From idealized worldview to idiosyncratic lifeworld: Marxist, Buddhist, spiritual humanist ….
This is a revised version of something I posted on Facebook back in February of this year (I have no idea if anyone read it). I thought to revise it a bit after my wise FB friend, Richard Melton, wrote in response to my avowed identification as a Marxist and socialist democrat (not a full specification of my lifeworld* because I wanted simply to distinguish my political and economic views from those of the late moral and political philosopher Gerald Gaus), that he is an “eclectic left-of-center non-Marxist quasi-progressive with social democratic leanings (it’s getting more difficult to define myself these days).”
There is perhaps a roughly equal number of virtues and vices (as to the former, it helps one avoid at least rigid orthodoxy and righteous dogmatism, while the latter might include a failure to meet minimal philosophical standards of clarity, consistency and coherence) in finding oneself having a lifeworld* that is, in effect, a somewhat inconsistent hodgepodge of several worldviews of Western and Eastern provenance, both “secular” and “religious.” Strictly speaking, not all of them, at least in my case, have the full-blown status of a worldview; in other words, I have not adopted them in toto but piecemeal, having attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff, the living from the dead, what’s persuasive from the merely plausible. So what constitutes this hodgepodge? Plato’s dialogues, Marxist traditions, Buddhist spirituality and praxis (these facets account for my interest in exploring what I call ‘spiritual humanism’), philosophical pragmatism (especially thus not only John Dewey, Nicholas Rescher, and Hilary Putnam), some Gandhian ideas (no doubt diluted or a bit altered), anarchist philosophies, and psychoanalytic theory and therapy (more or less in the tradition of Freud and Melanie Klein). This hodgepodge (or bricolage?) is often sprinkled with the ideas of others: from Indian philosophies and philosophers (e.g., Jain epistemology, B.K. Matilal, Chakravarti Ram-Prasad), to borrowed ideas and concepts from a number of often very different Western philosophers: Kant, J.S. Mill, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Raymond Tallis, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Michael P. Lynch, Ilham Dilman, Alain Locke, Amartya Sen, Robert E. Goodin, and Jon Elster, for example (these came quickest to mind and the last two are not always classed as philosophers, but I consider that a mistake). And this hodgepodge lifeworld, at least in principle, is open-ended, if only because the crucible of our experiences may alter our perceptions and understanding and thus our evaluative capacities and conclusions. With justice, one might point out that breadth here has been achieved at the cost of depth (a trade-off one might prefer reversed): the lifeworld equivalent of a jack of all trades and master of none!
Indeed, I feel free to learn from anyone anywhere, be they an uncommonly keen neighbor, philosopher, psychologist, poet, what have you, although to what extent motley values, ideas, or principles may become integral parts of my lifeworld is necessarily if not painfully constrained by ignorance, memory, and an uncertain capacity to make coherent or meaningful sense of this pluralism, this motley, this mishmash. The lifeworld that results is intended to be normatively indicative of the manner in which I strive to live my life from day-to-day, while revealing, for better and worse, how I avail myself of whatever measure of freedom I possess in circumstances and situations that are not solely or wholly products or effects of my own choosing but within which I must make choices of one kind or another, choices shaped in part by self-examination and philosophical reflection. Marx famously said he was not a “Marxist,” and Hilary Putnam expressed irritation at being labeled a “pragmatist,” and I sympathize if not identify with what appears to motivate such disavowals. And yet, when asked what my worldview is (what I believe, etc.), I usually reply that it is “part Buddhist and part Marxist,” although as you no doubt now see, that hardly does this lifeworld justice (apart from the fact that I am an ‘aspirational’ Buddhist!), although perhaps it gets to the heart of things, spiritually and politically speaking!
In a future post I will attempt to address in more detail the nature and function of worldviews and lifeworlds, as well as a skeptical argument regarding the need for “comprehensive worldviews” (much hinges, I suspect, on that adjective)
* By “lifeworld” I mean the worldview(s), ideology(ies), philosophy(ies), and/or tradition(s) that are peculiar to the individual person. These need not be well-understood by that person or logically consistent or even close to “orthodox” or “official” or “authoritative” explications or descriptions of same, indeed, I suspect they in fact never are! A person may self-identify, say, as a Christian, but upon further investigation of his or her beliefs, values, morals, and so forth (e.g., their character or way of life) we discover that this lifeworld is more than just “Christian,” and furthermore the “Christianity” that it avows is a far cry from that we’ve learned from authoritative texts in the tradition (be it Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, or any of the various sub-traditions thereof). I think the distinction between lifeworlds and worldviews is important for several reasons one being that it enables people to criticize or differ from “official” worldview identities and entailments and enables us to better understand a person’s values, principles, commitments, etc.
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