Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation

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Leading philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stand in the way of this task are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, LeÂvy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but also gives logical space to religious belief without advocating personal acceptance of that belief, and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D. Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, religious studies and theology. D. Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California and Rush Rhees Research Professor in the University of Wales at Swansea. His many books include The Concept of Prayer (1965, re-issued 1981), Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (1970), Religion Without Explanation (1976), Faith After Foundationalism (1988) Wittgenstein and Religion (1993), Introducing Philosophy (1996), and Recovering Religious Concepts (2000). He has also edited works by the late Rush Rhees including On Religion and Philosophy (Cambridge 1997) and Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (Cambridge 1998).

RELIGION AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF CONTEMPLATION D. Z. PHILLIPS Claremont Graduate University and University of Wales, Swansea

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © D. Z. Phillips 2004 First published in printed format 2001 ISBN 0-511-00768-X eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-80368-3 hardback ISBN 0-521-00846-8 paperback

In memory of Peter Winch

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements 1

page xi

Hermeneutics and the philosophical future of religious studies 1 The present contenders: the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion 2 The hermeneutics of contemplation 3 Beyond interpretation to contemplation 4 Beyond frameworks and grids to concept-formation 5 Suspicion about suspicion 6 The hermeneutics of contemplation and Wittgensteinian Fideism

1 1 4 8 17 23 25

2 Bernard Williams on the gods and us 1 Hermeneutics and modernity 2 Assumptions about the gods 3 Questioning the assumptions

31 31 33 39

3 Hume's legacy 1 Hume and hermeneutics 2 Hume's ®rst level of criticism 3 Hume's second level of criticism 4 Hume's third level of criticism 5 Hume's `true religion' 6 Hume on miracles 7 Beyond design to a song of creation 8 Hume's one-sided diet 9 Hume and us

55 55 57 65 67 69 73 78 80 83

vii

viii

Contents

4 Feuerbach: religion's secret? 1 Feuerbach and demysti®cation 2 God among the predicates 3 God and the human species 4 Contradiction and contemplation 5 Death and ®nitude 6 Contemplating reactions to death 7 God and death 8 Conclusions about death

87 87 92 99 105 112 116 126 128

5

130 130 140

Marx and Engels: religion, alienation and compensation 1 Marxism and monism 2 Religion and ideology

6 Tylor and Frazer: are religious beliefs mistaken hypotheses? 1 Animism and intellectualism 2 Animism, souls and spirits 3 What rituals can be 4 Rituals and the mythology in our language 5 Rituals and explanations 7

Marett: primitive reactions 1 Marett and anti-intellectualism 2 Marett and suspicion 3 In the beginning was the dance 4 Marett's other course

146 146 151 162 167 177 183 183 186 190 195

8 Freud: the battle for èarliest' things 1 Contemplation of èarliest' things 2 `The unconscious' and conditions of intelligibility 3 Religion and the three conditions of intelligibility 4 Freud's monistic vision 5 Freud's monism and cultural movements 6 Freud's blind spots 7 Psychoanalysis and religion

199 199 202 204 208 215 218 226

9 Durkheim: religion as a social construct 1 Anti-animism 2 The science without a subject

229 229 232

Contents 3 Social solidarity: a case of logical inversion 4 Social constructs and independent realities

ix 235 242

10 LeÂvy-Bruhl: primitive logic 1 `Prelogical thought' 2 Can we understand magico-religious beliefs? 3 Lessons from LeÂvy-Bruhl

247 247 252 259

11 Berger: the avoidance of discourse 1 Pluralism and marketing religion 2 Berger's sociological story 3 The fate of values and criticism 4 The fate of alienation and liberation 5 The language of sociology and the sociologising of language

267 267 273 277 280

12 Winch: trying to understand 1 Language, belief and reality 2 Understanding a primitive culture 3 Extending our understanding 4 Whose understanding?

289 289 294 304 311

13 Understanding: a philosophical vocation 1 A problem for contemplative philosophy 2 A philosophical imperative

318 318 320

Index of names Index of subjects

327 329

285

Preface and acknowledgements

Religion Without Explanation was published in 1976. It had grown out of lectures given at Swansea over the previous six years, lectures which were meant to discuss issues concerning religion which would be of interest to students in the social sciences as well as to students in the humanities. The structure of the book corresponds to that aim, with four of its chapters discussing Tylor and Frazer, Marett, Freud and Durkheim, with the remaining seven chapters, including the introduction and a discussion of Hume's legacy, being devoted to more traditional topics in the philosophy of religion. For some time I had toyed with the idea of revising the book with a view to a second edition, but when I ®nally gave myself to the task in the summer and autumn of 1998 I found that revision soon became rewriting, since I now decided to address larger issues. I was also dissatis®ed with various aspects of my original work. As a result, six chapters of the original work disappeared in writing this book, although use is made, now and again, of some material in them. More importantly, eight new chapters appear in the present work and important revisions are made in my previous discussions of the thinkers already mentioned. In my ®rst chapter on `Hermeneutics and the philosophical future of religious studies' I attempt to distinguish philosophy's contemplative task from the critiques of religion found in the hermeneutics of suspicion, and from the apologetic concerns of the hermeneutics of recollection. In these discussions I was stimulated by the works of Daniel L. Pals and J. Samuel Preus with respect to the nature of religious studies, and by the work of Van A. Harvey with respect to the hermeneutics of suspicion. In the course of the chapter I also meet Wayne Proudfoot's charge that in Religion Without Explanation I had failed to distinguish between descriptive xi

xii


reductionism and explanatory reductionism. I also comment again on the unscholarly charge of ®deism. It is often said that in modernity we have good reason to question assumptions about the gods that we ®nd in the ancient world. I, on the contrary, think that our own philosophical assumptions about what we take those assumptions to be need to be questioned, especially as they have an abiding in¯uence on the philosophical discussion of religion. This is my reason for the second chapter on `The gods and us' in which I conduct a critical discussion of Bernard Williams' arguments in Shame and Necessity. There is no denying that contemporary philosophy of religion, whether through disagreement or agreement, is an inheritor of Hume's legacy. Once Hume is thought to have shown the logically problematic character of arguments from the world to God, the task for anthropology, sociology and psychoanalysis becomes one of explaining why, despite that fact, people continue to believe in God. The new third chapter on `Hume's Legacy' in the present book contains important revisions. In my previous study I had not given suf®cient weight to the extent to which Hume, in his attenuated deism, is still in the grip of conceptions of `the world' which, elsewhere, he himself criticises. This means that Hume failed to press home the logical implications of some of his best criticisms. Had he done so, his attack on certain ways of philosophising about religion would have been even more devastating. In the new chapter I also give more attention to Hume's Natural History, arguing that in it we see crucial assumptions about concept-formation in religion which need to be examined. My fourth chapter on `Feuerbach: religion's secret?' repairs a serious omission in Religion Without Explanation in which my remarks on Feuerbach are cursory and misleading. They do not show the power of Feuerbach's challenge, or how much, even through disagreement, there is to learn from him. The need for a more substantial treatment of his work was brought home to me through discussions with Van A. Harvey and, even more, from studying his Feuerbach. My ®fth chapter `Marx and Engels: religion, alienation and compensation' is new and, again, recti®es an omission in Religion Without Explanation. The treatment here is briefer than that of Feuerbach, since Marx and Engels build on many of his basic assumptions concerning religious belief, despite their important disagreements.


xiii

In the sixth chapter, `Tylor and Frazer: are religious beliefs mistaken hypotheses?' I have given the thinkers separate treatment in a way in which I did not in Religion Without Explanation. I have given far more attention to the ways in which confusions may appear in rituals, confusions which are linked to a deep mythology in our language. My use of this latter notion is confused and unclear in my original chapter. I also give far more attention to the issue of explanation in religion in the light of Wittgenstein's `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough' and Rush Rhees' and Frank Ciof®'s discussions of this issue. I have also been helped by John Skorupski's discussions of the intellectualist tradition in the social sciences in my critique of that conception. In this chapter I make use of papers written subsequent to Religion Without Explanation. I have in mind `Wittgenstein's Full Stop', ®rst published in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Irving Block, Oxford: Blackwell 1981, and reprinted in my Wittgenstein and Religion, London: Macmillan 1993, and `Primitive Reactions and the Reactions of Primitives', the 1983 Marett Lecture, ®rst published by Exeter College, Oxford, and also reprinted in Wittgenstein and Religion. I am grateful for permission to use the material here. The seventh chapter on `Marett: primitive reactions' has also been revised. I have incorporated the emphases found in my original chapter with the different emphases found in `Primitive Reactions and the Reactions of Primitives'. In developing the connections between primitive reactions and concept-formation I have made use of some of the observations in Ìn the Beginning, was the Proposition ± In the Beginning was the Choice ± In the Beginning was the Dance', ®rst published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 21, 1995/6, and reprinted in my Recovering Religious Concepts, London: Macmillan 2000. I am grateful for permission to use the material here. In my eighth chapter on `Freud: the battle for `èarliest'' things' I have made more explicit distinctions between the different conceptual issues being discussed by the division of the chapter into its sections. The same is true of my ninth chapter, `Durkheim: religion as a social construct' in which I have given far more attention to what I have called logical inversions in Durkheim's arguments. My tenth chapter, `LeÂvy-Bruhl: primitive logic', is a new chapter. Discussed in my Swansea lectures, it is now a mystery to me why he was not accorded a chapter in Religion Without Explanation. I was

xiv


helped to understand the complexities of LeÂvy-Bruhl's thought by the stimulating discussions of E. E. Evans-Pritchard. My eleventh chapter, `Berger: the avoidance of discourse' is a new chapter, thought necessary because of the continuing in¯uence of this way of discussing religion in the social sciences. The chapter is a reorganisation of the two chapters on Berger in Faith After Foundationalism, London: Routledge 1988; Westview Press 1995. These chapters made use of my symposium with A. R. Manser, `The Sociologizing of Meaning', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 53, 1979. I am grateful for permission to use the material here. My twelfth chapter, `Winch: trying to understand' is a new chapter and discusses the implications of Winch's views on understanding a primitive society and how these are affected by later developments in his work. In particular it discusses the indeterminacy in the notion of understanding and the arti®ciality of making a distinction between our culture and alien cultures in this respect. In my thirteenth and ®nal chapter, I discuss the tensions between the indeterminacy in the notion of understanding discussed in the last chapter, and the tasks of the hermeneutics of contemplation. It is ®tting that in its last two chapters this book should end with a discussion of Winch's work, since he is an excellent example of a philosopher who gave things the kind of attention called for by a contemplative conception of philosophy. This conception of philosophy showed itself in the way he discussed with others and himself. I hope this book bears some mark of the in¯uence of one who was my teacher and friend, and who is deeply missed. I am grateful to Mrs Helen Baldwin, Secretary to the Department of Philosophy at Swansea, for preparing the typescript for publication from my handwritten version, and to my colleague, Mario von der Ruhr, for help with the proof-reading. I am also grateful to Kevin Taylor of Cambridge University Press for having faith in my manuscript and for the generous comments and criticisms of four anonymous readers, as a result of which I rewrote the ®nal chapter of the book.

chapter 1

Hermeneutics and the philosophical future of religious studies

1 the present contenders: the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion Since Paul Ricoeur's book, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,1 it has been commonly understood that if we want to understand religious concepts we have to choose between two distinct modes of interpreting religion in religious studies: the hermeneutics of recollection or the hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of recollection is sympathetic to religion, since it assumes that believers are in touch with something real. Its task is to recollect, in the sense of retrieve, this `something' for our age, convinced that there is a message here which we need to heed. The new faith which emerges from this dialectical exercise will be one which has been purged by the ®res of criticism. By contrast, the hermeneutics of suspicion denies that there is a divine reality in religion. The very conception of it is said to be the product of illusion. The imperative of the intellect is an imperative to be radically suspicious in this context. Since there is nothing real to recollect, or to retrieve, enlightenment consists in rescuing us from religious mysti®cation. Ricoeur believes that most phenomenologists of religion need to practise the hermeneutics of recollection. The faith which ®nally emerges will be a second naiveteÂ, but one which can only be achieved when one has worked one's way through to it via the various criticisms of religion in our culture which cannot be ignored. For many others, such as J. Samuel Preus, the hermeneutics of suspicion is the very hallmark of modern religious studies. For Preus, 1

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage, New Haven: Yale University Press 1970.

1

2

The philosophical future of religious studies

the hermeneutics of recollection is inimical to serious intellectual enquiry, and belongs, if anywhere, in religious institutions. He argues that there is an essential distinction between religious apologetics on the one hand, and naturalistic explanations of religion on the other. Religious apologetics involves the acceptance of religious authority, and in its acceptance of the God-given character of religion, it uses assumptions `different from the assumptions one might use to understand and explain other realms of culture'.2 This is why the status of religious apologetics in the academy is problematic. On the other hand, Preus argues, naturalistic explanations of religion are justi®ably reductionist, since they analyse religious beliefs in terms of their more fundamental constituent parts which are not religious. `Contrary to the claim of classical Western theology, this new tradition claimed and claims that it is not necessary to believe in order to understand ± indeed, that suspension of belief is probably a condition for understanding.'3 Preus admits that religious and naturalistic explanations compete in secular universities. He calls these explanations `paradigms' or èxemplars' of understanding, and holds that they are incommensurable. As yet, Preus concludes, there is no agreement in the academy about which paradigm or exemplar of interpretation of religion should be adopted. In fact, the situation within religious studies is more complex, since there are battles within the two kinds of hermeneutics. Within the hermeneutics of recollection there are battles between evidentialists, Reformed epistemologists, and phenomenologists of various persuasions. There is also a battle of paradigms and exemplars within the hermeneutics of suspicion. We need think only of Tylor's intellectualist account of religion, Freud's psychoanalytic account, and Durkheim's sociological analysis, to realise how radical the battle of the paradigms can be. When we consider this complex situation, it is not surprising that many thinkers, such as Daniel L. Pals, conclude that no single interpretation is going to succeed in giving a complete, all-inclusive account of religion: When we look back on it from the present, this hope of forming a single theory of all religions astonishes us by its naive overcon®dence. Thoughtful 2 3

J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1996, p. x. Ibid.

The present contenders

3

observers today are inclined to be far more modest. Impressive books have been written just to explain one belief of one religion or to compare a single feature ± a speci®c custom or ritual ± of one religion with something similar in another.4

Despite this complexity, Pals admits that all-embracing theories continue to prove attractive. Within the hermeneutics of recollection religionists are still ìnspired by the scienti®c ideal of a general theory that could draw many different phenomena into one coherent, widely illuminating pattern'.5 What of the all-embracing naturalistic explanations of the hermeneutics of suspicion? Pals argues that these explanations `need not be valid to be of value'. In religion as in other ®elds of inquiry, a suggestive original theory can, even in failure, stimulate new inquiry, or reformulate problems in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings. Thus, even if most of what they have said were found to be in error, the theorists . . . would still deserve our time and attention, for their ideas and interpretations have often ®ltered beyond the sphere of religion alone to affect our literature, philosophy, history, politics, art, psychology, and, indeed, almost every realm of modern thought.6

Although these cultural consequences cannot be denied, ùnderstanding religion' cannot be found among the `fruitful new understandings' if, in fact, most of what the theories say about religion is in error. In this context, to use Peter Berger's phrase, ìmaginary sticks can draw real blood'.7 What is vital is not to bleed to death, but to learn from the wounds of confusion. These wounds may go deep, but fruitful new understandings emerge through the process of healing them. Pals' ®nal verdict is that, whether in the hermeneutics of recollection, or the hermeneutics of suspicion, attempts at general theories are too ambitious, and that the future in religious studies lies with the particularists.8 Why not settle for this suitably modest conclusion? The philosophical reason for not doing so is that it does not address the conceptual issues which separate the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion. These conceptual issues re-emerge no matter how particularist research programmes 4 5 7 8

Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996, p. 9. 6 Ibid. Ibid. Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1975, p. 185. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, `Conclusion'.

4


in religious studies become. Pals admits that in this context many have still found naturalistic explanations of religion `to be extraordinarily useful simply by scaling back their claims from the whole to the part'.9 He has in mind those who are prepared to admit that such explanations are only partially correct. The strategy he recommends, however, has been used by Kai Nielsen, and others, to reestablish the comprehensive claims of the hermeneutics of suspicion.10 They admit that no single reductionist theory can account for every religious belief and practice, but still maintain that every aspect of religious belief and practice can be explained by some reductionist theory. What Tylor, Freud and Durkheim cannot achieve individually, they can achieve collectively. In this way, a general thesis is re-established: it is possible to give a naturalistic explanation of every aspect of religious belief and practice. Nor can Pals escape the ambitions of such a claim by saying, as he does at the end of his book, that `religion in the end seems to be a matter not of impersonal processes that can be known with certainty because they have been scripted by the laws of nature, but of personal beliefs and behaviours that can only be plausibly explained because they have arisen from complex, partly free and partly conditioned choices of human agents'.11 This is because reductionist theories of a psychological or sociological persuasion will claim to provide an analysis of these choices which is more fundamental than the reasons offered by the agents themselves. Those who practise the hermeneutics of recollection will, of course, continue to deny this claim. 2 the hermeneutics of contemplation In this book, I want to demonstrate the need to go beyond the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of contemplation. The last is simply an application to religion of the more general contemplative character of philosophy itself.12 This philosophical contemplation waits on the role concepts play in human life. In doing so, it faces head-on the 9 10

11 12

Ibid., p. 281. Kai Nielsen, Ìs Religion ``the Opium of the People?'' Marxianism and Religion' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, pp. 282 ±3. See D. Z. Phillips, Philosophy's Cool Place, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999.

The hermeneutics of contemplation

5

fundamental conceptual issues separating the hermeneutics of `recollection' and `suspicion'. Can religion be explained in nonreligious terms? Is religion a surface phenomenon which can be analysed in terms more real and fundamental than its own? Does religion have anything to say which is irreducibly religious? At this stage, I am stating conclusions dogmatically. Their justi®cation will be found in the chapters which follow. I adopt this strategy so that methodological issues may be addressed at the outset. Pals is correct in saying that the outcome of our enquiries will not be an all-embracing theory. In certain cases, reductionist, naturalistic explanations will prove to have an application. Would it not be surprising if they had no point at all? But, as we have seen, these explanations make far more ambitious claims. They claim that all religious beliefs are illusory. Waiting on such beliefs, contemplating their sense, shows that this general claim cannot be sustained. It follows that the hermeneutics of contemplation is opposed to the general claims of the hermeneutics of suspicion, without denying that some of its suspicions are well-founded. If the hermeneutics of contemplation goes beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion, does it go beyond the hermeneutics of recollection? Some will see in it no more than the hermeneutics of recollection in disguise. No philosophical progress can be made until I disabuse the reader of this accusation. Why should some harbour this thought? There are two reasons which need to be examined. The ®rst reason for thinking that the hermeneutics of contemplation is no more than the hermeneutics of recollection in disguise is the thought that the former is still a subtle form of apologetics. As we have seen, the hermeneutics of recollection has the retrieval of faith as its aim; a faith purged by criticism and, hence, one that can be advocated. The religious interpreter lives in the expectancy of a new Word which has a message for him. But this cannot be said of the hermeneutics of contemplation. To contemplate possibilities of sense is different from advocating those possibilities, or from ®nding a faith to live by in them. Philosophical, conceptual elucidation is different from, and wider than, personal appropriation. This has the consequence of opposing that theoretical atheism which claims that all religious beliefs are meaningless. Philosophical contemplation rescues atheism, as much as belief, from distortions of itself. We still need not deny that there are unbelievers who see no sense in religion, and religious believers who see no sense in atheism. An

6


appreciation of the virtues of philosophical contemplation would lead to a different attitude towards such blindness. Just as there is a difference between saying, Ì do not appreciate chamber music', and saying, `There is nothing in chamber music to appreciate', so there would be a difference between someone's saying that they cannot see any sense in either religion or atheism, and the claim that there is no sense in either to be appreciated. There is a sense in which ®nding meaning in religious belief or atheism is to have the possibility of belief or unbelief in one. This is not to confess either belief or unbelief. Rather, it is the ability to appreciate how human life can be seen like that. That need not imply that one will see one's own life in that way, or say Àmen' to it. Reactions to what is appreciated will vary a great deal, including the possibility of being appalled by it. Those who do not think religion can survive intellectual enquiry will not be able to admit the distinction I am making. This is why Preus argues that the distinction between theology as `prescriptive' and religious studies as `descriptive', drawn to justify the latter in secular universities, does not go far enough. Preus claims that èven when one only ``describes'' religious traditions, the self-understandings and self-justi®cations of these traditions are inevitably included in any adequate description. The result is that a subtle form of apologetic may result, since the message conveyed is that the (only) right and proper explanations of religions are of the sort given by believers.'13 If it can be shown, through examples, that religious concepts can have an irreducibly religious sense, why should that be any kind of advocacy? Preus says, `The goal, after all, is not to legitimate religion but to explain it.'14 But why should explanation, in the form of conceptual elucidation, be thought to show, always, that religion is illegitimate? Surely, our primary intellectual obligation is to recognise sense where sense is present. If that sense is a religious sense, so be it. In anthropology this is achieved in ìnterpretative' accounts of religious beliefs and practices, which endeavour to bring them alive to the reader in their own terms. Pals gives the work of Clifford Geertz as an example. The aim of Geertz's work is not apologetic. Pals says that Geertz opposes reductionist theories of religion, not 13 14

Preus, Explaining Religion, p. xx. Ibid.

The hermeneutics of contemplation

7

because they `present any challenge to his personal beliefs, but simply because in his view they do not adequately explain the subject of religion'.15 Personally, Geertz is agnostic about religion. The interpretative understanding he achieves in anthropology has a parallel, in philosophy, in the hermeneutics of contemplation. The second reason for thinking that the hermeneutics of contemplation is no more than the hermeneutics of recollection in disguise is the thought that it is simply a defensive strategy against the intellectual challenge of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Preus would, no doubt, describe it in the same way as he describes religious explanations: `The very last bastion of theology (or religious thought) was, and is, its claim to be able to explain itself on `ìts own terms''.'16 For Preus, it is an attempt to thwart the Enlightenment intellectual ambition to explain everything; an ambition whose exuberant spirit was expressed by Charles Dupuis when he exclaimed: `The genius of a man capable of explaining religion seems to me to be of a higher order than that of a founder of religion. And that is the glory to which I aspire.'17 One contributory factor to thinking of the hermeneutics of contemplation as a defensive strategy against the hermeneutics of suspicion is the confusion of thinking of religious beliefs as explanations of religion to be set against the reductive explanations of the latter. What do the religious explanations look like? Preus suggests that the explanation of religion offered is some `supernatural (or some objective transcendent) ground of religion . . . assumed as the really existent and generative source of religious language'.18 He argues that ònce supernatural cases have been renounced . . . the student of religion is forced to search out psychological and historical causes'.19 But Preus' way of putting the matter cannot be right. A belief that a religion is God-given is not an explanation of that religion, since it is itself a religious belief. What is happening here is that the use of a religious perspective is being confused with talk about the perspective, as though one were grounding it in some simple way. Similarly, to say that miracles are of God is not to 15 16 17 18 19

Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, p. 280. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. xvi. Quoted by Preus, Explaining Religion, p. xvi, from Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, New York: Atheneum 1967, p. 243. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. xvi. Ibid., p. 40.

8


explain miracles. `Miracles' is already a religious conception; they are revelatory of God. Again, believers do not praise God because he is their Creator, since `Creator' is already a term of praise. Saying a religion is from God is not like tracing the author of a book. It is rather to say Àmen' to it; it is itself a religious or spiritual judgement. Thus we cannot say, as Van Harvey does, `that religious ``sense'' . . . itself contains an implied explanation because this sense is alleged to arise out of or to have been caused by contact with an unseen presence, a ``More'' '.20 `Contact with an unseen presence' does not explain the religious sense, since it is that religious sense which gives meaning to what might be meant by `contact with an unseen presence'. It is as though we explained prayer as `talking to God', when it is the grammar of prayer which shows what such talk comes to.21 Confession is being confused with explanation. Thus we have seen that religious beliefs are not counterexplanations to the explanations found in the hermeneutics of suspicion. In that sense they are not explanations at all, and cannot therefore be seen as defensive explanatory strategies to avoid the threat of naturalistic explanations of religion. 3 beyond interpretation to contemplation So far, I have argued against the accusation that the hermeneutics of contemplation is the hermeneutics of recollection in disguise. I have tried to show that its aims are not apologetic, and that it is not a defensive strategy against the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nevertheless, it may still be felt that there is a task of interpreting religion which the hermeneutics of suspicion attempts, at least, but which the hermeneutics of contemplation, like the hermeneutics of recollection, shies away from. What are the philosophical roots of this misgiving? Many are to be found in the assumption that all concepts are interpretations, and the consequent failure to realise when interpretation has to stop. From the standpoint of the hermeneutics of suspicion, it often seems that religious thinkers evade criticism of their religious explanations by appealing to a notion of religious experience which 20 21

Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the interpretation of religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 94. This is a major theme in my The Concept of Prayer, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Schocken Books 1965; paperback edn Oxford: Blackwell pbk. 1981.

Beyond interpretation to contemplation

9

is independent of all concepts. Schleiermacher is often held to be guilty of such an appeal. But, even if we said, with Kierkegaard, that proof is from the emotions, this would not by-pass concepts since, as Van Harvey points out, `we cannot even ascribe emotions to ourselves or to others without concepts'.22 Why should this emphasis on concepts be so important for the hermeneutics of suspicion? The answer is to be found in the ways it identi®es `concepts' with ìnterpretations'. Since interpretations are essentially contestable, it would follow that religious concepts are contestable interpretations. But the identi®cation of `concepts' with ìnterpretations' is logically problematic. It is an identi®cation which Harvey seems to endorse. He makes the general claim `that emotions themselves arise out of or are functions of interpretations'.23 He is able to say this because he holds that às there are no theory-free perceptions, so there are no uninterpreted emotions. We have learned that interpretation ``goes all the way down'' so to speak.' 24 If we have learned this, we need to unlearn it as soon as possible. Interpretations, like theory-laden perceptions, are parasitic on concepts which are not interpretations, and on perceptions which are not theory-laden. For example, there are situations where we need to interpret whether someone is angry or sorrowful. But were there not situations in which what we mean by ànger' and `sorrow' does not call for interpretation, the call for interpretation, in other contexts, would be unintelligible. If ànger' and `sorrow' were not appreciated by someone in the situations where no interpretation is called for, we would conclude that they did not understand what is meant by ànger' and `sorrow'. To be sure, we can be puzzled, philosophically, about such concepts and that may call for elucidation. Such elucidation, however, seeks to give a perspicuous representation of the role those concepts actually have, not to get to something `behind' them of which they are supposed to be interpretations. When the concepts in question are religious concepts, contemplating them, too, will involve making clear the use they actually have, not searching for something `behind' them which they are supposed to interpret. These logical points have a crucial bearing on the practice of the hermeneutics of suspicion. That this is so can be brought out by an 22 23

Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 93. 24 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 93± 4.

10


examination of the claims of one in¯uential example, namely, Wayne Proudfoot's treatment of religious experience.25 The problematic assumptions on which this treatment is based appear early in the book's introduction. Proudfoot draws attention to what he regards as the successful attack on the alleged metaphysical basis of religion in the work of Hume and Kant, and says: `The turn to religious experience was motivated in large measure by an interest in freeing religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs.'26 Schleiermacher's On Religion had this explicit aim, and resulted in the claim that: Religion is grounded in a moment of experience that is intrinsically religious, so it need not be justi®ed by metaphysical argument, by the kind of evidence considered by proponents of the design argument, or by appeals to its importance for the moral life. Moreover, because religion is autonomous, all possible con¯ict between religion and science or morality is precluded. Any attempt to assimilate religion to nonreligious phenomena is an attempt to reduce it to something other than it is. Reductionism is thus the chief error to be avoided in the study of religion.27

There is no doubt that Schleiermacher's claim is too ambitious. Granting the value of freeing religion from certain metaphysical criticism, this does not secure, at a stroke, the immunity from criticism Proudfoot describes. This is because, as William James showed in his Varieties of Religious Experience, religion is a mixed bag. `Religious experience' covers many different phenomena. The hermeneutics of contemplation insists on saying that what these phenomena come to is discovered by paying attention to the place they occupy in human life. As we shall see later, nothing is presumed about whether this place reveals confusion or contradictions.28 This is because the hermeneutics of contemplation is not a presupposition one brings to the phenomena in question, but the result of giving the phenomena the attention they deserve. Proudfoot cannot give this kind of attention to the phenomena because he does approach them with a confused philosophical con¯ation of `concepts' and ìnterpretations'. Proudfoot is critical, as Harvey is, of the claim that the moment of religious experience is linguistically unmediated. This claim then 25 26 28

Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1985. 27 Ibid., pp. xiii±xiv. Ibid., pp. xiii. See pp. 13 ±17.


11

develops into the further assumption that such a `moment' can only be appreciated by direct acquaintance, and cannot be understood by the non-religious. We have already seen that these claims are not made by the hermeneutics of contemplation.29 Unfortunately, however, Proudfoot then argues that all concepts are interpretations. This stems from his Kantianism and the assumption that `we have no direct grasp of the objects of our experience. These objects can be apprehended only through the forms of sense and the categories that structure the judgements we make.' 30 As we know, Kant placed these categories in human consciousness, whereas we have argued that they have their life in the practice of human beings, thus averting the scepticism which reappears in Kant in the ontological gap between `the objects of experience' as they are in themselves, and our indirect grasp of them. Our indirect grasp of what? It has been justly said that Kant reduces our world to one of appearances. Unless one recognises that the need for interpretation comes to an end, that interpretation is not always called for, one will be led back to the very notion of unmediated experience which, in this context, Proudfoot rightly ®nds confused. If we ask, `What does a concept interpret?' the reply cannot be in terms of another concept. Or, at least, if it is, then, on Proudfoot's view, the same question can be asked of it. To break the hold of this question one would have to invoke the unfortunate notion of concept-free experience. Proudfoot offers us a false choice between interpretative concepts and unmediated experience. While rejecting the latter notion, we do not deny the former. The logical point to which we return is that re¯ective interpretations are dependent on concepts which are not further interpretations, and which are invoked in the course of the interpretations we are offered. To reject concepts in these noninterpretative contexts would not be to reject an interpretation, but to show that one did not understand the concepts in question. The neglect of these logical issues (which does not mean that Proudfoot does not mention them) makes possible a distinction which is central in the hermeneutics of suspicion. Proudfoot calls it the distinction between descriptive reductionism and explanatory reductionism, and claims that I ignore it in my Religion Without Explanation. Proudfoot wants to argue that there is a genuine fear in 29 30

For further evidence of this see section 6 of this chapter. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, p. 3. This does not mean that Proudfoot endorses Kant's conclusions in the philosophy of religion.

12


the fear of reductionism, realised in descriptive reductionism, but that this is confused with a defence of religion, for apologetic purposes, in the rejection of the possibility of explanatory reductionism. What does Proudfoot mean by descriptive reductionism? He de®nes it as `the failure to identify an emotion, practice, or experience under the description by which the subject identi®es it. This is indeed unacceptable. To describe an experience in nonreligious terms when the subject himself describes it in religious terms is to misidentify the experience, or to attend to another experience altogether.'31 As far as description is concerned, the speaker's account is normative. Proudfoot says: This is a kind of ®rst-person privilege which has nothing at all to do with immediate access to mental states versus mediated inferential reasoning. It is strictly a matter of intentionality. It is like the distinction between the words of a speaker and those of one who reports what he says. The speaker's meaning and his choice of words to express that meaning, are normative for the reporter . . . If . . . an observer or analyst describes the experience of another, he must formulate it in terms that would be acknowledged by the subject.32

The rejection of descriptive reductionism, however, in no way entails the rejection of explanatory reductionism, according to Proudfoot. What does this latter type of reductionism entail? Initially, Proudfoot makes his thesis far too easy to defend, since he de®nes explanatory reductionism as òffering an explanation of an experience in terms that are not those of the subject and that might not meet with his approval. This is perfectly justi®able and is, in fact, normal procedure. The explanandum is set in a new context, whether that be one of covering laws and initial conditions, narrative structure, or some other explanatory model. The terms of the explanation need not be familiar or acceptable to the subject. Historians offer explanations of past events by employing such concepts as socialization, ideology, means of production, and feudal economy. Seldom can these concepts properly be ascribed to the people whose behaviour is the object of the historian's study. But that poses no problem. The explanation stands or falls according to how well it can account for all the available evidence.33

This description does not get to the heart of what is normally meant by explanatory reductionism. In fact, it is not apparent yet 31

Ibid., p. 196.

32

Ibid., pp. 194 ±5.

33

Ibid., pp. 197.


13

what its connection with reductionism is supposed to be. An intellectual interest in activities which are not, primarily, intellectual, will, of course, bring to bear on those activities concepts which are not used, or, maybe, not understood by participants in those activities. In that sense the enquiry is wider than the activity being investigated. This is because it includes concepts which belong to the interests of the intellectual enquiry in question, whether it be a science, history, sociology, psychology, or whatever. Indeed, this is equally true of philosophical discussions of religion. In those discussions philosophical terms are used which may mean nothing to believers. This is because puzzlement about religious concepts will have to do with an inter-play between religious activities and assumptions that go deep in the history of philosophy. The conclusions of these enquiries may bear on religion in all sorts of ways. But if, in these enquiries, there is genuine puzzlement about religious concepts, then surely it will be imperative to appreciate what the use of those concepts in human life comes to. This does not preclude coming across confusion and superstition. Proudfoot says that it is silly to deny that there can be non-religious explanations of religion. It certainly is, but who has done so? In any case, it is equally silly to think that in saying this, one is endorsing explanatory reductionism. Explanatory reductionism makes far more ambitious claims. It is not suf®cient to say of it, as Proudfoot does, that `The terms of explanation need not be familiar or acceptable to the subject',34 since it certainly will not be acceptable to anyone who wants to remain a believer. This is because explanatory reductionism advances the general thesis that religious beliefs are the product of illusion. That is why it is the hallmark of the hermeneutics of suspicion. When Proudfoot accuses writers of confusing descriptive reductionism and explanatory reductionism he tends to attribute a speci®c motive to them at the same time. Speaking of my Religion Without Explanation, he says that ìt provides a clear illustration of the confusion of the concepts of descriptive and explanatory reduction in the service of an apologetic or protective strategy.'35 We have already seen, however, that the hermeneutics of contemplation does not have the apologetic concerns which characterise the hermeneutics of recollection. Further, Proudfoot does not do justice to the kind 34 35

My italics. Proudfoot, Religious Experience, p. 200.

14


of conceptual challenge found in the hermeneutics of suspicion. He claims: `Phillips argues that any attempt to explain religious experience, belief, or practice is reductive and is for that reason to be rejected.'36 I argue no such thing. This absurd thesis would eliminate, at a stroke, all intellectual explanations of religion. Proudfoot gets it right in his next sentence: `He devotes the ®rst half of his book to a brief survey of what he takes to be reductionist accounts of religion and the second half to an elucidation of religious phenomena which avoids reductionism.'37 In other words, reductionist analyses are explanations of religion, but all explanations are not reductionist. But what is the core of a reductionist explanation? Proudfoot treats the views of Durkheim and Freud as though they were hypotheses which may be true or false. According to him, the masters of suspicion know full well that religious believers do not describe what they do in terms of the reductive analyses, and that it is disingenuous of me to suggest that they do. It would indeed be disingenuous had I accused the reductionists of descriptive reductionism. My claim is that explanatory reductionism makes the general claim that, after analyses of various kinds, religious belief will be seen to be necessarily illusory. This is what is missed when Proudfoot says of Durkheim: Òne might disagree with Durkheim's hypothesis . . . But the subject's explanation may not be the correct one; it may be that the correct explanation requires no reference to religious realities.'38 In reductionist analyses there is no question that this may be the case. For them, religious beliefs cannot be what believers say they are, because they are not said to be hypotheses which simply happen to be false, but could conceivably be true. Rather, the beliefs are said to be the products of illusion, conceptual confusions which sociological or psychoanalytic analyses may bring out. The authors of reductionist analyses stand in the legacy of Hume, a master of conceptual suspicion. It was in this philosophical context that I discussed the reductionist analyses. The philosophical roots and impulse of these analyses are well captured by John Cook when he says, in response to the view that whether religious beliefs are true is an open question: This seems like an eminently sensible view to take ± so long as it is assumed that religious beliefs are either true or false, i.e., that either there are or there are not ancestral spirits who deserve human consideration, that either 36

Ibid.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid., p. 201.


15

reincarnation occurs or it does not occur, etc. Yet this is not how philosophers generally see the matter. Take the matter of disembodied existence after death. Philosophers nowadays do not regard this as an obviously possible state of affairs which may or may not occur. On the contrary, viewed philosophically the issue is whether this idea makes any sense at all, and at least most philosophers think it has been shown that the idea does not make sense. Extrapolating from this example, then, what I am suggesting is that if we think carefully about gods and spirits and so on, we may ®nd that these ideas are in some way confused, unintelligible. If they are, then, of course there is no possibility that gods and spirits exist.39

That is the voice of explanatory reductionism. Its conceptual character is a dimension which is not accorded the place it deserves in Proudfoot's discussion. The distinction between a false hypothesis and a conceptual confusion is crucial, since it determines what kind of discussion questions call for. It has to do with the distinction between direct and indirect communication. When we discuss competing hypotheses we are involved in direct communication, weighing and assessing the evidence in ways laid down by the relevant mode of investigation. Conceptual confusion cannot be dealt with in the same way. Direct refutation is impossible, since that assumes that the confused one is saying something. Indirect communication consists in going to the confused one where he is, and getting him to retrace the steps which led to the confusion. There is no road back from confusion without revealing the road which led to it. And that road is philosophical discussion. For example, it is clear that Cook thinks that if I could be led to re¯ect carefully enough I would be led to see that certain central religious beliefs are confused. I, on the other hand, think that if Cook were to re¯ect more carefully, he would no longer want to hold his thesis in the general way he does. How are such matters to be settled? There is no alternative to discussion, and that is not a matter of technique. Proudfoot seems to think that I hold a general thesis which is the opposite of the one I attribute to explanatory reductionism. He often suggests that I hold that all reductive analyses are confused, and that no religious beliefs are or could be confused. Neither in Religion Without Explanation nor in the present work do I present such a view. Whether religious beliefs are confused or not depends on the kind of belief they are, and the same can be said of reductive analyses. 39

John Cook, `Magic, Witchcraft and Science', Philosophical Investigations, Jan. 1983, p. 35.

16


Sometimes, as in the case of Durkheim, I argue that there is a fundamental logical confusion at the very core of his system. Brie¯y put, he argues that human activities and interests are a function of social solidarity. I reply: it is not our social bonds which explain our interests, but our interests which characterise our bonds.40 In the case of Freud, my argument is different. I mention a number of ways in which psychoanalysis may be seen positively. On the other hand, I do ®nd conceptual confusions in Freud's efforts to extrapolate from his psychoanalytic practice general theories concerning culture, morals, and religion.41 My observations do not share the craving for generality which characterises the hermeneutics of suspicion. That is one reason, among others, as to why we should be suspicious of suspicion.42 An essential part of that much-needed suspicion, as we have seen, is to question the con¯ation of `concepts' with ìnterpretations', a con¯ation which runs throughout Proudfoot's discussion. Harvey thinks that Proudfoot's distinction between descriptive reductionism and explanatory reductionism ìs crucial for the discipline of religious studies because it is essential that an investigator has some way of understanding religious experience without necessarily agreeing with its implied aims. Otherwise, a Buddhist investigator could not understand Judaism, a Muslim could not understand Judaism, or a Christian ancestor worship. Understanding cannot be identi®ed with agreement if there is to be any intellectual enterprise named religious studies.'43 This simply takes us back, however, to the confused equation of the hermeneutics of contemplation with the hermeneutics of recollection, and the equally confused equation of ùnderstanding' with àgreement'. To elucidate the meanings of religious beliefs and practices is not to adhere to them, confess them, or say Àmen' to them, any more than this is the case with the elucidation of moral perspectives other than our own. The hermeneutics of contemplation would endeavour to give perspicuous representations of Buddhist, Muslim, Christian and ancestor worship beliefs and practices, including, no doubt, their mixed character, together with equal representations of legitimate and confused examples of explanatory reductionism. Proudfoot's general distinction between descriptive reductionism and explanatory reductionism, so far from being essential to religious studies, obscures 40 42 43

41 See chapter 8. See chapter 9. See section 5 of the present chapter. Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 94.

Concept-formation

17

possibilities of meaning, and creates an obstacle to the hermeneutics of contemplation on which, I believe, the future philosophical health of religious studies depends. 4 beyond frameworks and grids to concept-formation I have been arguing for the virtues of the hermeneutics of contemplation in understanding the sense in which philosophy investigates reality. That sense has to do with the reality of concepts in our lives or, better, with the life our concepts have. I have argued that an obstacle to appreciating this sense is the confused equation of concepts with interpretations; a confusion which invites the question: Ìnterpretation of what?' It is said sometimes that clusters of concepts make up our perspectives on the world. These are sometimes called grids or frameworks, and the dif®culty is that they, too, are often regarded as interpretations, or ways in which we organise our experience, so giving rise to our familiar dif®culties. For those who think in this way, science will be said to be one such grid or framework, and religion will be said to be another. All our relations to the world, on this view, will be said to be scheme-bound. Once a multiplicity of frameworks or grids is admitted, it may seem as though the issue of the truth or falsity, adequacy or inadequacy, of a particular framework or grid is bound to arise. Such a conjecture is met by the Kantian-like answer we have already encountered. 44 Since there is no such thing as unmediated knowledge of the world, our mediated knowledge is via our conceptual frameworks which are the conditions of the possibility of truth and falsity. Therefore, it is said, we cannot ask whether the frameworks or grids themselves are true or false. Harvey is suspicious of this argument for two reasons. First, he is worried in case this is a disguised apologetics, which makes `possible two defensive strategies'.45 First, it enables religion to withdraw from any test of truth and falsity. Second, the distinctiveness of the religious framework may be justi®ed in terms of the distinctiveness of its subject-matter ± the sacred, which is simply not available to non-believers. 44 45

See p. 11. Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 251.

