A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

(11) Reentry by assault.  The writer-artist makes sure that he is in the world and that he is really by taking on the world, usually by political action and, more often than not, revolutionary.  Even if one is imprisoned by the state—especially if one is imprisoned—one can be certain of being human.  Ghosts can’t be imprisoned.  This stratagem is more available to European writers, who are taken more seriously than American writers.  The secret envy of American writers: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Despite their most violent attacks on the state and the establishment, nobody pays much attention to American writers, least of all the state.  To have taken on the state and defeated it, like Solzhenitsyn, is beyond the wildest dreams of the American writer.  Because the state doesn’t care.  This indifference leads to ever more frantic attempts to attract attention, like an ignored child, even to the point of depicting President Johnson and Lady Bird plotting the assassination of Kennedy with Barbara Garson’s MacBird!, or President Nixon having sex with Ethel Rosenberg and being buggered by Uncle Sam in Times Square in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.

Still, no one pays attention.

A paradigm of this generally failed reentry option: a lonely “radical” American writer standing outside the White House gate, screaming obscenities about this fascist state, dictatorship, exploitation of minorities, suppression of freedom of speech, and so on and on—all the while being ignored by President, police, and passerby.

There are worse thing than the Gulag.

–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, page 158.

Everybody has a world view. Doctors, teachers, firemen, Christians, Muslims, scientists and authors. People who do not know they have a world view possess one as much as people who can clearly articulate theirs. Even people who deny they have a world view, or even that is is possible for man to have a world view, are promoting a world view.

Simply stated, a world view is the mental grid work we use to make sense of the world around us. Everything, seen and unseen, immanent and transcendent, is filtered through our world view. It happens so often and naturally that we are unaware of it for the most part.

Input is not the only thing that is filtered through our world view, our actions and thoughts are also a result of our world view. When I think to myself, “I should apologize to Jim because I hurt his feelings last week,” I have just made a statement about a moral or ethical component of my world view. My world view dictates that when one is wronged by another party, the offending party should apologize to clear things up.

Of course the issue goes much deeper than this, as we can continue asking questions here: What constitutes an offense? Why am I morally obligated to apologize? What if the offended party does not want to hear my apology? What if I just thought that Jim was offended, but he really was not? When I apologize am I “doing the right thing,” or do I am doing it because “I feel bad about it.” If some one wrongs me, do I expect an apology from them also? etc. So far we have only asked questions regarding the Ethical aspect of our world view, but are there other aspects to a world view?

The late Belgian philosopher Leo Apostel created a seven point model to help us categorize different parts of our world view.

1. Ontology. The nature of Being, What is reality?
2. Explanation. The rules and law governing the Cosmos.
3. Futurology. In Christian terms this would be Eschatology, the End Times. How things will play out when we reach the end of time.
4. Ethics. What is good and right conduct for man?
5. Methodology. What are the acceptable methods to get things done in our world view. (Francis A. Schaeffer wrote a whole book about this called How Should We Then Live?)
6. Epistemology. The study of Knowledge, or how we know what we know.
7. Etiology. The study of Causality, or the reason things are the way they are.

Every statement, action or thought, that you or anybody else in the universe says, does or thinks will be connected to one of the above categories (and more than likely several). As you can see with our previous example of the transgression and apology with Jim, all seven of these come into play, either directly or indirectly.

As I originally stated, all authors have a world view. This world view shapes everything they write, it colors all of their perceptions, and even if they admit it or not, can be seen in everything they write. Some authors “just” write never thinking about their world view. Others set out to write with the intention of convincing others that their world view is correct, or at least worthy of merit and further investigation. Next time we will look at two of the methods that authors use to communicate their world view.