world vibe

we had a great conversation at home group last night around something that Steve had picked up somewhere.

Somebody (if you know who, please email / comment me) suggested that the metaphor of "worldview" was particularly unhelpful because of how it relied upon the experience of sight; apparently they suggested that an auditory metaphor would work much better.

I've been more than a little miffed at the "worldview" talk for the last few years, and I'm delighted with the possibilities that this language / metaphor provides.

To me, the idea of "worldview" denotes a sort of stable coherent vision of the world which contradicts all of the norms of perception, movement, peripheral vision, focus. It also privileges the intentional worldview thinker as a sort of conquering visionary. Once you know or understand your worldview -- you can look at anything and understand it according to your stable-coherent-vision-of-the-world. That seems to be to preclude the possibility of insight or development...(even if some of those effects are derived from the metaphor in ways that do not reflect the norms of the "worldview" discourse)

The downside? "Calling" as a metaphor -- which I (as you know) gave up recently -- works well in this paradigm.

But so does the concept of recognizing a particular refrain -- listening for loops or samples from some well-loved tune -- attending to a contrapuntal melody -- marching to the beat of a different drum -- finding truth by juxtaposing a suprising melody with an unexpected rhythm -- hearing the same tune played by many different instruments...