Leo Apostel's Integrating Worldview

Discussion

Francis Heylighen:

"Leo Apostel was a philosopher strongly committed to transdisciplinary integration. One of the problems he emphasized was fragmentation, especially the fragmentation of science into ever more specialized disciplines. He developed this theme most explicitly in his book Wereldbeelden, written with Jan Van der Veken, and in the later English version World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration, to which other scientists, engineers, and psychiatrists also contributed.

The starting point is that modern society confronts us with several kinds of fragmentation. Culturally, we live with increasing pluralism, individualization and rapid social change. People with very different traditions and assumptions are brought together, often producing disagreement or mutual incomprehension. At the same time, people in Western societies have become less embedded in stable communities and more dependent on themselves for choosing how to live.

Science has undergone a parallel specialization. Researchers become extremely knowledgeable about narrow domains, but this makes communication increasingly difficult—not only between specialists and laypeople, but even between specialists in different disciplines. Someone working on the geology of meteorites may have little common language with someone studying psychiatric disorders.

Apostel saw an important consequence of these tendencies: a loss of coherence. Instead of experiencing the world as an intelligible whole, people encounter disconnected fragments pointing in different directions. They may have a scientific view in one context, a religious view in another and a practical everyday view in yet another, without seeing how these fit together. The result can be alienation: people no longer feel at home in the world and lack a clear sense of direction or meaning.

Apostel’s proposed response was to construct an integrating worldview: a view of the whole that reconnects the universe, humanity, society and individual life. Such a worldview should provide coherence and orientation. It should not prescribe exactly what one must do. Rather, it should function like a map: it should show the relevant possibilities, relations and directions so that people can decide intelligently where they want to go.

An integrating worldview should reconnect personal life with society and with the universe, helping people to feel at home in the world. It should bridge the gaps between scientific disciplines, but also between science, the arts, and religion or spirituality. Apostel himself was interested in what he called an “atheistic religiosity”. More practically, such a worldview should help specialists communicate across disciplines and help experts communicate with laypeople. It should support pluralism and diversity without dissolving into incoherence."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)