18


Second, Harvey has logical concerns about this use of `frameworks' and `grids' which, it seems to me, are more important than his concern about defensive strategies. I shall mention three of them. First, it is said, sometimes, that we adopt or choose our conceptual frameworks or grids. What kind of àdoption' or `choice' is this supposed to be? When does it occur? Second, it is said, sometimes, that the frameworks or grids modify, or even distort, reality. In that case, we can never know what the world is really like, and the door to scepticism is wide open. (By the way, the same door is wide open if we hold Harvey's view of concepts as interpretations.) A third dif®culty arises from the second, namely, the possibility that a conceptual framework distorts reality and is, therefore, false. Harvey ®nds dif®culty with the suggestion that perception, said to be one of the conceptual frameworks, could be held to be completely false. On the other hand, he ®nds no comfort for religion in this fact because there is no analogy between them. Even if we said that perception is a limited perspective, in some sense, it cannot be denied that the judgements we make are based on data we agree on. Religion, on the other hand, cannot command this agreement. How are these dif®culties to be avoided? The answer is that facing them takes us back to the issue of concept-formation, and the problematic equation of `concepts' with ìnterpretations'. Doing so enables us to see the sense in which philosophy is concerned with reality, including those notions of reality involved in religion. Agreement in reactions is central in concept-formation. Consider our colour concepts as an example. It is essential to distinguish between talking about our concepts, say, the meaning of `red', and the actual judgements which fall under the concept, such as, `This box is red' or `This box is not red'. If the meaning of `red' kept changing, these judgements would not be possible. But when the judgements are made, one is not saying anything about the meaning of `red'. One is saying something about the colour of the box. Similarly, if the meaning of `holiness' kept changing, we could not judge a person to be, or not to be, holy. But when we make the judgement we are not saying anything about the meaning of holiness, one is saying something about the person. As Harvey points out, the disanalogy is in the fact that whereas there is no disagreement about the meaning of `red', there is disagreement between different concepts of holiness, and in the fact that some have no use for such concepts at all.

Concept-formation

19

Why is the distinction between concepts and the substantive judgements we make in terms of them so important for the nature of philosophical enquiry? The answer is that philosophical enquiry is about the reality of our concepts. Although the way we make substantive judgements will, of course, be part of that enquiry, philosophy is not a way of arriving at those judgements. When we raise the question of the reality of physical objects, colours, or religion, we are contemplating the sense which these concepts have, which will include, of course, the question of what judgements of truth and falsity come to in connection with them. But when someone says, `There is a box in the room', `The box is red', or `Thou art God', he is not saying anything about the meaning of concepts, but is saying what is in the room, describing the colour of a box, and responding to God in a confession. Harvey asks ®ve questions about conceptual frameworks or grids. If we ask these same questions of concept-formation instead, I think we'll ®nd that discussing them advances further our understanding of the sense in which philosophy is concerned with the life of our concepts. First, Harvey asks whether it makes sense to talk of choosing or adopting conceptual frameworks or grids. If we ask the same question about òur agreement in concepts', the notions of choice and adoption remain problematic. We do not choose to agree in order that conceptual continuity be established. Our agreement is shown in our reactions, but we do not agree to react. It is not something which occurs logically, or temporally prior to our reactions. To think otherwise would be, in Wittgenstein's phrase, to sublime the logic of a language; that is, to place the decision to agree on our concepts outside any context in which such agreement could have sense. It is similar to the confusion involved in the notion of a social contract in political philosophy. It is supposed to be a contract which makes possible agreement between citizens as to political obligation. Yet, by saying that people agree to such a contract one invokes, prior to the contract, the very thing which the contract is supposed to make possible. The same dif®culty emerges in any instrumental conception of language. As we saw, it is said that we use conceptual grids and frameworks to organise our experience. Talk of ùsing language' has sense in speci®c contexts. We may say of someone that he used language well to make his point. But the philosophical claim we are

20


considering wants to speak of using language as a whole for purposes of organisation prior to its existence. Yet talk of such òrganisation' presupposes the very use of language it was supposed to explain. The same logical dif®culties arise if, as some sociologists of knowledge have done, we attribute motives to this organisation of experience by means of language. The motives invoked, like òrganising', presuppose the very language they are meant to explain.46 In his second question, Harvey asks whether a person can use two conceptual frameworks at the same time; for example, a scienti®c framework and a religious framework. What if these frameworks contradict each other? The relevance of the question to the hermeneutics of suspicion is obvious. Preus, for example, sees religion as a remnant from a pre-scienti®c age, and religious beliefs as ¯ying in the face of what we now know to be the case. Only ignorance and superstition stand in the way of acknowledging this fact. The dif®culty with the second question is its generality, and the equally general answer it expects. In terms of concept-formation, we would be asked whether scienti®c and religious concepts contradict each other. Peter Winch has shown why no general answer to such questions can be given.47 Contradictions must be dealt with if and when they arise. Whether they arise in the case of science and religion depends on the role scienti®c and religious concepts play in the lives of individuals. The philosophical superstition is in the claim that they must arise, or that contradictions have a latent existence before the circumstances in which they emerge. When contradictions do arise they are indeed problematic and must be settled at some price or other. Winch points out that in the case of the Liar Paradox the price is that we rule out certain ®rst person uses of the verb `to lie'. For the elder Gosse, an evangelical and an eminent geologist, the dating of fossils did create a contradiction with his view of Creation for which he accepted, on Biblical authority, a much later date. He attempted to resolve it by saying that God had created the world at the time decreed by the Bible, but with objects which looked much older. The price he paid was his demise as a serious scientist.48 For others, however, there need be no such contradiction. They do not 46 47 48

These dif®culties will be discussed further in considering the work of Peter Berger in chapter 9. See Peter Winch, `Darwin and Contradiction' in Trying to Make Sense, Oxford: Blackwell 1987. See Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1970.

Concept-formation

21

see Genesis in competition with science, and do not think, for example, that a scienti®c explanation of the dawn con¯icts with seeing the dawn as God's gift of a day. Winch's point about the particularity of the contradictions does not deny that more general tensions may exist between science and religion in a culture. Indeed, where belief in miracles is concerned, he thinks this is true of our own.49 But this is not because of a contradiction between belief in the laws of nature, and a belief in miracles as violations of those laws (a dubious notion, in itself ). Rather, the tension is between the attitude which science asks of us in response to nature, one of explaining, examining, etc., and the wonder involved in response to a miracle which may ask one to rule out or desist from the very responses naturalistic enquiry asks of us. If the latter responses are dominant in a culture, it may be increasingly dif®cult to see miracles in nature. Such is the case with us, according to Winch. Further, as Rhees points out, even if we allow that extraordinary events did happen, such as the raising of Lazarus, and even if they inspire awe and humility in us, we are still likely to wonder at them as extraordinary natural events.50 It is not to see them as miracles. To see them in that way would be to see them as revelations of God; something that they clearly are in the Biblical accounts. That sense of revelation, however, may be eroded, to a large extent, in our culture. This discussion, which cannot be taken further at this point, shows how there can certainly be a con¯ict between science and religion which is not a matter of one contradicting the other. What it adds to the discussion, at a cultural level, is the insight that whether such con¯ict occurs is often not a matter of individual choice. We may be born into a culture in which it is in the very air we breathe. By the generality of its claims, the hermeneutics of suspicion fails to do justice to the character of the contradictions between science and religion which may arise. 49

50

Peter Winch, `Ceasing to Exist' in Trying to Make Sense and Àsking Too Many Questions' in Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, eds., Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Basingstoke, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1995. For my discussions of these issues see `Waiting for the Vanishing Shed' in Wittgenstein and Religion, Basingstoke, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1993, and Òpen-Door Epistemology' in Recovering Religious Concepts, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan 2000. Rush Rhees, `Miracles' in Rush Rhees, On Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997.

22


Harvey's third question is whether, if religion is regarded as a conceptual framework, it can be regarded as true or false. Rephrasing the question in terms of concept-formation, we saw that it is judgements which are made under concepts which are true or false. Thus, within a religion we have judgements concerning what is and what is not of God. Those judgements are themselves religious judgements. As with moral concepts, however, judgements are not only made within religions, but between religions. Putting aside, for the moment, accusations of conceptual confusion or superstition, to call another religion false is also a religious or spiritual judgement. Harvey's question, I suspect, has more to do with those who, to use the original terminology, reject a whole conceptual framework; with those who, in terms of concepts, have no time for, and totally reject, any concept of God or of the divine. Can the word `false' be used in this context? Or rather: is it so used? All uses are not necessarily intelligible. As we shall see, there are those who call religion false because it is made up of false hypotheses about the world. I shall argue that this is itself a confused view of the nature of religious belief. But there are other uses of `false'. Some of these are `moral', as when religion is regarded as a false view of life, or a false conception of life. There are views of religion, however, which see it as riddled by conceptual confusion, in which case religious concepts would not be said to be `false' but meaningless. It is no accident, therefore, that, traditionally, atheism has held that religion is not false, but meaningless. Harvey's fourth question arises from an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of conceptual frameworks and grids. In the light of that acknowledgement, Harvey wonders how any framework or grid can be regarded as absolute. In terms of the revised terminology, given the obvious multiplicity and variety of value concepts, how can any of them be regarded as absolute? The answer is that this use of àbsolute' does not imply universality. It is the absolute of a measure; the status that measure has for the individual. Whether a measure is so regarded is itself the result of a moral or religious response, and cannot be determined by philosophy. Harvey's ®fth question is whether the adoption of a framework or grid is a matter of faith, and whether a clash of frameworks or grids is akin to those aesthetic disagreements which are notoriously dif®cult to resolve. In the context of concept-formation, the question gives rise to the dif®culty we encountered in discussing Harvey's ®rst

Suspicion about suspicion

23

question. There we faced the problem of what it means to speak of `decisions to adopt' in such contexts. The same dif®culty arises with the suggested use of `faith'. If the concept of faith has its sense in certain contexts, what does it mean to speak of having faith in those contexts? Once again, the logic of language is being sublimed in placing `faith' outside any context in which it could have an application. On the other hand, clashes in perspectival views of the world involving religion, such as those we discussed in answering Harvey's third question, have, in fact, far more in common with moral or aesthetic perspectival clashes than with disputes between competing theories or hypotheses. Wittgenstein drew analogies between logic and aesthetics; between seeking for the logicality of logic and seeking the ground of an aesthetic; between asking why we think as we do, and asking why the Egyptians paint as they do. 5 suspicion about suspicion In the contrast between the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion, the latter is often equated, by critics of religion, with the challenge of the intellect. Perhaps this is not surprising since, as Harvey says, that hermeneutic assumes `that the religious consciousness is bewitched by an illusion'.51 But what if, as general theories, the naturalistic explanations of religion are bewitched by illusion? What if we should be philosophically suspicious of their suspicions? In that case, the hermeneutics of contemplation will be a battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by such theories. In the discussions in this chapter I have said, repeatedly, that there are possibilities of religious sense that those theories cannot account for, and virtually ignore. Preus protests: `But possibilities come cheap and are no alternative to well-argued theories such as Freud's.'52 To some extent, that is fair comment. Examples need to be explored in detail. That is something I shall do in each chapter in providing counter-examples to the hermeneutics of suspicion. For that is what I am interested in ± possibilities of sense ± it is these which inspire the wonder which is an essential part of philosophical enquiry; 51 52

Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 1. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 211.

24


wonder at the fact that people have thought about human life in different ways, thought that such-and-such constituted problems, and that other things counted as solutions, or, perhaps, that to many questions there are no solutions. But, having said that, such matters are not even approached if prestigious methodological assumptions stand in the way. These have been my concern in this opening chapter. One assumption which deeply in¯uences the methodology of the hermeneutics of suspicion is that its practitioners fully understand religious phenomena. For the most part, they see themselves as bringing light into the darkness of religion. Pals reminds us that to regard them as detached scholars may be naive: The decidedly antireligious uses that Tylor and Frazer found for the comparative study of religion opened the way for the even more aggressive attacks of the three great reductionists . . . ± Freud, Durkheim and Marx. Like Frazer and Tylor, they, too, personally reject religion and dismiss it as a relic left over from ages of ignorance. Going a step farther, however, they proceed to explain how it has survived by tracing its origin to irrational or subconscious causes ± the neurotic psychology of the individual, economic injustice in the social order, or the idealization of community interests. Since religion cannot possibly be a normal and rational thing, such functional and reductive accounts of its survival appear to be the only ones possible. Atheism in this connection seems to lead naturally to reductionism.53

It may be replied, on behalf of the reductionists, that this is so because their theories are an accurate account of what religious beliefs come to. As I have said, perspicuous representations of counter-examples are part of the response to this claim. But the response in this book also contains something which one does not ®nd very often in discussions of naturalistic, reductionist theories of religion, namely, a demonstration of conceptual confusions in the theories based on their own terms of reference. Thus, in the chapters on Freud and Durkheim, as I have said, I shall show that their treatment of religion is confused even in psychoanalytic and sociological terms. Thus the theories are shown to be, not simply descriptively inaccurate, but also conceptually inadequate. Preus' closing remarks of his book express what he takes to be the virtues of naturalistic explanations of religion: The naturalistic approach is at once more modest and more ambitious 53

Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, p. 279.

Wittgensteinian Fideism

25

than the religious one: more modest because it is content to investigate the causes, motivations, meanings and impact of religious phenomena without pronouncing on their cosmic signi®cance for human destiny; ambitious, in that the study of religion tries to explain religion and to integrate its understanding into the other elements of culture to which it is related.54

To which it may be replied that the so-called modest approach is guilty of neglect, since to omit issues of cosmic signi®cance and human destiny is to ignore the very contexts which religion addresses. Harvey recognises that Feuerbach, in his later work, though suspicious of religion, realised full well that it is a response to the riddle of existence: `Who am I? What am I here for? What can I hope for? What sense can be made of the contingencies of life?' As to the more ambitious claim, we must postpone the details of our verdict until we examine naturalistic explanations in detail. But with respect to its claim to relate religion to other aspects of the culture, that is one shared by the hermeneutics of contemplation. One of my central themes will be that although there are distinctive religious meanings, these cannot be what they are independent of their relation to other aspects of human life and culture. 6 the hermeneutics of contemplation and wittgensteinian fideism There is one remaining obstacle which stands in the way of the contemplative attitude which must be addressed if the discussions of subsequent chapters are going to be entered into by the reader. This is an assumption which will prejudge their outcome before they begin, namely, that the hermeneutics of contemplation is to be equated with so-called Wittgensteinian Fideism. To make matters worse, I am the author said to be primarily associated with this latter position. It is regrettable, at this stage, that it has become necessary, once again, to point out the simple fact that no philosopher I know of has held the theses attributed to Wittgensteinian Fideism. The label has been in circulation for thirty-two years, originating in a paper under that title by Kai Nielsen published in Philosophy in 1967. In 1986, having let the label have a good run for its money, I undertook the boring, but necessary, task of providing straightforward textual 54

Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 211.

26


evidence which shows that I have never held the views attributed to me.55 After that, use of the label went into decline for a while. But it is hard to keep a good slogan down, or to expect those who use it to let mere facts to get in its way. There is new evidence that `Wittgensteinian Fideism' has a renewed currency, hence the need to repeat the rebuttals I have already provided. I shall not do so here with as much detail as I did previously, nor shall I repeat the survey of my accusers. What is essential, however, is to show how unscholarly a term `Wittgensteinian Fideism' is, since use of it can, has been, and is, used as an excuse for sidestepping the real issues raised by the hermeneutics of contemplation. Wittgensteinian Fideists are supposed to hold ®ve absurd theses which we must now review again. The ®rst of these is the view that religious beliefs are logically cut off from all other aspects of human life. In my ®rst book, published thirty-four years ago, I said, `Religious concepts . . . are not technical concepts; they are not cut off from the common experiences of human life: joy and sorrow, hope and despair. Because this is so, an attempt can be made to clarify their meaning. The idea of prayer as talking to God presents us with this task.'56 Commenting in 1986, I said: After all, the purpose of the whole book is to explore the connections which do exist between prayer and the events of human life. The fact of such connections is not contingently related to the meaning of prayer. How could God be thanked if there were nothing to thank God for? How could confessions be made to God if there were nothing to confess? How could petitions be made to God in the absence of purposes and desires? So far from denying the connections between prayer and these features of human life, I argued that if such connections are severed, the religious signi®cance of the `prayer' becomes problematic.57

The same point can be made about rituals. In short, one cannot have harvest festivals unless there are harvests. This is no isolated emphasis in The Concept of Prayer, but is repeated throughout my work. Indeed, my complaint against philosophical practitioners of the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion

55 56 57

See D. Z. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan 1986. See Chapter One. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer, p. 40. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, p. 10.


27

is that, so often, they do divorce religious beliefs from the human phenomena that lie behind them. The second thesis Wittgensteinian Fideists are supposed to hold is that religious belief can only be understood by religious believers. The consequences would be, of course, that any discussion of religion, other than one's own, would be a waste of time. I have said enough in the present chapter to make it obvious that this view is not mine, but thirty-three years ago I said: When a man prays to God for forgiveness, for example, his prayer would be worthless did it not arise from problems in his relationships with other people. These problems can be appreciated by the religious and the nonreligious alike. Because of such connections between religious and nonreligious activity, it is possible to convey the meaning of religious language to someone unfamiliar with it, even if all one achieves is to stop him talking nonsense.58

Ten years later I said: À person . . . may see the kind of thing atheism is and still reject it. Similarly, a man may see the kind of thing religious belief is and still call himself an atheist because he does not live by such beliefs.'59 And ten years later still I said: True, religious believers call obedience to God a form of understanding. It would follow that anyone who did not practise such obedience in his life, lacked that understanding. But a philosopher can understand what I have just said about religious understanding and give an account of how obedience to God differs from other kinds of obedience, without being a believer himself, that is, in this context, without being obedient to God.60

In a recent publication Paul Helm says that my emphasis on paying attention to the contexts in which religious concepts have their sense is one that no one is likely to disagree with.61 Of this it can be said that, as contemporary philosophy of religion shows, it is one thing to say this, and quite another to do it in one's philosophising. It cannot be said, at the moment, that the hermeneutics of contemplation holds the ®eld in the subject. Paul Helm goes on to say, however, that I also hold a far more controversial thesis, namely, that only religious believers understand religious belief.62 Enough said. Also, in the recent edition of an in¯uential collection in the 58 59 60 61 62

D. Z. Phillips, `God and Ought' in Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, London: S. C. M. Press 1966. Quoted in Belief, Change and Forms of Life, p. 11. D. Z. Phillips, Religion Without Explanation, Oxford: Blackwell 1976, p. 189. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, p. 12. See Paul Helm, Faith and Understanding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1998. See ibid.

28


philosophy of religion, the editors have a reference to so-called `Wittgensteinian Fideism'. The ®rst contributor to the section is Wittgenstein. So Wittgenstein, who was not a believer, is supposed to hold that only believers understand religious belief. Enough said, `Wittgensteinian Fideism' over. Or, rather, not enough said. The editors have a note which simply says: Fideists believe that a properly formed faith is not based on rational evidence and cannot be properly assessed by rational standards. Phillips' view is similar in that he thinks religious belief should not be assessed by the rational criteria used in science, traditional metaphysics, or our commonsense re¯ections about the world, or by other external standards.63

This simply begs the questions about `rationality' and ignores all but one of the claims made in the name of `Wittgensteinian Fideism'. In the course of the present work we will see, again and again, why views, for example, about contradiction or criticism, cannot be expressed in this general form. Although the accusations are in retreat, the term `Wittgensteinian Fideism' should be dropped in the interests of scholarship. The third view which Wittgensteinian Fideism is supposed to hold is that religious language determines what is and what is not meaningful in religion. On this view, there is said to be no Archimedean point from which we can judge a conceptual framework as a whole. We have already seen, in this chapter, that the notion of such a framework can be problematic, and we have concentrated on concept-formation instead. I have always recognised that religious concepts are a mixed bag: Religious believers make mistakes like anyone else. What they say, if it comes under the appropriate criteria of meaningfulness, must answer to these critics ± Yuri Gagarin's concept of God as an object that he would have observed, had it existed, during his ®rst space ¯ight [is confused]. It can be shown to be confused in two ways: ®rst, by reference to what one can reasonably expect to observe in space, and secondly, by what is meant by the reality of God. Nonsense remains nonsense even if we associate God's name with it.64

Thus we ®nd religious forms of superstition. We also ®nd conceptual confusions in religion, as when, for example, it is thought that sins 63 64

William Rowe and William Wainwright, eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, 3rd edn., Fortworth: Harcourt Brace 1998. Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, p. 13.


29

can be washed away like dirt.65 The fact that something is called religious, then, does not guarantee its meaningfulness. As will be evident in subsequent chapters, everything depends on what is shown in practice. The fourth thesis Wittgensteinian Fideists are supposed to hold is that religious beliefs cannot be criticised. But, as we can see from our previous remarks, certain religious beliefs can be criticised as superstitious or conceptually confused. Further, there is the possibility of criticisms of religion from anti-religious moral perspectives. There are also interreligious criticisms. Some will be called `false', `higher' or `lower'. But these are personal judgements.66 The ®fth view attributed to Wittgensteinian Fideism is that religious beliefs cannot be affected by personal, social or cultural events. The fear is that religion will be treated as a cultural ghetto, immune from the precariousness of discourse. In relation to my work it is easy to show that the fear has no foundation: Far from denying the effects of cultural change on religious pictures I have drawn attention to them. I said we have reason to distinguish between the case of the picture losing its hold for a given individual, with religious pictures losing their hold anyway, not through the fault of any particular individual, but because of changes in the culture. Certain religious pictures decline, and yet you can't ask `But whose fault is it that they are declining?' You can't trace the decline to the biographical details of the life of any single individual . . . a picture may die in a culture because believing is not an isolated activity. To call the belief a language-game can be misleading if it does suggest an isolated activity. Other cultural changes can affect people's worship. For example, in Brave New World there is a decline in the notion of moral responsibility. In such a society one can see, without too much dif®culty, how the notion of God as a Judge might also be in decline.67

In Through A Darkening Glass68 my main concern was the erosion of perspectives of various kinds, and in DramaÃu Gwenlyn Parry69 I discuss a Welsh dramatist's plays in which man's spiritual dwelling places decline from play to play. Not only, then, have I discussed the possibility of cultural threats 65 66 67

68 69

See `Primitive Reactions and the Reactions of Primitives' in Wittgenstein and Religion. See `Religion in Wittgenstein's Mirror' in Wittgenstein and Religion. `Belief and Loss of Belief ' (with J. R. Jones) in D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970, pp. 116± 20. Quoted in Belief, Change and Forms of Life, pp. 15 ± 16. Oxford and Notre Dame: Blackwell and University of Notre Dame Press 1982. Caernarfon: Pantycelyn Press 1982, 2nd edn 1995.

30


to religious belief, but I have also criticised various attempts to make religion logically immune from such threats. In Chapter Five of Belief, Change and Forms of Life, I discuss three comforting pictures which try to do precisely that. I called the ®rst `religious individualism', the view that the heart is a secret place where a relationship with God is immune to all that surrounds it. But if certain possibilities of sense are eroded, the heart will be as shabby or shoddy as its surroundings. I called the second comforting picture, `religious rationalism', the view that reason, as expressed in proofs for the existence of God, transcends any cultural change. I showed the untenability of this view by arguing that it is not the proofs that ground faith, but faith which breathes into the proofs whatever life they had. If the sense of that faith is eroded, the proofs, cut off from it, become empty gestures. I called the third comforting picture, `religious accommodation': the view that religion can accommodate any cultural change. I am not advocating an a priori pessimism about religion's future prospects. But, for the very same reason, one cannot have an a priori optimism about them either. My rejection of the three comforting pictures is simply additional evidence that I fully acknowledge that personal, social or cultural events can affect religious belief. Having had to provide reminders, yet again, of the unscholarly creation of `Wittgensteinian Fideism' there is surely no further excuse, at the commencement of an examination of theories of religion in this book, to equate Wittgensteinian Fideism with the hermeneutics of contemplation. In presenting examples of irreducibly religious meanings, what we have is not, as Preus fears, the irresponsible postulation of possibilities, but an invitation to consider these examples, without prejudice, and to consider whether naturalistic explanations do justice to them. It is in the effort to give this kind of attention to religion, in religious studies, that we are taken beyond the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of contemplation.

chapter 2

Bernard Williams on the gods and us

1 hermeneutics and modernity Having distinguished, in the last chapter, between the hermeneutics of recollection and the hermeneutics of suspicion, there is little doubt about which of these is taken by most philosophers to re¯ect our modernity. For them, we are not so much practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion as its bene®ciaries. We have stood in the light for so long, it is said, that we have almost forgotten the religious darkness from which our fathers emerged. As a result, philosophers, in a con®dent use of the plural, say that it is no longer possible for us to believe in God. This impossibility, it is argued, is the fruit of enlightened re¯ection. Given this cultural climate, it is easy to see how the hermeneutics of suspicion becomes identi®ed with intellectual enquiry, and how the hermeneutics of recollection becomes identi®ed with muddled thinking which needs to be recti®ed. In such a context, arguing for essential connections between philosophical enquiry and the hermeneutics of contemplation is likely to prove dif®cult. The situation is complicated by the fact that many apologetic defences of religion in the hermeneutics of recollection are, in fact, instances of muddled thinking. It is dif®cult to go beyond these to a consideration of other possibilities of religious sense, since for most practitioners of suspicion, all such possibilities are no more than mere remnants of a primitive mentality in our culture. There is one embarrassment which this general claim has to face. The intellectual enlightenment we are supposed to have gained is said to be an inheritance from the Greeks. Yet one fact cannot be denied about our illustrious ancestors ± they believed in the gods. If Greek thought is part of our self-consciousness, if we would not be what we are without them, what are we going to say about this belief ? 31

32


In reply to this question, Bernard Williams has argued that, despite our indebtedness to the Greeks, we must not forget that which separates us from them, that which is the very mark of our modernity, namely, our freedom.1 There may be all sorts of disagreements concerning the nature, content and extent of this freedom, but, at least, he argues, our feet are on the ground. We are free of the gods. Some cultural commentators have described this situation as a crisis of modernity. Human beings are said to be lost and afraid in an alien world; old moral guarantees have been lost and we no longer search for certainties. According to this point of view, we no longer know how to call for the supernatural help which was available to our ancestors. Further, it is claimed, existential problems about selfidentity arise because the theistic framework, which alone is adequate to meet them, is missing.2 This, however, is not the reaction of most philosophers. They, like Williams, re¯ect secular reactions to our situation. Williams says that we should not indulge in nostalgia for something which never existed, in the hope of a less fragile and precarious life than our own. According to him, we have not lost our hold on supernatural help. Such help was not available, even in time of trouble, because the very conception of such help is rooted in confusion. Williams' conclusion is that we should not feel sorry for ourselves. We cannot lose or be cast out of a paradise which never existed.3 Williams warns against over-exaggeration in face of our metaphysical freedom from the gods. Although we live our lives under a secular heaven, free from supernatural necessity, necessities of other kinds remain on our doorstep. We are bound, not simply by causal necessities, but by necessities created by the imposition of the wills of others on us. Sheer luck and chance can create havoc in our lives. We are also subject to necessities which result from economic, political and cultural patterns over which, as individuals, we have little control. These patterns are complex, and must not be simpli®ed. But, the conclusion runs, no matter how fragmentary our

1 2 3

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1993. See for example, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Williams, Shame and Necessity, pp. 166 ±7.

Assumptions about the gods

33

culture, our morals, and our lives may be, at least our feet are on the ground. We neither look for, nor long after, the gods. Notice that the hermeneutics of suspicion does not simply offer or promote different perspectives on the world. It characterises religious faith as an illusion, and freedom from it as freedom from confusion. Therefore, the hermeneutics of contemplation is faced with a formidable task in suggesting that we should be suspicious of this general suspicion. In attempting to trace the steps by which confused suspicions come to be formed, the hermeneutics of contemplation is likely to face obstacles of the will as well as obstacles of the intellect, since it would be asking an intellectual movement which thinks it has seen through religion to admit that there are possibilities of sense which it has not understood at all. Faced with anything other than what is easily criticisable, the hermeneutics of suspicion is too ready to cry without further ado, `Mysti®cation'. This is not to deny that there is much in religion which is criticisable. Neither is it to say that when religious possibilities are elucidated, the aim in doing so must be apologetics or advocacy. Rather, that elucidation is part of the more general philosophical contemplation of possibilities of sense, of the kind of philosophical attention which seeks to do justice to the world. Whether a person can personally appropriate the perspective which has been elucidated is always a further question. 2 assumptions about the gods What are we to make of the beliefs in the relationships between the gods and human affairs in the ancient world? It would be futile to expect a general answer to this question, and that is not what we seek. It is also necessary to avoid premature, over-simple answers. One too simple answer, Williams argues, is the suggestion that talk of the actions of the gods only belongs to an age in which an adequate conception of human volition and action has not developed. Such a view is held by Bruno Snell who says, `Homer's man does not yet regard himself as the source of his decisions.'4 There are philosophical confusions which lead to Snell's claim, confusions related to his views of the `soul' and `body', but these need not concern us now.5 4 5

Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1960, p. 31. Williams has excellent criticisms of these confusions, see Chapter Two.

34


Let us, rather, accept Williams' view that the authority of Homer's poetry simply will not allow us to regard his characters as anything other than people acting and deciding in ordinary ways. Snell and other critics are ignoring what is before their eyes. If we regard the characters in any other way, we would not be moved by their sufferings and tragedies in the way we are. We respond morally and emotionally to the events as they unfold. We would not respond in such a way to puppets. As Williams says, there are examples where the gods seem to determine a person's actions in a strict sense, but these are in the minority. Still, this leaves us with the question of how the gods are related to human endeavour in the wide range of other cases. `Human endeavour' is a wide term which covers, not only the purposive actions of human beings, but also their reactions to, and understanding of, the events that befall them. It is through the latter understanding that there can be a sense of what faces us, of what has to be accepted or overcome. For example, commenting on Simone Weil's essay, `The Iliad or the Poem of Force',6 Peter Winch says that `this essay insists that in order to understand the forces which operate in human affairs we need a way of appreciating what is lost through their operation'. It is characteristic of ®re (at certain temperatures) that it can destroy wood but not stone: this would mean nothing to us if we did not know what wood and stone were. It is also characteristic of ®re that it can destroy people and ideas (through the destruction of books, for example): this too will mean nothing to us unless we understand what people are and the kinds of ideas that may be thus destroyed . . . we need such an understanding if we are to have an adequate grasp of ®re.7

But, then, in Aeschylus' play, Prometheus Bound,8 we are told that the very existence of human life depends on a gift from the god Prometheus ± the gift of ®re. Are we to say that this, too, is part of an adequate grasp of ®re? Many would deny this, saying, as Williams no doubt would, that there is an unintelligibility in the very notion of such a gift, an unintelligibility which extends to the notion of

6 7 8

Simone Weil, `The Iliad or the Poem of Force', Wallingford, Penn.: Pendle Hill, Pamphlet No. 91, Dec. 1956. Peter Winch, Simone Weil: `The Just Balance', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989, p. 161. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, in Aeschylus, London: Penguin Classics 1961.


35

creation itself. It will be said that no sense can be made of the belief that life is a gift of the gods ± the gift of ®re. This was certainly the opinion of Lucretius in discussing the gods of the Romans. He was certainly alive to the interrelations between natural events and human life ± including the effects of ®re. But Lucretius argued that reference to the gods, so far from throwing light on these interrelations, actually demeans them. He thought that a proper emphasis on naturalistic explanations would reveal this; it would reveal the irrelevance of the gods. When we know what ®re really is, we would see through the illusions of religion. He presents his challenge to religion in a highly effective comic polemic: But if Jupiter and other gods shake the shining regions of heaven with appalling din, if they cast ®re whither it may be the pleasure of each one, why do they not see to it that those who have not refrained from some abominable crime, shall be struck and breathe out sulphurous ¯ames from breast pierced through, a sharp lesson to mankind? Why rather does one with no base guilt on his conscience roll in ¯ames all innocent, suddenly involved in a tornado from heaven and taken off by ®re? Why again do they aim at deserts and waste their labour? Or are they then practising their hands and strengthening their muscles? And why do they suffer the Father's bolt to be blunted against the earth? Why does he himself allow this, instead of saving it for his enemies? Why again does Jupiter never cast a bolt on the earth and send his thunder when the heaven is clear on all sides? Does he wait until clouds have come up, to descend into them himself, that he may be nearby to direct hence the blow of his bolt?9

For Williams, however, this would be another over-simpli®ed attempt to dispose of the gods, since the role of the gods is more complex and, hence, more puzzling, than Lucretius' questions would suggest. It is not as though the availability of naturalistic or ordinary explanations automatically demonstrates the irrelevance of appeals to the gods. For example, suppose that a tree is hit by lightning. To say that the gods are responsible is not to deny the causal effect of the lightning on the tree. Again, if a warrior kills his enemy with a spear, to say that a god is responsible is not necessarily to deny that the warrior has performed the act, or that he is responsible. Perhaps it will be said that the god guided the warrior's hand, but what does this mean? It is not to deny that the warrior threw the spear, nor to

9

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Bk. VI, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, London and Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical Library 1943, pp. 472± 3.

36


deny that he threw it with one hand rather than two. The god's hand is not an extra hand in that sense. Williams notes that the gods are referred to even when full naturalistic or ordinary explanations are known. Even after the full causal story is told, it may still be asked why the lightning had to hit the tree just then. Why is the warrior the kind of person who has to kill his enemy? Why does he ®nd himself in circumstances which lead him to do so? Why is the world the kind of place in which such circumstances are found? As Williams admits, it is not only the ancients who ask such questions. We ask them ourselves. Despite our modernity we, too, ask, `Why do things have to be like this?' We may have been given full accounts of why various tragedies or disasters occurred, but these do not stop the question being asked. Why did all this have to happen? So I do not think that Williams holds that these questions are meaningless. The dif®culty does not come from these questions of the ancients. The dif®culty for Williams, as for many others, comes from their answers ± they said that we are in the hands of the gods. If Greek thought is central to our intellectual and cultural inheritance, is it not problematic to ®nd at the heart of it a belief in supernatural necessity which cannot possibly, Williams argues, be an inheritance for us? In order to see the impossibility of such an inheritance for modernity we need to look at Williams' assumptions, concerning the Greeks, which bring out what he takes to be the primary reasons for this impossibility. The ®rst assumption is that in order to believe in the gods, as the Greeks did, we would have to indulge in anthropomorphism. Williams claims: `No one is going to deny that Homer's gods are thoroughly anthropomorphic, and their decisions are just like those of mortals when no god intervenes: the language of doubt and the formulae of decision are the same.'10 Anthropomorphism involves attributing the language of action and decision outside contexts where it has its sense. The second assumption is that the essential relation in which the gods stand to the world is one of power. This is essentially the same power as humans possess, only the gods have more of it. Speaking of supernatural necessity, Williams says: `The relation of human beings 10

Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 31.


37

to supernatural necessity inevitably invokes the image of being in someone's power. The mere idea that things are shaped, one way or another, in relation to human purposes ± in particular against them ± is enough to ground that image . . . Living under supernatural necessity was living under a power, a power that typically used no distinctive means.'11 The third assumption is that if characters are depicted as living under supernatural necessity, they will appear to lack any inner life of their own, being too completely part of their world. Thus, Williams says, Homeric heroes have `no innerness, no secret motives'.12 The fourth assumption is that the hiddenness and mysteriousness of the ways of the gods are an essential ingredient which serves to hide from us the ultimate unintelligibility of supernatural necessity. Williams brings out some of the conceptual tensions involved as follows: Fate and chance were forces, and they were deeply, necessarily, signi®cantly mysterious. Like the Aeschylean and Sophoclean necessities . . . they belong to an order of things that has the shape and the discouraging effect of a hostile plan, a plan that remains incurably hidden from us . . . Supernatural necessity of this sort is like the operation of an effective agent, but this agent . . . has no characteristics except purpose and power. Since there is nothing more to the supernatural agent than this, he has, so to speak, no style. There are no distinctive ways in which his purposes come about, and so, once such a purpose has been set, there is nothing to be said about alternative circumstances in which it would not be realised or realised by a different route.13

The ®fth assumption is that the ruling out of possible alternatives is a mark of lack of freedom, and that our ability to contemplate such alternatives is an advance. Euripides had already suggested that the reference to the gods' hidden game is super¯uous and that ìt is simply a banal truth that human affairs are likely to prove unpredictably ruinous'.14 We see, as human beings, that we are metaphysically free, but this means only `that there is nothing in the structure of the universe that denies their power to intend, to decide, to act, indeed to take and receive responsibility in the fundamental and intelligible sense that we found . . . already in Homer'.15 We then have to turn our attention to reality and away from the fantasies of 11 14

Ibid., p. 151. Ibid., p. 151.

12 15

Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 152.

13

Ibid., pp. 150 ± 1.

38


religion: `The real obstacles to our freedom, as John Stuart Mill said, are not metaphysical but psychological, social and political.'16 The sixth assumption is that because of the incoherence of the notion of supernatural necessity, insuperable dif®culties ensue when we try to relate it to ordinary conceptions of necessity in our lives, such as the necessities created by the imposition of the wills of others, or the necessity expressed by the thought that I must do such-andsuch. What can it possibly mean `to put on the yoke of necessity'? If necessities have already been imposed on me, or if I have already made my decision, what is there `to put on'? Also, once again, talk of `the yoke of necessity' may blind one to alternatives or even to the possibility of considering that there are any.17 The seventh assumption is that it can be shown, philosophically, that our readiness to ask questions where the Greeks would not is a right re¯ection of the human condition, whereas a perspective governed by the notion of supernatural necessity is not. Surely, Williams argues, this is the real lesson of Plato's work ± that dialogue and exchange are essential.18 The problem is, however, that Plato thought that that dialogue and exchange are carried on in a context where our interests are already ®xed in the nature of things. We need to move to the Enlightenment ideal whereby `my whole outlook should in principle be exposed to a critique, as a result of which every value that I hold can become a consideration for me, critically accepted, and should not remain merely something that happens to be part of me'.19 The problem is that this ideal can itself suggest a caricature of the critical self, characterless and cut off from the background in which critical enquiry is carried on. Williams thinks this caricature can be avoided by freely admitting that critical re¯ection is historically situated, and that there is nothing in the structure of the world, contrary to the opinions of Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, which is inherently shaped to answer human interests. There is nothing in this life or beyond it which makes us safe from the contingencies of life. For the modern, politics takes the place of fate. If the individual thinks of subjection, it is likely to be in terms of subjection by society.20 The eighth assumption is that the tragic hero is a term of art, and that we do not actually live our lives in this way. In our modernity, 16 19

17 Ibid. See pp. 137f. 18 Ibid. See pp. 156± 7. Ibid. 20 Ibid. See pp. 158f. Ibid., p. 158.

Questioning the assumptions

39

Williams argues, we stand beyond Christianity and its Kantian and Hegelian legacies. We have ambivalent reactions to human achievements, but still hope to live as free of lies as possible ± itself a powerful motivation. But we now realise that it is futile to look for a harmony between the world as it is, and the world as we would want it to be. In this way we are closer to the ancients than to our Christian heritage. But we have the added insight that the world was not created for our sakes, and that we were not created for the world. Our world and our lives are necessarily ragged and precarious. There is no vantage point outside the world or history which guarantees or underwrites our activities. We must accept responsibility for our mistakes, no matter how horrendous or far-reaching they may be. We are free of thinking that there is a redeeming pattern in reason or history. We do not need religious categories to understand the good and evil which are our lot. The only choice we have is that of living our imperfect, fallible, and incomplete lives with as few lies as possible, and with our feet on the ground. 21 Williams' eight assumptions are not particularly his. In relation to religion, ancient or Judaeo-Christian, they are deeply embedded in the hermeneutics of suspicion. In examining them, our aim will not be to deny that any of these assumptions have application. Still less is our aim to show that the secular, humanistic perspective Williams advocates is wrong, and that some religious perspective is right. The hermeneutics of recollection might well engage in such a task. Rather, the aim is to question the generality of Williams' assumptions and, by so doing, give reminders of possibilities of religious sense that are ignored by them. In short, it is an exercise in the kind of attention to the world which is central to the hermeneutics of contemplation. 3 questioning the assumptions Let us now retrace our steps in re-examining Williams' eight assumptions. In many ways, the ®rst is the most important, since, if we cannot get beyond it, other issues simply do not arise. The point is not to deny that someone's conception of God may be anthropomorphic, but to deny that it must be. Notions of God impinge on life in ways conceptually distinct from any which could be attributed to humans. Put differently: we must pay attention to concept-for21

Ibid. See pp. 164f.

