(A lifeworld is the individual or idiosyncratic appropriation and understanding of a worldview that typically departs in this or that manner from the orthodox or officially prescribed or expert/authoritative doctrines of institutionalized religions. Lifeworlds may also include ideas, ideals, values, beliefs and so forth that are not in any way intrinsically connected to the worldview, such as a penchant for astrology, or the belief that life exists on other planets, or an inordinate fondness for baseball!)
When I taught a course on “world religions” at our community college I tried to get my students to appreciate the fact that it is quite difficult if not completely misleading to make (or foolish to even attempt) plausible “grandiose” empirical or sociological or historical generalizations about religious worldviews as such (especially, but not only, if they were but dimly aware of Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Instead, we need to examine, for better and worse, religious doctrines in all their plurality, the different forms of religious institutions, the different kinds of religious communities and groups, the different sorts of religious persons, the creation of “sacred” art and so forth (I have elsewhere attempted to identify the ten main characteristics or dimensions of religious worldviews).
This came to mind again when I was reading … and thinking about the Catholic Church in France during the Enlightenment and French Revolution. How different this sort of Catholicism was and is from the Catholic faith later evidenced in the Catholic Worker movement or the liberation theology that for a time flourished in the “base communities” of Central and South America, for example. Religions, I insisted in the classroom (not effectively, I suspect), are what people make of them, thus they are, from the outside looking in, constructed by all-too-human beings who are afflicted with the vices and virtues, the ignorance and illusions, the cognitive biases and vehement passions, that afflict everyone else. This is true irrespective of their various (divine or sacred) “beginnings:” in revelation, dreams, prophecy, meditation, mystical experience, what have you. Consider, for example, the differences between two well-known Christians no longer with us: the American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist, Jerry Falwell Sr. on the one hand, and the South African Anglican bishop and theologian Desmond Tutu, on the other. When the more strident atheists polemicize against religions, they frequently ignore the genuine “messiness” or complexity of religions on the ground, as we say, let alone their theological or philosophical diversity and sophistication. And very few of these folks, if any of them, are well-acquainted with (i.e., have studied in some depth) religious worldviews of both Western and Eastern provenance.
For myself, I have long been intrigued by the question of whether or not what the philosopher John Cottingham identifies as the “spiritual dimension” of religious worldviews (which partially overlaps with a secular or humanistic version of same found in non-religious worldviews, philosophies, and lifeworlds), that is, the focus on “spiritual exercises” or a spiritually (and thus psychologically) therapeutic regimen conducive to individuation, self-transformation, and self-realization (all of which assume ‘moral autonomy’) is unavoidably dependent (as a necessary condition) on religious traditions. In other words, can such spirituality ever be wholly divorced from religions as we know them? The “communitarian” response to this question has been an emphatic “no,” while a genuinely Liberal answer is more ambivalent, or at least it admits that individuals, having reached the age of reason, are free to do what they want with the worldviews or ideologies or cluster of beliefs and values in which they have been reared (such socialization and enculturation ranges from weak to strong, deliberate to inadvertent). This implies that one can, or perhaps should, fashion one’s own lifeworld, the danger here being that one will be tempted to select beliefs and values and practices that suit one’s existing temperament and biases, one’s dispositional vices and cognitive blind spots, one’s indulgence in self-deception and wishful thinking, in short, construct a lifeworld that is “comfortable,” one that provides no challenges by way of ego-transcendence, a worldview and lifeworld that becomes merely a poorly disguised form of personal identity and debilitating ego-orientation inclining us toward the pleasure principle. I imagine there might be ways out of this conundrum, but that will be material for another day.
Comments