reality there is. Nothing could be more opposite to the Christian worldview than that. Christians hold that there is much more to reality than can be directly perceived by our consciousness or dreamt of in Zen philosophy. God is there as the Creator of both our consciousness and the world of which it is conscious—and only partially conscious of at best.
    What Bashō does in a multitude of his haiku poems is to create in us the realization of the nature of what he takes to be the “really real.” How does he do this? Read it again:
          An ancient pond
          A frog leaps in
          The sound of water
    Like many of Bashō’s haikus, this one is pure image—image of sight and sound. The sight: an ancient pond and a frog leaping in. The sound: the sound of water. Not much. Indeed, but enough to encompass the whole of reality as Zen views it. 11
    The “ancient pond” is first of all