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mation, to the way in which humans come to think about the gods. This is evident even in colloquial speech where there is talk of outcomes being in the lap of the gods, and of natural events as acts of God. This talk is speci®cally meant to deny any action, purpose or design akin to human agency. Ìt is in the hands of the gods' is nearer to `chance', `fate', or `Che sera sera', than to any conception of an anthropomorphic being thought of as more powerful than ourselves. What is more, how can creation or the gift of life be thought of in anthropomorphic terms? The gift of a day, for example, can hardly be thought of by analogy with one human being handing over a gift to another. It has more in common with our talk of gifted people, where the question of who gave them the gifts, in that sense, does not arise. The religious expression of this fact is to say that their gifts are God-given. Thus Plato insisted that the poets were inspired by the gods. When we look at Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound we ®nd that it is the god Prometheus who gives human beings the gift of ®re, the gift which makes human life what it is. Yet the gift angers Zeus, and he punishes Prometheus. What could it possibly mean to try to understand the gift of ®re by analogy with human agency? It cannot be understood anthropomorphically. That, by the way, is why an argument which is understood in this way, the argument from design, can never yield the concept of a creator. As Peter Winch says, `we should look on the phrase `the creation of the world' not as expressing something analogous to a physical making, but rather as expressing something like the making possible of a certain conception, a certain sort of understanding'.22 In Prometheus Bound, Winch suggests we see, in the relation between Zeus and Prometheus, a relation between different aspects of divinity. These different aspects have their signi®cance in relation to human life. On the one hand, in Zeus, we have the expression of the divine as that which is other than the human. But, in Prometheus, we see the human, the gift of ®re, as something other than the gods.23 These suggestions lead us to look again at Williams' second assumption, namely, that the relation between the gods and human beings is essentially one of power. We are in the hands of the gods 22 23

Winch, Simone Weil, pp. 197 ±8. Peter Winch, `What can philosophy say to religion?', in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Faith and Philosophy, Oct. 2001. Subsequent quotations about Prometheus Bound come from this paper.


41

because, being more powerful than we are, they have control over our lives. In his reading of Prometheus Bound, Peter Winch presents very different possibilities. It is a play àbout the love of gods for human beings and the implications of this love'. He suggests that the tension between Zeus and Prometheus is meant to express à con¯ict, an essential con¯ict, in the nature of the divine: a con¯ict involved in the very idea of humanity as the object of divine love'. What does the con¯ict consist in? Winch replies that it consists in the attempt to represent `the undoubted miseries of many different sorts that life involves . . . as a natural, perhaps necessary, concomitant of that in human life which also shows it to be a product of divine love'. And this can be nothing less than everything that we regard as characteristic of human existence, the practice of cultivating the environment, husbandry, the taming of animals, the building of homes, the arts, the various forms of inquiry, the ability to plan for future contingencies, the complex modalities of love in human relationships, and so on. In short all those gifts that Prometheus bestowed on humankind and the absence of which Hobbes' Leviathan represents as what makes natural human existence `solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' . . . The life that goes with the cultivation of the land, the search for understanding, the existence of stable family and other social relationships, is a life with tremendous potentialities but equally, and by the same token, a life inevitably involving agonizing disappointments and sufferings of all sorts.

This marks off this notion of life as a divine gift from various versions of the so-called `free-will defence' in the constructions of theodicies. In this latter context, it is rightly observed that human life could not be what it is without such freedom. On the other hand, it is said to be a gift given for a reason, namely, that through the exercise of his free will, a man should develop in the way in which God intended him to develop. It is supposed to be a story with a happy end, and one which is supposed to explain why God allows sufferings which we would alleviate if we could. Prometheus Bound presents a very different picture. There are no reasons underlying Prometheus' gift of ®re, since the gift is itself the manifestation of his love. As Winch says, to speak of reasons for the love would involve one in hopeless circularity, `since one would need to refer to those very features, which are a divine gift, as the reason why the gift was bestowed'. There is no suggestion in Prometheus Bound of sufferings made

42


`meaningful' by being the means to some state of affairs which is to emerge later. Rather, the tensions referred to are internally related to the sufferings of the gods, in the person of Prometheus, and the suffering of humanity in the person of Io. Winch brings out the nature of these sufferings. Prometheus' gift of ®re involves the application of standards and expectations in human life which cannot possibly be ful®lled. As Winch says, `Their realization can only be a divine realization. What is more, the understanding of this fact emerges from, and only from, that very life in which perfect realization of the good is unattainable.' What is the result for the gods? Winch replies: But when the gods give these things to human beings, they ensure that their own perfection is no longer fully realized in the world. That is why their gift is a gift of love and why it involves suffering in the very nature of being, in the nature, that is, of the gods themselves. It is the helpless suffering of knowing one has sacri®ced the possibility of complete perfection. Human suffering, on the other hand, is the sort in¯icted by the gad¯y: the restless search for a perfection that is unattainable.

But has Winch forgotten the sufferings which humans in¯ict on each other? Not at all. He sees them as involved in Prometheus' gift of ®re. Winch asks: I wonder if this is part of the meaning of Io's semi-trans®guration into a beast, a cow, in her attempt to ¯ee Zeus' love. She sees the suffering that love involves and tries to escape it by rejecting its gifts. Only, of course, once the nature of the gifts has been comprehended, it is too late, for such comprehension comes only with those gifts. The eventual salvation which Prometheus prophesies for her is an acceptance of the gifts: Zeus' impregnation, `without fear', an acceptance, that is to say, of the gifts along with their cost. Whereas, on the contrary, any historicist hope . . . that all may one day be made well (the cost eliminated), when the revolution comes perhaps, is just a continuation of the original refusal to accept the gods' gifts, their costs being an inextricable part of the package; it takes one farther from the possibility of salvation and reconciliation with Zeus.

The rejection of creation as an act of power is something which Simone Weil ®nds, not only among the Greeks, but in Christianity too: The act of Creation is not an act of power. It is an abdication. Through this act a kingdom was established other than the kingdom of God. The reality of this world is constituted by the mechanism of matter and the autonomy of rational creatures. It is a kingdom from which God has withdrawn. God,


43

having renounced being its king, can enter it only as a beggar. As for the cause of this abdication, Plato expressed it thus: `He was good'.24

We have said little, as yet, of what is involved in accepting the gift of the gods, including its costs. At this preliminary stage, we simply need to question the two general assumptions which will dog the whole of our enquiry if they are not modi®ed at the outset: ®rst, the assumption that the gods must be perceived in anthropomorphic terms; and second, the assumption that the relation in which the gods stand to human beings is essentially one of power. Once these two assumptions are modi®ed, it follows that Williams' third assumption can also be questioned, namely, the view that Homeric heroes lack an inner life, and are too much part of their world. As we have seen, on the alternative view of creation as an abdication, that very abdication on the part of the divine involves the granting of human autonomy, the radical freedom of human beings. What may have happened in Williams' assumption is that he is contrasting the Homeric vision with a certain kind of inner life which he associates with modernity. The problem comes from the tendency to equate this kind of inner life with the fruits of intellectual development, implying that any other kind of inner life would be a mark of intellectual de®ciency. But, clearly, what form people's ìnner life' takes varies enormously. Some kind of inner life is always present, since to deny this would be to deny the development of any kind of self at all; the denial for which Williams rightly criticises Snell and others. What is more, varieties of inner life are not simply found by comparing cultures, but also by comparisons within our culture. Simone Weil wrote within that culture and takes herself to be throwing light on possibilities of religious sense which she did not create. That this is so does not show that the perspective she talks of is right and that Williams' is wrong. What it does show, however, is that his con®dent use of the `plural' in relation to what we can believe today is, at best, premature.25 Williams' fourth assumption is that the mysteriousness of the ways of the gods is simply an expression of the unintelligibility of the notion. These ways have no style, since there is nothing more to a 24 25

Simone Weil, Àre We Struggling For Justice?', trans. Marina Barabas, Philosophical Investigations, Jan. 1987, p. 3. For my related criticism that Martha Nussbaum often con¯ates the openness of philosophical enquiry with the kind of openness which belongs to a moral perspective she advocates, see my Philosophy's Cool Place, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999.

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supernatural agent than sheer power. Since we have been showing that the divine need not be equated with such power, Williams' assumption simply does not cover this new possibility. So far from the gift of the gods having no style, we have seen that it is an expression of a certain kind of love. Further, though we have yet to say much about it, there will be corresponding styles involved in forms of acceptance, refusal or de®ance of the god's gift. Williams' fourth assumption also contains the claim that since we cannot determine how the ways of the gods come about, we cannot frame any conception of alternatives to these ways; we cannot ask whether the subsequent states of affairs could have come about by other means. This should lead us to question the analogy between `the ways of the gods' and a plan. In the case of the latter, I have independent access to it, an access which allows me to distinguish between what is in accordance with the plan, and what is not. The hiddenness of the ways of the gods means that anything is in accordance with the gods' plan. In that case, however, the appeal to the plan becomes super¯uous. Should we not say with Marlowe's Faustus, `What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera. What will be, shall be. Divinity, adieu!' For Williams, this shows the inherent unintelligibility of `the ways of the gods'. The other possibility is that the confusion is in trying to understand these ways in terms of a plan. The emphasis Williams chooses leads to his ®fth assumption, namely, that our modern ability to consider alternatives, our readiness to ask questions when they do not, itself constitutes an intellectual advance. Euripides had already suggested that talk of the gods amounts to no more than the banal truth that life can be unpredictably ruinous. Seeing that alternatives are possible is part of our freedom from religious fantasies; the realisation that no metaphysical structure of the world determines that things should be as they are, and the further realisation that the real obstacles to our freedom are psychological, social and political. More will be said later about the asking of questions and the consideration of alternatives, but, for the moment, the important point to emphasise is that no claim is being made that the religious perspective being advanced is underwritten by the structure of the universe. That is why nothing like a proof of the perspective is being offered by appeal to such a structure. There are times when Simone Weil is tempted by such an appeal, but, at her best, she is not. Of course, there is a conception of the world and its creation in the


45

religious perspective elucidated, but that is not the ground or explanation of the perspective, but a manifestation of its sense. It is in terms of the perspective that we grasp the sense of talk of creation, and see how different it is from a theory in science. One of the weakest claims in Williams' book, it seems to me, is that, for us, politics replaces fate. This is as unlikely a claim as saying that appeals to science could replace fate. A geological theory about earthquakes will not be an answer to a mother's anguished cry of `Why?' when she loses her children in one. Such a cry is part of a bewilderment concerning what Wittgenstein called `the riddle of existence in space and time'. We may ®nd ourselves asking why we were born at a certain time and place, with certain problems to face, certain people to live with, matters determined by circumstances beyond our control. Again, sudden disasters turn hope to ashes: `She had so much to live for.' Expectations are thwarted: Ì thought that we had a lasting relationship and then . . . '; Ì thought our friendship could be relied on, but then . . . '. Chance knows nothing of fairness and does not relate suffering to fairness: `We thought the worst was over and then . . . '. Medicine, science and politics can certainly contribute to bewilderment at life. Ìf only the cure had been available then . . . '. `We had hopes of what the revolution would usher in, and then look what happened . . . '. Àll those people who passed their lives under evil regimes; the millions lost without trace.' It is hard to see how medicine, science and politics can themselves answer the bewilderment they create, which is not to deny the urgency of addressing speci®c problems. This is not to say that everyone does, or must, experience this bewilderment. It is to say that one cannot argue that there is something confused about it. Neither is it to deny that there are various responses to this bewilderment.26 Among these are religious responses which, I want to say, cannot be shown, philosophically, to be the product of confusion and illusion. Williams' sixth assumption does suggest, however, that we will run into conceptual dif®culties when we try to relate the notion of the ways of the gods to the ordinary necessities in our lives. If necessities have already been imposed on us, what is there left for us to do? In what sense can we put on `the yoke of necessity'? If we have already 26

I discussed these various reactions as expressed in twentieth-century literature in From Fantasy to Faith, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1991.

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performed an action for which we feel remorse, how can it be undone or alleviated by appeal to divine necessity? Finally, does not the reference to such necessity blind us to the existence of other alternatives in the situations which face us? The ®rst thing to note is that there is no inconsistency involved in both recognising that something has been imposed on one, and asking how one is going to react to this. There is still the question of whether one can put on `the yoke of necessity' even in such situations. Kierkegaard admits that, to many, the whole matter seems paradoxical. He asks, Ìs not suffering something that one must be forced into against his will? If a man can be free of it, can he then will it, and if he is bound to it, can he be said to will it? . . . Yes, for many men it is almost an impossibility for them to unite freedom and suffering in the same thought.'27 But, then, Kierkegaard asks, `But what then is patience?'28 Looking at his Purity of Heart, it is easy to think of `patience' as not being de¯ected from decency in face of life's adversities. Thus, Kierkegaard says, `patience . . . performs an even greater miracle than courage. Courage voluntarily chooses suffering that may be avoided; but patience achieves freedom in unavoidable suffering. By his courage, the free one voluntarily lets himself be caught, but by his patience the prisoner effects his freedom ± although not in a sense that need make the jailer anxious or fearful.'29 Someone may say, in a derogatory way, that such a person is simply making a virtue out of a necessity. Kierkegaard replies: Undeniably he is making a virtue out of a necessity, that is just the secret, that is certainly a most accurate designation of what he does . . . He brings a determination of freedom out of that which is determined as necessity. And it is just there that the healing power of the decision for the Eternal resides: that the sufferer may voluntarily accept the compulsory suffering.30

The reference to `the Eternal' should give us pause for thought. When Kierkegaard speaks of making a virtue out of a necessity, it may be that someone asks how that virtue manifests itself. After all, it may be said, patience, as not being de¯ected from decency under adversity, does not seem to require a reference to the Eternal, nor have to be connected with religion. There may be closer af®nities 27 28

Sùren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, trans. Douglas Steere, New York: Harper Torchbooks 1956, p. 173. 29 Ibid., p. 174. 30 Ibid. Ibid.


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between particular cases than this objection allows, but, still, there is a case to answer. We get nearer to the religious conception when we see that life itself is a necessity which may or may not be accepted. To put it in the context of Prometheus Bound, the question is whether we can accept the necessity of the gift of ®re, with all the costs it involves. Can we be ìmpregnated by Zeus without fear'? Maybe we can get nearer to seeing what these questions involve by seeing what it is not to accept the gift, to think that the gods can be ignored. Let us return, for a moment, to Lucretius' challenge. For him, our relation to nature is one of control through understanding. As natural explanations evolve, so the gods become super¯uous. Remember his challenge: show me Jupiter thundering from a clear sky. Horace seems to take up this challenge. What is impressive about his remarks is that he does not appear to have apologetic motives. He confesses that he is not a frequent worshipper, but has been forced to rethink his too easy dismissal of the gods and their ways. Horace exempli®es giving a possibility of sense the kind of attention that belongs to the hermeneutics of contemplation. He says: I, a chary and infrequent worshipper of the gods, what time I wondered, the votary of a foolish wisdom, am now compelled to spread my sails for the voyage back, and to retrace the course I had abandoned. For though it is the clouds that Jove is want to cleave with his ¯ashing bolts, this time he drove his thundering steeds and ¯ying car through a sky serene ± his steeds and car, whereby the lifeless earth and wandering streams were shaken . . .

What is the relation of this act by the god to human life? Horace continues: `Power the god does have. He can interchange the lowest and the highest: the mighty he abases and exalts the lowly. From one man Fortune with shrill whirring of her wings swiftly snatches away the crown; on another she delights to place it.'31 To fail to recognise the gift of ®re is to think that one is entirely in control of one's life and surroundings. Williams thinks that religion seeks to make the world a safe place, and to suggest that its contingencies are part of a wider harmonious plan. But, in Horace, we see the opposite tendency. It might be said that Lucretius wanted to replace one plan with another, to promote the order science 31

Horace, Odes Bk. 1. Ode XXIV: `The Poet's Conversion' in The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, London and New York: The Loeb Classical Library 1919, p. 91.

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provides instead of the spurious plans of the gods which can be shown to have no application. Not so Horace, who wants to remind us that life's contingencies are not eradicated by the order of science. He reminds us of the precariousness which is part of the conception of the gift of life. If we forget this, events have a nasty habit of reminding us. No matter how many of our endeavours have been crowned by success, there is always the possibility that this crown will be snatched away when we least expect it. Jupiter may thunder from a clear sky. This must be recognised with a humility which should inform our endeavours and successes. As we know, the Greeks had a word for this lack of humility ± they called it hubris. And is not Sophocles, in Oedipus Rex, showing us, in a terrible way, what hubris can mean? This can only be appreciated, however, if we avoid certain deterministic readings of the play which would rob it of its point. For Aristotle, Oedipus' remorse on ®nding out that he has killed his father and married his mother would be unintelligible and quite irrational. How can an individual blame himself for something he knew nothing about, and which he did not intend either consciously or unconsciously?32 This reaction does not give suf®cient emphasis to the perspective of the agent. Williams, too, wants to say that, despite the circumstances, killing his father and marrying his mother remain something that Oedipus has done. Sophocles wants to emphasise the relations between human identity and human actions. Oedipus cannot walk away from what he has done. On certain readings of the play, however, attributing these actions to Oedipus becomes problematic. After all, was it not the gods who made him kill his father and marry his mother? Is not that what the Chorus tell us? How are their words to be understood? It seems to me that if we read them in either of two ways we miss the point of the play. First, if we take the Chorus to be telling us that all the events which befall Oedipus are determined beforehand, this would make the whole story pointless. It would lose its human interest. Second, if we say that the Chorus merely predicts what is going to happen, as any experienced observer could, reference to the gods seems to be rendered super¯uous. Neither reading does justice to

32

For a discussion of Freud's claim that Oedipus must have desired, unconsciously, to kill his father and marry his mother see chapter 8.


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what Sophocles shows us about Oedipus' relation to the gods when faced with the necessities which befall him. Oedipus thought it impossible that he should be cursed among men. In his view, this simply could not happen to him. He looked on himself as self-suf®cient. Williams recognises that life may disabuse us of such con®dence, since luck and chance play major roles in it. These can ruin the best laid plans. The Greeks expressed this by saying that there is something over and above our purposive acts. There are the ways of the gods. But why the gods? Why not settle, as Euripides suggests we should, for saying that life is unpredictable? What I offer in reply is not a proof that one cannot or should not settle for this, but simply the reminder that one does not have to. Some Greeks saw contingency as something to be wondered at, as something with signi®cance for life as a whole, namely, that we are not the masters of our fate. Hubris is the failure to recognise this. To say we are in the hands of the gods is one spiritual form this recognition can take. It is to see things in a certain spirit ± the spirit of the gods. If we understand `the ways of the gods' in this way, we can see that it makes no sense to say that we could know these ways in advance. That is why there is so much talk of darkness and mystery concerning them ± the notions that worry Williams. But, of course, in the drama, the audience has to appreciate the difference between Oedipus' foolish self-suf®ciency and what, in fact, has happened, or is going to happen. To achieve this dramatic effect, this contrast is expressed by the Chorus. It helps us to see how terrible ignoring possibilities of fate can be. It does not follow, then, as Williams seems to think, that if the will of the gods is expressed in whatever happens, that would make reference to them super¯uous. On the contrary, that the gods are everywhere follows from the fact that life, ®re, is their life. This is what Oedipus is brought to see in a terrible way. For him, as Horace would say, Jupiter thundered from a clear sky. What if someone says, as Williams does, that the fact that we do not see necessities, where the Greeks did, shows a certain intellectual gain in our understanding of the world? We are already in a position to see why this seventh assumption on his part is unfounded. Initially, it seems to have a point, in that Williams has argued that belief in supernatural necessity depends on believing that the world has a certain structure. Since this notion of a metaphysical structure is confused, it cannot give the Greek way of thinking about things the

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necessity it claims. The gods are robbed of their metaphysical necessity. I have argued, on the contrary, that it is not a belief about the structure of the world which gives point to belief in the gods, but belief in the gods which gives the world that spiritual order. Williams also wants to argue that the kinds of choices open to us, in modernity, are enough in themselves to rob supernatural necessity of the necessity it claims for itself. Williams points out that there were such choices among the Greeks, but that these have increased dramatically in modernity. There is, however, a crucial ambiguity in his argument. It confuses noting conceptions of necessity which belong to various perspectives, with the necessity of embracing a perspective. For example, I can elucidate the necessity of recognising the gods depicted in Oedipus Rex. I may also elucidate the necessity of obedience involved in a military ethic. All I have done in doing so is to describe characteristics of the perspectives in question. The question of the necessary demand a perspective makes on me is an entirely different matter. This depends on whether I embrace the perspective in question. For example, if I see someone falling down in the street, I may say, Ì must stop and help her'. Others may pass by. That fact would not be a denial of the moral necessity I recognise. That absolute demand belongs to the moral measure. It makes no claims as to universality. Williams argues as though the mere presence of standpoints other than my own shows that no necessity pertains to the one I embrace. But moral or religious necessity does not depend on metaphysical necessity. Whether certain demands are necessary cannot be determined independently of the relations in which people stand to them. What is or is not regarded as religiously or morally necessary is precisely what accounts for distances between people. Some will see options where others see necessities. Williams argues as though readiness to see most things as options, or readiness to consider options, is itself the sign of the intellectual advance of modernity. The hermeneutics of contemplation shows that this is not so. Philosophical openness would recognise that the openness to options Williams mentions itself belongs to a certain moral/political perspective. By suggesting that it can be equated with intellectual advance, Williams is illegitimately elevating one outlook among the many which intellectual enquiry has to recognise.33 33

Again, this is a major theme in my Philosophy's Cool Place.


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In Williams' eighth assumption, he appeals to the fact that we do not live like tragic heroes to justify the fact that we ask questions which those heroes do not ask. That the heroes do not ask the questions, he says, is something determined by the authors of the tragedies. Authorial authority does not allow us to ask, `What would have happened if . . . ?' or `Why didn't Oedipus stay at home?' But that does not mean that we cannot ask such questions of ourselves. Life itself is not constrained or bounded as a text is. These arguments depend on the following assumption by Williams. He says: Ì have said, more than once, that we do well to remember that tragedy is a form of art: there is no suggestion here of anyone behaving as a tragic hero. (That reminder can only be reinforced by bearing in mind the extent to which Sophoclean necessities of fate are themselves the product of art.)'34 Contrast this view with Winch's comment: Ì shall . . . take it for granted that these stories are not merely told for the entertainment value (though that is of course, sometimes, a signi®cant element), but are intended to convey important insights about the nature of human life, about ``the human condition''.' If this is so, we cannot say, with Williams, that `the way we live our lives' excludes such insights, since such insights will determine, for some, how, in certain respects, they live their lives. Before concluding, however, it is necessary to say more about the insights Winch refers to. In the main we have talked of failure to recognise the gift of the gods. But what does it mean to accept it? One major obstacle to giving an answer to this question is the description of the gift as `supernatural', and of its source as being òutside the world'. Simone Weil's distinction between supernatural and natural justice helps us to understand these terms. 35 We have already noted that ®re, the gift of life, involves costs as well as bene®ts. How are people to cope in these conditions? A natural conception of justice is one which is meant to answer this question. Justice is the product of enlightened self-interest; it is a set of rewards and sanctions which are necessary for a co-operative coexistence. But what if interests and strength are not evenly distributed, as seems to be the case? What rationale, on these terms, can 34 35

Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 165. Dif®culties arise in this context about some of the things Simone Weil says about speci®c human relationships, such as friendship. I shall not discuss these here. But see Winch, Simone Weil, Chapter Six.

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there be for the strong to heed the pleas of the weak? None, it seems. Thus justice, what one has a right to expect, becomes what the weak can expect at the hands of the strong. For Simone Weil, this is illustrated by a powerful passage from Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. The Milesians protested to the Athenians about their attempts to bully them into an anti-Spartan alliance. The Milesians said that in the event of their being coerced, they would have the gods and justice on their side. The Athenians replied: So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. Our aims and actions are perfectly consistent with the beliefs men hold about the gods and with the principles which govern their own conduct. Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whenever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the ®rst to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist forever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way. And therefore, as far as the gods are concerned, we see no good reason why we should fear to be at a disadvantage.36

Notice that the Athenians appeal to à general and necessary law of nature', and, in the light of it, say that, given the opportunity, the Milesians would act in precisely the same way as they have. Weil says that the proof that the Athenians are wrong lies in the fact that, although it is rare, a person will forgo to exercise his power when he has the opportunity to do so, and show compassion to the weaker party.37 She calls the exercise of such compassion a `supernatural virtue'. What kind of `proof ' is Weil presenting here? As Winch says, she is certainly not producing a counter-thesis about what is in accord with human nature. Rather, what the counter-example shows is that the Athenians cannot sustain their general thesis about human nature. But we still do not see why the virtue should be called `supernatural', and be said to have a source òutside the world'. Winch shows that it would not be suf®cient to say that whereas the Athenian conception of justice has a natural explanation in terms of enlightened selfinterest, the immediate response of compassion has not. This is 36 37

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1980, V.7. See Simone Weil, Waiting For God, trans. Emma Craufurd, New York: Harper and Row 1973, p. 144.


53

because it can be replied that though this distinction is true, responses of compassion are simply that, different responses which some human beings make, and which are not based on enlightened self-interest. Why the need to invoke anything `supernatural', or anything òutside the world'? Again, it is not a question of justifying a need to speak in this way, but one of trying to see what is involved in speaking in this way. To see this we must return to the concept of creation as an abdication, the creation of a world in which something, perfection, is necessarily lacking. This lack subjects human beings to a common condition which transcends how, in fact, they may fare in it. Simone Weil thought that Homer's Iliad is suffused with compassion for this common fate which embraces both victor and vanquished. This compassion can only have sense if the human world is seen from this eternal aspect as a limited whole. From the human point of view, it involves the recognition that nothing is ours by right ± that the natural world and other people are a gift of the gods. For Simone Weil, this recognition involves repeating, in our own persons, the need to abdicate the false divinity we think we have within us. To recognise our dependence on the gods is to recognise others as their children, and not as things incapable of refusing our designs. If `supernatural' is to have sense in this context, so must the phrase òutside the world'. Clearly, we cannot ask `Where is `òutside the world''?' since any place one could come up with would be simply another place. For similar reasons, the gods cannot be thought of, anthropomorphically, as beings among beings. The gods are part of àn eternal order', the perspective from which the world can be seen as a limited whole. The gods are what we are not, and what we long for. For this reason, it is misleading, perhaps, to speak of the existence of the gods. Or, if we do want to say that the gods were said to exist, èxistence' will get its sense from the notion of `the eternal order' to which they were said to belong. To put the matter differently: we cannot ask whether human beings can be impregnated by Zeus without fear, as though we know how to answer prior to determining the sense of divine impregnation. An hermeneutics of recollection, among the Greeks, would be one which argued for and advocated reconciliation with Zeus. The hermeneutics of suspicion questions the intelligibility of the whole notion. The hermeneutics of contemplation tries to elucidate, without advocacy, what it is like to see the world in this way.

54


We saw, at the outset, however, that Williams' interest in the Greeks is not purely historical. He wants to show why our Greek inheritance cannot contain their belief in the gods. Our inability to believe in supernatural necessity, for Williams, is a mark of our intellectual progress, a gain in understanding. It should be clear that one consequence of the arguments of this chapter is that there is no general answer to the question, Àre we free of supernatural necessity?' In contemporary philosophy of religion, most of my colleagues are arguing for or against the reality of God. Re¯ections on the Greeks should help us to see why philosophy cannot settle this question. If we think that philosophy can, as we think of hubris among the Greeks, we fall foul of hubris of another kind in our own subject. Wittgenstein said that one of the most dif®cult things in philosophy is to know where to stop. Sometimes, it is also dif®cult to know where to begin. The two matters are related, in fact, when we consider the centrality of concept-formation in religion. An example is Winch's reminder that belief in the perfect goodness of the divine èmerges from, and only from, that very life in which perfect realization of the good is unattainable'. What if this context is ignored, and we do not see that this, at least, is where we should begin? What if a new beginning is proposed, namely, that we should attempt to argue, without an antecedent context, from the world to God? The inevitable result is the hermeneutics of suspicion, the exposure of confusion and illusion. As David Hume, said: if a person ìs left to gather such a belief from the appearance of things . . . this entirely alters the case, nor will he ever ®nd any reason for such a conclusion'.38 It is to that master of suspicion that we turn in the next chapter. 38

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Melbourne, Toronto and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2nd edn 1947, Part XI, p. 204.

chapter 3

Hume's legacy

1 hume and hermeneutics It is not an extravagant judgement to say that most philosophers today regard Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion1 to be the most devastating critique of religion in the history of philosophy. Philosophers sympathetic to religion have called it `the greatest work on philosophy of religion in the English language'.2 Why should this be so? The answer lies in the fact that it has shaped, if not determined, the terms of reference within which most philosophy of religion is carried on. In any discussion of religion and modernity, there is no way of avoiding Hume. How is Hume's work related to the hermeneutics of recollection, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the hermeneutics of contemplation? The fundamental claim of the Dialogues is that it is impossible to infer anything substantive about God from the world about us. That being so, it would seem that Hume makes little contribution to the hermeneutics of recollection. But this is not so. Many philosophers of religion sympathetic to religion attempt to answer Hume on his own terms. The work of Richard Swinburne can be seen in this light. He has been described as a twentieth-century Cleanthes. It is easy to see how Hume's work contributes to the hermeneutics of suspicion, although how it does so is a matter of dispute. According to some, Hume concludes that religion is the product of illusion. Others argue that although Hume merely says that we must suspend judgement where religious belief is concerned, since this 1

2

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Melbourne, Toronto and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 2nd edn 1947. T. Penelhum, Hume, London: Macmillan 1975, p. 171.

55

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Hume's legacy

situation cannot conceivably change, it demonstrates the irrelevance of religion for human life. Those supporting the stronger view claim that Hume did not state it explicitly because of the political constraints of his time. In any event, Hume is clearly a master of suspicion. What of the hermeneutics of contemplation? Hume's relation to it can be appreciated only if we are prepared to go beyond Hume. Such preparedness is problematic for the hermeneutics of suspicion. From its perspective, there is little to be said after Hume's conclusions. Religion has been dealt a fatal blow, and that is that. The attempts to answer Hume, on his own terms, within the hermeneutics of recollection, are said to be further evidence of how fatal a blow Hume has delivered. Attempts to go beyond Hume will also be resisted, within the hermeneutics of recollection, by those who attempt to answer him on his own terms. These terms de®ne how they see their apologetic task. Any attempt to go beyond these terms is seen as an erosion of the intellectual defence which has to be made. Thus the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of recollection unite in a common cause against any attempt to go beyond Hume. Yet there seems to be a reason for doing so, if only on purely historical grounds. It is generally agreed that deism is an attenuated and distorted form of Christianity. It is this deism which is the object of Hume's attack in the Dialogues. One would expect philosophers, therefore, to be interested in those other possibilities of religious sense not captured by deism. When these possibilities are advanced, however, they are said to be `watered-down' examples of religion, defensive strategies to avoid Hume's criticisms. This cannot be maintained, however, since deism is precisely the `watered-down' version of these possibilities. Hume's reason for not considering these other possibilities in the Dialogues is that he would think them accounted for by his remarks in his Natural History of Religion.3 There, Hume consigns every substantive religious belief to the pathology of religious belief. Are Hume's analyses due to a one-sided diet of examples, or to a one-sided reading of the examples he provides? Hume contrasts substantive religious beliefs with his view of `true religion'. The latter, however, 3

Hume, The Natural History of Religion in Hume On Religion, selected and introduced by Richard Wollheim, London and Glasgow: Fontana 1966.

Hume's ®rst level of criticism

57

turns out to be the minimal belief that there is some remote, inconceivable analogy between the design of the universe and human intelligence. Hume's conclusions have also had a very different effect on the hermeneutics of recollection from the one mentioned hitherto. They were welcomed, for example, by J. G. Hamann who had an enormous in¯uence on Kierkegaard. This may seem puzzling at ®rst, but the explanation is clear. As we know, Kierkegaard held that the Denmark of his day was in the grip of à monstrous illusion'. People thought they were Christians when they were not. Philosophy made its distinctive contribution to this illusion by arguing as though religious belief were a matter of intellectual assent to theoretical propositions. Hume's demonstration of the vacuity of this assent is, therefore, a welcome conclusion. It shows the confusion which results from going down a wrong road. Yet, this welcome is still within the hermeneutics of recollection. The aim is to retrieve a faith purged from confusions of various kinds. It is important to see what Christianity is not. The aim of the hermeneutics of contemplation is different. It is not a matter of apologetics, but of contemplating possibilities of sense. Whether those possibilities are appropriated, personally, is another matter. The hermeneutics of suspicion says that one should not appropriate what is unintelligible. Can that claim be applied generally to religion? That question must be looked at by examining Hume, the philosopher who inspires the general reaction. It is to that task that we now turn; the task of going beyond Hume in the philosophical contemplation of possibilities of religious sense. 2 hume's first level of criticism In Hume's Dialogues we have three levels of criticism, each of increasing logical severity. The ®rst level of criticism is Philo's claim that we cannot infer more about God than the evidence allows. Throughout the Dialogues, the main assumption is that arguments concerning God's nature must be a posteriori arguments. On this view, there is no difference in assessing religious belief, from assessing any other kind of belief. It is assumed that there are no conceptual differences between them. Philo and Cleanthes agree that Òur ideas reach no farther than our experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and

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operations.'4 Philo adds, `You can draw the inference yourself ', and claims that God's nature must remain an incomprehensible mystery to us. Cleanthes, on the other hand, argues that our ideas are such that they allow us to infer truths about God's nature. He puts his case in these famous lines: Look round the world. Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will ®nd it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an in®nite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace or explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, through it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori and by this argument alone, we do prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.5

Yet, if we should say no more than the evidence allows, how can Cleanthes speak, without quali®cation, of `the grandeur of the work', and of that `which ravishes into admiration all men'? Is it not obvious that this ignores so much that cannot be described in this way? What is more, Philo's response is very different: Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insuf®cient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.6

So while Cleanthes says that nature `ravishes into admiration all men', Philo says it is `contemptible or odious to the spectator'. We may say that there is some reason, in some circumstances, to react in either way. But if this is so, if the evidence is mixed, we can only infer 4 5

Hume, Dialogues, Part II, pp. 142± 3. 6 Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 143.


59

that the character of the Author of Nature is equally mixed. God, it seems, has his good days and his bad days. But, on such evidence, we can never ®nd grounds for believing in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God. We cannot arrive at such a belief on an experiential or experimental basis. The hopelessness of this attempt was pointed out in a famous article by John Wisdom: Two people return to their long neglected garden and ®nd among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, Ìt must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these plants'. Upon enquiry they ®nd that no neighbour has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The ®rst man says to the other `He must have worked while people slept'. The other says `No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds'. The ®rst man says `Look at the way these are arranged. There is a purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall ®nd con®rmation of this.' They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting that a gardener comes and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says Ì still believe a gardener comes' while the other says Ì don't' their different words now re¯ect no difference as to what they would ®nd in the garden if they looked further and no difference about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. At this stage, in this context, the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be experimental, the difference between one who accepts and one who rejects it is now not a matter of expecting something the other does not expect. What is the difference between them? The one says À gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar', the other says `There is no gardener' and with this difference in what they say about the gardener goes a difference in how they feel towards the garden, in spite of the fact that neither expects anything of it which the other does not expect.7

Is this where the matter must be left? Must we say that what can be said about the garden is inconclusive, or that we are in the hands of a capricious God? Our examination of the Greeks has already shown us that our reactions to the contingencies of life are various. There are differences in how we feel about the garden. 8 In exploring 7 8

John Wisdom, `Gods' in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Blackwell 1968, pp. 154 ±5. I shall not discuss here my criticisms of the way in which Wisdom develops this argument. See `Wisdom's Gods', Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 19, 1969, reprinted in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge 1970.

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these differences, we shall be going beyond Hume. The point of doing so is not to advocate them, but to contemplate what they come to. I shall consider these differences by drawing on a previous discussion.9 In a Hume-like way, H. Tennessen suggests that the Book of Job can be read as a comic attack on any attempt to infer the goodness of God from the contingencies of life.10 Job tries to make sense of the various disasters which befall him. Tennessen presents us with the following dilemma: either we judge God by the same standards that we judge each other, in which case he will be found guilty; or we place God beyond those moral standards, the consequence being that we ®nd him in the place reserved for monsters. What Tennessen objects to is the attempt of apologists to have it both ways: And neither shall we tolerate that swindle which the believers are guilty of when they call an act à most shameful crime', à most irreparable infamy', as long as it is done by a man but an àct of inscrutable love' if God is its author. Either one or the other: the same law and the same sentence for both, or separate laws and different sentences, but not the same law and different sentences. If we are to accept the direction of the universe as something just, claims Job . . . then this must mean: just by human standards. Otherwise God may be as `just' as he pleases, in his own language.11

If we take as our conception of justice acting towards people according to their deserts, Job can make nothing of the explanations given him to explain why God has visited him with such sufferings. To be told that this is due to what he has done makes no sense, since he is known to be a holy man, and others have committed deeds far worse than anything he might be guilty of. Tennessen says: Ìt is in the interest of elucidation for the sake of the problem per se, that he scrutinises his conduct. He wants to know what they mean by sin when they build their entire argument on the premise that the wicked will perish and the righteous will triumph.'12 It is impossible to make any sense of human suffering in these terms. To try to say that Job's sufferings are for his own good, either in this life or the next, is to betray a degree of moral insensitivity which staggers nonbelievers when they hear such arguments from their religious 9 10 11

See Òn Not Understanding God', Archivio Di Filoso®a, vol. 56, reprinted in Wittgenstein and Religion, Basingstoke and New York, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1993. H. Tennessen, À Masterpiece of Existential Blasphemy: The Book of Job', The Human World, no. 13, Nov. 1973. 12 Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 5.


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counterparts. Unfortunately, these arguments still dominate contemporary theodicies. But what happens if we suggest that God is not to be judged by these moral standards? Tennessen's novel suggestion is that this is precisely what Job discovers about the God he is dealing with: We can easily imagine Job's boundless astonishment at this tangible appearance by Jehovah. Here Job has been sitting, attaching the most profound and central importance to the problem, in the belief that he was dealing with an opponent who would convince him at the point of mortal embarrassment as soon as his tongue touched the burning issue ± a god of such holiness and purity that even his indictment would release exultation! Only to ®nd himself confronted by a ruler of grotesque primitivity, a cosmic cave dweller, a braggart and a rumble-dumble, almost congenial in his complete ignorance about spiritual re®nement . . . The new thing for Job is not God's quantitative greatness; he had realised this in advance . . . his discovery lies in God's qualitative smallness.13

Job discovers that God is not even worth arguing with. By accusing God of lack of spiritual re®nement, Job consigns his fate to the monstrous. We can see that the god Tennessen attacks is a god of power, one conceived of in anthropomorphic terms. We might well expect him to leave the matter there. At this point, however, Tennessen's article takes a surprising turn. We would expect him to deny the reality of the god he has been criticising. Instead, we ®nd him asking: `But this god in the Book of Job, does he concern us? Is the whole of it any more than a poetic game with an alien and out-dated concept of the divine? Do we know this god?' He replies: `Yes, we know him from the history of religion; he is the god of the Old Testament, ``the Lord of Hosts'' or, as we might put it, the Lord of Armies: the jealous Jehovah.'14 But Tennessen does not think that this is a matter of purely historical interest: But does he live only in the history of religion? No, he also lords it over our own experience, today as many millenniae ago. He represents a familiar biological and social milieu: the blind forces of nature, completely indifferent to the human need for order and meaning and justice . . . the unpredictable visitations by disease and death, the transitoriness of fame, the treason by friends and kin. He is the god of machines and power, of despotism and conquest, of pieces of brass and armoured plates. There are other men than Job who counter him with weapons of the spirit. Some of 13

Ibid., pp. 8± 9.

14

Ibid., p. 10.

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them are being trampled down in heroic martyrdom. Others recognise the limitations of martyrdom, then yield on the surface but hide the despair in their hearts.15

It seems that the kind of order Job is urged to seek in the vicissitudes of life is not to be found there. In fact, Tennessen claims that it is a mistake to seek that kind of understanding at all in that context. But this is just as much a mistake whether such an order is sought from a secular or a religious perspective. Tennessen assumes, however, that a religious perspective is necessarily tied to such an order. But, as we have seen, this is not necessarily the case in ancient religion or in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In neither context need creation be thought of in terms of power. In both cases, creation can be seen as an act of abdication, an allowing of human life which involves the possibility of disasters such as those which befell Job. These disasters are not for anything. Faced by them, Tennessen argues that the only conceivable god is a god of caprice. Indeed, we could imagine a religion whose rituals express the terribleness of chance. What Tennessen does not see is how concept-formation, faced by the same contingencies, could involve belief in a God of grace. How different are the gods that can walk in Wisdom's garden! What stands in the way of Tennessen recognising possibilities other than his anthropomorphic god? He thinks that God must be judged as a human being would be, otherwise, God could be `just' in his own language. Thus he ignores a speci®cally religious context, saying, `The concept of the deity is not to be derived from ``the given God''.'16 This reminds us of the similar strategy adopted by Philo: if a person ìs not antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevolent and powerful, but is left to gather such a belief from the appearance of things . . . [he will never] ®nd any reason for such a conclusion'.17 But the philosophical request is not for an antecedent conviction, but to begin with `the given God' in the sense of beginning by giving attention to the role certain religious concepts play in human life. Tennessen says that human language can only speak of human standards. This is confused, since in that language there is talk of God or the gods. We saw, in the last chapter, that the gods of the Greeks cannot be understood anthropomorphically. Winch brought 15 17

16 Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 10. Hume, Dialogues, Part XI, p. 204.


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out the interrelations between the suffering of the gods and the sufferings of human beings. Relating to the same theme, Marina Barabas says: `The Moirai, the grim protectors of the frontiers between the human and the divine, are ®rst silenced when men become intimate with gods by loving the same things; now, however, they are outraged as god becomes intimate with man, by sharing in his suffering: as Zeus turns from protecting the suppliant to being one himself: Zeus aphiktoÃr.'18 She quotes Simone Weil: `The supplication of a sufferer comes from God himself, and one cannot push the sufferer away without offending God. The Greeks stated that thought by an admirable expression: ``Zeus suppliant'', not ``Zeus, the protector of suppliants''.'19 Weil ®nds certain parallels between the Greeks and Christianity. If creation is seen as an act of abdication (`He spared not his own Son'), the cry of the Son is understood in that context. The only power God has is that of love. Compassion in human beings thus becomes a participation in that love; a love which involves turning one's back on human power, and the realisation that life itself is a grace. It is this love, love of the beauty of the world, which, in believers, draws them to itself, as well as being that by which they see themselves as judged. This interrelation between love, suffering and creation in Christianity, so different from theodicies which make suffering a means to an end, has been powerfully captured in verse by R. S. Thomas in a poem in which he sees Calvary foreshadowed in the slaying of Abel. Abel looked at the wound His brother had dealt him, and loved him For it. Cain saw that look And struck him again. The blood cried On the ground. God listened to it.

When Cain asks why his own sacri®ce of vegetables and ¯owers involving no blood was less acceptable that Abel's sacri®ce of a lamb, God's answer identi®es the divine with suffering: And God said: It was part of myself 18

19

Marina Barabas, `Transcending the Human' in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Religion Without Transcendence?, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1997, p. 219. Barabas' paper is in striking contrast to Martha Nussbaum's claim that reference to the gods is a denial of the human. See `Transcending the Human' in Love's Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990. Simone Weil, `God's Quest for Man' in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1957, p. 3. Quoted by Barabas on p. 232.

64

Hume's legacy He gave me. The lamb was torn From my own side. The limp head, The slow fall of sad tears ± they Were like a mirror to me in which I beheld My re¯ection. I anointed myself In readiness for the journey To the doomed tree you were to work upon. (Cain)

In Christianity God and sacri®ce become one. Sacri®ce being the essence of spirituality: And God held in his hand A small globe. Look, he said. The son looked . . . On a bare Hill a bare tree saddened The sky. Many people Held out their thin arms To it, as though waiting For a vanished April To return to its crossed Boughs. The son watched Them. Let me go there, he said. (The Coming)20

If we stay within the limits of Hume's ®rst level of criticism, there is hardly a glimmer of these aspects of religious concept-formation. Indeed, those who remain within it are unlikely to see any sense in them. They are likely to say, with J. L. Mackie, `This sounds impressive; but what exactly is Phillips saying?'21 For Mackie, I am faced with the following dilemma: either God is some kind of object which has to be conceived anthropomorphically, or my use of language is metaphorical, and religion is something else, perhaps morality, in disguise, as the hermeneutics of suspicion has always suspected. The choice that Mackie provides is simply a conceptual impoverishment of language, since the primary use of language in religion is not factual, idiomatic or metaphorical. As we have seen, there is no question of locating the gods on Olympus, or the omnipresent God of Christianity. If the religious use of language were idiomatic, it could make sense factually, even if that is not what is meant. We could send a person away with a ¯ea in his ear. With metaphors, such as `Juliet is the sun', any attempt to cash them, 20 21

Both poems from R. S. Thomas, Later Poems 1972 ± 1982, London: Macmillan 1983. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982, p. 225.

Hume's second level of criticism

65

factually, leads to nonsense. The reason for saying that the primary use of religious language is not metaphorical is that the latter is a use of one kind of language for a certain purpose. But although there are metaphors in religious language, its primary use is to offer us a way of thinking about our relation to the world. It is as though religion says to one, `Think like this'. But we cannot get to this way of thinking via the assumptions of Hume's ®rst level of criticism. It is not that we have to infer the character of nature's Author from mixed evidence. Rather, in ancient and Christian religion, we are offered a way of thinking about the mixed character of our lives. Thus, in contemplating this way of thinking, we are not involved, as Mackie thinks, in a vain attempt to avoid Hume's criticisms.22 3 hume's second level of criticism As we have seen, Hume's ®rst level of criticism depends on the claim that it is illegitimate to infer more of the Designer of nature than the evidence allows. Yet this criticism begs an even more important question, namely, whether nature can be seen as the product of design in the ®rst place. Someone might think that the effect of my criticisms of Hume's ®rst level of criticism is to insist that there are many reactions to the ¯owers and weeds of the garden in which we live, among them, religious reactions. But this does not go far enough, since as long as we think of nature as a garden, there must have been a gardener, since a garden is a human artefact. But why should nature be regarded as a garden? Thousands of causes are at work in nature, but they are not the result of human-like design and planning. It was the misleading image of the garden which, according to Aldous Huxley, led Wordsworth astray in his later views on nature: The Wordsworthian adoration of Nature has two principal defects. The ®rst . . . is that it is only possible in a country where Nature has been nearly or quite enslaved to man. The second is that it is only possible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone is always alien and unknown, and occasionally diabolic . . . A voyage through the tropics would have cured [Wordsworth] of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter 22

For my detailed criticisms of Mackie see `The Friends of Cleanthes ± A Case of Conceptual Poverty' in Recovering Religious Concepts, Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000.

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strangeness of Nature are at least as real as its intellectually discovered unity. Nor would he have felt as certain, in the damp and sti¯ing darkness, among the leeches and the malevolently tangled rattans, of the divinely anglican character of that fundamental unity. He would have learned once more to treat Nature naturally, as he treated it in his youth, to react to it spontaneously, loving where love was the appropriate emotion, fearing, hating, ®ghting whenever Nature presented itself to his intuition as being, not merely strange, but hostile, inhumanly evil . . . Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art . . . Man has recreated Europe in his own image. Its tamed and temperate Nature con®rmed Wordsworth in his philosophisings.23

No doubt Huxley goes too far in suggesting that there is only one response to the mixed character of nature, but his point about men recreating nature in their own image in a well-gardened Europe is well taken. Once the analogy between gardens and nature collapses, it opens the way to the recognition that nature admits of natural explanations, and that the inference to a designer has no basis in nature itself. For Hume, nature is the only starting-point we have, but it is a natural starting-point in which nature's fruits are distinguished from artefacts. We may wonder at the complexities in nature, but this is not curiosity about how things are made. Thus, as Norman Kemp Smith points out, the argument from design is at its weakest precisely at those points which are supposed to be its strength: The existence of an arti®cial product is only possible in and through the existence of an external arti®cer: the natural, on the other hand, is qua natural, self-evolving and self-maintaining; that is to say, its form is as native to it as the matter of which it is composed. Indeed the argument is at its weakest precisely in those ®elds in which it professes to ®nd its chief evidence ± the evidence upon which Paley, for instance, mainly relied ± the amazingly complex and effective adjustments exhibited in vegetable and animal organisms. The hinge of a door affords conclusive proof of the existence of an arti®cer: the hinge of the bivalve shell, though incomparably superior as a hinge, affords no such proof, it is as natural in its origin as anything in physical Nature can be known to be.24

Furthermore, it is not true that particular causal explanations are intellectually inadequate, forcing us to ask further questions until we arrive at an explanation of the universe as such. Whether further 23 24

Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will, London: Windus 1931. Norman Kemp Smith, Ìs Divine Existence Credible?' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Religion and Understanding, Oxford: Blackwell 1967, pp. 108 ±9.

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questions are asked depends on the circumstances. Sometimes, this will not be necessary. When one child hits another to the ¯oor, the victim does not need a further causal explanation of why he is on the ¯oor. If parents explain the facts of procreation to their children, it does not necessitate any reference to grandparents. Sometimes, the insistence on asking further questions is not a sign of commendable intellectual persistence, but of stubbornness and stupidity; a failure to recognise when enough is enough. We all know that it does not take too many questions `Why?' from a child before the child is told not to be silly! We can see why Hume's second level of criticism is logically more severe than the ®rst. It is more severe to be told, not simply to be careful about one's inferences concerning design, but that the whole notion of design, in this context, is logically inappropriate. 4 hume's third level of criticism It may be said that our objections, so far, do not apply to our intellectual desire to explain, not merely states of affairs in the universe, but the universe as such. Hume is aware that whereas the argument from design takes speci®c states of affairs as its startingpoint, the cosmological argument begins from the fact that anything exists. It asks, `Why should there be something rather than nothing?' There are connections between the two arguments, since both rely on a distinction between the world and something other than the world. Hume's answers to these questions are what I mean by Hume's third level of criticism. It is a criticism, I shall argue, that he does not press hard enough. Philo argues that when we infer one thing from another, we do so on the basis of past experience. Let us accept this argument for the moment. We can say Ìf X then Y' only because we have learnt from past experience that given X then Y. X may not be a particular, but a class or kind of event, so that of anything which is an X and of anything which is a Y, one can say, Ìf X then Y'. Cleanthes, as we have seen, wanted to compare the universe to a machine, but the crucial question, as Philo points out, is whether talk of the universe can be compared with talk of machines, or indeed with any particular or class of particulars one cares to mention. The legitimacy of the inference from the world to God depends on the appropriateness of the comparison. Philo says that when things are within the same species one can make inferences about their

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behaviour. Thus, from observing blood circulation in a number of human beings, we are prepared to make inferences on these matters about any human being. But if we observed it in frogs, although the inference is highly probable, it is still only a matter of conjecture that the same conclusions can be drawn about human beings. Cleanthes, however, wants the existence of God to be more than a conjecture. He doubts whether there is dissimilarity between the way in which one can infer an architect from the existence of a house, and the way in which the existence of the universe implies the existence of its author. The second part of the Dialogues ends with Philo's challenge to Cleanthes: Can you pretend to show any . . . similarity between the fabric of a house, and the generation of a universe? Have you ever seen nature in any such situation as resembles the ®nal arrangements of the elements? Have worlds ever been formed under your eye? and have you had leisure to observe the whole progress of the phenomenon, from the ®rst appearance of order to its ®nal consummation? If you have, then cite your experience and deliver your theory.25

What insights can we attribute to Hume as a result of Philo's challenge? We can probably say that he thinks that it is idle to seek a substantive answer to the question, `Who made the universe?' This is because we have no idea of the context in which this question could be answered. This is why there are important differences between `How did this house come to be?' and `How did the universe come to be?' We can answer the former question because we have experience of houses. We know the difference between a completed house, a half-®nished house, a damaged house, a ruin, and so on. We cannot speak of universes in the same way. These objections cannot be avoided by saying that we know only one universe, that the universe is unique, but bears the mark of its Maker. It is true that when we see a maker's mark on a product, we usually do not check the authenticity of the mark. The important point, however, is that this could be done if necessary. The question of whether there is such a maker is quite independent of the appearance of the mark. Seeing the mark is not a self-authenticating exercise in con®rmation. It is part of a convention by which we recognise who made the given product, but the fact that someone did make it is not simply a matter of seeing the mark, but something 25

Hume, Dialogues, Part II, p. 151.

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69

which can be checked independently of that fact. The absence of an independent check in the case of the claim that God made the world leads us back to all the dif®culties Hume has raised. We have not escaped or answered their challenge. In Religion Without Explanation I made a further claim. I said that Hume did not merely remain agnostic on these questions. I said: `He is not simply saying that we can never know whether anyone made the universe. He is questioning the intelligibility of such talk.'26 I think now that this view is mistaken. It is mistaken precisely because Hume did not press his objections to the analogy between the universe and a house in the logical directions which bring out how severe the criticism can be. Perhaps it can be said that Hume realised that in asking, `Who made the world?' we cannot refer to any process or development in answering the question. Asking for the cause of everything is odd, since we explain the cause of something by referring to something else. But if we want to give the cause of èverything', what else is there to refer to? Yet, it seems to me, there are deeper logical issues concerning the notion of `the world' which Hume either did not pursue suf®ciently, or did not recognise at all. Suppose we say that in asking why anything exists, we mean ànything as opposed to nothing'. Does it make sense to speak of `nothing' in this absolute sense? I can say that there is nothing in my pocket, or in the drawer, but, here, I establish that there is nothing by establishing what is the case. But when we try to speak of `nothing' in the absence of any such context, it isn't clear that our words mean anything at all. Remember that when it is said that there might have been nothing, this is supposed to be a state which could exist. Whatever of this, it is clear that Hume did think that it made sense to speak of `the world', and to speculate on what its origins might be. Were that not the case, we would not be in a position to appreciate what Hume meant by `true religion'. 5 hume's `true religion' At the outset of The Natural History of Religion Hume says: `The whole frame of nature bespeaks of an intelligent author; and no rational 26

See p. 19.

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enquirer can, after serious re¯ection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.'27 This remark will seem to ¯y in the face of Hume's views on religion throughout his work, if we do not consider what `true religion' comes to for Hume. It is in this context that we can appreciate the directions in which his third level of criticism could have developed. When Hume criticises the analogy between a house and the universe, one way of putting the matter would be to say that, unlike a house, the universe is not a thing. It has been suggested that the cosmological argument depends on treating the universe as though it were one big object, and the same is true if, instead of `the universe', we speak of `the world' or èverything'. It is tempting to think of the difference between èverything' and particular things as one of generality. Thus the world or the universe might be thought of as the class of all things. When we speak of a class of things, however, we can identify this class as being distinct from any other class. But what are the common criteria which would determine what would belong to the class of things called èverything'? `The world' is not the most general class of things to which all things belong. Whatever is meant by the unity of the world, it is not the unity of a thing, or of a class of things. Hume, in some ways, continues to speak of the universe or the world as though it were a thing, the only problem being that, unlike other things, such as houses, we do not have the kind of experience of it which allows us to frame any de®nite hypotheses concerning it. Any theory can be advanced, since there is an absence of any intelligible context for discrimination. But if this matter is pressed, as it should be, we can see that this is another way of saying that there is no room here for real theories or hypotheses at all. The world might have been the product of an infant deity, abandoned out of boredom, and allowed to run on unattended ever since. Or the world may have been the work of a superannuated deity ± a kind of basket-weaving among the gods. At the end of Part V of the Dialogues Philo cannot think `that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all'.28 The notions of `belief ' and `hypothesis' have taken off into metaphysical orbit. 27 28

Hume, The Natural History of Religion, p. 31. Hume, Dialogues, Part V, p. 169.

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Considerations such as these should have prevented Hume from thinking of the world as a thing whose origin can be explained. They can be strengthened by reminding ourselves that `the world' must include, presumably, not only that which exists, but that which no longer exists, and that which is yet to exist. That being so, it is dif®cult to see how one can speak of `the world' itself as something which exists. Hume should have heeded his own advice, with respect to other metaphysical theses, when he came to discuss the notion of the origin of the world: consign it to the ¯ames. Instead, we ®nd him conceding that the cause or causes of order in the universe bear some remote, inconceivable analogy to human intelligence. Why does he do this? For Hume, all human knowledge is based on impressions and ideas which are copies of them. Yet, when we reason, we go beyond our ideas. Hume thought he was the ®rst philosopher to give a satisfactory account of how this is possible. When we see a child's hand reach out to touch a ¯ame, we expect the child to be burned. The expectation is not derived from an impression. Neither does it depend on a scienti®c theory, since the expectation exists quite independently of, and even in ignorance of, the scienti®c theory which explains why ®re burns. According to Hume, we make the inference because of the constant conjunction of causes with what we call their effects. But why do we take it for granted that the conjunction will continue beyond our experience of it? We cannot say that we have logically compelling reasons to make inferences in the way we do. Neither can we say that we make the inferences on the grounds of probability, since reasoning on the grounds of probability is precisely the mode of reasoning we are seeking to justify. The suggested justi®cation would be viciously circular. Hume argues that our mode of reasoning is an operation of the mind, an instinct which is independent of any other. But while this instinct can be described there is no justi®cation of it. Instead of saying that the request for such a justi®cation is confused, however, Hume says that it must remain a mystery. Unfortunately, he begins building in the air from this point. Hume says that although our modes of reasoning have no ultimate justi®cations, it would be irrational not to rely on them, since we have no alternative in practice. The only science we have is a practical science of man. There may be thought to be a similarity between these views and those of Wittgenstein when he speaks about

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agreements in practice in the lives people lead. But much in Hume would have to be changed. Hume would have to give up his view that ideas are inherently intelligible without reference to their essentially shared character. Customs or habits of thought would have to be thought of in a less conventional way, and there would be no justi®cation of them in terms of utility. Most importantly, there would be no attempt `to get behind' our agreement in practice. Unfortunately, this is what Hume attempts to do. He thinks that `the order' exhibited in our modes of thought itself requires explanation in terms of some principle in the universe, although we cannot claim knowledge of it. Hume thought it self-evident, along with Cicero, Francis Bacon, Pierre Bayle and Samuel Clarke, that this principle has to be expressed in `mental' terms, rather than in any form of materialism. Hume did not call himself an atheist, not simply because he believed atheists were too dogmatic about `the original principle of order', but because he believed, wrongly, that atheists must be committed to materialism. To account for the original principle of order in the universe, Hume thought that we have to choose between `the mental' and `the physical'. This metaphysical dualism was attacked by Wittgenstein. It is tempting to say that these categories, thought to be exclusive, overlap constantly in our forms of life, but that way of talking perpetuates the very categories which are suspect. Think of Wittgenstein's logical critique of the suggestion that a word is physical, and that its meaning is its mental correlate. Is music physical or mental? We reach for things, or point to them. We toss about in an agitated state, or writhe in agony. Are these gestures, actions and reactions, mental or physical? We see emotion in a face: boredom, interest, grief. Is what the face shows mental or physical? These examples bring out the arti®ciality of the metaphysical dualism: the dualism Wittgenstein was combating when he said that the best picture of the human soul is the human body. Our conclusion is that the notion of `the original principle of order in the universe' is confused, as are the two candidates to be that principle: the categories of `the mental' and `the physical'. But it is in the context of the ®rst of these categories that the equally confused notion of `true religion' emerges, the supposition that the cause or causes of order in the universe bear some remote, inconceivable analogy to human intelligence. Hume claimed that this conclusion made the dispute between theism and atheism purely verbal. The

Hume on miracles

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theist is prepared to admit that there is a great difference between the mind of man and the mind of God, whereas the atheist is prepared to admit a remote analogy between ultimate causes and human intelligence. Hume's `true religion' is a minimal belief which, on Hume's admission, has little practical consequence for human life. What he did not recognise was that `true religion' is the outcome of a metaphysical argument he should not have embarked on. 6 hume on miracles Richard Wollheim notes that `the eighteenth century was not in the sphere of religion a great age either for new dogma or for fresh ethical teaching'. What characterised the dominant religious thought of the period was a sustained attempt to secure for the propositions of religion a ®rm foundation which would make them acceptable to any man of sound mind and common sense. Theology was even prepared to concede a little to natural science in the matter of content, if in exchange it could be assured the mark of scienti®c method . . . It is, then, not surprising that given the thought of his time, Hume should have been so concerned with the problem of religious belief. For he found in this ®eld what he most distrusted: reason pressed into the service of intellectual subversion. 29

What never occurs to Hume, however, is that his own arguments intellectually subvert the religious beliefs he discusses. Before showing how this applies to belief in creation, via the argument from design, we need to note how the same point applies to belief in miracles. Hume argues that no testimony is ever suf®cient to establish that a miracle has occurred because miracles are violations of laws of nature. Laws of nature are established, for Hume, by the constant conjunction of cause and effect. This uniformity of experience counts against any miracle, since it will always outweigh any testimony for miracles. This view can be criticised, since once we ask whose experience we rely on in causal generalities, the answer, for most of us is: not our own. We take these generalities on trust from the testimony of those whose experience we regard as authoritative in these matters. But, 29

Richard Wollheim, Introduction to Hume, The Natural History of Religion, pp. 16± 17.

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then, if Hume's argument relies on the fact that testimony is uniform, this turns out not to be the case, since there are those who testify to miracles. We cannot adjudicate between the testimonies on the ground that testimony is uniform. R. W. Beardsmore has argued that this is not, in fact, Hume's reason for the rejection of miracles. Faced by testimony of alleged miracles, such as that of a man who has lost a leg recovering it by rubbing the stump with holy oil, Hume does not appeal to violations of laws of nature, but to the àbsolute impossibility' of what he is asked to believe.30 He simply says of Cardinal de Retz, who refused to investigate the miracle, that `he concluded like any just reasoner that such evidence carried falsehood upon the very face of it, and was . . . more properly the subject of derision than argument'.31 Beardsmore points out that Hume's analysis of causality in terms of constant conjunction will not account for this absolute impossibility. First, constant conjunction is not necessary to account for obvious causal effects, such as ®re burning. Second, not any constant conjunction will do. It has to be a signi®cant conjunction. What is necessary, Beardsmore argues, is an understanding which comes from scienti®c or technical knowledge: Given a technical understanding of how a car works, you will see why it cannot run without fuel. Given an understanding of the medical changes involved in death and you will understand why a cadaver cannot be brought back to life after rotting for four days in a hot climate. Given a chemist's understanding of the processes of fermentation, you will understand that the process requires sugar and cannot take place in however long a period of time, if all you have to start with is pure water. So Hume would have seen that the conclusion of his discussion of miracles was correct, had he only been able to see that his discussion of causality was incorrect. Paradoxically, to have seen the latter would have been possible only if he had been able to admit just the sort of account of necessity, of what must happen or what cannot happen, which he was most concerned to exclude.32

This conclusion faces Beardsmore with a problem. It is not feasible to believe that people in Biblical times did not have ordinary causal 30

31 32

R. W. Beardsmore, `Hume and the Miraculous' in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Religion and Hume's Legacy, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1990, p. 9. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975, p. 124. Beardsmore, `Hume and the Miraculous', pp. 13 ±14.

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and technical understanding, yet they believed in miracles. So the mere presence of that understanding clearly does not make it impossible to believe in miracles. Beardsmore's answer is that writers who rely on this argument share Hume's view of laws of nature as constant conjunction. What is missing in the Bible is a conception of science and technology with the notion of necessity they involve. Once we have this conception, certain things are ruled out for us. Beardsmore says: Many of the events which surrounded the life of Christ are of the sort which we should be inclined to regard as impossible. To us it seems natural to ask not whether they did happen, but rather how they could have happened. Evidently for the Israelites, it was different. Lacking the distinction between what is unusual or unheard of, and what is impossible, they may have disagreed over whether or not to believe the account of a particular miracle, but they did not disagree over the occurrence of miracles. And since they did not (because they could not) raise the question of the possibility of Christ's having cured the sick or raised the dead, they asked other questions which presupposed that such questions were not raised. Surrounded by miracles, they asked whether what they and others had witnessed was the work of God or of the Devil.33

Beardsmore's paper is in¯uenced by discussions of miracles by Peter Winch34 and Rush Rhees.35 There are some interesting differences between them. Beardsmore simply says that we cannot understand, given the place of science in our culture, what it is to see things as the Israelites saw them. He does not say, as rationalists would, that science disproves the possibility of miracles. To think otherwise would be to confuse the necessities recognised if we think scienti®cally, and the spurious claim that it is necessary to think scienti®cally about the world. Winch, too, argues that miracles are not accidentally problematic in our culture, but he goes further than Beardsmore in asking where the anomaly lies. It does not lie in the alleged anomaly between laws of nature, and miracles conceived of as violations of those laws. Winch argues that the latter notion is unintelligible, since in the event of a deviation occurring, either 33 34

35

Beardsmore, `Hume and Miracles', p. 22. Peter Winch, `Ceasing To Exist' in Trying To Make Sense, Oxford: Blackwell 1988, and Àsking Too Many Questions' in Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, eds., Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1995. Rush Rhees, `Miracles' in Rush Rhees, On Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997.

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reasons are given for the deviation, or, more rarely, the law is reformulated. The real anomaly is between what natural explanation asks of us, and what is asked of us in the acknowledgement of a miracle. Moses' natural reaction, on seeing the burning bush, is to enquire into what is happening, but he is told not to do this, but to kneel. In our culture, it is increasingly dif®cult not to pursue such enquiries. Or if we try to ®nd a place for God it will be a supernatural causal power. The irony is that in an attempt to show that religion is free of science, God's agency is thought of in quasiscienti®c terms. Given the gap between what has been said to occur, and our scienti®c understanding, the in¯uence of science on us is such that we think that the gap must be ®lled by a causality of a different kind. The gap must be ®lled by another possibility if one wishes to speak of `the miraculous'. The whole issue concerns what kind of possibility this is. An example Winch provides illustrates what is at issue: A year or so ago the news media in the United States had a ®eld day about the statue of the Virgin Mary in a church in a small southern town: the statue was reported to be from time to time shedding tears. There were many interviews on the radio with people who, in the main, either maintained that this was a genuine occurrence of a miraculous nature ± by which they meant that there was no `natural' explanation of it; or they maintained that it was indeed explicable, for example by fraud and clever mechanical tricks. I must confess that in the main I found the speakers on both sides of this issue equally disgusting, or at least mediocre, in their response to what was happening. What had all this to do with worship of God and veneration of the Virgin Mary? There was one interview, however, that to my mind stood out from the rest: with a woman who simply asked: why would the Holy Mother not shed tears at the terrible spectacle of human life in our time? What was striking about the woman was that she evinced no interest in the questions about how what was happening might have been caused; and equally she had no interest in trying to show that it had no natural causes. These questions lay, as it were, outside the spectrum of her interests. Her posture was quite at variance both with that of those who insisted on some sort of natural causation (probably trickery) and with that of those who, having investigated the case, concluded that the explanation must be a supernatural one.36

Winch, therefore, does not seem to be saying that no one can witness a miracle today, but that there are enormous obstacles to doing so. Rhees says that his problem concerning Biblical miracles is not in 36

Winch, Àsking Too Many Questions', p. 250.

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accepting that they occurred. He says, with respect to Lazarus, that if it happened it happened. Science is no longer thought of as a closed system which can account for such events. Believing it has occurred, Rhees says, may inspire a certain awe in one, and promote an humility about the achievements of science. But, in that event, Rhees says, he would be experiencing this awe and humility about an amazing natural event. He would not be reacting to it as a miracle. Miracles are revelations of God. But that is what we have lost, partly through the prestige of other interests in our culture ± we cannot see how such events are revelatory of God. But Rhees also speaks of a person suffering from cancer for whom the doctors had given up all hope. In a faith healing service the cancer `simply went away'. Again, the issue would be how he would determine whether this is a miracle. We can see how enormous Hume's in¯uence has been. Perhaps there are problems about his analysis of laws of nature, but, nevertheless, it re¯ects where the problem lies ± in the enormous obstacle created for an apprehension of miracles by the naturalistic modes of explanation which dominate our culture. As we shall see, this obstacle reappears when we compare the argument from design with other religious responses to the world which may not be as problematic for us as the apprehension of miracles. One ®nal point. Some may question the pervasive absence of miracles in our culture. They may invite us to turn on our television sets to witness miracles of healing in abundance. The phenomenon certainly cannot be denied. But what notions surround it: power, technique, causal ef®cacy, with strong commercial interests all too evident. The question remains: how is it revelatory of God?37 37

Apart from the papers already mentioned, other papers occasioned by Winch's `Ceasing to Exist' are as follows: H. O. Mounce, Critical Notice of Winch's Trying to Make Sense, Philosophical Investigations, vol. 2, 1988; R. F. Holland, `Lusus Naturae' in D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch, eds., Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees, London: Macmillan 1989; R. F. Holland, `Naturalism and Preternatural Change' in Raimond Gaita, ed., Values and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, London: Routledge 1990; Norman Malcolm, Òn Ceasing to Exist' in Values and Understanding; D. Z. Phillips, `Waiting for the Vanishing Shed' in Wittgenstein and Religion, Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1993; D. Z. Phillips, `Miracles and Open-Door Epistemology' in Recovering Religious Concepts, Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000; Anthony Palmer, `Violations of Nature and Conditions of Sense' in Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr, eds., Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief.

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The fact that so many of Hume's critics and defenders discuss religious belief in terms of design shows the extent to which the philosophical temper of his age is still ours. While Hume revealed the bankruptcy of the argument from design, he could not see beyond it. Hume never suspected that the argument from design was itself an intellectualist distortion of belief in God as Creator of the world. Remembering the Creator in the days of one's youth is not to have a feeling of design. Consider the conceptual differences between Philo's challenge, `Have you ever seen nature in any such situation as resembles the ®rst arrangement of the elements? . . . If you have, then cite your experience and deliver your theory', and God's response to Job when the latter seeks àn original principle of order' to make sense of his life: `Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding . . . Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail? . . .'. God's response to Job is not an answer to his questions, but an exposing of what is wrong with them. This does not mean that the questions should not be asked, but they are worked through until a different kind of relation to the world is reached: not a feeling of design, but wonder that there should be anything at all; wonder at existence. Job asks for an explanation of creation, but is given a song of creation. To know God is to be able to sing the song of creation; to partake of its spirit. The radical conceptual contrast is between `the ®rst arrangement of the particles' and creation at which `the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy'. This may go some way towards accounting for what may seem to be odd lapses in critics of the argument from design. It is now generally agreed that, in the main, Hume's views are to be found in Philo. Yet, at the end of the tenth section, we ®nd Philo saying: Ìn many views of the universe, and of its parts, particularly the latter, the beauty and ®tness of ®nal causes strike us with such irresistible force, that all objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere cavils and sophisms; nor can we then imagine how it was ever possible for us to repose any weight on them.' 38 38

Hume, Dialogues, Part X, p. 202.

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Later, in the twelfth section, we ®nd Philo saying: À purpose, an intention or design strikes everywhere the most careless, the most stupid thinker, and no man can be so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it.'39 Kant, who was greatly in¯uenced by Hume in his criticism of the proofs for the existence of God, nevertheless says of the argument from design that it ìs the oldest, the clearest, and the best suited to ordinary human reason. It enlivens the study of nature, just as itself deserves its existence and gains ever new vigour from that source.'40 John Cook Wilson, after a penetratingly critical discussion of relations between religious belief and the requests for proof, says that if a person turns from theorising to look at the facts: `Can he help feeling admiration and wonder? Whether it be an illusion or not, the idea of plan and design and choice of means comes on us with irresistible force; we cannot shut it out.'41 And when Hume begins The Natural History of Religion by saying `The whole frame of nature bespeaks of an intelligent author', 42 Van Harvey thinks it is too strained to explain the passage away as an attempt `to throw dust in the eyes of the censors',43 although he thinks `that the notion of an orderer is not in the strict sense, an hypothesis but a confession'.44 Still, it is a confession involving design and this, for Van Harvey, determines the nature of the problem: The issue is not whether the belief is weakly probable and, therefore, only permits a weak assent, rather the question is whether, given the astonishment one feels in relation to the order and beauty in the cosmos, one has the right to believe in an orderer, and whether this belief can be brought into relationship with others without deleterious consequences or absurdities.45

How do these tensions come about? How can critics say that nature, which they hold to be worthless as evidence of design, nevertheless gives a strong impression of design? Norman Kemp Smith offers the following answer: 39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., p. 214. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan 1956, A623. John Cook Wilson, `Rational Grounds of Belief in God' in J. Cook Wilson, Statement and Inference, ed. A. S. L. Farquhasson, Oxford 1926. Hume, The Natural History of Religion, p. 31. Van A. Harvey, Ìs There Anything Religious About Philo's `True Religion'?' in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Religion and Hume's Legacy, p. 4. 45 Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 15.

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The answer would seem to be that while undoubtedly Nature produces an impression which is overwhelming, the impression is being misinterpreted as an impression of design. Minds which have been moulded upon the anthropomorphic Deistic ways of thinking so prevalent in the eighteenth century, and which in popular religious circles are still so usual, will indeed be apt to interpret the impression in this fashion. That Hume and Kant should have done so shows the extent to which they were still under their in¯uence. Immediately the tension of their thought was relaxed, the accustomed ways of thinking resumed their sway.46

We have already encountered dif®culties with the distinction between impressions and interpretations Kemp Smith employs. The suggestion that nature must make such-and-such an impression on us is equally problematic. Yet, his main point holds, that an account of a religious response may be given which is hampered by one's understanding of the intellectual possibilities open to one. Harvey characterises Philo as one having `no con®dence in any reasoning' about `the feeling of design that . . . awakens a ``profound adoration of the divine Being'' '.47 But what if the reasoning itself has been too con®ned? What if the need is to go beyond the argument from design, since it is inadequate to capture religious conceptions of creation? What if the need is to go beyond the argument to examine the song of creation? Then it will become clear to my critics how it is possible both to say that Hume's criticisms are entirely successful, and that there are religious responses to the contingencies of nature which they do not touch. 8 hume's one-sided diet When we turn to Hume's Natural History of Religion, we ®nd that the need is not to go beyond an intellectual argument, such as the argument from design, but to go beyond his uncritical prejudices which lead to a one-sided diet of examples. Hume indulges in a common condescension towards early cultures, which we shall meet again in this book, calling their peoples stupid, barbarous, uninstructed and, of course, incapable of philosophical re¯ection. According to Hume, their religious beliefs come, not from inadequate re¯ection, but from superstitious reactions to the contingencies of life: 46 47

Kemp Smith, Ìs Divine Existence Credible?', p. 117. Harvey, Ìs There Anything Religious About Philo's `True Religion'?', pp. 13 ±14.

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. . . the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessities. Agitated by hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the ®rst obscure traces of divinity.48

While Kierkegaard said that proof in religion is from the emotions, Hume, it might be said, thought that the disproof of religion, apart from his attenuated deism, is from the emotions. The aim is not to deny Hume his examples. Within religion itself there are plenty of criticisms of alleged miracles. It would require a perverse blindness to deny the evils to which religion has contributed through persecution and intolerance. Nor can it be denied that religious powers have often colluded with their worldly counterparts, becoming the agents of oppression and exploitation. The point, rather, is to show what Hume does not even consider, what lies beyond the limits of his philosophising. As we have seen already in this and the previous chapter, Hume, in concentrating on reactions to the contingencies of life, located the proper context for contemplation of concept-formation in religion. The trouble is that, thereafter, he does not contemplate the various forms it may take. For example, desire for future happiness and dread of future misery, simply constitute, for him, a series of sanctions, heaven and hell perhaps, which rule human life in terms of ultimate utility. There is no sense in Hume of the religious conception of life as a gift for which we are answerable, or of heaven and hell as expressions of an eternal judgement on how that gift has been used, a judgement which has nothing to do with utility. Hell, for example, is seen as eternal separation from God; the recognition that I have it in me to damn myself. It is because religious concepts are so often seen in terms of utility, of happy outcomes, that so many liberal theologians ®nd hell an embarrassment. The same notion of utility pervades Hume's treatment of rituals. He sees them as ¯awed instruments in an attempt to satisfy our desires. He simply assumes that ìgnorance is the mother of devotion',49 a remark that illustrates the extent of Hume's blindness. He is as blind to the celebratory character of the rituals, as when he 48 49

Hume, The Natural History of Religion, p. 39. Ibid., p. 98.

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missed the song of creation in discussing the argument from design. Hume reduces praise to propositions. Hume's emphases have increased in our technological age. We ®nd it hard to see anything in sinister and terrible rituals other than attempts at warding off what is so described. We do not see that the sinister and the terrible can be contemplated simply because they are sinister and terrible. An age obsessed with solving problems ®nds this hard to recognise. Even death is thought of as a fate primitives tried to avoid, whereas, in fact, they often recognised its majesty. Perhaps it is we who make it a secret behind hospital walls. Again, speaking of one who belongs to what he calls `the raw and ignorant multitude', Hume says: À monstrous birth excites his curiosity and is deemed a prodigy. It alarms him for its novelty and immediately sets him a trembling and sacri®cing, and praying. But an animal, compleat in all its limbs and organs, is to him an ordinary spectacle, and produces no religious opinion or affection.'50 Hume does not see how the relation between abnormality or madness and normality could be a matter of religious signi®cance. So far from the latter inspiring no religious reaction, its preciousness as a gift is seen in the light of its precariousness. Normality is seen as a gift or grace when, in awe, one realises how little it takes to disturb it. In this way `the disordered sense' may well lead people to see with astonished eyes `the ®rst obscure traces of divinity', but not with the `disordered eyes' Hume attributes to them. Again, consider Hume's remarks on predestination. The Scotland of his day was in the grip of a distorted form of Calvinism, and it in¯uenced his polemics. With mischievous wit Hume said, in this context, that polytheism is superior to monotheism: `The grosser pagans contented themselves with divinizing lust, incest, and adultery; but the predestinarian doctors have divinized cruelty, wrath, fury, vengeance and all the blackest vices.'51 Wittgenstein agrees with Hume that one could only react with incredulity or despair to certain readings of predestination in which it is determined, from the outset, that a few go to heaven, while the majority go to hell. Wittgenstein said that such a picture of necessity even destroys any possibility of punishment. Such a picture, Wittgenstein says, destroys morality, and has been the cause of a great deal of harm. But there are 50

Ibid., p. 35.

51

Ibid., p. 90.

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differences: for Hume, predestination, so understood, is the nonsense which is religion, whereas Wittgenstein calls it irreligious nonsense. Unlike Hume, however, Wittgenstein proceeds to enquire how, in the mouths of some people, such as Saint Paul, belief in predestination can be à good and godly picture'. There, predestination is not understood as an independent theory about morality, but as an expression of a religious morality. From the start, come what may, we are judged in the light of God's commands, whatever our various abilities as individuals to obey them. It is not a case of saying that because God has commanded it, we must be able to do it. Rather, it is as though one is told, `Think of how you are to be judged like this'.52 No doubt Hume would have reacted with abhorrence to this conception of predestination too, but it is philosophically important to give a just account even of a conception one abhors. The difference between Hume and Wittgenstein, in this respect, is the difference between a polemical and a contemplative philosopher. 9 hume and us What is the philosophical signi®cance of Hume for us? There are three answers I want to consider in relation to his `true religion'. The ®rst is the one I ®nd most unlikely, since it tries to attribute a mystical signi®cance to Hume's `true religion'. As we have seen, Hume's conception involves a minimal belief in a remote, inconceivable analogy between the cause or causes of the universe, and human intelligence. No more substantive claims concerning this origin can be made. At times, in an attempt to understand Philo, Harvey aligns him with those mystics whom he describes as claiming `to adore an ineffable divinity about which they will make no determinate claims'.53 Kemp Smith offers similar alternatives: What Hume has achieved in the Dialogues, considered by themselves, is, at most, to show that the traditional arguments which he has been considering have in fact the defects which he asserts. The reader, should he approve Hume's criticisms, has still the alternatives before him, either to follow Hume in his thorough-going scepticism, or should he so choose, to look to the Dialogues for instruction only in the via negativa ± a discipline upon which 52

53

For Wittgenstein's discussion of predestination see Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in a collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell 1977, pp. 30e, 32e, 72e, 77e, 81e, 86e. Harvey, Ìs There Anything Religious About Philo's `True Religion'?', p. 14.

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theology, thanks to the mystics no less than to the sceptics, has itself found reason to insist.54

To try to see any similarity between Hume's attenuated deism and the theological via negativa is a confusion of epistemological mystery with religious mystery. Further, notions of God's ineffability appear in more common religious contexts than mysticism, although there are continuities between them.55 If we think of passages in the Old and New Testaments where God is said to be beyond human understanding, it is likely that some of the following would come to mind. Job seeks a God who `doeth great things and unsearchable' (5:9); the Psalmist testi®es, `Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised: and his greatness is unsearchable' (145:3); St. Paul exclaims as he wonders at the knowledge and wisdom of God, `how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past ®nding out' (Rom. 11:33). All are agreed on the Psalmist's view of God's knowledge: `Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high. I cannot attain unto it' (139:6). The ®rst thing it is essential to note is that Job, the Psalmist and St. Paul are not making statements about human language. Their expressions of mystery are expressions in language. They are not telling us that because of the inadequacy of language, they cannot praise God. Praising God is precisely what they are doing.56

To think otherwise is as bad as thinking that someone who says `Words can't tell you how grateful I am' fails to thank because of the inadequacy of language. Hume's minimal belief can hardly be assimilated to these religious expressions. This does not mean that the phenomenon of minimal faith does not exist, or those who possess it are not legion among us. This minimalism can take different forms. There are those who can only accept a small number of religious beliefs, although they may belong to religious communities who profess to believe a far wider range. These minimal beliefs may be held by people with no formal religious allegiances. In the realm of popular belief, distorted forms of religious belief may appear in suppressed forms in advertisements and television commercials in their promise of perfections not far removed from a religious pie-in-the-sky. They may appear in various 54 55 56

Norman Kemp Smith, `The Argument of The ``Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion'' ' in Hume's Dialogues, p. 75. See D. Z. Phillips, `From Coffee to Carmelites' in Wittgenstein and Religion. D. Z. Phillips, Faith After Foundationalism, Boulder, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press 1995 (®rst published London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 277 ± 8. The notion of mystery is discussed at greater length here.

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forms of the occult with its promise of mystery devoid of spiritual effort. Such phenomena have been captured by the television dramatist Dennis Potter in such plays as Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Joe's Ark, Brimstone and Treacle, Suf®cient Carbohydrate and Pennies From Heaven. They show how quasi-religious hopes and fears surface in our songs and fantasies. Potter says: [T]he human dream for some concept of perfection, some Zion or Eden or Golden City, will surface and take hold of whatever circumstances are at hand ± no matter how ludicrous. Even in a future land of Muzak, monosodium glutamate and melamined encounters, the old resilient dreams will insist on making metaphors and ®nding illumination in the midst of the surrounding dross. There is, then, no place where `God' cannot reach.57

There are those too, who think that God can be reached instantly via drugs in ecstatic moments which are recounted by raconteurs of the staggeringly banal. `God' may drift in and out of our casual conversation. People speculate on how we see through a glass darkly, as they indulge in a glass of dark. `There must be something behind it all,' they say. So what does a minimal belief look like? Any of these. A second suggestion about Hume is more promising, namely, that in Philo we are shown someone who does `not claim to know more than one knows or to believe more than one can believe'.58 We need to appropriate this lesson if we are to avoid the false road down which the argument from design takes us. In this sense, conceptual confusion is always trying to say more than we know, or to believe more than we can believe. Given the state of contemporary philosophy of religion we certainly need to take Hume's lesson to heart. Yet, salutary though this reminder is, we need to go beyond it in the third suggestion concerning Hume's signi®cance for us. Harvey says that `Philo simply makes a distinction between his religious feeling ± his astonishment and awe at the world's order ± and any attempt to articulate his feelings about this in the form of a theological proposition of some kind.'59 But, as we have seen, this distinction is necessitated by the limitations of Hume's philosophical analyses. Ironically, in relation to religion, Hume was not distrustful enough; not suspicious enough of his own suspicions. As Kemp 57 58 59

Dennis Potter, Introduction to Brimstone and Treacle, London: Methuen 1983, p. 3 (unpaginated). Harvey, Ìs There Anything Religious About Philo's `True Religion'?', p. 19. Ibid., p. 13.

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Smith points out, in assigning substantive religious beliefs to the pathology of religion, Hume was not enough of a sceptical enquirer.60 Hume never suspected that in the argument from design religion was being as intellectually subverted as reason itself because, along with others, he was putting up the song of relation for scienti®c approval. The reason why the hermeneutics of contemplation involves going beyond Hume is that Hume did not contemplate his surroundings with suf®cient philosophical attention. Having presented us with a battery of follies, obscurities, superstitions and con¯icting beliefs, Hume concludes his Natural History as follows: The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such is the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Hume's escape was premature. The region of philosophy he escaped into, the argument from design and `true religion', was obscure indeed. What needs to be done is to return to those contexts in the Natural History Hume thought least fruitful, not in the name of ®deism, but in the spirit of philosophical re¯ection to consider religious possibilities he ignores. The aim is not to set anything a quarrelling, but to teach us differences worthy of philosophical contemplation. 60

Norman Kemp Smith, `Hume's View Regarding Religion in General' in Hume, Dialogues, p. 11.

chapter 4

Feuerbach: religion's secret?

1 feuerbach and demystification In the course of the last chapter we saw the insuperable dif®culties facing anyone who argues that since God's existence cannot be veri®ed directly, it must be inferred from what we see around us. Hume, at his strongest, argues that that inference is logically problematic. I have argued that these logical dif®culties are more severe than Hume realised, although this greater challenge is latent in his remarks. In his Natural History it can be said that Hume, turning from the philosophical character of his `true religion', examined concept-formation in religious belief. He concluded that seeing what this amounts to reduces religion to an understandable natural phenomenon; a phenomenon which helps one understand why religion along with philosophical defences of it, leads one to postulate transcendental illusions. Once Hume's philosophical critique is accepted, the inevitable legacy he bequeaths is simply the task of giving increasingly detailed accounts of how these illusions come to be formed and believed. It is easy to see Ludwig Feuerbach as an inheritor of Hume's legacy. Eugene Kamenka says of him: He does not confront religion as an external critic, as one who is simply concerned to show that there is no God. This, Feuerbach believed, was work successfully completed by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The point now was to understand religion, to show its genesis in something nonsupernatural in terms of which it could be explained and understood, thus undermining the supernatural pretensions of religion at the same time as accounting for them. Feuerbach's method, applied and extended by such thinkers as Marx and Freud has become one of the standard ways of dealing with ìdeologies' as opposed to theories ± we show how they arose and what needs they satisfy or what language they appeal to.1 1

Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, London: Routledge 1970, p. 37.

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It is necessary, at the outset, to confront the accusation that remarks such as these are guilty of the genetic fallacy, confusing the truth or falsity of a belief with its origin. Kamenka is aware of the distinction and comments: Only when such an analysis becomes a substitute for considering the truth or falsity of a belief does it become vicious. The two questions ± `why does a man have a certain belief ?' and ìs that belief true?' are separate issues and must be kept distinct. If the distinction is maintained, however, the ®rst question is as legitimate as the second. In particular contexts (especially where the belief is patently false), this ®rst question may be much more interesting and we may come to understand the nature of an error much more precisely by understanding how men are led into it.2

These comments, however, while being applicable to many contexts, do not get to the heart of the matter where philosophical criticism is concerned. This is because the philosophical theses being attacked are not the product of error, but of confusion. They are not theses which are simply false, but could have been true, but theses which are the product of illogicality. As we saw in the third section of chapter 1, this is why a philosophical confusion has to be dismantled indirectly, by exposing the route by which the confusion has come about. This is precisely what Feuerbach claimed to be doing with respect to religious belief, and why his emphasis on conceptformation is not an emphasis on origin instead of truth, but an emphasis on how certain philosophical concepts can be formed in a way which distorts the realities of human existence. As Thomas Wartenburg says: Feuerbach had come to believe that God and Truth, the purported objects of religion and philosophy, were not their real objects. According to Feuerbach, when the religious person spoke of God or the philosopher discussed the nature of Being and Truth, what he or she was really talking about was the human being, only through the use of a sort of code. Feuerbach saw his task as that of exposing the nature of these codes, thereby liberating human beings from living under the illusions fostered by religion and philosophy.3

While the in¯uence of Hume cannot be denied, the philosophy on Feuerbach's doorstep which fostered the illusions he wanted to decode was Hegel's metaphysical system. He believed that that 2 3

Ibid., p. 160 fn. Thomas E. Wartenburg, Ìntroduction' in Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Indianapolis: Hackett 1986, pp. vi ±viii.

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system was the result of the logical confusion of reifying the predicates of human existence. For example, from the fact that human beings think, Hegel concluded that Thought is an independent subject in which they participate. Such Thought, since it is not con®ned to any particular individual, is universalised and said to be in®nite. By a similar process, the spirit of human consciousness becomes an independent, universal subject called Absolute Spirit. Time is simply a manifestation of the way in which the inner logic of this Absolute Spirit unfolds in and through ®nite things. As Van Harvey points out: Hegel's philosophy of Spirit had enormous implications for the philosophy of religion and for the understanding of Christianity. Since he regarded all the various stages of human culture as `moments' in the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, it followed that the various stages of religion, from animism to the ethical monotheism of Judaism and Christianity, could be seen as stages in the self-manifestation of this Spirit. In other words, the history of religion culminating in Christianity is not merely an impersonal substance but a Subject.4

Indeed, Christianity itself becomes a stage in the self-manifestation of Absolute Spirit as it reaches its most perfect expression in philosophical terms, the very terms which characterise Hegel's metaphysics. Hence Kierkegaard's jibe about how fortunate Hegel was to be born just at the time when reality reached its consummation in his own System. Feuerbach's critique of Hegel's rei®cation and objectifying of predicates is a far-reaching one. It goes to the heart of the question about the subject of philosophical enquiry. The philosopher is said to investigate, not the reality of any particular state of affairs, but Reality as such, as though this were an independent existing Subject. It seems that all we can say of this Subject called `Reality' is that ìt is'. If we try to say anything substantive about it, the kind of dif®culty associated with various theses propounded by the Presocratics soon becomes evident. They asked, `What is the nature of àll things'?' and gave replies such as, Àll things are water' and Àll things are atoms'. But, then, one begins to wonder why no account can be given of the reality of the water and the atoms. Plato wrestled with this problem of measuring `the measure', where the latter is thought of as the measure of `the real'. Plato came to the conclusion that the 4

Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the interpretation of religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 26.

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unity of the world is neither the unity of a form or of a thing. `Being', that most general predicate, is rei®ed by Hegel into an independent Subject, whereas Wittgenstein said that the word `real' should be treated as humbly as the word `table' or `chair'. In other words, we should look to see what the distinction between `the real' and `the unreal' comes to in various contexts, instead of reifying and objectifying these contexts in the claim that they all participate in an existent called Reality. We saw, in the fourth section of the previous chapter, the problems which arise when we treat Reality or the World as a discrete subject, as though àll things' were one big object, or a class of things. In identifying the one big subject of philosophy as Absolute Spirit, Hegel is providing idealism's candidate for this universal subject of enquiry. Feuerbach wanted to invert this philosophical tendency to reify and objectify words such as èxistence', `real', and `thinking' into independent metaphysical Subjects. Little wonder that he in¯uenced thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber and Jean-Paul Sartre, since each, in different ways, echo Feuerbach's insistence, expressed later in the saying, that existence precedes essence. The inversion of Hegel's philosophy consisted in the claim that its essences were, in fact, confused rei®cations of the real predicates of human existence. It is this methodological inversion, the undoing of what he took to be mysti®cation in Hegel's philosophy, that strikes the reader as a contemporary feature of Feuerbach's thought. This is because, in the twentieth century, in the work of Wittgenstein, the emphasis on demysti®cation in philosophy has been given a greater emphasis than it has ever had in the history of philosophy. Comparisons between Feuerbach and Wittgenstein seem to suggest themselves readily to the reader of the former's Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity. Neither Feuerbach nor Wittgenstein want to replace the metaphysical theses they attack with a counter-metaphysical thesis of their own. Both thinkers insist that they want to replace the mysti®cations of metaphysics with the realities of human existence. They also seem to agree on how this is to be done. Two tasks need to be ful®lled. First, one has to show how the mysti®cation comes about. But, second, they agree that this can only be done by paying attention to the actualities of human life. This is what Feuerbach accuses Hegel and other idealists of not doing:

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I differ toto caelo from those philosophers who pluck out their eyes that they may see better . . . I do not generate the object from the thought, but the thought from the object . . . it recognises as the true thing, not the thing as it is an object of the abstract reason, but as it is an object of the real, complete man, and hence as it is itself a real, complete thing. 5

We can only achieve understanding and freedom from confusion if we return from the language of metaphysics where, to use Wittgenstein's phrase, language is idling, and listen to the diverse speech of human discourse. Speaking of his method, Feuerbach says, `This philosophy does not rest on Understanding per se, on an absolute, nameless understanding, belonging one knows not to whom, but on the understanding of man.'6 Wittgenstein spoke of the philosophical task as bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.7 Feuerbach says that he hopes that readers whose eyes are not sealed will be convinced and will admit, èven though reluctantly, that my work contains a faithful, correct translation of the Christian religion out of the Oriental language of imagery into plain speech.'8 This reluctance on the part of readers is understandable, and is what suffering amounts to in philosophy ± the giving up of confused ways of thinking that we try to hang on to and do not want to give up. The result of an understanding free of mysti®cation will not be another system. Feuerbach says that he has found his criterion of truth not in `the abstract, professional philosopher' but in the one who àbstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy'.9 Because of the philosophical climate of his day, Feuerbach, like Wittgenstein, doubted whether the spirit in which he philosophised would be appreciated. Yet, Feuerbach entertained the hope that his works, which he believed to be of universal human interest, would one day, though perhaps not in their present form, `become the common property of mankind: for nothing is opposed to them in the present day but empty, powerless illusions and prejudices in contradiction with the true nature of man'.10 I have been comparing Feuerbach with Wittgenstein, without quali®cation, to account for the contemporary resonances the reader 5 6 7 8 9

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper 1957, pp. xxxiv ± xxxv. Ibid., p. xxxv. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell 1953, §116. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. xlii. 10 Ibid., p. xliii. Ibid., p. xlii.

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can ®nd in Feuerbach's work. But in concluding this section of the chapter, a question must be raised which, potentially, severely limits the comparison. In exposing metaphysical confusions, Wittgenstein claimed that he was restoring or recovering ordinary discourse. He did not take himself to be disturbing the grammar of that discourse in any way ± he leaves that where it is. Can the same be said of Feuerbach? He claimed to bring religion to a self-consciousness of its own nature. Feuerbach says: Speculation makes religion say only what it has itself thought, and expressed far better than religion; it assigns a meaning to religion without any reference to the actual meaning of religion; it does not look beyond itself. I, on the contrary, let religion itself speak; I constitute myself only its listener and interpreter, not its prompter. Not to invent, but to discover, `to unveil existence' has been my sole object; to see correctly, my sole endeavour.11

To what extent can we accept these philosophical declarations? 2 god among the predicates There is one aspect of Feuerbach's philosophical analysis which would enable us to say that he did listen to religion in rescuing it from metaphysical distortion. Unfortunately, the aspect I have in mind is purely negative: it concerns Feuerbach's understanding of what `God' cannot be. Ironically, it is an aspect of his analysis to which too little attention is given, since commentators want to get on to the positive aspects of his analysis. In these positive aspects, however, Feuerbach has ceased to listen to all aspects of religion and is certainly imposing his limited interpretation on it, one which lacks credibility as a complete account. The more interesting negative part of his analysis claims that what he calls the divine predicates cannot be attached to a metaphysical subject, God. Put another way: Feuerbach argues that `God' cannot be regarded as a thing; `God', in order to be the object of religious worship, cannot be an object among objects. It is extremely interesting to ®nd that the twin objects of Feuerbach's attack on metaphysics are the `God' of theology, and the `Being' of philosophy. As we have seen, this `Being' cannot have the unity of a thing. It might be said that Hegel tried to give it the unity of a form, an idea. This second suggestion will not do either. But, 11

Ibid., pp. xxxv ± xxxvi.

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remaining with the attempt to think of `Being' or `the world' as a thing, we saw, in our discussion of Hume, that if `the world' refers not only to what is, but also to what has ceased to be, and to what has yet to be, it is hard to see how `the world' can be thought of as a `something' which exists. `The world' cannot be thought of as a discrete individual which one would have to distinguish from other individuals. In these respects, the comparison between `the world' and `God' goes a fairly long way. Neither can be thought of as having the unity of a thing. This is linked, crucially, to questions concerning the identity of divine beings. How could we say whether two people are worshipping the same god? In tackling this question, we see that `God' cannot have the identity of a thing. We can hardly think of that in which we are said to live, move, and have our being in this way. How is this related to Feuerbach's analysis? It is precisely Feuerbach's claim that in attributing the divine predicates to the divine subject, theologians are treating `God' as a quasi `thing' beyond the predicates. Further, Feuerbach claimed, theologians are turning `God' into a metaphysical subject which does not do justice to the essence of religious belief. Once again, Feuerbach's claim has resonances with work in twentieth-century analytic philosophy of religion. Here, too, we ®nd criticisms of the divorce between the divine predicates and `God' as a subject. For example, Rush Rhees shows how this divorce is linked to the confusion of treating `God' as though it were a substantive or proper name. Rhees says: If one lays emphasis . . . on the fact that `God' is a substantive, and especially if one goes on . . . to say that it is a proper name, then the natural thing will be to assume that meaning the same by `God' is something like meaning the same by `the sun' or meaning the same by `Churchill'. You might even want to use some such phrase as `stands for' the same. But nothing of that sort will do here. Questions about `meaning the same' in connexion with the names of physical objects are connected with the kind of criteria to which we may appeal in saying that this is the same object ± `that is the same planet as I saw in the south west last night', `that is the same car that was standing here this morning'. Supposing someone said the `word ``God'' stands for a different object now'. What could that mean? I know what it means to say that `the Queen' stands for a different person now, and I know what it means to say that St. Mary's Church is not the

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St. Mary's Church that was here in So-and-So's day. I know the sort of thing that might be said if I were to question either of these statements. But nothing of that sort could be said in connexion with any question about the meaning of `God'. It is not by having someone point and say `That's God'. Now this is not a trivial or inessential matter. It hangs together in very important ways with what I call the grammar of the word `God'. And it is one reason why I do not think it is helpful just to say that the word is a substantive.12 One way of bringing out the difference in grammar is to show central differences between a thing and its predicates, which have no correlate in the religious case. Rhees says: If it was God, then it was the creator of all there is, it was that in which all things live and move and have their being . . . Nor would it be Experience of God without that. Winston Churchill may be Prime Minister and also a company director, but I might come to know him without knowing this. But I could not know God without knowing that he was the Creator and Father of all things. That would be like saying that I might come to know Churchill without knowing that he had a face, hands, body, voice or any of the attributes of a human being.13

Rhees is bringing out the internal relations between spiritual realities and the expressions he mentions. The expressions determine what those realities mean. The relations are not external, as they are in the case of Churchill and the of®ces he holds. Another way of putting the same point is to say that `love', for example, in `God is love', is not a predicate contingently related to its subject. If it were, God's love would just happen to be true of God at some time, while the actual character of God could be quite different. But is not this confusion something that Feuerbach, too, is anxious to expose? He asks: God is love: but what does that mean? Is God something besides love? a being distinct from love? It is as if I said of an affectionate human being, he is love itself ? Certainly; otherwise I must give up the name God, which expresses a special personal being, a subject in distinction from the predicate. Thus love is made something apart . . . it receives both in theory and in feeling, both objectively and subjectively, the rank simply of a predicate, not that of a subject, of the substance; it shrinks out of observation as a collateral, an accident; at one moment it presents itself to me as something essential, at another, it vanishes again. God appears to me 12 13

Rush Rhees, `Religion and Language' in Rush Rhees, On Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, pp. 45 ±6. Ibid., p. 48.


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in another form besides that of love; in the form of omnipotence, of a severe power not bound by love; a power in which, though in a smaller degree, the devils participate.14

A different way of raising the issue is to ask whether the ìs' in `God is love' is an ìs' of predication. The illuminating grammatical alternative is to see `God is love' as a grammatical rule in dogmatics: it gives us one use of the word `God', just as `Generosity is good' gives us one rule for the use of `good', and is not a predicate of what G. E. Moore took to be an ùnde®nable subject'.15 Seen in this way, the predicates become grammatical predicates of a grammatical object, not descriptions of an independent existing object of which they happen to be true. They de®ne the parameters of the divine under certain aspects. Thus one avoids Feuerbach's fears: `So long as love is not exalted into a substance, into an essence, so long as there lurks in the background of love a subject who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, whose personality, separable and actually separated from love delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, ± the phantom of religious fanaticism.'16 In his analysis, too, Rhees is fully aware of the lurking `phantom' Feuerbach warns us of. Rhees writes: Is the reason for not worshipping the devil instead of God that God is stronger than the devil? God will get you in the end, the devil will not be able to save you from his fury, and then you will be for it. `Think of your future, boy, and don't throw away your chances.' What a creeping and vile sort of thing religion must be. The difference between the power of God and the power of the devil: it is dif®cult to understand at all clearly what this difference is (otherwise there might be no idolatry); and yet people with any religion at all will have a lively sense of it, generally. The power of God is a different power from the power of the devil. But if you said that God is more powerful than the devil ± then I should not understand you, because I should not know what sort of measure you used. If you tried to explain by comparing the different physical causes, as you might if you said that one explosion was more powerful than another ± meaning it had more far reaching effects ± then I think you would have sidetracked things well and properly. (When Satan said that dominion over this world had been left to him, Jesus did not contradict him.) 14 15 16

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 52. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1959. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 52± 3.

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I should think that any natural theology which rested on a quantitative comparison between the power of God and the power of physical agents or operations ± or: a quantitative comparison between the physical effects of God's power and the physical effects of anything else ± would be a pretty unholy sort of thing.17

As for Feuerbach's diabolical God who delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, Rhees' response to such supernatural threats is unequivocal. Ì hope I should have the decency to tell this being, who is named Almighty God, to go ahead and blast.'18 If we appreciate the grammatical points made by Feuerbach and Rhees we see that the divine predicates cannot be understood as factual descriptions of a divine subject thought of as a further, independent fact. Rhees writes: `God exists' is not a statement of fact. You might say also that it is not in the indicative mood. It is a confession ± or expression ± of faith. This is recognised in some way when people say that God's existence is `necessary existence', as opposed to the `contingency' of what exists as a matter of fact; and when they say that to doubt God's existence is a sin, as opposed to a mistake about the facts.19

Feuerbach brings out, brilliantly, how the confused rupture between the divine predicates and `God' as a metaphysical subject separates such a `God' from the practical realities of religion and threatens to make `belief ' a purely theoretical belief. Feuerbach elaborates on the confusion as follows: What theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the In®nite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God is God: namely, the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. Hence he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being, ± for example, love, wisdom, justice, ± are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing. And in no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates considered in themselves.20

What can be said is that any attempt to negate the predicates, so that we are left with God as he is in himself, leaves us, in fact, with a metaphysical abstraction which has no bearing on human life: The negation of the subject is held to be irreligion, nay, atheism; though not so the negation of the predicates. But that which has no predicates or 17 18 19 20

Rush Rhees, `Natural Theology' in On Religion and Philosophy, pp. 36 ±7. Ibid., p. 36. Rhees, `Religion and Language', p. 49. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 14 ± 15.


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qualities, has no effect upon me; that which has no effect upon me has no existence for me. To deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself . . . the proposition that God is unknowable or inde®nable, can only be enunciated and become ®xed as a dogma, where this object has no longer any interest for the intellect . . . On the ground that God is unknowable, man excuses himself to what is yet remaining of his religious conscience for his forgetfulness of God, his absorption in the world: he denies God practically by his conduct, ± the world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations, ± but he does not deny him theoretically, he does not attack his existence; he lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or incommode him; it is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence, a self-contradictory existence, ± a state of being which, as to its effects, is not distinguishable from non-being.21

Given the undoubted similarities between Feuerbach's analyses and Rhees' grammatical observations, why is it that the latter, and like-minded philosophers, go on to consider other religious possibilities which are not open to Feuerbach's criticisms? Is it not because in contemplating the divine predicates they do not conclude, with Feuerbach, that there is no qualitative difference in what can be said of God and man? They do not share his view that `Religion has no material exclusively its own.'22 Let us consider two examples to illustrate this difference. First, it does not follow from the emphasis on `God is love' as a rule for the use of `God', or from the theological claim that `love' is of God's essence, that all talk of God's wrath or anger is thereby excluded. The sense of such talk may be internally related to that very notion of divine love. We ®nd numerous examples of believers pleading with God not to turn his face from them. The force of that prayer, however, need not be, `Don't do that to me', but rather, `Don't let me become that'. The creature prays not to become alienated from love of the Creator. Rhees pointed out that `God exists' is not a statement in the indicative mood, but a confession of faith. But, then, the further analysis of that faith awaits us. O. K. Bouwsma considers religious expressions whose surface grammar is that of indicative statements, but whose actual use is very different: `Great is Jehovah and greatly to be praised' (Ps. 48); `Jehovah reigneth; let the people tremble. He sitteth above the cherubim; Let the earth be moved. Jehovah is great in Zion' (Ps. 99); `Bless Jehovah, O my soul. O Jehovah, my God, 21

Ibid., p. 21.

22

Ibid., p. 22.

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thou art very great' (Ps. 104); `Great is Jehovah and greatly to be praised. And his greatness is unsearchable' (Ps. 145). Bouwsma points out that the word `great' in these sentences is being used as a `superlative', as is the word `high' in Ìt is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord and to sing praises unto thy name, O most high' (Ps. 92:1). The sentences from the Psalms which have the form of indicatives are, in their use, imperatives of praise, as in Ò, let the nations be glad and sing for joy' (Ps. 67:6) and `Let the Lord be magni®ed' (Ps. 35:2). Bouwsma comments: The earlier set of sentences have the form of indicatives ± `Great is Jehovah', etc. When removed from their surroundings and cooled for purposes of proof, they may be mistaken for sentences about God, as though they furnished information or descriptions. But they are no more statements or descriptions than the sentences just quoted. Those by their imperative form prevent at least that misunderstanding. The sentence, `Great is our God above all other gods' is not to be mistaken for such a sentence as, `High is the Empire State Building above all buildings in New York'. Or is it? I'm afraid so.23

Bouwsma and Rhees emphasise that to ask whether God exists is not to ask a theoretical question. If it is to mean anything at all, it is to wonder about prayer and praise; to wonder whether there is anything in all that. That is why philosophy cannot answer the question, `Does God exist?' with either an af®rmative or negative reply. From whose mouth does the question come and how is it answered? Praising, thanking, confessing, asking, and adoring before God may have meant little to a man. But, then, it means everything to him. He says that God has become a reality in his life. Has this come about by his discovering an object? Hardly. What has happened is that he has found God in a praise, a thanksgiving, a confessing and an asking which were not his beforehand. 24 And if coming to God is not coming to see that an object one thought did not exist does in fact exist, neither is losing faith in God coming to see that an object one thought existed does not in fact exist. `There is a God', though it appears to be in the indicative mood, is an expression of faith. One of its most characteristic forms is showing 23 24

O. K. Bouwsma, Ànselm's Argument' in Without Proof or Evidence, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1984, p. 47. I tried to show what is involved in such asking, thanking and confessing in The Concept of Prayer, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Schocken Books 1965, pp. viii, 167. Reprinted 1968; paperback edn: Oxford Blackwell 1981.

God and the human species

99

forth praise. `There is no God' also appears to be in the indicative mood, but it is, in fact, a denial; an indication of one of a number of possible relations in which someone may stand to the af®rmation of faith. The task of philosophy, as the hermeneutics of contemplation, is to comment on the character of such af®rmations and denials. Such philosophical comment may, in fact, clear the way or bar the way towards af®rmation or denial for a person, but that is a consequence not the purpose of the contemplation. The worst misunderstanding is to think that `Does God exist?' is a theoretical question. Not far behind is the belief that philosophy should be able to answer it. Feuerbach does not turn from the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of contemplation to give anything akin to the analyses we ®nd in Rhees and Bouwsma. To this it may be replied that this is because he would not have agreed with such analyses. He provides a counter-analysis of his own. When we turn to see, in more detail, what this analysis amounts to, we ®nd that Feuerbach was not as free as he imagined from the metaphysics he attacked. 3 god and the human species Feuerbach's claim that `God' is simply the sum of human qualities seems, at ®rst, to be an outrageous claim. It comes about because underlying Feuerbach's brilliant rejection of `God' as a metaphysical subject is an unacknowledged hold of that very metaphysical conception on him. He sees that `God' cannot be this metaphysical subject, but does not see how `God' can be anything else. Thus, for Feuerbach, once the metaphysical subject is denied, the predicates can only be human qualities. A supernatural religion thus becomes a religion of humanity. Feuerbach is anxious to point out that while he reduces theology to anthropology, he also exalts anthropology into theology.25 Feuerbach agreed with Kant that onto-theology is the attribution to God of all the real qualities we ®nd in ourselves. For Feuerbach, the Incarnation is the highest symbolic expression of the primacy of the human. He argues that since God would only renounce his divinity out of love, this shows that, ultimately, love is more important than God. Feuerbach asks, `Who then is our Saviour 25

See Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. xxxviii.

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and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God.'26 It is clear that, for Feuerbach, there is only one kind of love ± human love. `For though there is also a self-interested love among men, still the true human love, which alone is worthy of this name, is that which impels the sacri®ce of self to another.'27 We have already seen, in chapter 2, that these conclusions are premature. There, both in Greek and Christian contexts, we saw the belief in creation as an act of renunciation on the part of the divine. So far from this leading to the conclusion that all love is human love, the renunciation is integral to understanding divine love as expressed in creation. Part of this understanding involves contrasting creation as an abdication on the part of the divine, with creation thought of as an act of power, the very power Feuerbach despises. Given his premature conclusions, however, Feuerbach is faced with obvious problems. How is he to ®nd, through his analysis, correlates of the divine predicates which do justice to the claims which are made for them? God is said to be in®nite, his plenitude knows no bounds, in him we live and move and have our being. How can this be said of a human being? Any such suggestion does not begin to be plausible. As individuals, we are ®nite, none of us possess the plenitude of being, and no person can say that in him or her others live and move and have their being. Feuerbach thought that Kant had done philosophy of religion a great service in locating religious belief, grammatically, in the practical realm. He believed, however, that Kant's rationalism needed to be supplemented by Schleiermacher's insistence on the importance of feeling in religion. The predicates Feuerbach insists on are those of justice, wisdom and love ± essentially moral predicates. Yet, this emphasis on moral predicates makes Feuerbach's problem all the more acute, since the imperfections of individual human beings are self-evident. How, then, can these replace or be the correct account of the perfections ascribed to God? The answer to these questions is that Feuerbach's analysis does not make the individual the ®nal court of appeal. He argued that the consciousness of an individual is not self-suf®cient; it cannot bestow an identity on 26

Ibid., p. 53.

27

Ibid., p. 53.


101

itself. A human being's self-consciousness depends on a contrast between itself and others. One might put the point by saying that the individual human being has a sense of identity only in a human neighbourhood. The fact that personal identity depends on a contrast with others is a logical, not an empirical, truth, though it depends on common reactions which establish our sense of the human.28 From this logical requirement, which it is unclear whether he recognises as such, Feuerbach draws a confused conclusion, namely, that in being aware of his own consciousness an individual is aware of its essence, which is the consciousness of the species. But the contrast between oneself and others does not entail any such essence. We can see, however, why the reference to the species seems to hold out more promise than an emphasis on the individual. The individual, Feuerbach argues, overcomes the sense of his own ®nitude by thinking of the in®nity of the species. The fact that my own life has to end is overcome by the thought that I shall live on in the memories of those who come after me. Neither does it seem odd to say that I live, move and have my being in the species, since I am born into it, and have my very nature de®ned by it. Thus, Feuerbach is able to conclude: `The mystery of the inexhaustible fullness of the divine predicates is . . . nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered in an in®nitely varied, in®nitely modi®able, but consequently, phenomenal being.'29 At this point, however, the problems which would obviously occur if one tried to give an account of the divine predicates in terms of the virtues of an individual, with all their imperfections, re-emerge at the level of the species, since is not it equally imperfect? Feuerbach's attempt to overcome this dif®culty is unconvincing. He uses what Harvey rightly calls a weak argument, which leads him to draw an incredible conclusion, namely, `that all the sins of individual persons will vanish in the idea of the species itself '. How can the imperfections of individuals contribute to the perfection of the whole? Here is Feuerbach's argument: Hence the lamentation over sin is found only where the human individual regards himself in his individuality as a perfect, complete being, not 28

29

See Peter Winch, Èine Einstellung Zur Seele' in Trying To Make Sense, Oxford: Blackwell 1987, and D. Z. Phillips, `My Neighbour and My Neighbours' in Interventions in Ethics, London: Macmillan 1992. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 23.

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needing others for the realization of the species, of the perfect man; where instead of the consciousness of the species has been substituted the exclusive self-consciousness of the individual; where the individual does not recognize himself as a part of mankind, but identi®es himself with the species, and for this reason makes his own sins, limits and weaknesses, the sins, limits, and weaknesses of mankind in general. Nevertheless man cannot lose the consciousness of the species, for his self-consciousness is essentially united to his consciousness of another than himself. Where therefore the species is not an object to him as a species, it will be an object to him as God. He supplies the absence of the idea of the species by the idea of God, as the being who is free from the limits and wants which oppress the individual and, in his opinion (since he identi®es the species with the individual), the species itself. But this perfect being, free from the limits of the individual, is nothing else than the species, which reveals the in®nitude of its nature in this, that it is realized in in®nitely numerous and various individuals.30

Harvey comments: `Kierkegaard poured out his biting sarcasm in this idea of the perfection of the species, and although sarcasm does not qualify as intellectual criticism, it will nevertheless strike many contemporary readers as justi®ed in this case. With this faith that the species is divine, he wrote, idealistic philosophy has sunk so low that the mob has become the God-man.'31 It does seem as though, in the elevation of the species into a being, Feuerbach is manifesting the very abstractionism he condemned in Hegel's notion of Absolute Spirit; one absolute seems to be replaced by another. This emphasis is to be found also in Feuerbach's earlier work, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, but in the form of an appeal to an in®nite spirit in which all ®nite spirits participate. But James Massey argues that it would miss the logic of Feuerbach's argument to dismiss it as simply another dream of transcendence.32 Rather, he argues, Feuerbach is showing the implications of the isolation of the individual from the wider communal context. In the wake of the individual's concerns with his own felicity, religion retreats into the private realm. Harvey says that it would be a charitable reconstruction of the later appeal to the in®nity of the species to see it, in the same way, as a warning of the dangers of alienation from the community.33 The inadequacy of doing so, as Harvey points out, is its neglect of the central role the notion of the in®nity of the species plays in 30 31 32 33

Ibid., p. 157. Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 119. James A. Massey, Introduction in Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 1980, p. xxxv. Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 114.


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Feuerbach's account of projection and alienation. After all, it is the in®nity of the species which the believer is said to project in objectifying it in an in®nite individual, God. Believers, of course, do not realise that they are doing this. Christianity, Feuerbach argues, has a great deal to answer for in this respect, since it departs from the communal emphases in the gods and spirits of primitive religion. Once the divine is individualised in an almighty God, the will of this God becomes all-important. The result is a narrowing of perspective in favour of satisfying the supreme egoism involved in the conception of such a will. Correspondingly, the felicity of the believer now depends on establishing a right relationship with the arbitrary power which is God's will. The egoism of God is paralleled by the narcissism of the believers who must attribute to the supreme being the ability to satisfy all their desires. The belief in miracles, the power to transcend even the laws of nature, is simply an example of such an attribution. Through these projections the individual is alienated from the human neighbourhood. If this is the process by which human consciousness becomes alienated from itself, the road to the recovery of self-consciousness is clear. Human beings must be brought to realise what they have done in projecting the in®nity of the species on to the idea of God, and by so doing return to the reality of their relations to others; not a relation of ideas, as Hegel would have it, but a relation between people of ¯esh and blood. Feuerbach held that the highest form of this relation is found in love, sacri®ce for the sake of another, the very antithesis of individualistic narcissism. The problem is that Feuerbach's distinction between the individual and the human neighbourhood does not need any reference to the essence of human nature, or to the in®nity of the species. As Harvey says, The dif®culty is that his idea of the human essence or species includes at least two logically distinct ideas: ®rst, the notion of the human essence refers to those inherent potentialities the realization of which constitutes the `truly human'; second, it refers to the species taken as a totality. The ®rst idea is still plausible to most contemporary readers; the second is so only if one can accept the Hegelian assumption, held by Feuerbach . . . that the idea of the species cannot be exempli®ed in any one individual but only in the totality of all individuals, in which the multiplicity of examplars complement one another . . . It is the fusion of these two ideas that explains the feeling contemporary readers of Christianity frequently have that

104


Feuerbach has articulated a profound insight but that there is something unintelligible about the implications he draws from it.34

Harvey goes on to argue that there is nothing confused in the ®rst notion of alienation. He says that one can ®nd forms of it in Marx, Kierkegaard, Tillich, various political critiques and in some forms of feminism. Àll of these', Harvey argues, `presuppose some idea that human beings can fail to achieve what they essentially are.'35 I think, however, that dif®culties akin to those in the second notion of alienation, with its reference to the totality of the species, still lurk in the ®rst conception. These are found in its appeal to `human potentialities' as the expression of the `truly human' or as the expression of what human beings èssentially are'. Essences have not gone away. Further, this has a profound effect on our understanding of `the human condition'. This claim needs further justi®cation. Harvey brings out, as we have seen, Feuerbach's confused argument that what human beings should be is realised in the species taken as a totality. Feuerbach writes: All men are sinners. Granted; but they are not all sinners in the same way; on the contrary, there exists a great and essential difference between them. One man is inclined to falsehood, another is not; he would rather give up his life than break his word or tell a lie; the third has a propensity to intoxication, the fourth to licentiousness; while the ®fth, whether by favour of Nature, or from the energy of his character, exhibits none of these vices. Thus, in the moral as well as the physical and intellectual elements, men compensate for each other, so that, taken as a whole, they are as they should be, they present the perfect man.36

Let us now say that what is `truly human' is found in human potentialities which show what human beings èssentially are'. The dif®culties are obvious. First, to which potentialities are we referring, since human potentialities, from the outset, have a mixed character?37 Second, even if we single out those potentialities for what is deemed good in human life, it is these very same potentialities which are also the source of what is most terrible, wounding and disappointing in human life. We need only mention the various forms of love which exist between human beings to point this out. Here, we 34 36 37

35 Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 117 ± 8. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, pp. 155 ± 6. In `My Neighbour and My Neighbours', I was insisting on the mixed character of reactions which give us our sense of the human, and insisting that unsympathetic reactions are not parasitic on their sympathetic counterparts. Here, one might add that neither are they always alienated forms of them.

Contradiction and contemplation

105

ought to recall our discussion in chapter 2, of what is involved in Prometheus' gift of ®re. The gift, with all its potentialities, is also one which involves the possibility of all that we mean by human misery. In this sense, sin is indeed original. There is a dif®culty, therefore, in explaining alienation, or even seeking a solution to it, by an appeal to what is `truly human', or to what we èssentially are', since alienation and other human miseries are also truly human, and part of what we essentially are. The solution seems to be an attempt to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Further, if we say that certain aspects of `the human condition' compensate for others, this seems uncomfortably close to Feuerbach's weak argument concerning the compensations in the weakness of individuals which make up the perfection of the species. Is it not more realistic to say that our lives are mixtures of gains and losses? This is brought out in Wittgenstein's wonderful remark: `The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.'38 Or again, as Beckett's Hamm says: `You're on earth: there's no cure for that!'39 Feuerbach said that the in®nity of God is a projection of the in®nity of human consciousness, or of the in®nity of the species. This is the secret of religion: an atheism which captures the essence of what we ought to be. `God' is the projected essence of the human. In arriving at this secret, Feuerbach claimed that he had listened to religion, and not imposed anything on it. There is at least one good reason for rejecting the generality of Feuerbach's claim. From one religious point of view, `God' expresses not what we essentially are or could be, but all that we are not. God becomes the mirror in which we see and judge ourselves. This affects what it makes sense to hope for on earth. As David McLellan says: `Religion gives us an image of what is not there . . . If religion shows us what we lack, it gives us a different way of looking at society. No society can be recommended as the New Jerusalem.'40 4 contradiction and contemplation Though critical of Hegel, the analyses of Feuerbach we have considered, so far, are still under his in¯uence. This is true of the 38 39 40

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value Oxford: Blackwell 1984 (1929), p. 1e. Samuel Beckett, Endgame, London: Faber 1976, p. 37. David McLellan, `Voices in Discussion' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., in Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, p. 280.

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appeals to the in®nity of consciousness and to the in®nity of the species, which play such a central role in Feuerbach's theory of alienation. If this is the secret of religion he promised to reveal, then, as Harvey says, we should be disposed to dismiss Feuerbach's critique às an interesting but antiquated episode in the history of atheism'.41 Harvey claims, however, that this is to dismiss the existential dimension in Feuerbach's work which, a subordinate theme in The Essence of Christianity, becomes the dominant theme in his later work. This dimension has to do with the desire of human beings to overcome their ®nitude; to overcome suffering and death. Theology responds to this desire. It promises human beings limitless felicity. But these promises cannot be realised. They contradict the practicalities that we are aware of in human life. In fact, Feuerbach claims, `Christianity has . . . long vanished, not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a ®xed idea, in ¯agrant contradiction with our ®re and life assurance companies, our railroads and steam-carriages, our picture and sculpture galleries, our military and industrial schools, our theatres and scienti®c museums.'42 Divine assurance is no more than divine insurance. Thus miracles are no more than `The sorcery of the imagination which satis®es without contradiction all the wishes of the heart';43 and the resurrection of Christ is no more than `the satis®ed desire of man for an immediate certainty of his personal existence after death'.44 Harvey argues that Feuerbach's hermeneutics of suspicion is at its strongest in these accusations of contradiction, accusations which can be viewed independently of his theory of projection. It is worth examining this claim in its own right. In this section of the chapter, before turning to Feuerbach's later work, I shall con®ne myself to the most serious accusation of contradiction made in The Essence of Christianity, the alleged contradiction between faith and love. According to Feuerbach, this contradiction reveals the dark side of religion and even shows that Ìn faith there lies a malignant principle'.45 It is not dif®cult to see why this claim was one of the most offensive to Christian readers and theologians. Before examining this alleged contradiction, we would do well to remember our caution, in section 4 of the ®rst chapter, against 41 42 43

Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 120. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. xliv. 44 Ibid., p. 135. 45 Ibid., p. 252. Ibid., p. 134.


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asking, in general terms, whether something contradicts something else. We deal with contradictions as they arise, but whether they arise depends on what is said, where, and by whom. The same is true of Feuerbach's claim that there is a contradiction between faith and love. I shall argue that his claim has much to do with his denial of `God' as a metaphysical subject. Even so, the point is not to deny the phenomenon to which Feuerbach draws our attention. Neither is it to deny that the phenomenon may be quite widespread. Rather, it is to point out that the hermeneutics of suspicion makes a wider claim, namely, that analysis will reveal a contradiction in the theological notion of faith. The hermeneutics of contemplation embraces that possibility in speci®c cases, while also wanting to remind us of other possibilities of religious sense. We have already noted, in the previous section of this chapter, that, for Feuerbach, once `God' is individualised, metaphysically, he becomes the egotistical centre of endeavour, the one for whose sake every good deed must be done. But does not this contradict what acts of love are ± acts simply done out of love without any external sanction, constraint or motive? Feuerbach makes the contrast as follows with respect to the believer: But in him good works do not proceed from essentially virtuous dispositions. It is not love, not the object of love, man, the basis of all morality, which is the motive of his good works. No! he does good not for the sake of goodness itself, not for the sake of man, but for the sake of God; ± out of gratitude to God, who has done all for him, and for whom therefore he must on his side do all that lies in his power . . . The idea of virtue is here the idea of compensatory sacri®ce . . . it has therefore no sense of virtue.46

Here are similar sentiments expressed by Rush Rhees: . . . love is kept alive through its own exercise and through the love of him who shares it. It moves and lives in spite of special circumstances and dif®culties, and it never springs from or follows their bidding . . . A poet, says Cummings, is one who gives. And for him life is giving, and acquisitiveness is shrinking and death. We might say that freedom and creation and generosity go together . . . Now religion does not do this. And this springs from qualities in religion by which it tends to stultify and poison free activities, and to keep the spirit in the servitude from which it seemed to call it. I mean especially the view that there can be nothing good except

46

Ibid., p. 262 ±3.

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it spring from the love of God and acceptance of the faith; the view that unless a man believes he is lost.47

It may seem that in making sacri®ces to God, the believer is the humblest of men. Feuerbach claims that this is, in fact, inverted arrogance: Às the servant feels himself honoured in the dignity of his master, nay, fancies himself greater than a free, independent man of lower rank than his master, so it is with the believer.'48 Rhees recognises the phenomenon: . . . the turning of everything into service of the master, making one's life an offering to him, goes with the emphasis on personal salvation. This is just the sort of egoistic concern about one's lot, that has to be overcome if freedom is to be possible at all . . . It is thus self-seeking, and is an expression of one's sense of sin. There is nothing here that is like a red, red rose.49

Feuerbach points out that the result of these emphases in religion is exclusiveness, the shutting out of those who do not subscribe to the faith. The emphasis on Christ has this effect: Àll love founded on a special historical phenomenon contradicts . . . the nature of love, which endures no limits, which triumphs over all particularity.' 50 The same result comes from emphasising `God', the subject of faith, instead of the predicate `love': `Faith isolates God, it makes him a particular, distinct being: love universalises; it makes God a common being, the love of whom is one with the love of man.' 51 Again, compare these sentiments with the following remarks by Rhees: I think that Christians, and probably those of other religions, do want to say that there is nothing really ®ne unless it is done from religious belief, or from the love of God. And that is an expression of meanness and spite. It shows a want of generosity and a want of honesty: a failure to recognise or greet what is ®ne where it does appear . . . Religion must hold that it is only by belief that the grace of God can be found and evil be avoided. That is the basis of preaching. (There is no preaching in the practice of generosity any more than there is generosity in preaching.) And it is the basis of the Church's ®ght against the evil of the world: it is only by belief that evil can be conquered or even resisted. If the Church did not hold this it would have no mission.52 47 48 49 50 51 52

Rush Rhees, `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B' in On Religion and Philosophy, A, p. 168. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 250. Rhees, `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B', A, p. 170. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 268. Ibid., p. 247. Rhees, `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B', A, p. 169.


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Feuerbach concludes: Ìn the proposition `God is love' the subject is darkness . . . the predicate is the light',53 and that Ìt was faith, not love, not reason, which invented Hell. To love, Hell is a horror; to reason, an absurdity. It would be a pitiable mistake to regard Hell as a mere aberration of faith, a false faith. Hell stands already in the bible.'54 Rhees concludes: Ìf artists have shown us the greatness that may be in . . . religious ideas, they have shown us what the preachers of religion never can. And they have shown us how we may escape from the bondage and spiritual death to which the preachers of religion call us.'55 We can see from Feuerbach's remarks that the `God' of faith is nothing other than the metaphysical subject which he thinks of as externally related to the predicates that are attributed to it; predicates which are essentially human predicates, such as love. Attempts are made, as we have seen, to anthropomorphise the subject, but these create insuperable tensions with its metaphysical status, leading to the results we have noted. There are times when Feuerbach seems to be criticising certain forms of religion, rather than religion as such, but this is unclear. In any case, alternatives are not explored. Fifteen years later, Rhees returned to the same topic.56 In the ®rst paper, he too had admitted that religion condemned the very pride it sometimes fosters. In his second paper, however, he does not change his mind about the religious narrowness he criticises in the ®rst, but, unlike Feuerbach, he explores alternatives of religious sense. This could be put by saying that instead of divorcing the metaphysical `God' from its predicates, Rhees explores the proposition `God is love', or the notion of `sacri®ce to God', in other religious contexts. In doing this, Rhees expounds possibilities which show that Feuerbach's assumptions do not apply to them. In these possibilities of religious sense, ®rst, `God' is not the external motivation for moral endeavour; second, in making a sacri®ce to God, the believer is not making a repayment for what has been done for him; third, sacri®ce to God is not ego-centric, or an inverted form of arrogance; fourth, love of God does not exclude or divide human 53 54 55 56

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p. 264. Ibid., p. 257. Rhees, `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B', A, p. 171. I have juxtaposed his two discussions as A and B in his `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B'.

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beings; ®fth, the notion of Hell is not the contradictory of love. In these explorations, Rhees is turning, in a way Feuerbach did not, from the hermeneutics of suspicion to the hermeneutics of contemplation. Rhees is puzzled by what it means to seek God. He is clear that this is not a theoretical search, and recognises that it is intimately connected with `sacri®ce'. But how is this `sacri®ce' to be understood? Rhees thinks that a beginning in answering this question is to recognise that, unlike art and science, religion is not a vocation, though the priesthood may be. Religion is not an ìnterest' in something: `the difference is partly that for the religious man it is not a question of subordinating everything else to a particular interest or occupation'.57 It is rather a matter of trying to make everything one does an expression of love of God. If one were to ask what is being sought after, one might reply: purity. Clearly, nothing could be further removed from this than smug satisfaction (Ì thank thee that I am not as other men are'). But more subtle forms of confusion in this area are harder to avoid. Jesus said, `He that seeketh his life shall lose it.' But, Rhees says, [I]t is perverting things if what you seek in the worship of God is the joy and satisfaction that it brings you. (You see how the passion and cruci®xion show what the love of God is. You see in them what it means to glorify God. And that is the religious sense of the sacri®ce.) You see that you cannot ®nd your life, unless for you your life becomes nothing. So people speak of paradox here ± foolishly, I think, because to say that does not help in the least.58

Rhees brings out that the religious notion of sacri®ce does not involve the subordination involved in sacri®cing one's life for a cause: `Let my life be a sacri®ce to Thee': that is more the sense of it than `Let me sacri®ce myself for Thee' ± which I think would be absurd. Both absurd and blasphemous. If I sacri®ce myself to make some scienti®c experiment possible ± or if I sacri®ce myself to save somebody from drowning ± here there is something which depends upon the help I can give. I make something possible by my sacri®ce which would not be possible otherwise. That is why it would be absurd to talk about sacri®cing myself for God, in that sense.59

For similar reasons, Rhees argues, I am neither sel®sh nor unsel®sh 57 58

Rhees, `Religion, Life and Meaning: A and B', B, p. 174. 59 Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 175.


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towards God. If there is sel®shness in my prayers, that is a sin towards God. Rhees says: Ìf my life is a sacri®ce to God, there is no unsel®shness in that. There is, if my devotion is genuine, an abandonment of pride ± a sel¯essness in that sense. And with that goes a love.'60 In these analyses, `God' is not the metaphysical subject of Feuerbach's critique, but a spiritual reality. This affects, vitally, the logic of `seeking God', `®nding God', `losing God', `longing for God', etc. It should not be dif®cult to see that the notion of hell can play no part in this analysis as an external sanction or consequence of religious observances. If `hell' is to mean anything, it must be internally related to what is meant by making one's life a sacri®ce to God. Love cannot conquer by force. The realisation of the possibility of hell, then, would not be the realisation of an unfortunate consequence of the absence of love of God, but the realisation of the horror of such an absence. It is the realisation that we have it in us to damn ourselves, to sink into various kinds of degradation. To pray that God will not leave one's soul in hell is to pray that one does not sink to those depths. If `hell' is a form of condemnation, it is not one imposed from without, but one which issues from our own state. There are theologians who believe that the notion of hell is incompatible with the notion of loving God, and speak of God saving everyone, by coercion if necessary.61 But it is the notion of `coercion' which is misplaced in this context. To repeat: in the comparison between Feuerbach and Rhees, the philosophical aim is not to deny the former his examples. How could we, since Rhees' account has its force, partly, by contrast with them? The contemplative aim is to show that if religion can, in the opinion of many, cause a great deal of harm, there are other possibilities of sense where this is not so. These possibilities are not being advocated, for the faith may not be actually retrieved by someone who appreciates them. But he or she will be brought to see that religious belief can be like that. This `seeing', however, involves going beyond Feuerbach's hermeneutics of suspicion.

60 61

Ibid., p. 176. See, for example, Marilyn McCord Adams, Èvil and the God-Who-Does-Nothing-InParticular' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Religion and Morality, London: Macmillan 1996.

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Feuerbach: religion's secret? 5 death and finitude

In Feuerbach's later work Lectures on The Essence of Religion he is concerned, not simply with Christianity, but with religion as a wider phenomenon. He still attacks speculative philosophers às those who, instead of ®tting their concepts to the facts, ®t the facts to their concepts'.62 Feuerbach continues to deny the God who is the product of such philosophical systems, `the abstract disembodied being distinct from nature and man'.63 Having said that, however, he gives less attention to the technical theory of projection we have discussed. This is because he is less interested now in the origin of religion, and is more concerned to explain its persistence. For this we need to realise that the essence of God `denotes nothing other than on the one hand the essence of nature and, on the other, the essence of man'.64 It is in man's relation to nature that we ®nd the secret of religion's appeal. In the course of his discussion, Feuerbach pays attention to topics I shall not pursue in this section. For example, he discusses attempts to prove God's existence from nature, and mentions the kinds of objections we discussed in chapter 3 on `Hume's Legacy'. He also presents a picture of man's relation to nature which will appear frequently in subsequent chapters: the picture of man, fearful and superstitious, confronted by a nature he does not understand. Animism, the view that nature is peopled by spirits, is the result of human projection in these circumstances. I shall not discuss this picture further, since it is not Feuerbach's main reason for the persistence of religion, even in modernity. Why does it persist when we are no longer ignorant of nature? Feuerbach's answer is: religion answers our concern with our ®nitude. The hallmark of that ®nitude is the fact that we shall all die. Natural forces, with all their coming to be and passing away, remind us of death. We are part of nature, and our moods re¯ect its changing circumstances: `the feelings of hunger or discomfort, the fear of death, gloom when the weather is bad, joy when it is good, grief over wasted pains, over hopes shattered by natural catastrophies'.65 All these factors contribute to our sense of dependence. `But', Feuerbach claims, `the most sensitive, most painful of man's 62 63

Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on The Essence of Religion, New York and London: Evanston and Harper and Row 1967, p. 25. 64 Ibid., p. 23. 65 Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 23.

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feelings of ®niteness is the feeling or awareness that he will one day end, that he will die.'66 Religious belief is an expression of our desire to overcome our ®nitude. Therefore, religion must attempt to show how death can be overcome. This is why Feuerbach is able to say: Ìf a man did not die, if he lived forever, if there were no such thing as death, there would be no religion.'67 Indeed, he claims `that man's tomb is the birth place of the gods'.68 Feuerbach says that he can understand how nature worship is an attempt to come to terms with our sense of dependence. `The god who destroys trees, animals, and men with his thunderbolt is the selfsame god who fructi®es the ®elds and meadows with his rain.'69 Dependence can become more manageable if these natural events can be seen as divine pleasures or displeasures, or even as rewards and punishments. Feuerbach confesses to ®nding in himself, still, `the motives of natural religion, motives which, if they were not countered by culture, science and philosophy, would still make me a nature worshipper today'.70 We shall have reason, later, to pursue the issue of the sense, if any, in which culture, science and philosophy counter animism. For now, however, it is more relevant to pursue the question why Feuerbach concluded that nature worship could not satisfy the need to overcome our ®nitude. He argued that it is dif®cult to see nature as a being who could care about our hopes, fears and desires. Harvey says that when Feuerbach listened to the hymns and prayers of believers he found something more there, namely, `the faith that each one of them is the object of a personal, divine subject who transcends nature and who will, in the end, enable them to transcend it also'.71 Only such a being can conquer death. But, of course, for Feuerbach, the conception of such a being, and the hope which depends on it, are religious illusions. I want to explore why. It is not too much to claim that Feuerbach's whole analysis of immortality depends on his view that man's deepest desire is not to die. If God is to satisfy human desires then, surely, this is the most important to satisfy: `to live forever; this is indeed man's highest and ultimate desire, the desire of all desires, just as life is the epitome of all blessings, and for that very reason. Consequently a God who does not ful®l this desire, who does not annul death or at least replace it 66 70 71

67 Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 90. Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 309.

68

Ibid., p. 33.

69

Ibid., p. 30.

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by a new life, is no God, at least no true God consonant with the concept of a God.'72 One question we have to ask is whether Feuerbach's view is simply a product of listening to the desires of the faithful, as he claims, or whether it is a partial listening to a desire he recognises to the exclusion of others. Does Feuerbach ignore other reactions to death because of his underlying assumption, and because even if recognised, they would involve, for him, `no true God'? Before turning to these questions we must say more about the attitude to death he endorses. Feuerbach says that, although he is an atheist, he recognises his dependence on nature. He also understands man's desire to transcend this dependence. Feuerbach says that this desire ¯ows from man's yearning for felicity, and is part of his egoism. How is this to be understood? Feuerbach's analysis is not pejorative, as one might at ®rst suppose. He does condemn the arrogance of the abstract self of philosophical theism which abstracts man from nature.73 The yearnings which interest Feuerbach, by contrast, are rooted in nature. It is true that those roots are said, sometimes, to be the roots of selfinterest, and Feuerbach does seem to offer a Hobbes-like analysis of altruism in these terms. But I agree with Harvey's claim that these are not the deepest associations which ègoism' has for Feuerbach. To understand the existentialist import that term has for him, ègoism' is best understood as man's drive for happiness which, faced by ®nitude, becomes the rage to live.74 It leads to man's vital question: Man with his ego or consciousness stands at the brink of a bottomless abyss; that abyss is his own unconscious being, which seems alien to him and inspires him with a feeling which expresses itself in words of wonderment such as: What am I? Where have I come from? To what end? And this feeling that I am nothing without a not-I which is distinct from me yet intimately related to me, something other, which is at the same time my own being, is the religious feeling. But what part of me is I and what part is notI?75

Feuerbach thinks it naive to expect such questions to cease. They are natural questions. According to him, however, our need is to work through such questions; it is the questions, not nature, which 72 73 74 75

Feuerbach, Lectures on The Essence of Religion, pp. 269 ± 70. Ibid., p. 35. See Harvey, Feuerbach, pp. 175 ±91. Feuerbach, Lectures on The Essence of Religion, p. 311.

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need to be transcended. Harvey shows how Feuerbach's concerns are related to those of theologians such as Schleiermacher and Tillich: Òne might say that they all regard the problem of religious faith to be whether the great Void into which all things tumble, to use Alfred North Whitehead's phrase, can be seen as the great companion.'76 Feuerbach's argument is that religion ®lls that void, without reason, with the imagination. Faced with the void which death makes all too explicit, man invents a God who can transcend it. `God' is thus the product of man's wishful thinking. What is the result of this religious illusion? First, our wonder becomes directed at the wrong object: Ìf we wish to marvel at something, we should marvel at the very existence of the earth and con®ne our theological wonderment and proofs to the original characteristics of the earth.'77 Second, because religion does not do this, it neglects the earth in its longing for heaven. Third, in longing for immortality, man is led to deny the limitations of his own body. Feuerbach argues that these consequences must be reversed if the world is to be given an atheism which enables men to live with dignity, though their longings and goals are modi®ed: `religion has wishes that can be ful®lled only in the imagination, in faith, whereas man as man, the man who replaces religion with culture, reason, science and replaces heaven by earth, has desires that do not exceed the limits of nature and reason and whose realization lies within the realm of natural possibility'.78 As Van Harvey says, from a twentiethcentury perspective Feuerbach's view of that realisation will seem naive: `to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world'.79 Perhaps now, as we stumble along, we have learned to settle for less. Nevertheless, it could be argued, if we follow Feuerbach, we will have learned, at least, that to long for `the more' religion offers is simply to build castles in the air in which real human beings cannot dwell. Only by realising that the earth is our only real home can the rupture in the human psyche be healed. Only then is there hope, to use Feuerbach's language, to transform `Christians who, by their own profession and admission, are ``half animal, half angel'', into men, into whole men'.80 76 77 78

Harvey, Feuerbach, p. 196. Feuerbach, Lectures on The Essence of Religion, p. 129. 79 Ibid., p. 285. 80 Ibid. Ibid., p. 249.

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Feuerbach: religion's secret? 6 contemplating reactions to death

Does Feuerbach stick to his claim to have merely listened to discover the meaning of religion, and not invented anything or imposed anything on it? It can certainly be said that there are possibilities he does not consider. For Feuerbach, religious responses are instances of an aesthetic pathology. Before considering the possibilities his hermeneutics of suspicion did not allow him to consider, it is important to recognise that those who recognise them fully recognise the confusions he brings to our attention. First, consider the confusion involved in the notion of surviving death. Supposing someone asks, `What will happen to me after I die?' The question seems to assume that àfter death' is a state in which certain events may occur. Rush Rhees replies: If I could suffer or be inspired I should not be dead. Ì won't know anything after I am dead' can be confusing if it be thought of as parallel to `when I am asleep' or `when I am unconscious' ± as though `when I am dead' meant `when I am in a certain state' ± as `when I am unconscious'. I shall not be in any sort of state. I shall not be at all.81

If I ask where someone is, who has died, I might be told, Ìn Mt. Carmel cemetery.' But as Rhees says, what can be located is the corpse. It is interesting, however that we use the language of the living to refer to the dead. I ask `Where is he?' where the he means, not the corpse, but the person I have known. This is connected with the signi®cance the dead have for us. If I do not know he has died, I may be told that he has departed. But to ask `Where?', in the sense in which one could ask about his burial, would be a confusion of grammars. We go further astray if we think of invisible beings moving about in some kind of realm. This makes it look as though immortality were something one could be in a position to verify. If this made sense, then it would also make sense to contact the dead so that we may learn the facts. One wonders how this talk of individuals, free of what we mean by coming to be, ¯ourishing and passing away, is talk of any kind of individual at all. Rhees says that religion has become a pseudo-science in this misleading talk. It is dif®cult to appreciate what is meant by talk of immortality, since the imagery used may be taken in the wrong way. For example, as Rhees says, `People use the language in speaking of ``what is 81

Rush Rhees, `Death and Immortality' in On Religion and Philosophy, p. 206.

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beyond the grave'' that they use to tell of what they are going to do or what they expect next week.' Yet they are not making empirical predictions, and they are not spinning fantasies. There is a series of images, like the image of sleeping and waking, for instance. When a man speaks in this way, it does not keep him from the terrible recognition that his brother is not asleep but dead: he does not try to wake the corpse, and he knows it would make no sense to speak of waking it. There is no need to ask him, `Don't you know what death is? Don't you know what it is when someone's dead?' He would not bury or cremate his brother when he was asleep. And yet he may go on using this imagery.82

Some attempts at explaining this are not very convincing in many cases. Rhees is not impressed by the suggestion that believers are cowards who are afraid to face the facts. This obviously does not apply to martyrs and many others. This is not to deny cases of cowardice where someone fears his own extinction, saying, Òh no, that is too terrible to think of, there must be something else',83 but one cannot generalise from these. The same holds for accusations of illusion. Parents may refuse to believe that their son has been killed in the war, and keep expecting him to turn up. But, as Rhees points out, the bereaved do not expect their dead ones to `turn up' in that sense. It may be said, however, that Feuerbach and others who treat religious belief as some kind of projection would not deny that one cannot attribute confusions or illusions to believers in a straightforward way. We must take into account the mechanism of projection, the ways in which religious illusions satisfy the rage to live, and the ways in which imagination ®lls the void created by death. In reply, however, it can be pointed out that those who want to call our attention to possibilities of religious sense are aware of this phenomenon and want to contrast it with these possibilities. I shall establish this fact at some length, since the contrast brings to the fore the whole issue of concept-formation in religion. John Wisdom provides us with an example which Feuerbach would feel at home with: A child may wish to sit a while with his father and he may, when he has done what his father dislikes, fear punishment and feel distress at causing vexation, and while his father is alive he may feel sure of help when danger threatens and feel that there is sympathy for him when disaster has come. 82

Ibid., p. 218.

83

Ibid., p. 210.

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When his father is dead he will no longer expect punishment or help. Maybe for a moment an old fear will come or a cry for help escape him, but he will at once remember that this is no good now. He may feel that his father is no more until perhaps someone says to him that his father is still alive although he lives now in another world and one so far away that there is no hope of seeing him or hearing his voice again. The child may be told that nevertheless his father can see him and hears all that he says. When he has been told this the child will still fear no punishment nor expect any sign of his father, but now, even more than he did when his father was alive, he will feel that his father sees him all the time and will dread distressing him and when he has done something wrong he will feel separated from his father until he has felt sorry for what he has done. Maybe when he himself comes to die he will be like a man who expects to ®nd a friend in the strange country where he is going.84

In the example we see a child gripped by the illusion that his father is still alive. We are shown how this comes about. The child's life is full of the father. The father's pleasure and displeasure mean everything to him. Then the father dies. A void is created in the life of the child. But then the child is told that his father is still alive although he cannot be seen or heard because he lives in a far-off world. Imagination seizes this news eagerly and ®lls the void with it. As a result, the father's will governs the child's life once again. It is tempting on the basis of examples such as these to draw general conclusions which are misleading. It may be assumed that any attempt to speak of the reality of the dead must entail the fantastic belief that they are still alive, a belief created by imagination ®lling a void ± in this case, but not in all, a void created by bereavement. I want to show how these generalisations are misplaced by considering the form concept-formation takes in other contexts. The dead may enter our lives in a number of ways, some of them terrible. Yet, even in these cases, Wisdom's analysis need not hold. Let us consider ®rst, however, a terrible case where it applies; a case where fantasy leads to tragedy. In her short story, The Lame Shall Enter First, Flannery O'Connor tells of the relationship between a widower, Sheppard, and his young son, Norton. Sheppard is the director of a recreation centre and a part-time social worker. His mother's death has created an enormous void in the life of the young boy, but the father thinks that the boy's grief is too extreme, even 84

John Wisdom, `Gods' in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Blackwell 1968, p. 150.


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irrational. Instead of moping listlessly about the house he should be getting down to making something of his life. In this respect he compares him unfavourably with a lame delinquent called Johnson whom he befriends. When Sheppard re¯ects on Johnson's disadvantaged background he is convinced that something can be made of him, something which his own son, with all his advantages, cannot attain. He gives Johnson more and more attention, ®nally bringing him into his own home. He is appalled to ®nd that Johnson is in the grips of the irrationality of religion, explaining his behaviour by saying that he is in the grip of Satan's power. He promises Johnson to explain his devil to him. On one occasion, when the boy is accused of arson, but later found not guilty, the social worker's remorse for having thought him guilty is intense. After that, he believes him innocent of all other charges brought against him. When Johnson is alone with the young son, he reveals his attitude to Sheppard: ` ``God, kid'', Johnson said in a cracked voice, ``how do you stand it?'' His face was stiff with outrage. ``He thinks he's Jesus Christ!'' ' He talks to Norton about his religious ideas, emphasising that good people go to heaven while the wicked go to hell. He tells Norton that if his mother was a good woman she now exists on high. Norton is anxious to know where that is. ` `Ìt's in the sky somewhere,'' Johnson said, ``but you got to be dead to get there. You can't go in no space ship''.' The father tries in vain to destroy these ideas, but they are a source of consolation to the young boy, his only contact with his mother. Johnson, because of his interest in astronomy, has been given a telescope which is lodged in the attic. It becomes linked in Norton's mind, encouraged by Johnson, with his mother who exists on high. At one stage, Sheppard ®nds his son in the attic convinced that he has located his mother. He tells his son that the telescope cannot show him anything but star clusters. But the child is waving his arm: `She waved at me!' At the end of the story we ®nd that Johnson has been fooling Sheppard all along. He has been guilty of everything he has been accused of, and even tries to implicate the social worker. He is taken away by the police compounding lie on lie. The story draws to its close with Sheppard re¯ecting on his actions. Ì have nothing to reproach myself with,' he began again. Ì did more for him than I did for my own child.' He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He repeated the sentence silently. Slowly his face drained of colour. It became almost grey beneath the white halo of his hair. The sentence echoed in his mind, each syllable like a

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dull blow . . . He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton. He had ignored his own son to feed his vision of himself . . . He saw Norton at the telescope, all back and ears, saw his arm shoot up and wave frantically. A rush of agonizing love for the child rushed over him like a transformation of life. The little boy's face appeared to him transformed; the image of his salvation; all light. He groaned with joy. He would make everything up to him. He would never let him suffer again. He would be mother and father. He jumped up and ran to his room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him, that he would never fail him again. The light was on in Norton's room but the bed was empty. He turned and dashed up the attic stairs and at the top reeled back like a man on the edge of a pit. The tripod had fallen and the telescope lay on the ¯oor. A few feet over it, the child hung in the jungle of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his ¯ight into space.85

Here, tragedy results from the way in which imagination ®lls the void. The child's love for his dead mother is real enough, but the meeting he seeks with her is all too like a meeting in this life. Yet it ful®ls the assumptions in Wisdom's example, and Feuerbach's assumption that those who believe in the reality of the dead must believe in the reality of another world which is a product of our unful®lled wishes in this one. But, of course, O'Connor here, as in so many of her stories, is presenting what she takes to be a perversion of Christian belief in eternity. She is endeavouring to convey a truth through a distortion of it. The distortions, conveyed through her portrayal of freaks, drop-outs, and self-satis®ed pharisees, were what led her to say that if the South was not Christ-centred, it was certainly Christ-haunted. Yet, even if we stay within the category of the terrible in relations to the dead, there are examples where Feuerbach's assumptions do not hold. In a poem called `Meet the Family', the poet R. S. Thomas introduces us in each verse to a maimed son, John One, John Two, John Three. Their wretched state is connected to the in¯uence of their dead parents whose photograph is referred to in the last verse: John All and his lean wife, Whose forced complicity gave life To each loathed foetus, stare from the wall, Dead not absent. The night falls.86

Here, there is no question of thinking that the parents are still alive. 85 86

All extracts are from Flannery O'Connor, `The Lame Shall Enter First' in Everything That Rises Must Converge, London: Faber and Faber 1966, pp. 143± 90. R. S. Thomas, `Meet the Family' in Collected Poems 1945 ±1990, London: Dent 1993, p. 90.


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Their reality depends on the fact that they are dead. Neither need one think here that a void has been ®lled by the imagination. It is not obvious that a void need be invoked at all. Yet, even in cases where the void plays an essential part, it is clear that, in many, belief in the reality of the dead is not a matter of ®lling the void by the imagination. Simone Weil actually contrasts the kind of example I have in mind with what she calls the evils of the imagination in ®lling the void. To lose somebody: we suffer at the thought that the dead one, the absent one should have become something imaginary, something false. But the longing we have for him is not imaginary. We must go down into ourselves, where the desire which is not imaginary resides. Hunger; we imagine different foods; but the hunger itself is real; we must seize hold of the hunger. The loss of contact with reality ± there lies evil, there lies sorrow. There are certain situations which bring about such a loss: deprivation, suffering. The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for attaining reality. The presence of the dead one is imaginary, but his absence is very real; it is henceforth his manner of appearing.87

Peter Winch has given an illuminating gloss on these words: Suppose that the dead person is a woman whom I deeply loved; that while she lived, the woman was the centre round which the world revolved as far as I was concerned: anything that I thought worth doing, anything in which I took an interest, was connected in my thoughts in some way with her. I may say, `The world without her is impossible for me to live in. The only thing from which I could draw any support is lacking'. Simone Weil says that `The remedy is to use the loss itself as an intermediary for attaining reality'. That is to say, I must look for what is real in my situation ± for the centre from which I am now forced to view the world. And this, she suggests, is to be found in my very loss, my longing, in the void created by the beloved's absence. It is important to what Simone Weil is saying that longing is intentional. I long for something or someone. In other words my longing itself, which is undoubtedly something real, cannot be grasped except as a longing for that person. So mention of her is essential to describing the reality of the world as it is for me; she has not become something unreal, imaginary, because mention of her is indispensable to describing the world as it is. Her absence is, henceforth, `her way of appearing'; she makes a difference to the world by virtue of her absence.88

There is clearly a marked difference between Simone Weil's 87 88

Simone Weil, The Notebooks, vol. I, London: Routledge 1956, p. 29. From an unpublished manuscript by Peter Winch.

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remarks and Winch's comments on the one hand, and Wisdom's example of the child's belief on the other. In Wisdom's example, the void has to be ®lled, whereas, with Weil and Winch, the void is not ®lled, but faced. For Wisdom's child the recognition of the void is the emptiness after the father's death. Once the father had ®lled the child's world. After the father's death, despite occasional impulses of thought in which the child is tempted to believe that the father is somehow still around, the child realises that to think that his father is still part of his world is no good now. How can the father be part of his world when the father is no more? There is no suggestion in Wisdom's example of the dead making a difference to one's world by virtue of their absence. The only way in which the child's father comes to play a part in his world again is by the arrival of unexpected news: things are not what they seem, the father still lives in another world. One can see without too much dif®culty why many would want to mark the difference between the two examples by noting the presence of fantasy in the one and its absence in the other. In Wisdom's example there is a loss of contact with reality, whereas in Winch's example it is precisely reality that is embraced, despite the fact that the reality embraced is the realisation that the dead one can only be present in the form of absence. It may be thought that the fact that the father is also said to be absent in Wisdom's example makes the difference between it and the case Winch discusses minimal. This would be to ignore a radical discontinuity present in the one case and absent in the other. In Wisdom's example, the death of the father clearly has consequences for the child's life: he no longer expects punishment or help. When he is told, however, that his father is still alive, Wisdom tells us that now èven more than he did when his father was alive, he will feel that his father sees him all the time and will dread distressing him and when he has done something wrong he will feel separated from his father until he has felt sorry for what he has done'. He is related even more to his father now in certain respects than he was before. The difference is simply a difference in degree. True, there are no actual helps or punishments, but this is simply because death has placed such a distance between himself and his father as to make this impracticable. The point could be expressed in this way: the child has not come to have a relation with a dead father, he simply intensi®es a prior relationship with a father who still lives, but afar off. Apart from the unavoidable absence, the relationship has the


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same character as it had previously. Absence has made the heart grow fonder. If, on the other hand, one tries to apply this analysis to Winch's example, one blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. Winch emphasises that the longing caused by bereavement is a longing for a particular person, `so that mention of her is essential to describing the reality of the world as it is for me'. That is to say, part of how the world is for me is determined by the absence of a loved one in a way in which it obviously would not be if I had not given the dead one a second thought. If, however, I begin to think that the loved one is still alive, I lose contact with reality, that is, with the reality of her death, and I am led into different kinds of false expectations and consolations. Consider the difference between how, after the death of a loved one, a favourite cafeÂ table at which one used to sit with her can acquire new signi®cance, and one's beginning to think that one will meet the loved one again at the table, that one can actually see her waiting for one at the table, and so on. Winch mentions the way in which Sartre in Being and Nothingness, through his description of the cafeÂ from which Pierre is absent, brings out how à world from which a certain person is absent is not the same world as a world the description of which involves no mention of that person'. The reality of the dead need not involve ®lling the void by the imagination. It is important to see that similar points can be made, not simply in the context of the signi®cance of the dead for the living, but in the context of what can be said about the destiny of the dead themselves. It is equally important to note that these points are relevant to secular as well as religious uses of language concerning the dead. Think of the notion of an eternal pact between lovers. An elegy by Robert Bridges tells of a lady who dies of grief on hearing that her betrothed has been killed. At her funeral she is laid in a cedar litter on the river: But now for many days the dewy grass Has shown no markings of his feet at morn: And watching she has seen no shadow pass The moonlit walk, and heard no music borne Upon her ear forlorn. In vain has she looked out to greet him; He has not come, he will not come, alas! So let us bear her out where she must meet him.

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different in kind from any meeting between the living however well planned. This counts against Feuerbach's suggestion that conceptions of eternity must be projections of scenes from human life. The necessity of the meeting cannot be understood without reference to death: it is the union of lovers in death. The vision of such a union can even involve changes in the status of the dead which may seem to resemble changes which can occur to a human being during his lifetime. Bridges says of the lady's dead lover: And thou, o lover, that art on the watch, Where, on the banks of the forgetful streams, The pale indifferent ghosts wonder and snatch The sweeter moments of their broken dreams, ± Thou, when the torchlight gleams, When thou shalt see the slow procession, And when thine ears the ®tful music catch, Rejoice, for thou art near to thy possession.89

The lives of the lovers had been so bound up with one another that when one is over the other becomes meaningless. What can be said of the restless state of the lover in death is determined by the fact that he is separated from his loved one. When she dies too, what can be said of him in death changes accordingly. But the restlessness depicted here has little in common with the restlessness one associates with a haunted manor! Now what if someone were to say, `But the vital question is whether what the poet says is true'? What would it mean to say it is true? What Bridges gives us is a possible way of thinking of the death of the lovers. He gives us a language which makes this way possible. To say it is true is to be able to say Àmen' to it, to appropriate it. It is to be prepared to say, `This is how it is with the deaths of these lovers.' It is an expression of value. If one asks what it says, the answer is that it says itself. To recognise these grammatical points, philosophically, is not to appropriate what is said personally. It is to note what `truth' and àppropriation' come to in this context. These examples of the reality of the dead are, of course, different from the religious conceptions of eternity which interest Feuerbach, but they were meant as a preliminary demonstration of the fact that the dead can be thought of as real without any ®lling of the void by the imagination. We shall get closer to the religious cases if we 89

Robert Bridges, Èlegy' in Poetical Works, Oxford 1912.


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consider the notion of the will of the dead, a notion similar, in certain respects, to the notion of the will of God. Kierkegaard discusses the way in which ingratiating oneself with a human being one admires may lead to self-deception with regard to what is morally required of one: The living person may perhaps favour you too much ± perhaps too little. If you see him each day, your shame will perhaps lose something of its intensity or perhaps bring on itself an acute disease, so that you would wish to possess a magic means of deceiving the revered one, so that you wished to be able to ingratiate yourself with him or by any means to raise yourself up in his good graces, because his judgement has become for you the most important thing of all. How much danger and temptation to doublemindedness.90

If we want to respect the will of a dead person the matter is entirely different. One can argue with a living person, hope to get him to change his mind, accuse him of being mistaken, and so on. But it is not so with the will of a dead person, since it does not exist in an earthly sense where all the changes we have mentioned make sense. The will of the dead is ®xed, unchanging. Kierkegaard calls it a trans®gured will. One who is living can indeed be mistaken, can be changed, can be stampeded in a moment and by the moment . . . A man cannot get round a trans®gured one. Favour and persuasion and overhastiness belong to the moments of earthly life. The departed one does not notice these appearances, the trans®gured one cannot understand them.91

These remarks are grammatical remarks about the will of the dead. They set limits to what it makes sense to say here. Once this is recognised the difference between Kierkegaard's example and Wisdom's example becomes apparent. In the former, there is no question of the attitude to the dead being a reaction to the void. It is rather a matter of contemplating the ethical will of a dead person. Similarities between Kierkegaard and Wisdom are only apparent. Kierkegaard tells us that `the trans®gured one exists only as trans®gured, not visibly to the earthly eye, not audibly to the earthly ear'.92 We may be reminded that Wisdom's child is also told that although his father is still alive in another world `there is no hope of seeing him or hearing his voice again'. Do these remarks amount to the 90 91

Sùren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, trans. Douglas Steere, London: Fontana 1961, p. 80. 92 Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 80 ±1.

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same thing? I think not. One must bear in mind the logical continuity in Wisdom's example. As far as one can tell, there is no suggestion that the father exists in another world in any sense other than he existed in this life. Death, in Wisdom's example, has brought about a separation, but no trans®guration. Wisdom, in his example, endeavours to convey the ®xed and unchanging character of the father's will, but fails to do so because of his insistence that the father is still alive. For Kierkegaard, on the other hand, the dead person is trans®gured, glori®ed, or, one might say, raised on high. This ®xity and unchangeableness eludes Wisdom because he pays little attention to the evaluative notions of trans®guration and glori®cation. For Wisdom's child of faith, belief in the second father is a product of a void created by the death of the ®rst. The ®rst father fails the child by dying. In his need, fantasy and imagination ®ll the void, and he believes that his father is still alive in another world. In Kierkegaard's example, belief in the reality of the dead is not the product of anything. If one asks why people should believe in the reality of the dead, why the dead should be held in awe, reverence or dread, one can only reply that people do react to the dead in this way, that is all. By assembling certain material which surrounds the beliefs, and by apt comparisons, one may be able to bring out the force of the beliefs. That would be an elucidation of the beliefs, not an explanation of them. The kind of belief Kierkegaard is talking about cannot be explained away. The belief cannot be reduced to something more fundamental than itself. It is the belief that is fundamental. 7 god and death Despite the conclusions we have reached, a Feuerbachian might still want to argue that things are different where connections between death and God are concerned. God is said to be qualitatively distinct from a human being, even from a being whose will is trans®gured in death. As we have seen, Feuerbach's whole point is that belief in God is an attempt to transcend human ®nitude, including the attempt to transcend death. This goes along with his assumption that we all have a rage to live, and that no one wants to die. The ®rst thing we need to do is to question this deep-going Feuerbachian assumption. For various reasons, people, perhaps most people, fear dying. One reason would be the thought of what one's completed life amounts to: Ìs your soul in such a condition that you

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would be prepared to die?'93 This is the concern with immortality ± a concern with the state of one's immortal soul. It is a spiritual concern, which is why no event after death, were that intelligible, could show that one had immortality. This is another way of saying that a longing for immortality is a longing to glorify God. This longing is intimately related to reactions to death. It could be said that one's attitude to death is internally related to the love of God. Similarly, not being prepared to accept death would, in this context, be the refusal to recognise that life was always a gift which had to be returned. The spirit of reception and the spirit of relinquishing are obviously connected ± `The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord'. It is hard to see how any sense could be made of tasks in life, conceptions of what one is becoming, or any conception of development if one took away any sense of death, any sense of a limit. The thought of going on and on and on would, contra Feuerbach, ®ll many people with horror. One should recall the response of the Sibyl, trapped for years in a bottle, when asked what she desired. She replied: Ì want to die.'94 Once the issue of a response to death is made central, we can see how one response could be in terms of what we have already discussed in the notion of making life a sacri®ce to God, of making life an expression of gratitude to God. Once again, we can see why Feuerbach echoes, but, in the end, ignores, some central religious reactions to death. He is right to emphasise the desire to transcend ®nitude, but wrong to see this only in terms of the illusion of omnipotence of thought. Believers do want to transcend, in the sense of `come to terms with', their ®nitude, but this can mean coming to terms with their failure, in all their limitations, to make their lives a sacri®ce to God, and to make it a life of gratitude of spirit. This concern becomes acute at the approach of death. `Death is the most precious gift which has been given to man. That is why the supreme impiety is to make a bad use of it. To die amiss.'95 Rhees, in his essay, has a discussion of what `dying amiss' may mean. He discusses it personally and philosophically in a powerful way. He asks how death can be a hope even when one is convinced 93 94 95

Rhees, `Death and Immortality', p. 215. See Petronius, Satyricon and the Fragments, trans. J. R. Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1965, p. 63. Simone Weil, `Violence' in Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Craufurd, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952, p. 77.

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that one has lived a depraved life. One way of using death amiss, he argues, is to see it as a way out of this depravity, simply in the sense that it puts an end to the harm to others it has caused. The question for Rhees is how, at death, he can become something other than he is. It is obviously no use saying now, `Do better'. His life, with all its limitations, is the result of trying to do better ± but he is ashamed of the outcome. If he is to become something other than he is, it cannot be by his own efforts. It is at this point that Rhees sees death as hope in Christianity. What does this hope amount to? First, he wants to be judged, to be answerable to what is eternal. It is essential not to look away from what one's life has been, and the greatest sin would be to say that it would have been better if one had not lived. This is the ultimate ingratitude: `To look on death if this means looking away from the world, even looking away from my own de®lement of the world ± is again a form of deception: a failure to see death as the word of God.'96 If this happens, the soul does not meet death; death is not seen as coming from God, which is to say it is not seen in God. Rhees asks that even his own damnation should be to God's glory. It is in death that I cease altoghether to seek after personal satisfaction; that I sink into nothingness before God. This is what Simone Weil would call the achievement of purity. While I have been living as a particular man, the imperfections in all this have prevented me from sinking into nothing before God: I have not been able to remove entirely the `je' ± I have not been able to recognize my nothingness before God, and this has prevented me from recognizing the majesty of God . . . In these ways death is very like love; is in fact the culmination of love. In love as in death all personal requirements subside, and my own existence is of no account. (Both are like the recognition of beauty, in this way.)97

Rhees contrasts this with what he regards as the vulgarity of `That will be Glory for me'. 8 conclusions about death In this chapter, through a discussion of Feuerbach, we have seen how diverse reactions to death can be, and how they cannot be represented by simple, exclusive alternatives. It is insuf®cient to say, as Feuerbach does in his Thoughts on Death and Immortality, that our only 96 97

Rhees, `Death and Immortality', p. 237. Ibid., p. 233± 4.

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choice is either to accept our ®nitude and love the humanity in each other, or to hope for survival after death, which for Feuerbach is to live as though one were already dead. We have seen how this ignores very different religious possibilities. If we take note of the variety of reactions to death I have mentioned we can see that proper contemplation of them, that is, giving them the attention they deserve, makes it impossible to tidy them up in the service of some grand, but falsifying, thesis. Reactions to the dead may involve fantasy, a ®lling of the void by the imagination, but this is not always the case. When philosophers say that the dead are dead, they may have such fantasies in mind. As a result, they think that only two possibilities face us: either to recognise that the dead are dead, or to indulge in fantasy. But, as we have seen, there are other possibilities which people may or may not accept. Some may live by the will of the dead, while others may regard this as foolish. The reality which the dead have may be one which inspires reverence for the dead, while others may not give the dead a second thought, believing that life is for the living. Others may see death as a wonderful gift from God, one which, if used rightly, informs us of our nothingness before the eternal and can lead to gratitude for existence and love of others as God's graces. Others may ®nd it impossible to react to life in this way, given `the maimed and abortive children' it contains. These are all reactions to death. If, now, in face of these diverse reactions, the philosophers say, `The dead are dead', as though this is the only real response as distinct from all the others, they are confused. In fact, their response is one among others which enjoys no privileged philosophical position. The same is true of Feuerbach's hope that the dead are left to rest in peace.98 98

Feuerbach, Lectures on The Essence of Religion, p. 284.

chapter 5

Marx and Engels: religion, alienation and compensation

1 marxism and monism In the previous chapter we saw how Feuerbach inverted the priorities of Hegel's metaphysical system. To use Wittgenstein's phrase, he attempted to bring words back from their metaphysical to their ordinary use. This project, he hoped, would determine the future course of philosophy: The philosophy of the future has the task of leading philosophy from the realm of `departed souls' back into the realm of embodied and living souls; of pulling philosophy from the divine, self-suf®cient bliss in the realm of ideas into human misery. To this end, it needs nothing more than human understanding and human speech. To think, speak and act in a pure and true human fashion will, however, be granted only to future generations. At present, the task is not to present man as such, but to pull him out of the mud in which he has been embedded.1

If we equate `religion', in the broadest sense, with any kind of metaphysical transcendentalism, we can see how Feuerbach could accuse philosophy of having theology as its unacknowledged subject. We can also see why Marx said, although religion was a minor part of his system, `For Germany the criticism of religion is in the main complete, and criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.' 2 Feuerbach's project was greeted with enthusiasm by Marx and Engels, but they did not think he pressed his analysis far enough. It could be put by saying that, on their view, although Feuerbach attempted to bring words back from their metaphysical to their ordinary use, he did not give an adequate analysis of what `the 1 2

Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, Indianapolis: Hackett, p. 3. Karl Marx, `Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right' in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Atlanta: Scholars Press, p. 41.

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ordinary' amounts to. We shall have occasion to question the adequacy of the counter-analysis offered by Marx and Engels. Marx complains: `Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.'3 Engels, too, complains that instead of abolishing religion, Feuerbach tries to perfect it: `he does not simply accept mutual relations based on reciprocal inclination between human beings, such as sex, love, friendship, compassion, self-sacri®ce, etc., as what they are in themselves ± without associating them with any particular religion which to him, too, belongs to the past; but instead he asserts that they will attain their full value only when consecrated by the name of religion.'4 Feuerbach's emphasis on human consciousness, however radically reformed, meant that, for Marx and Engels, he remained an idealist. They looked for a further determinant of human consciousness. The analysis they offer is monistic in character. Marx was concerned to show that his views were rooted in human experience. What guarantee do we have, however, that experience re¯ects reality? Like Locke, Marx ®nds objectivity in the fact that our ideas, by which he meant images of real things in the brain, are said to be caused by matter. Were this not the case, he thought, we would be trapped, like Berkeley, within the circle of our own ideas. Marx wanted to avoid this idealism at all costs. Yet, like Locke, he gives us no clear account of what he means by `matter'. That this should be so is not accidental. We saw, in the last chapter, the dif®culties which attend the metaphysical impulse to give a monistic answer to the question, `What is the nature of all things?' Once a substantive answer is given, which is supposed to display the commensurability of all things, the problem arises of what account can be given of the reality of the proposed measure, whether it be `water', àtoms', or any other measure. As I said, Plato came to see that the unity of the world cannot be anything akin to the unity of a substance. It has been argued that Marx was in¯uenced by an Aristotelian conception of substance. Without a conception of substance, it is said, no account can be given of commensurability between things: `Things cannot be recognised as individual things except insofar as they are recognised 3 4

Karl Marx, `Theses on Feuerbach' in Marx and Engels, On Religion, p. 71. Friedrich Engels, `L. Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy' in Marx and Engels, On Religion, pp. 238± 9.

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as things of a kind; the kind to which they belong is revealed by the regularities in their behaviour. In denying that things have natures, tendencies, and capacities, empiricist philosophy tears things asunder: It severs a thing's being what it is, from its doing what it does.'5 The vital question, however, is whether a thing's being what it is depends on being able to show its commensurability with all other things, through its participation in, or manifestation of, the fundamental nature of all things. For Marx, this fundamental nature is `matter'. The postulation of such a substance, however, which is supposed to persist through all change, makes impossible the very science of things for which it is said to be necessary: Wood can become coal. There are properties of wood that are not properties of coal and there are properties of coal that are not properties of wood. We couldn't distinguish between them if this were not so. If you were going to say that wood and coal are merely matter then you would be denying any distinction between them . . . Even if there is such a thing as matter it is not exactly the same as wood and coal. (It can't be exactly the same as both for they are different.) Unless you are prepared to recognize the reality of many things you can't have a coherent theory, you can't have science.6

It will be said that this objection ignores the fact that Marx is not a materialist, but a dialectical materialist. `Matter' does not refer to a static substance, but to processes which in nature, and in the human brain, observe a certain pattern. Marx took over the nature of this pattern from Hegel, that of a thesis which is denied by an antithesis which reveals the tensions between them, tensions which are resolved in a synthesis at a higher level. But the reference to the dialectic does not ease the logical dif®culties. First, there are processes which simply do not conform to this pattern: What justi®cation is there for saying that the plant is the opposite of the seed or the negation of the seed? Certainly it differs from the seed but so does my shoe. If you say that the seed ceases to exist when the plant comes into existence then that is true, but it doesn't make the plant the opposite of the seed, if you say that it makes the plant the negation of the seed then this simply means that you are using the phrase `negation of an earlier phase' to mean the succeeding phase.7 5

6 7

Scott Meikle, `History of Philosophy: The metaphysics of substance in Marx' in Terrell Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 302. W. H. C. Eddy, Understanding Marxism, Oxford, Blackwell 1979, p. 7. Ibid., pp. 13± 14.

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Second, even where something like the pattern applies, will it not be the actual situation with the events or ideas involved in it which gives sense to it, and not the metaphysical theory? It seems as though Marx's monism replaces `the absolute' in Hegel's metaphysics: [A]ttempts to reduce reality to One, or Monism as it is called, are bound to break down. The Marxist theory of matter is no exception. Marx and Engels thought they were making an advance when they threw out the notions of idea, spirit, or mind as the One, and substituted the notion of matter. They thought they were throwing out the supernatural. In fact it made no difference. They might as well have ®tted in X as matter. All such theories are open to the same criticism.8

Marx's monism applies as much to social relations as to the natural world. Marx regarded society as a substance. This, however, poses problems, since there seems to be a difference between the relation between a natural substance and the elements of which it is composed, and the relation between a society and its members. Engels emphasised that there are important differences between events in the natural world and social relations. In the former context we have blind, unconscious agents, while, in social relations, conscious agents act according to their plans and intentions. Marxism, according to Engels, differs from older forms of materialism by asking further questions about the purposive activities of human beings: `What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical forces which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?'9 In answering this question Marxism claims to reveal `the real ultimate driving forces of history'.10 It has been argued that Marx's Aristotelian-like conception of society as a substance enables him to avoid denying human freedom by an over-emphasis on social constraints, and to avoid denying that society has a substantial nature by over-emphasising human freedom. That conception amounts to something like the following: Society is a natural growth, something constituted by nature. Man is by nature a social animal, and society is not an arti®cial construct imposed on man but a manifestation of human nature itself. Society is the natural form of existence for man, and the capacity for social life is what is speci®c to humans alone among gregarious animals. The capacities that are speci®c8 9 10

Ibid., p. 7. Engels, `L. Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy', p. 255. Ibid., p. 256.

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ally human can be attained only through the development of society and speci®cally through the development of a politikon bion (political life) in which citizens genuinely control and run their communal life. Human goods and capacities like eudaimonia, proairesis, and theoria are not possible without this, and they are subsidiary to it: One who can exist separately from society and be self-suf®cient is either a lower animal or a god, but not a man. Like other natural entities, society has an object or point, and its point is not to avoid harm and promote trade but to share in a good life.11

This conception of society raises an enormous number of problems, and they cannot all be pursued here. One major problem, given these comments and Engels' observations about the difference between natural events and social relations, is what is supposed to happen to the claim that processes in both contexts are governed by the same laws. This issue is not helped when we are told that Marx, like Aristotle, did not think that society is a substance in the strict sense, but regarded it as a `virtual substance', or that `The òrganic analogy' between society and organisms is an analogy, but the view that society is a substance is something quite separate from that analogy.'12 But, surely, if we are to speak of processes in the natural world and in social relations operating according to the same laws, `virtual' or ànalogical' substances are hardly suf®cient to meet the case. The point, as Peter Winch has shown, is not to quarrel over the use of the word `cause': The important point to remember here is that the word `cause' (and related words) are used in a very wide variety of different ways in different contexts . . . We do use causal language when we are exploring people's motives. `What made him do that? What was the cause of his doing that?' Ìt was a combination of ambition, greed and jealousy.' And there is of course absolutely nothing wrong with this way of talking; it cannot be said to be merely metaphysical. It follows that causal notions do apply to human behaviour that is in question. More particularly, because we also speak, for example, of the cause of the engine's failure to start being dirty sparking plugs, it would be quite wrong to infer that we are dealing with an explanation of the same kind as that offered in the previous example. The phrase `causal explanation', we might say, indicates what is being explained ± roughly, the source or origin of something ± and so far says little or nothing about how it is being explained, or about what the explanation looks like.13 11 12 13

Meikle, `History of Philosophy, p. 305. Ibid., p. 313. Peter Winch, Preface to The Idea of a Social Science, 2nd edn, London: Routledge 1995, pp. xii±xiii.

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It is by giving attention to such details that conceptual differences between the uses of `cause' come to be appreciated. The claim that society is a `substance' is in a different category. That claim comes from metaphysics and not from ordinary discourse. Meikle offers us a choice between seeing society in this way, and seeing it as the aggregate result of the actions of individuals, the accidental outcome of their con¯icting endeavours; but prefers the former. He says that which we choose depends on our metaphysics, but why should this be so? What we need here, as elsewhere, is attention to the concepts at work in the context we are discussing; namely, society. It is dif®cult to see how a monistic account can be given of the society we know; dif®cult to see how a single conception of the good life or of an object can be attributed to it. On the face of it, society is made up of movements of different kinds, informed by different aims and interests. Some of these may be relatively independent of each other, while others may compete or co-operate. An individual may be involved in more than one of these and this involvement, in turn, will have implications for the personal relationships the individual is part of, with all the complexities and contingencies that belong to them. Again, on the face of it, any attempt to reduce this heterogeneity, this multiplicity of movements and hubbub of voices, to an account of the development of a single substance seems to be a high road to confusion and obscurity. Meikle says: Certainly, in regard to a priori considerations, it makes sense to proceed on the assumption that society is a substance with a nature and laws. It hardly makes as much sense to work on the assumption that it is not, because then one would not have reason to inquire into it in the way that science does, seeking the general and lawlike in the particular. One would have assumed at the outset, on a priori grounds and without considering the facts, that there was nothing general and lawlike to be found. It is possible that inquiry might lead to the conclusion that society is not a substance, but this would need to be the outcome of investigation.14

But that is precisely what a conceptual investigation aims at. It is in the course of such an investigation, as we have seen, that monistic theories are challenged. They are not challenged on a priori grounds. The abandonment of such a theory does not mean that all talk of social development has to be censured. There will be all kinds of 14

Meikle, `History of Philosophy, p. 309.

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developments in a society, some on a larger scale than others. What does follow is that it will make no sense to speak of society, as such, developing, as though piecemeal developments were subservient to or parasitic on it. Similarly, that overall development may lead to talk of `progress over all', whereas a recognition of social heterogeneity will lead to the insight that `progress' is always relative to a particular context. Further, what is hailed as progress from one perspective may be deemed decline from another. Marxist monism cannot allow this heterogeneity. This becomes evident when we look closer at what Marx took to be the ultimate forces at work in society. These forces, according to Marx, are economic forces. These are the foundation in terms of which other forces are to be explained. The existence of other ideas ± political ideas, artistic ideas, religious ideas, legal ideas ± are certainly not denied, but they are to be explained in terms of their economic foundation. They belong to the superstructure of society. It must be borne in mind that Marx's explanations refer to society, not to individuals. Individuals may have all sorts of ideas, but the ®nal analysis of why they think as they do will be in terms of their social existence. It is that social existence which has economic realities as its foundation. Within this social monistic theory, Marx emphasised productive forces such as tools, ships, railways, machines, etc., and the productive relations in which people stand to each other, such as lord and serf, buyer and seller, employer and employee. Productive forces develop in such a way that creates tensions for existing productive relations. Their development may be resisted by those wielding economic power at any given time. Nevertheless, the development of productive forces cannot be resisted for ever. As the tensions mount these lead to a social revolution in which the productive relations change. With this new economic structure there will be corresponding effects on the superstructure. Marx analyses historical changes in society in these terms, and seems to suggest that these changes operate according to laws of history which mould the lives of human beings.15 Eddy notes that the attribution of a monistic social theory to Marx has been denied. Such an attribution, it is said, denies the dialectical character of Marx's reasoning. In a letter to Bloch in 1890 Engels wrote: 15

I am indebted here to Eddy's criticisms.

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According to the materialist conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure ± the political forms of the class struggle and its results ± constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles ± legal forms and even the re¯exes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas ± all these exercise an in¯uence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, ®nally, through the endless array of contingencies . . . the economic movement asserts itself as necessary . . . We ourselves make our own history, but, ®rst of all, under very de®nite presuppositions and conditions. Among these are the economic which are ®nally decisive. But there are also the political, etc. Yes, even the ghostly traditions which haunt the minds of men play a role albeit not a decisive one.16

So far from allaying suspicions that Marx has a monistic theory, Eddy sees in Engels' letter a man `wriggling desperately to hold on to one thing while pretending to admit something else which is incompatible with it'. . . . Notice how every time he gives something away he takes it back again. The economic is not the sole determining factor (he's given it away) . . . but in the last instance it is the determining factor (he's taken it back). There is a reciprocity between all these factors (he's given it away) . . . but ®nally the economic asserts itself as necessary (he's taken it back). Among the conditions under which we make our history are the economic (he's given it away) . . . but the economic are ®nally decisive (he's taken it back). Even the ghostly traditions play a role (he's given it away) . . . but not a decisive one (he's taken it back).17

Eddy calls himself a pluralist, by which he means, in this context, the recognition of an irreducible plurality of social movements which cannot be reduced to a monistic explanation, any more than there could be one causal explanation of every event in the natural world. Monism entails the denial of genuine complexity, interaction and development. Eddy brings out the logical and conceptual dif®culties as follows: 16 17

Quoted by Eddy in Understanding Marxism, p. 29. Eddy, Understanding Marxism, p. 30.

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If ìn the last instance' the economic is `the determining factor of history' then what is left for any other factor to determine? If other factors play their part then how can the economic be the determining factor in the last instance or any other instance? If the economic is `decisive' then this means it decides what happens and if other factors are `not decisive' then this means that they don't decide what happens. In that case there is no role for them to play. Engels tells us that ®nally the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. But what does he mean by that? By `®nally' he cannot mean that the economic is the ®nal determinant of every event because that would be treating it straight out as the sole determining factor. If he means that there is an elapse of time in which the economic does not get its way but ®nally (i.e. in the long run) it does, then he is simply saying that part of the time the economic gets its way and part of the time other things get their way. That certainly gives no basis for assigning a special role to the economic, especially when we remember that there is no `®nality' in history, no `last instance', but only a continuing complexity.18

The same kind of criticism is made of Marx's concept of the class struggle which is closely related to the distinction between the economic foundation and the superstructure of society. The developments between modes of production and productive relations, we have already noted, do not develop in abstraction, but in terms of struggles between different classes in history. These struggles go through three main phases: slave-society with its distinction between slave-owners and slaves, feudal society with its distinction between feudal lords and serfs, and the capitalist phase with its distinction between capitalists and workers. The revolutionary move from one system to another may take place over a long time and with different time-scales in different societies, but the overall direction of change is inevitable. Marx is not claiming to advocate what ought to happen, but to describe what does and will happen. Further, he claims that the revolutionary process has a culminating point in a working-class or proletarian revolution. All previous revolutions have been by minorities, so various forms of exploitation of the workers have persisted, but the last proletarian revolution brings class struggle to an end. It is at this point that a truly human history is said to begin. Unsurprisingly, criticism of Marx's notion of the class struggle takes the form of accusing it of being an over-simpli®ed account of history. The complexities involved are such that all struggles cannot be reduced to one form of struggle. Once that is admitted, we can also appreciate that ideas, other than economic ideas, play their part 18

Ibid., pp. 30 ± 1.

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in these struggles. Further, the notion of `struggle' itself deserves a no more central role than that of `co-operation'. Co-operative activities, like struggles, will be informed by ideas of various kinds. If we accept Marx's monistic theory, we can see why the concept of ideology becomes so important. If the foundation of society is economic, all else belonging to its superstructure, it follows that anyone or any movement which gives an account of activities in other terms will not be understanding the economic interests those activities subserve. Marx is not accusing people of lying. They may be sincere enough in their beliefs. Nevertheless, on his view, they do not appreciate the real explanation of their beliefs. Here is an example of Marx's insistence that we must go below the surface of things to their underlying rationale. There is a dispute about whether Marx regards his own theory as ideological. Because scienti®c socialism is an analysis prior to the ®nal revolution, some Marxists have argued that it, too, is ideological. It re¯ects a speci®c stage in the class struggle, namely, the ®nal phase, the struggle between capitalists and workers. When the ®nal revolution comes, scienti®c socialism will no longer be an adequate analysis. The dawn of truly human history will be accompanied by a truly human social science. David McLellan, on the other hand, says that Marx would never have called his work ìdeological'. What made ideas ideological for him was that they concealed the real nature of social and economic relationships and thus served to justify the unequal distribution of social and economic resources in society. It followed that not all ideas were ideological, but only those that served to conceal social contradictions. Hence, while all classes including the working class could produce ideology, it was only ideology in so far as it served to further the interests of the ruling class. And since society and its class structure were constantly changing, the same ideas could begin or cease to be ideological. Lenin was the great exponent of `socialist ideology' which for Marx would have been a contradiction in terms.19

Fortunately, from the point of view of the pluralist critique, we do not have to resolve this dispute. If all ideas prior to the ®nal revolution are ideological, in the sense that they re¯ect certain interests, or if ideologies are only those ideas which conceal the interests of the ruling class which they serve, Marxists are still faced 19

David McLellan, Ìs Religion the Opium of the People?' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, pp. 224 ±5.

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with their claim that some interests, namely, economic interests, belong to the foundation of society while all others belong to its superstructure. The pluralist will still want to know on what grounds economic interests are foundational, or why concealed ideological interests should always be of this kind. It is not dif®cult to see how Marx's basic concepts make up an hermeneutic of suspicion in relation to religion. If the structure of society is economic, all else being its superstructure, it is clear that religion is to be located in the latter context. Religious ideas cannot have a direct determining role in history. Their role is indirect, through the unacknowledged interests they serve. Religious thinking is essentially ideological thinking. Religious beliefs may be held sincerely, but they are the product of wishful thinking. This does not reduce them to harmless dreams, since they alienate people from their true interests. Religious movements must be inauthentic, since they obscure from people the real nature of their situation. After the ®nal revolution there will be no religion. Neither will there be any atheism, since it gets its sense from what it denies. Religious acceptance or rejection will not be part of a truly human society. This outcome is not contingent for Marx, since it is part of the development of history. Wittgenstein said that he often felt like asking Marx, `Don't you ever feel uncertain? Don't you ever tell yourself that you don't know just what will happen here or there, where so much may enter in that you have not examined?' But this would have been at odds with the way Marx looked on the world. It would not be scienti®c. ± In this sense, Wittgenstein said, Marx's view of the world was not at all religious. He said that an elementary or `minimum' religious sense might ®nd expression in Job's `The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord'.20

For Marx, this attitude is nonsense. We must turn to his more speci®c comments on religion to see why. 2 religion and ideology We have already seen that ideological beliefs must be distinguished from lies. They can be held sincerely. Further, elements in the beliefs 20

Rush Rhees, ` ``The divide'' between religion and ``scienti®c method'' ' in Rush Rhees, On Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 123.

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141

may well refer to what is real. Marx argues that this is the case with religious beliefs: `Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.'21 But although the distress is real enough, the solution to it which religion offers is not. Religious beliefs are ideological beliefs because they offer fantasies instead of reality. `Man, who looked for a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven . . . found nothing there but the re¯exion of himself.'22 What human beings need is to understand the reality of their situation. This involves revealing the essentially ideological character of religious beliefs. `The immediate task of philosophy, which is at the service of history, once the saintly form of human selfalienation has been unmasked, is to unmask self-alienation in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of right and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.'23 This shift in the location of criticism occurs precisely because religious beliefs obscure the real interests they serve. Engels says that `Christianity places . . . salvation in a life beyond death in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.'24 Religion becomes the agent of alienation and works against the interests of the proletariat by offering them false consolations, and suggesting that their af¯ictions are due to original sin, thus hindering the necessary social transformations. The solutions to these infamies are transferred `to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on earth'.25 In this way, religion preaches acquiescence and becomes the defender of the interests of those who want to defend the status quo. There is no doubt that Marx's notion of ideology, like Freud's notion of the unconscious, is a major contribution to our deepening appreciation of the various ways in which we can be in the grip of confusion. Moreover, it helps us to see how religion can often make a distinctive contribution to this very confusion. This much was clear in our discussion of Feuerbach. Who can deny that religion, in crude or sophisticated forms, often 21 22 24 25

Marx, `Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right', p. 42. 23 Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 41. Engels, Òn the History of Early Christianity' in Marx and Engels, On Religion, p. 316. Marx, `The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter' in Marx and Engels, On Religion, pp. 83 ± 4.

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offers pie-in-the-sky? When the world does not smile on us, it is easy to invent a God who does. Marx and Engels are right: we can go down a yellow brick road and people the heavens with fantasies. 26 We know that in this world there is no happy marriage between virtue and happiness, between events and deserts. Bad things happen to good people. What are contemporary theodicies in the philosophy of religion other than vulgar attempts to explain these facts away by justifying them? Such is the effort to show, despite obvious facts to the contrary, that all suffering leads to a greater good. Again and again people are crushed by af¯iction. Theodicists do not seem to appreciate the vulgarity involved in the readiness to use sufferings in a calculus of gains and losses.27 The vulgarity is no less if the solution is postponed to a point beyond death. Philosophers, rightly dismissive of attempts to justify horrendous evils in this life, do not hesitate to propound such justi®cations in the next, not seeing that the vulgarity is in such propounding.28 Other aspects of the Marxist critique of religion have obvious application. Who can deny that religion has often been used to bolster oppressive regimes? Religion has been guilty, again and again, of collaborating with, and even of being an expression of, worldly power, justifying oppression instead of protesting and working against it. According to Nielsen, the Marxist critique of religion identi®es, correctly, general tendencies in religious beliefs and the usual consequences which go with holding them. He is in no doubt that religion does more harm than good and longs for the day when it disappears. He recognises that these opinions are not themselves philosophical. Nielsen recognises that there are exceptions to his observations, but says that he is referring to general tendencies. This response is philosophically inadequate as a defence of the ideological accusations. Marx and Engels are not saying that religion is sometimes as they say it is, and sometimes not. Their analysis is an essentialist analysis. Religion is necessarily ideological. That is why Marx and Engels can be said, rightly, to be presenting an hermeneutic of suspicion. 26 27 28

For examples of such fantasies in twentieth-century literature see my From Fantasy to Faith, London: Macmillan 1991. For an example of such a dispute see my symposium with Richard Swinburne on `The Problem of Evil' in S. Brown, ed., Reason and Religion, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. See Marilyn McCord Adams, Èvil and the God-Who-Does-Nothing-In-Particular' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Religion and Morality, London: Macmillan 1996.


143

We have seen already, in previous chapters, that religion may take forms to which the Marxist critique does not apply. Why, it might be asked, are they ignored by Marx and Engels? With respect to Marx, McLellan's blunt answer is that he had a tin ear for these possibilities of religious sense.29 As for Engels, he simply relied on E. B. Tylor's view of primitive religion as personi®cations of nature, a view we shall have reason to criticise in the next chapter. Yet these explanations do not get to the philosophical reasons for their neglect. These, in fact, are shared by the failure of Eddy's philosophical pluralism to take account of these same religious possibilities. Philosophically, we would expect philosophical pluralism to include among the heterogeneity of movements in a culture which it regards as irreducible, religious movements with their distinctive concepts. We do not ®nd this happening in Eddy's discussion. Instead, Marx's critique is simply modi®ed in certain respects. Religion, it is said, is a more complex phenomenon than the critique recognises. For example, religion does not always lead to acquiescence. It can also lead to revolt. Marx and Engels recognised this in the case of the Puritan revolution, but called that revolution incomplete. Further, it is said, the critique of religion need not simply be in terms of Marx's economic analysis. It can be supplemented, for example, by Freud's psychological critique. Apart from these modi®cations, no attention is paid to other religious possibilities, except to the discredited proofs of God's existence. The explanation of this puzzling lack of attention on the part of the pluralist is the same as that of an equal inattention by Marx and Engels. As Nielsen says, they presupposed the incoherence of religious belief as `something evident to anyone with a reasonable education and not beguiled by ideology. That such beliefs are false or incoherent, they argue, has been well shown by Enlightenment thinkers such as Holbach, Hobbes, Hume and Boyle.'30 The exposure of religion's ideological character simply builds on the logical critique of the Enlightenment. In our discussion of Hume, we saw that that logical critique may itself obscure other religious possibilities. If, like Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, however, we do not get beyond that critique, no reason for looking in other religious directions will emerge. At the close of this chapter, I shall simply mention some of these 29 30

`Voices in Discussion' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, p. 282. Nielsen, Ìs Religion the Opium of the People? Marxianism and Religion' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, p. 184.

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religious directions. The idea of love at work in theodicies seems to be one which guarantees recti®cation. God must put things right. If even the most horrendous evil in a person is not recti®ed, then, it is argued, God will have created a human being he cannot save, and who seems to be beyond the reach of his love. In chapter 2, however, we discussed creation as the granting of a radical freedom to human beings, including the freedom to reject love. At the heart of Christianity, in the cruci®xion, is an extreme expression of love rejected. This is far removed from a religion of pie-in-the-sky. Nielsen admits that classical Marxist theories have neglected what he calls existential problems concerning death and the limits of human existence. He says, `These problems are not going to go away in any society no matter how classless and enlightened it may be'.31 But he sees no connection between these issues and social relations between people. Nielsen acknowledges the social concerns of liberation theology, but says that he ®nds the metaphysics of that theology incoherent. He ignores the internal connections we discussed in the last chapter between religious attitudes to death and religious attitudes to our neighbours and the natural world. If death is seen as the return of a gift, life itself is seen as a grace which is not ours by right. Other people and the natural world will be seen as graces too, which are not for us to possess or exploit. Thus religion need not be passive when faced by possessive and exploitive relations. It is no accident that there is an internal relation between love of God and love of the neighbour. Nielsen says that there can be atheistic reactions to death and to the limits of human existence. Why should that be doubted? It will be part of philosophy's contemplative task to see what these amount to. But Nielsen wants to argue that religious responses must be confused. This is a failure to contemplate possibilities. Further, a contemplation of possibilities shows that criticism is not con®ned to religious responses to life's contingencies. There can be similar criticisms of atheistic responses too. For example, Camus criticises a comparable attitude to present sufferings in religion and materialism, which places the remedy for them in some future hope.32 Marxism, like religion, has its fantasies. What is more, the fantasies of the former are at their most alluring when they pretend to be a 31 32

Ibid., p. 210. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. A. Bower, London: Peregrine Books 1962.


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form of science. Thus Rhees reports Wittgenstein's criticism of the pseudo-scienti®c basis of Marxist optimism concerning the ®nal revolution, and the dawn of a truly human society. Wittgenstein had listened with Rhees to a paper on `Causality in History' which had appealed to the Marxian dialectic and the claim that we can see `progress on the whole' in the course of history. Wittgenstein `said how he disliked this kind of `òptimism'' which was supposed to result from demonstration (from a theory of history, or of how history must go)'. If a man says `Certainly things look black at the moment; and if you look at past history you can ®nd plenty that might lead anyone to be depressed. But in spite of all that, I am still optimistic' ± then I can admire this, even if I do not agree with him. But if his optimism is just the outcome of a scienti®c proof ± the scienti®c study of history ± then . . . ' That seemed to Wittgenstein a weak and mealy-mouthed sort of optimism, I think; and one with a sort of smugness to it. It was not really facing the problem it pretended to face; it was painting it over.33

On the religious side, Rhees would want to distinguish, in the same way, between belief in immortality and a theory of immortality. This is what the hermeneutics of contemplation allows for: the recognition of religious and atheistic possibilities of sense, and of criticism and counter-criticism on either side. It is to be contrasted with the all-or-nothing theses of the hermeneutics of suspicion. As we have seen, that suspicion can certainly be found in Marx and Engels. It can be seen in their claim that morals, religion, metaphysics and other forms of ideology and the forms of consciousness corresponding to them no longer retain their apparent independence. They have no history, they have no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse with this, their reality, their thinking and the products of their thinking also change. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.34

That last sentence may well be endorsed, but the philosophical contemplation of life will reveal a variety which the Marxist dialectic cannot contain or deny. 33 34

Rush Rhees, `Death and Immortality' in On Religion and Philosophy, p. 226. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, `German Ideology' in On Religion, pp. 74 ±5.

chapter 6

Tylor and Frazer: are religious beliefs mistaken hypotheses?

1 animism and intellectualism E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, the two thinkers to be discussed in this chapter, are said to investigate religion in the intellectualist tradition. What is intellectualism? It is important to be clear about this term at the outset. We must distinguish between an intellectualist and an intellectual investigation of religion. The former assumes that the point of beliefs is to be found in their intellectual relation to the world. That relation is thought of in scienti®c terms which, it is said, do justice to the literal meaning of the beliefs. Thus, John Skorupski tells us: The literalist takes magical and religious rites to be, by and large, ìnstrumental' acts: actions which the actors perform because of the aimedat consequences which they believe their actions will have. This already commits him to a view of the actors' underlying beliefs ± namely, that they are beliefs about the world which can be used to explain it and which underpin attempts to control it. The intellectualist seizes on this role which magico-religious beliefs do play and takes it to be the role which they are called forth to play.1

Unlike the intellectualist, the intellectual does not assume that all beliefs are related to the world intellectually, and certainly does not assume that magico-religious beliefs are causal hypotheses about events in the natural world. Rather, the intellectual contemplates the nature of various beliefs in human life. If, like the intellectualist, one assumes that the point of magico-religious beliefs is to explain and control the natural environment, the questions which need answering become obvious: why did people come to form beliefs which are so ineffective; why do the beliefs persist; and do they actually ful®l 1

John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, p. 12.

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the function they are supposed to have. These questions seem to form a coherent research programme within which religion can be studied. The alternative to the intellectualist approach in anthropology is often said to be the symbolic approach. We shall meet this approach when we discuss Durkheim. It does not deny that the outward form of magico-religious beliefs is literal, or even that the actors think they are behaving in the way the intellectualist describes. The symbolist claims, however, that the literal forms need decoding. Only then do we arrive at the real symbolic or expressive meaning. The intellectualist and symbolic perspectives do not exhaust the possible forms of investigation. According to Skorupski, Wittgenstein denies that any decoding of the literal form of magico-religious beliefs is necessary, since the presence of a literal meaning is denied from the outset. He questions `whether these statements do have the literal meaning which both the literalist and the symbolist are agreed upon', and hence questions `literalism's right to its name'. 2 According to Skorupski, Wittgenstein holds that to think religious statements `have a literal, cosmological level of meaning at all is therefore an illusion engendered by a bad theory of meaning. If the symbolist followed his approach right through he would be freed of his residual literalist shackles and, with that, from the false dialectic of ``literalism'' and ``symbolism''.'3 Skorupski's account of Wittgenstein does not capture how radical his insights are, since it remains shackled to the assumptions those insights are supposed to free us from. Skorupski treats Wittgenstein's views as though they constitute a third theory about language which must compete with the theories of the literalist and the symbolist. For him, ìf the literalist account can make good sense of traditional magical or religious beliefs and practices, and if the intellectualism which combines naturally with it can be plausibly worked out, then that will be a considerable vindication of the classical conception of meaning which underpins it. It will then be up to the Wittgensteinian to detail a better, more integrated account'.4 For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, confusion is caused precisely by approaching language armed with a theory about it. Hence his insistence that we ought to look rather than think. If we wait on the diverse meanings in our discourse, we shall ®nd that 2

Ibid., p. 14.

3

Ibid., p. 16.

4

Ibid., p. 17.

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what `literal', `belonging to the world', `saying something about the world', amount to, is far more varied than the intellectualist supposes. For example, if `literal use' means `standard use', we have to recognise that we do not know, in advance of waiting on our discourse, what constitutes `standard use'. May not the standard use be a religious use? From the start, Skorupski con®nes the parameters of `the literal'. He equates `literal' with `literal and cosmological', so ensuring that it is understood in intellectualist terms. Skorupski claims that the Wittgensteinian denies the symbolist's insistence òn the need for further hermeneutic understanding'5 of the corpus of beliefs which have a literal form. What is really needed, however, is an hermeneutic which pays attention to the variety in the very distinction between the literal and the symbolic ± the hermeneutics of contemplation. For Skorupski, Wittgenstein's emphasis on differences has a high cost. It means `giving up ambitions (a uni®ed semantic treatment of natural language) which seem . . . to be of central importance in the theory of meaning'.6 Such a uni®ed treatment of beliefs is essential to the intellectualist programme with respect to religion. Magical and religious practices are regarded as instrumental, in ways akin to technological techniques. It is then thought that their results can be assessed over time for their ef®cacy. They are to be compared, in a uni®ed treatment, with other practices and methods which are taken to be aiming at the same results. This supposed uni®ed treatment will make it possible to speak of progress, and to distinguish between primitive and sophisticated means of attaining the same desired results. As in science, we can speak here, too, of building on previous results. Thus, it becomes possible for the intellectualist to conclude that religious beliefs and practices must be discarded as outmoded, mistaken, and irrelevant hypotheses. Tylor makes the parameters of his investigations clear from the outset: We may hasten to escape from the regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more hopeful journey over more practicable ground. None will deny that, as each man knows by evidence of his own consciousness, de®nite and natural cause, does, to a large extent, determine human action. Then, keeping aside from considerations of extra-natural inference and causeless spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of 5

Ibid., p. 13.

6

Ibid., p. 16.

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natural cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel on it so far as it will bear us.7

Tylor thought that the comparison of magico-religious explanations with those of science will take us a very long way. The essential question here, as it was for Marx, is whether the primary form of reality is to be found in matter or in spirit. Tylor argues that religions believe the latter to be the case. Thus, despite the diversity to be found in religion, Tylor thought that their essential claim can be reduced to one belief, namely, animism. The term comes from the Latin anima, meaning `spirit', and expressed the belief that the world is understood best by postulating spirits that are at work in it. Deeply in¯uenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, in a social context, as well as in the natural world, there was never a chance that Tylor would treat a belief in spirits as basic. For him, it is a belief which itself stands in need of a more fundamental analysis: `the religious doctrines and practices examined . . . are treated as belonging to theological systems devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation; in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion'.8 Tylor thinks that the intellectualist approach is synonymous with òbjectivity', whereas, as we shall see, it predetermines the grammar of the beliefs to be discussed. What is the origin of the notion of `spirit'? Tylor suggests that it is derived from the phenomena of death and dreams. Looking at the difference between a corpse and a living person, it is easy to conclude that the difference is due to the absence of that which activates the body, namely, its spirit or soul. Similarly, in dreams, we travel to distant places, but our bodies do not move. It is easy to assume that what leaves the body is its spirit or soul. Of course, if we ask for whom such reasoning is easy, Tylor's reply is that it is such for those at the early stages of civilization. We see the same tendencies of thought in our children when they think anthropomorphically about their toys. Òur comprehension of the lower stages of mental culture depends much on the thoroughness with which we can appreciate this primitive, childlike conception, and in this our best guide may be the meaning of our own childish days.'9 For Tylor, Ànimism is, in fact, the groundwork of that Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men.'10 This 7 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, London: John Murray 1920, vol. I, p. 3. 8 Ibid., p. 427. 9 Ibid., p. 478. 10 Ibid., p. 426.

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is because the anthropomorphic tendencies we see in children in relation to their toys are also found in higher religions: [A]s we consider the nature of the great gods of the nations, in whom the vastest functions of the universe are vested, it will still be apparent that these mighty deities are modelled on human souls, that in great measure their feeling and sympathy, their character and habit, their will and action, even their material and form, display throughout their adaptations, exaggerations, and distortions, characteristics shaped upon those of the human spirit.11

These anthropomorphising tendencies have an inner logic which makes monotheism the ®nal outcome of animism: Àmong thoughtful men whose theory of the soul animating the body has already led them to suppose a divine spirit animating the huge mass of earth or sky, this idea needs but a last expression to become a doctrine of the universe as animated by one greatest, all-pervading divinity, the World-Spirit.12 Thus, Tylor argues, animism is not a degradation of a higher form of religion, but rather a primary form of religious belief. The intellectualist task facing us now, according to Tylor, is to compare the explanatory power of animism with that of modern science. To establish a connexion between what uncultured ancient man thought and did, and what cultured modern men think and do, is not a matter of inapplicable theoretic knowledge, for it raises the issue, how far are modern opinion and conduct based on the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge, or how far only on such knowledge as was available in the earlier and ruder stages of culture where their types were shaped.13

That is why, in order to make the comparison, `The systematization of the lower religions, the reduction of the multifarious details to the few and simple ideas of primitive philosophy' is àn urgently needed contribution to the science of religion'.14 For Tylor, as we have seen, animism is rooted in a confused anthropomorphic inference by which the world is peopled with spirits. Once this confusion is exposed, the cultural consequences will be far-reaching: [R]eligious authority and dogma is simply deposed and banished, and the throne of absolute reason is set up without a rival even in name; in 11 12

Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. II, pp. 247± 8. 13 Ibid., pp. 443 ± 4. Ibid., p. 335.

14

Ibid., p. 358.

Animism, souls and spirits

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secularism the feeling and imagination which in the religious world are bound to theological belief, have to attach themselves to a positive natural philosophy, and to a positive morality which shall of its own force control the acts of man.15

It is clear that, for Tylor, there is an internal relation between intellectualism and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The last words of Primitive Culture read: It is a harsher, and at times even painful, of®ce of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science.16

2 animism, souls and spirits It is easy to discuss Tylor's animism without realising how crude is his use of the notions of soul and spirit. There are philosophical temptations which can lead us to misconstrue uses of the word `soul', but Tylor's views are a crude version of these. Why is it easy to be misled in discussing the soul? Wittgenstein asks: `What am I believing in when I believe that men have souls? What am I believing in, when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey.'17 In the case of the soul, what is in the foreground may obscure the actual application of the concept.18 Wittgenstein also says that there are uses of language where the soul in the use of words is all-important, whereas in other uses this is not the case.19 Tylor's use of `soul' or `spirit' falls into the latter category. For him, the words refer to an alleged active `something' in bodies. I say àlleged' because he thinks this `something' does not exist. Mature scienti®c re¯ection replaces this cause with the real cause. 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid., vol. I, p. 426. Ibid., vol. II, p. 453. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell 1953, vol. I: §422. For a further discussion of these dif®culties see D. Z. Phillips, Introducing Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell 1996. See chapters 4 ±6. See D. Z. Phillips, `Dislocating the Soul' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §530 ±1.

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Here, one sentence can be replaced by another without loss of meaning: `The cause of x is not y, but z.' In other uses of words, they cannot be replaced with equivalent uses. If lost, a distinctive way of thinking about things is lost with them. Many uses of the word `soul' fall into this category. Here, it will be important not to ignore the soul in uses of `the soul'. Remarkably, although it does not exercise him for long, we ®nd Tylor raising this concern about his own work: Those to whom religion means above all things religious feeling may say of my argument that I have written soullessly of the soul, and unspiritually of spiritual things. Be it so: I accept the phrase not as needing an apology, but as expressing a plan. Scienti®c progress is at times most furthered by working along a distinct intellectual line . . . My task has been not to discuss Religion in all its bearings, but to portray in outline the great doctrine of animism, as found in what I conceive to be its earlier stages among the lower races of mankind, and to show its transmission along the lines of religious thought.20

But what if the bearings of magic and religion Tylor ignores are essential to the notion of the soul? He cannot allow that possibility. Without the assumption that animism captures the essence of the matter, he cannot argue that it is necessarily superseded by science. Consider an example of Tylor writing soullessly of the soul and unspiritually of spiritual things. Here is his account of how primitive peoples think of the active `something' within them called `the soul': It is a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, ®lm or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far behind, to ¯ash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body; able to enter into, possess and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things.21

Tylor is anxious to assure us that he is not speaking metaphorically of these beliefs: [I]f any should think such expressions due to mere metaphor, they may judge the strength of the implied connexion between breath and spirit by 20

21

Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. III, p. 359. The passage is quoted by J. Samuel Preus in Explaining Religion, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1996, p. 152, but he is no more exercised than Tylor is by this possibility. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I, p. 429.


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cases of most unequivocal signi®cance. Among the Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth, the infant was held over her face to receive her parting spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its future use. These Indians could have well understood why at the death-bed of an ancient Roman, the nearest kinsman leant over to inhale the last breath of the departing . . . Their state of mind is kept up to this day among Tyrolese peasants, who can still fancy a good man's soul to issue from his mouth at death like a little white cloud.22

So far from this example being an unequivocal endorsement of Tylor's analysis, it reveals the extent of his blindness to the soul in the words. All he can see in the ritual involving the dying mother and her child is a crude transfer of power almost akin to the transfer of electricity. He pays little attention to what the ritual shows: a mother giving her life for her child. The child receives her parting breath, the mother gives her soul for her child; what more needs to be said? It would be equally stupid to compare `He'd sell his soul for money' with `He'd sell his kidney for money'. The ®rst does not refer to the transfer of any kind of substance. It is a moral remark concerning the degradation to which a person is susceptible. Similarly, the relation between the mother's parting breath and the child is not a causal, empirical relation, but a spiritual relation. Without realising that, one cannot understand the ritual. Ironically, it is Tylor, the intellectualist, who is in the grip of the very conception of the soul he criticises. For him, there would have to be a vapour, ®lm, or shadow, called the soul, for that term to have any meaning. It is his intellectualist, positivistic conception of the soul which prevents him from appreciating what the notion means in its natural settings. Similar conclusions follow in the example of the nearest Roman kinsman receiving the breath of a dying man. What needs to be understood is the relationship between kin which gives this act its authority. If one says that power is transformed by the act, the point is not to quarrel over the use of these words, but to enquire into the application they actually have. The extent of Tylor's blindness may be gauged if we apply his analysis to practices we regard as predominantly practical. Having noted the various purposive activities involved in business practices, it may be said that they are thought to be ineffective unless they are consummated in a magical ritual called `sealing the agreement': one 22

Ibid., p. 433.

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hand clasps another and thereby the informal agreement is sealed. What if it were said that this is an example of unequivocal meaning, showing belief in a substance which passes from one palm to another, for how else could the sealing be thought to take place? The businessmen are no less hard done by in this analysis than are Tylor's primitives. The absurdity comes from ignoring the role of a handshake in business practices. This does not mean that we should endorse a distinction between the practical and the symbolic as a result of our observations. It cannot be said that nothing happens in the handshake. Certainly something happens: the bargain is sealed. But `something happening' is no longer con®ned to examples where, for instance, wax may be used to seal an envelope. Similarly, something happens when a mother dies for her child, or when authority is transferred to the next of kin. But the sense of `something happening' cannot be given an intellectualist analysis prior to waiting on the contexts in which these events have their sense. It may be said in response that the examples have been selective, involving relationships between people. Surely, it is argued, intellectualism comes into its own in criticising attempts to attribute souls or spirits to animals, and even to things. Animism, after all, is meant to answer a wide range of questions: `Why do the Indians of America talk to animals as they would to each other? Because, like themselves, animals are owners of souls. Why does the water move, or the tree grow? Because nature spirits inhabit them.'23 Here, primitives fall foul of an association of ideas, moving from their idea of an active force in themselves (the soul), to the idea of similar forces in nature. Thus an ideal connection, a connection in thought, is mistaken for a real connection. When we evolve to a scienti®c understanding of the world, the demise of animism is inevitable. As Pals points out, for Tylor, àny thoughtful inquirer knows, the world is not animated by invisible spirits'. As any modern geologist can tell us, rocks do not have phantoms within them. As any botanist can explain, plants are not moved to grow by some secret anima in their stem. Science has shown that the real sun and sea owe nothing to the adventures of Apollo and Poseidon, that plants grow by the reactions of chemicals within their ®bres, and that the wind and water are 23

Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996, p. 26. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. II, p. 209.


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only names for a powerful ¯ow of molecules governed by iron laws of cause and effect.24

For this reason, the growth of religion `has been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens'.25 Why, it may be asked, does animism take such a long time to die? Tylor recognises the problem: Ìf it be asked how such a system could have held its ground, not merely in independence but in de®ance of its own facts, a fair answer does not seem hard to ®nd.'26 Tylor, in fact, gives four answers to the question. First, magic does not rely on its own methods entirely. In relation to other people, divination of evil spirits in them would also depend on genuine psychological insight, such as discerning signs of guilt. Also, the magician made lucky guesses on many occasions. Second, one must not underestimate the philosophical temptation which leads one to embrace animistic conclusions. These conclusions constitute à sincere but fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human intellect by processes still in great measure intelligible to our own minds, and it had thus an original standing-ground in the world'.27 Third, what of the large number of failures, the disparity between animistic predictions and what actually happened? Tylor points out that animism itself had strategies for coping with these eventualities. The prediction used vague words, so that, as with prophecies, a number of outcomes could be read as con®rming it. It was also said that a spell failed because of the inappropriate attitude of the suppliants, or because a more powerful spell had interfered with it. Even when tempest came instead of sun, it could be said that the tempest would have been even worse without the spell! Fourth, and most important, Tylor emphasises the low level of development we are dealing with. Their tendencies of mind should not surprise us, since they can still be found even within the most educated culture. Tylor reminds us of the memorable passage at the beginning of Bacon's Novum Organum: The human understanding when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission or belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and con®rmation; and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them; or gets rid and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacri®ce the 24 25 26

Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, p. 28. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, p. 317. 27 Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 133.

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authority of its ®rst conclusions. It was well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognise the power of the gods, by an inquiry, `But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows?'28

For these four reasons, Tylor concludes: Òn the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the middle ages and into our times is an unsatisfactory, but not a mysterious fact.'29 On the other hand, if we look at magic in its own right, as it were, Tylor is in no doubt what we should say of it: Looking at the details here selected as fair examples of symbolic magic, we may well ask the question, is there in the whole monstrous farrago no truth or value whatever? It appears that there is practically none, and that the world has been enthralled for ages in a blind belief in processes wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, and which might as well have been taken just the opposite way.30

The relevant processes are revealed by science. Hence, the clash between magico-religious beliefs and science, for Tylor, is a clash between mistaken and genuine hypotheses concerning how things happen in the world. Yet, he acknowledges, we could not arrive at genuine hypotheses had we not worked our way through the mistaken ones. Thus, he is able to conclude: `To impress men's minds with a doctrine of development will lead them in all honour to their ancestors to continue the progressive work of past ages, to continue it the more vigorously because light has increased in the world.'31 One major dif®culty with Tylor's analysis is that it attributes massive ignorance to primitive peoples concerning elementary natural facts and causal connections. Surely, Wittgenstein is right when he says that ìt will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity'.32 Missionaries and travellers who reported what they saw among these people naturally emphasised what was, to them, strange and bizarre. They do not emphasise what was perfectly familiar in their day-to-day living. Had they done so it would not have been plausible for a moment to accuse the so-called 28 29 31 32

Quoted in ibid., p. 136. 30 Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., vol. II, p. 453. Ludwig Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912 ± 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett 1993, p. 119.


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primitives of the pervasive ignorance attributed to them by Tylor. Were it true, it is dif®cult to see how they could have survived at all. Their dependence on nature was such that they certainly needed more than the luck and chance on which, according to Tylor, magic relied. These people possessed considerable technical skills and knowledge. They had a thriving agriculture and, like everyone else involved in such activity, had to take advantage of the regularity of the seasons, expectations of sun and rain, successful and unsuccessful methods of sowing and reaping, and so on. We cannot imagine them engaged in such activities if they were ignorant of natural facts and of causal connections. They were also skilled hunters. They made their own weapons, knew where to look for their prey, and how to stalk it. So in all these activities they had purposes in view, knew the best means to attain these purposes, and could make necessary adjustments when things did not go according to plan. Interwoven with these activities, which are familiar to us, are others which are ritualistic in character. How are these rituals to be understood? It is important to be clear about the philosophical point of the question. It is easy for the philosophical enquiry to be sidetracked into a dispute over whether an account of a given ritual is correct or not. The discussion then centres around the question whether a particular account of a ritual does re¯ect what the ritual meant for the people practising it. Such a discussion is justi®ed in so far as the offered account does claim to be an account of the ritual in question, but if one does not proceed beyond it, the main philosophical issue is obscured. Tylor's account of the rituals sees them as explanations of the purposive activities associated with agriculture and hunting already mentioned. In this way, the possible meanings of the ritual are already circumscribed by these assumptions. Tylor was blind to other possibilities of meaning. This is the central philosophical question: whether accounts of what activities must mean are justi®able, or whether such accounts have a stipulative character, so obscuring possibilities of meaning which do not ®t their paradigms of sense. We can wait on certain examples to see whether they can be understood in terms of Tylor's analysis. Consider the following lament by a holy Wintu woman: The White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, `Don't I'm sore. Don't hurt me'. But they cut it down and chop it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depth. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never

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hurt anything; but the White people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, `Don't, you are hurting me.' 33

Again, consider the following comments by Stoney Indian Walking Buffalo: Indians living close to nature and nature's ruler are not living in darkness. Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they'll talk to you if you listen. Trouble is, white people don't listen. They never learned to listen to the Indians so I don't suppose they'll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit.34

Discussing these examples, Mario von der Ruhr asks whether it helps to ask whether they are meant literally or symbolically. If, by `literally', we mean that trees feel pain or hate as humans do, the remarks lead to nonsense. This is not a matter of conjecture. Trees do not participate in those forms of life which give ascriptions of pain and hatred their sense. But if the examples are not to be understood literally, are they to be understood symbolically? Von der Ruhr shows what the second alternative would involve: When the Wintu woman says that trees don't want to be hurt, she is not ascribing to them states of consciousness, but condemning the practice of felling trees. Her remark has the force of a reproach. Similarly, the expression `spirit of the land' is just a poetic way of saying that the ecosystem should not be upset in that way, etc. And when Walking Buffalo insists that trees `talk' to him about the weather, he is simply using the term to express, metaphorically, the idea that trees may be used in a primitive sort of weather forecast, etc. Hence, we can make perfectly good sense of what the North American Indians say, once we recognize that they are speaking metaphorically rather than literally; there is no need to accuse them of conceptual confusion.35

The problem with this symbolic alternative, as von der Ruhr shows, is that it gives the impression that there is only a contingent relation between the ways of talking about the trees and land, and what they want to say. The `literal' remains the domain of factual propositions, while the `metaphorical' is simply thought to capture attitudes to the facts. What this ignores, as von der Ruhr points out, is the third possibility in which we are offered a language in which to 33 34 35

T. C. McLuhan, Touch the Earth. A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, London: Abacus 1980, p. 15. Ibid., p. 23. Von der Ruhr, Ìs Animism Alive and Well?' in Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, pp. 29 ± 30.


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think of the world. The earth and trees have a certain spiritual status. This status is internally related to, or constitutive of, what one takes the earth and the trees to be. Therefore, the question of their nature is one which can arise in contexts other than science. Further, to have a spiritual conception of the earth and trees will itself determine what one can do with respect to them. Look at the following reaction, for example, to the suggestion that the earth shall be ploughed: You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breasts? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?36

`Not being taken in the bosom of the earth' is not a consequence of the spiritual relation with the earth, but an expression of it. At this point, it may be said that the spiritual relations we have discussed presuppose the truth of the beliefs which underpin them, for example, a belief in the spirit of the land. Skorupski wants to distinguish between cosmocentric beliefs, that is, beliefs about the world, and anthropocentric aspects of the ritual.37 But, again, this is to con®ne à belief about the world' to the kind of beliefs arrived at in science. Further, the belief in the spiritual nature of the earth does not underpin the ritual, but is expressed in it. As to Tylor's accusation that the rituals express beliefs in processes wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, this again begs the question as to what is or is not relevant. Is the spiritual view of the earth relevant or not? Are the prohibitions this view entails relevant or not? Relevant to what? This question cannot be answered in the abstract. It may be said that the decline of magico-religious beliefs in face of technological advances shows that they are answerable to common criteria of assessment. If they are not, why do they decline? The point is not to deny that there are cases to which this analysis applies, for example, in medical advances. But Tylor's thesis would not be content with such piecemeal observations. It is a general thesis concerning cultural development which entails the necessary demise of religion. The point is not to deny that such a demise may occur, 36 37

McLuhan, Touch the Earth, p. 56, quoted in ibid., p. 31. Skorupski, Symbol and Theory, p. 53.

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but its character may be quite other than Tylor assumes. For him, the demise is that of mistaken hypotheses faced by better explanations within a common enquiry. But that need not be the form demise takes. Yet, it is true that an ever-increasing emphasis on the kind of results which interest Tylor could bring about the demise of a ritual. How can this be? Consider, for example, the ritual of anointing hunters before they go to pursue animals. Also, after an animal is killed, it may be addressed by the hunter who pleads for its forgiveness. These practices show what killing an animal is for the hunter. It is a solemn act done in the context of the dependence of the hunters on animals for food. There is no denying that the hunter has his purposes, but his conception of his relation to animals interpenetrates with these purposes. Imagine that the tribe in question comes into contact with people interested in the animals as a food supply for large markets. The tribe are given guns, more ef®cient ways of killing the animals. When the emphasis is solely on killing animals for pro®t, it is not dif®cult to see how the solemnity of the hunt is eroded. Gradually, the rituals will come to be seen as a waste of time, wholly irrelevant to the purposes in view. But this is not because the rituals have been shown to be mistaken hypotheses about hunting and killing animals, but because one no longer embraces the conception of hunting and slaying expressed in the ritual. If this is realised, our understanding of rituals is very different from that sought by Tylor. It can no longer be said that geology shows that rocks do not have spirits in them, or that science has shown that spirits do not move in wind and water. It is not that science fails to show this. It is not clear what it would mean for it to try. This is not to deny that real tensions and contradictions may arise as science and religion more than brush shoulders in the same culture. We discussed the case of Edmund Gosse and his father, an evangelical geologist, in the ®rst chapter. Whether Darwin contradicts Genesis will depend on what religion and science have become in the life of the person concerned. What we have seen in the present chapter is the confusion of thinking that a contradiction or refutation must exist between religious and scienti®c perspectives. As for clashes between religion and technological advance, this can be seen in the dispute between native Americans and various development companies over the use of what the former regard as sacred lands. Matters are complicated when such disputes have to be


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judged under a legal system which has developed with little regard for this conception of sacredness. In a dispute over an extensive ski development in the Mineral King Valley in the Sequoia National Forest federal judge Mr Justice Douglas gave an interesting dissenting judgement in opposing the development. He noted that many nonhuman entities have a standing under the law: À ship has a legal personality, a ®ction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation soul ± a creature of ecclesiastical law ± is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a ``person'' for purposes of the adjudicatory process, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, esthetic, or charitable causes.' He goes on to say: So it should be as respect valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes ± ®sh, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, ®shes, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water ± whether it be a ®sherman, a canoeist, a geologist, or a logger ± must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with destruction . . . Perhaps they will not win. Perhaps the bulldozers of `progress' will plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land. That is not the present question. The sole question is, who has standing to be heard?38

This is as far as a secular court could take the matter. From a religious perspective it could lead to a misunderstanding. No doubt those who have ecological concerns support the defence of `the sacred lands', but this might give the impression that the ecological considerations are a natural measure by which to judge `the validity' of native American religion as opposed to modern technology. This would be an ironic reversion of Tylor's thesis, but misleading nevertheless. The religious vision of the Indians does not depend on ecological consequences. Rather, those consequences are of concern because of their spiritual vision of the land, and of what constitutes an offence or violation with respect to it. Sometimes, it seems as though one of the powerful exponents of native American religion is resting his case on ecological consequentialism when he says of his 38

Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red, Colorado: Fulcrum 1994, Appendix 1, pp. 294 ±5.

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appeal: ìt is a redemption of sanity, not a supernatural reclamation project at the end of history. The planet itself calls to the other living species for relief.'39 But he goes on to assert the religious context for all that he has said: Religion cannot be kept within the bounds of sermons and scriptures. It is a force in and of itself and it calls for the integration of lands and peoples in harmonious unity . . . As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the land of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will ®nally discover that for this land, God is red.40

Tylor is advancing a general thesis concerning the necessary demise of what he calls the grand doctrine of animism, a thesis which advances a universal notion of progress. To understand that progress, he claims, we are led in all honour to our ancestors to whose mistaken hypotheses we are, nevertheless, indebted. It is dif®cult to disagree with Ernst Cassirer when he says that what we are presented with, in fact, is a picture of `primeval stupidity'.41 For Tylor, the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science. The hermeneutics of contemplation questions the very possibility of such a science. What is our relation to the heterogeneous possibilities of sense such an hermeneutic displays? That is a question we shall pursue further in discussing the work of James Frazer. 3 what rituals can be The diverse aspects of Frazer's The Golden Bough have given rise to a range of philosophical discussions. One of these concerns the narrowness of the intellectualist tradition in which Frazer stands ®rmly with Tylor. The differences between them, in this context, do not occasion any new philosophical issues. For example, instead of speaking of magico-religious beliefs, as Tylor did, Frazer argues that an age of magic precedes religion. Magic is abandoned because of the perceived lack of correlation between magical rituals and what actually happened. Frazer says: `Man saw that he had taken for causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these imaginary causes had been vain. He had been pulling at 39 41

40 Ibid. Ibid., p. 292. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven: Yale University Press 1950, p. 4.

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strings to which nothing was attached.'42 How does he turn to religion? Frazer provides the same animistic analysis that we found in Tylor. The effects magic sought to explain still occurred: The rain still fell on the thirsty ground: the sun still pursued his daily, and the moon her nightly journey across the sky: the silent procession of the seasons still moved in light and shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were still born to labour and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heaven in their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel . . . If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic. 43

Yet, it was only a matter of time before the same disparity between practice and what happens became evident in the case of religious prayers and rituals. What is more, regularity, rather than the arbitrary will of unseen beings, seemed to be characteristic of the natural world. As powers of explanation and prediction increase `religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science'.44 The difference between magic and science is that although both emphasise an order in nature, in magic, this ìs merely an extension, by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds; the order laid down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the phenomena themselves.'45 Like Tylor, Frazer thought that this story of progress from magicto-religion-to-science should lead us in all honour to our ancestors. Frazer says: [T]heir errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justi®able as such at the time they were propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and the rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited. After all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best. Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the 42 43

J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged edition), London: Macmillan 1963, p. 75. 44 Ibid., p. 932. 45 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 75 ±6.

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bene®t of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day stand in need of.46

The accusation of narrowness against Frazer comes from the clear assumption that the kind of interests expressed in science are the only ones which bring knowledge of reality. It is true that Frazer allows that science itself may be superseded by some form of enquiry which we cannot imagine yet, but it would be an enquiry in pursuit of the same kind of explanatory interests. He says: Ìn the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought.'47 Any new theory would have to advance the same interests. For the moment, however, science, for Frazer, is our only way ahead: Ìt is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress ± moral and intellectual as well as material ± in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scienti®c discovery is a wrong to humanity.'48 In view of this narrowness it is not surprising to hear protesting voices, voices which point out how confused it is to treat rituals as though they were scienti®c theories. Such a characterisation takes us away from the features of primitive stories and rituals which should command our attention. As Chesterton says: `The student cannot make a scienti®c statement about the savage, because the savage is not making a scienti®c statement about the world.'49 For example, Frazer gives an account of rain dances in which the point of the dance is causally related to the coming of the rain. Were it not so, Frazer could not see any point in the dance. Similar analyses are given of rituals concerning hunting and the harvest. But if the rituals are meant to be causally effective in this way, why are they performed on speci®c occasions? Harvest rituals accompany the harvest, hunting rituals accompany the hunt. They cannot secure animals without the hunt, or the harvest when it is not due. If the rituals are independent causes, why aren't they used in time of need when animals and the fruits of the harvest could avoid disaster? Wittgenstein asks the same question of the rain dances, noting the features of his own example which Frazer has missed: I believe that the characteristic feature of primitive man is that he did not act from opinions (contrary to Frazer). I read, among many similar examples, of a Rain-King in Africa to whom 46 49

47 Ibid., p. 932. 48 Ibid. Ibid., p. 348. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, New York: Dodd, Mead 1925, p. 110.

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the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is à parched and arid desert'. For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this of®ce of Rain-King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless clear that they had previously experienced that the rains begin in March, and then they would have the Rain-King function for the other part of the year. Or again: toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated by the people, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps.50

As we have seen, Frazer argues that the rites are performed because of their causal ef®cacy. He also argues that the gradual realisation of their causal inef®cacy accounts for the transition from magic to religion. His explanation for the delay in this recognition is hardly convincing. Frazer explains: Why cling to beliefs which were so ¯atly contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had failed so often. The answer seems to be that the fallacy was far from easy to detect . . . since in many, perhaps in most, cases the desired event did actually follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the performance of the rite which was designed to bring it about . . . A ceremony intended to make the wind blow or the rain fall, or to mark the death of an enemy, will always be followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence it is meant to bring to pass; and primitive man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a direct result of the ceremony; and the best possible proof of its ef®cacy.51

Wittgenstein replies: `Frazer says that it is very hard to discover the error in magic ± and that is why it has lasted so long ± because, for example, an incantation that is supposed to bring rain certainly seems ef®cacious sooner or later. But then it is surely remarkable that people don't realize earlier that sooner or later it's going to rain anyhow.'52 Instead of regarding the rituals as mistaken causal techniques, Wittgenstein suggests, we can see that they say something about the lives of the people who practised them in a quite different way. The rain dances are not causal attempts to make it rain, but a celebration of the coming of rain. Similarly rites at dawn celebrate the coming of the day. It is absurd to suppose that these rites are based on the belief that if, for example, arms were not raised at dawn, the day would not come. Similarly, when the adoption of a baby is marked by the 50 51 52

Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 137. Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 77 ± 8. Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 121.

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woman pulling the child from beneath her clothes, ìt is surely insane to believe that an error is present and that she believes she had given birth to the child'.53 We have only to assemble these examples in a certain way to bring out their signi®cance. That is not done by tracing the origin of these practices, but by giving perspicuous representations of them, through attention to the role they play in human life. Wittgenstein is not saying that natural phenomena must produce these ritualistic reactions, but simply that they do. Recognising this can result in an enlightening clarity. Thus, M. O'C. Drury testi®es: Frazer thinks that he can make clear the origin of the rites and ceremonies he describes by regarding them as primitive and erroneous scienti®c beliefs. The words he uses are, `We shall do well to look with leniency upon the errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth'. Now Wittgenstein made it clear to me that on the contrary the people who practised these rites already possessed a considerable scienti®c achievement, agriculture, metalworking, building, etc., etc.; and the ceremonies existed alongside these sober techniques. They are not mistaken beliefs that produced the rites but the need to express something; the ceremonies were a form of language, a form of life. Thus today if we are introduced to someone we shake hands; if we enter a church we take off our hats and speak in a low voice; at Christmas perhaps we decorate a tree. These are expressions of friendliness, reverence, and of celebration. We do not believe that shaking hands has any mysterious ef®cacy, or that to keep one's hat on in church is dangerous! Now this I regard as a good illustration of how I understand clarity as something to be desired as a goal, as distinct from clarity as something to serve a further elaboration. For seeing these rites as a form of language immediately puts to an end all the elaborate theorising concerning `primitive mentality'. The clarity prevents a condescending misunderstanding, and puts a full-stop to a lot of idle speculation.54

Yet, having got rid of a view of rituals as causally instrumental, we can easily fall into the trap, as Drury does to some extent, of viewing rituals as psychologically instrumental. Drury speaks of certain forms of behaviour as expressions of friendliness, reverence and celebration. But he also speaks of rites as the result of a need to express something. This makes it look as though the rites are a means of satisfying needs independent of them; to speak as though a distinction between means and ends is involved. Speaking of burning an ef®gy Wittgenstein says: `Burning an ef®gy. Kissing a picture of one's 53 54

Ibid., p. 125. M. O'C. Drury, The Danger of Words, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973, pp. x ±xi.

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beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some speci®c effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it.' But Wittgenstein goes on to correct himself immediately: Òr rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satis®ed.'55 A man does not smash the portrait of his beloved in order to express his anger (unless he is posturing). This is the form his anger takes. Whether the rites are regarded as erroneous scienti®c beliefs or as psychologically instrumental, these explanations take us away from an appreciation of what it is that is expressed in them. As a result, Wittgenstein reacts vehemently, `What a narrow spiritual life on Frazer's part! As a result: how impossible it was for him to conceive of a life different from that of the England of his time! Frazer cannot imagine a priest who is not basically a present-day English parson with the same stupidity and dullness.'56 And again: `Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of a spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.'57 It could be said that Frazer's hermeneutics of suspicion prevented his acquiring an hermeneutic of contemplation, whereby, confronted by many of the rituals Wittgenstein discusses, `Here one can only describe and say: this is what human life is like.'58 4 rituals and the mythology in our language Having seen the wide gulf between what Wittgenstein calls perspicuous representations of the rituals, and Frazer's account of them as erroneous scienti®c theories, it is tempting to characterise their disagreement as a clash of theories. It has been said that whereas Frazer offered an a priori intellectualist, instrumental view of the rituals, Wittgenstein countered it with an a priori anti-instrumental, expressive theory of his own. It cannot be denied that there are some comments by Wittgenstein which would lead one to think that he is advancing a general thesis about rituals. For example: `When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to 55 56

Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 123. 57 Ibid., p. 131. 58 Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 125.

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blame or that my beating can help anything. `Ì am venting my anger.'' And all rites are of this kind.'59 On the basis of remarks such as these, John Cook argues: Wittgenstein was going beyond the mere rejection of Frazer's theory. He was offering a theory of his own, a theory to the effect that the primitive magician in the performance of his rites no more intends to help his crops ¯ourish or to harm his enemy than we intend to bring about some effect by kissing the picture of a loved one. But merely ®nding good reason for rejecting Frazer's theory does not give us a reason for embracing this new theory of Wittgenstein's ± unless, of course, we assume that these are the only possibilities from which to choose. Wittgenstein, perhaps, thought that they were the only alternatives and that his own positive theory could therefore be adequately supported by simply ®nding good reason to dismiss Frazer's.60

Wittgenstein's and Cook's remarks are puzzling. When Wittgenstein says that all rites are of the same kind, Frank Ciof® responds: `This is a dismally opinionated utterance and a profoundly unWittgensteinian one. All rites are not of ``this kind'' nor of any other kind and Wittgenstein himself knows that they are not since the statement that they are is contradicted by remarks he makes elsewhere as well as in the Frazer notes themselves.'61 Wittgenstein's puzzling remark could be discarded as a slip on his part, and replaced by a modi®ed claim: many, or most rituals can be understood in a non-instrumental way. If this were all, Wittgenstein's main contribution would be, as Ciof® says, `that of removing objections to non-instrumental or non-ratiocinative accounts on the score [of ] their implausibility by relating them to inclinations [of ] our own'.62 This would be the kind of clari®cation of what rituals can be which we discussed in the previous section of this chapter. Cook's remarks are puzzling in a different way. He sees Frazer as saying that all rites are erroneous scienti®c theories, and Wittgenstein as saying that all rites are expressive and non-instrumental. Wittgenstein, he argues, thinks he must say this because he sees, rightly, that rituals cannot be the mistakes Frazer takes them to be. In thinking in this way, Cook claims, Wittgenstein is missing a third possibility, 59 60 61 62

Ibid., p. 137. John Cook, `Magic, witchcraft and science', Philosophical Investigations, vol. 6, no. 1, 1983, pp. 5 ± 6. Frank Ciof®, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 156. Ibid., p. 180.


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namely, that rituals are neither scienti®c mistakes nor expressive gestures, but, rather, the product of conceptual confusion. Cook then advances his own general thesis, namely, that magico-religious beliefs are the products of such confusion, and that Wittgenstein is defending them against this charge. Cook is certainly right in thinking that Wittgenstein would have no truck with his general thesis, but quite wrong in thinking that Wittgenstein is denying that any magical or religious belief can be confused. Indeed, Wittgenstein spends a great deal of time discussing the very confusions Cook says he ignores. The puzzle is why Cook ignores these discussions. Further, Rhees had anticipated the kind of reaction we ®nd in Cook almost in Cook's words: `So Wittgenstein was coming forward in defence of the ancient rituals! That remark could have sense only if Wittgenstein had recognised no other ``coordinates'', no other standards than that of knowledge, of what may be established in science and error; (and probably it would not have sense even then).'63 When Wittgenstein speaks of the confusions which may be found in magic, he compares them with deep metaphysical confusion. The contrast we ®nd in Wittgenstein is between rituals which say something in themselves, and those which are a product of a powerful mythology in our language. When he speaks of confusions as à very powerful mythology . . . he means the powerful hold it has on a man's thinking'.64 It seems to me that Ciof® misses the force of this distinction, because he emphasised that whether we think of magic expressively or instrumentally, its hold on us may be equally instinctive. Suppose that I stick pins into a picture of my enemy. This reaction may be instinctive if it is an expression of my anger, but equally instinctive if I think that, somehow or other, I am harming my enemy. Ciof® thinks that we should leave the matter there, and not try to show that some instinctive reactions are confused and others not. The most important thing to learn, according to him, is that both kinds of reactions are natural features of the lives we lead, and that the matter should be left there without trying to tidy it up. I do not think Wittgenstein is content to leave it there, precisely because some of the reactions Ciof® has in mind are, in his view, 63 64

Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual' in Rush Rhees, On Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 74. Ibid., p. 73.

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deep-rooted confusions. Wittgenstein is concerned to show how these confusions come about. Hence the opening sentences of the Remarks on Frazer, where he emphasises the importance of bringing out conceptual confusion: One must start out with error and convert it into truth. That is, one must reveal the source of the error, otherwise hearing the truth won't do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must ®nd the path from error to truth.65

One of Wittgenstein's main aims is to show that the error we ®nd in magic is not to be equated with empirical mistakes. Rather, it is the kind of error which results from conceptual confusion. Once again: so far from defending magic from any accusation of confusion, Wittgenstein explores the kind of confusion it is. What is the difference between an empirical mistake and a conceptual confusion? Consider the following example. A person who wants to poison another mistakenly buys a harmless potion. The belief that the potion is harmful is false, but it might have been true. But can I say the same when I stick pins in a picture, believing it will harm the person pictured? Can we say that sticking pins in the picture might have been effective but, in fact, is not? Of course not. We have not the slightest idea of what it could mean to say this. What we have here is not a false, but a meaningless belief. Yet people may feel a strong compulsion to believe it. This should not surprise us, since we are by no means immune from such compulsion ourselves. Although we may not be ignorant of certain causal connections, our superstitions may still ¯ourish alongside them. What is the source of this compulsion? Wittgenstein's interest in Frazer stems, partly, from his wrestling with this question in a way which links it with what he calls a magical, as distinct from a logical, conception of language. Interestingly, John Beattie, in his in¯uential book on social anthropology, advances a related view of the form confusion may take in magic: I am not saying that ritual and magical activities are not commonly thought to be causally ef®cacious; they certainly are. But they are expressive as well as being instrumental, and it is this that distinguishes them from strictly empirical, instrumental activity. Indeed often they are believed to be 65

Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 119.


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instrumental just because they are expressive; many people think that the word, the logos, has its own special power. Often it is believed that to say or even to think something solemnly and emphatically enough is somehow to make it more likely to happen. Even members of modern societies may be frightened or ashamed when they become conscious of hidden wishes for the death or injury of someone they dislike, and may feel guilty when the object of their antipathy is run over by a bus. Belief in the power of words, thoughts and symbols is by no means con®ned to simpler peoples.66

`Belief in the power of words', a belief that the meaning of a word resides, not in its application, its use, but in a power which resides in the word itself, may throw light on a wide range of examples we ®nd in Frazer. But this is achieved only if we trace the source of this `magical' conception of the power of words. Rhees has done this in a detail which cannot be repeated here.67 He points out that rituals could not have the force they do were it not for the fact that they belong to a wider language. They are related to features of life which people hold to be important. Much of the language used in ritual uses the same words as are used elsewhere in the language. Yet they are often used differently, for example, in a formal, expressive context. The woman who pulls the adopted child from under her skirts may use the same words as one might hear at an actual birth, but her expressive gesture, though it says something, is not confused with the report of an actual birth. The shift in grammar in the ritual, Rhees says, may be as natural to people as their use of language at an actual birth. But what if that shift of grammar is not present, and words are thought to have an inherent power? In that case, words will be brought into the ritual on the assumption that they have the same power as they have outside it. For example, if I beckon someone in his presence and that person comes towards me, I may think, confusedly, that it is an inherent power in my gesture which makes him do so. I do not see that the gesture has its sense in its application, an application which I share with the person beckoned. When I beckon in a ritual, in the absence of the person summoned, one can see how I may feel that my gesture has an inherent power to make the person summoned come to me. At the same time as he was discussing Frazer, Wittgenstein, as Rhees shows, was discussing the difference between a magical and a logical 66 67

John Beattie, Other Cultures, Cohen and West 1964, p. 204. Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual'.

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conception of signs. Wittgenstein wants to bring out the hold this magical conception has on us. Wittgenstein writes in the Investigations: When you tell me that you cursed and meant N. as you did so it is all one to me whether you looked at a picture of him, or imagined him, uttered his name, or what. The conclusions from this fact that interest me have nothing to do with these things. On the other hand, however, someone might explain to me that cursing was effective only when one had a clear image of the man or spoke his name out loud. But we should not say `The point is how the man who is cursing means his victim'.68

`Seeing the image' or `speaking the name' may be conditions of what is to count as a curse, but they do not, in themselves, determine who is cursed or the meaning of the curse. That depends on the circumstances in which the curse is uttered. As Rhees says, these circumstances and the connections between them and the curse cannot be given àll at once' in the image or in the uttering of a name: I want the utterance of the curse to be something like hitting him. If I hit him, there is a `connexion'; and that is the sort of connexion that is important for me. But uttering the words and having or drawing the image can be something like hitting only because they are words and symbols understood in the syntax of ordinary language; which establishes the `connexion' both with him and with hitting.69

The `magical' view of meaning severs words from these connections, thinking that their meaning is given àll at once' in the words themselves. Thinking that one can harm a person simply by sticking pins in his picture is a `magical' view of harming or hitting. This `magical' view can enter into our conception of what it is to wish for something, in the assumption that what is wished for is already present in the wish. This can then lead to the magical view that my wish can come true simply by wishing it; the ful®lment of the wish is given, all at once, in the wishing. This is an instance of wider logical confusions which Wittgenstein describes as the `tendency to confuse what belongs to the symbolism with what is expressed in the symbolism', or the tendency to confuse the name with the bearer of the name. These confusions are connected with the reasons why Wittgenstein 68 69

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, vol. I, §680. Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual', in On Religion and Philosophy, p. 73.


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found the ritual of the scapegoat in Leviticus to contain what he called à jarring symbolism'. The people wish to be delivered from their sins. Physical burdens are loaded on to the back of a goat who is then driven out into the wilderness. Their sins, it seems, are carried away àll at once' by the goat ± a magical conception of deliverance. Rhees says: When Wittgenstein calls this rite a misleading picture, he may mean something like this: consider 1 `Children carry the sins of their fathers'. 2 À goat, when consecrated, carries the sins of the people'. In the ®rst sentence `carry' seems to mean what it does in `The goat carries on his back the basket in which we put our ®rewood'; and yet it cannot mean that.70

Here, the attempt to elucidate the wider connections as one can in the case of the fathers and their children runs into trouble because of the role of an animal: Perhaps we should not ®nd it incongruous ± we should not ®nd the picture jars in symbolizing what is intended for it ± if you said that a man might take on himself the sins the people have had to bear, and offer himself in atonement for them. But a goat? What would it mean to say that a goat has to bear its own sins, let alone that it has to bear the sins of people? Bunyan's image of Christian bearing his sins like a heavy pack on his shoulders does not jar in this way.71

This aside, however, it also illustrates the confusion between the symbolism and what it symbolizes in the notion of sins being carried away àll at once'. Compare the following: On the ritual of the scapegoat, Matthew Henry observes that it `had been a jest, nay an affront to God, if he himself had not ordained it' . . . But in these days can we any longer say that God ordained it? Ritual may be a substitute for true religion, or it may be its natural and spontaneous expression . . . Men may take a magical view of the sacraments, as of such rites as the scapegoat.72

It is not dif®cult to see how the confusion of the symbol with what is symbolised is present in a magical view of the sacraments: cleansed, all at once. The prophets criticised such magical conceptions of rituals, just as the Church has condemned magical views of the sacraments. Again, the same confusions may be found in the notion of baptism or washing in a holy river, where the removal of

70 72

71 Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 75. The Interpreter's Bible, New York 1953, vol. II, pp. 82 ±4.

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sins is thought of as guaranteed by an inherent power in the baptism or the washing. Yet, in the very making of these criticisms, the pointing out of the confusions which can arise from a deep mythology of our language, a magical conception of meaning, contrasts are drawn with other possibilities of sense. Pointing out confusions, as we have, does `not imply that this misunderstanding underlies all magic, or that it is present in the ancient rituals'.73 This no more follows than the claim that because some expressions of wishes involve the confusion of a name with the bearer of the name, that confusion must underlie all uses of those expressions. Because of possible confusions, Wittgenstein does not advocate reforming the language: Wittgenstein would not have said that there need be anything mistaken in our using the different forms of expression: Ì am expecting him', Ì am expecting him to come', and Ì expect that he will come'. He would not have said that only the second of these expresses correctly what the ful®lment of my expectation would be. If you asked, `What are you waiting for?' and I answered Ì'm waiting for my brother' there would be nothing inaccurate or inadequate in this; and Wittgenstein would not have said, `what you really mean is that you are waiting for your brother to come'.74

Furthermore, there are cases of expressions of wishes where what I want is in my wish in the sense that the character of my wish shows something about myself. Here there need be no confusion between a name and its bearer, or between the symbol and what it symbolises. Think of Wittgenstein's remark, `The representation of a wish is, eo ipso, the representation of its ful®lment'.75 Rhees comments: Ìf I translate `Darstellung' roughly in the phrases `portrayal of my wish . . . portrayal of that which would satisfy my wish', then this second phrase is not the same as, ``portraying the satisfaction of my wish'' or ``portraying the arrival of what I wish for''.'76 Yet the wish, in portraying what would satisfy it, reveals, at the same time, what would satisfy me. Compare the following: If a man were given the choice to be born in one tree of a forest, there would be some who would seek out the most beautiful or the highest tree, some who would choose the smallest, and some who would choose an average or below average tree, and I certainly do not mean out of 73 74 75 76

Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual', p. 70. Ibid., p. 80. Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 125. Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual', p. 82. For Rhees' detailed discussion of the logical issues involved see pp. 77 ±84.


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philistinism, but rather for exactly the same reason, or kind of reason, that the other had chosen the highest. That the feeling which we have for our lives is comparable to that of such a being who could choose for himself his viewpoint in the world underlies, I believe, the myth ± or the belief ± that we had chosen our bodies before birth.77

There is an internal relation between our choices, our wishes, and who we are. It should be obvious from the discussion that we look in vain for a general theory about magic in Wittgenstein. He is not putting an expressivist theory against an intellectualist theory, or defending magic or religion against all accusations of conceptual confusion. On the contrary, he shows how our practices may harbour a deep mythology in our language whereby we confuse the symbol with what is symbolised, and a name with the bearer of the name. Yet these confusions need not be present in our rituals. To see whether this is so, we need more than to note the words and phrases employed. We must look at their application in our lives, since the same words and phrases may have very different applications. To conclude this section let us illustrate this fact by considering again the example of sticking pins in a picture of a person. H. O. Mounce asks us to imagine someone who has drawn an excellent likeness of one's mother asking one to stick a pin in the picture, taking special care to aim at one of the eyes. Mounce comments, `There is hardly anyone, I suppose, who would not ®nd it very dif®cult to comply with this request. This reaction . . . as far as I can see, is neither rational nor irrational; it is just the way most people would happen to react.'78 Mounce does not tell us what he thinks of this reaction. He does not consider the possibility of its being a primitive moral reaction. As we shall see, this is important, since it will enter into one's reading of the act Mounce goes on to describe. Suppose, however, that one does comply with the request and then discovers, a short time later, that one's mother has developed an af¯iction in the eye and is in danger of going blind. I wonder how many people would resist the feeling, if only momentarily, that there was some connection between the two events. But this belief . . . is just as absurd as anything held by the Azande.79 77 78 79

Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 137. H. O. Mounce, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', Philosophy, Oct. 1973, pp. 347 ± 62. Ibid., p. 353.

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Is it? It depends. By `some connection' Mounce means `some causal connection', but we cannot assume that the àcting out', the `connection', must take this form. If it does then we might well ®nd here the confusion of a name with the bearer of the name, and, in the expression of the deed, a confusion of the symbol with what is symbolised. In short, one would ®nd here a magical conception of symbols. But are there no other possibilities? Discussing Mounce's example with a class of forty students I found (contra Mounce) that ®fteen said that they would ®nd no dif®culty in sticking pins in the picture, and that if they did, they would feel no guilt if their mother were visited later with the eye infection. Ìt's only a picture,' they said, `how can it have anything to do with it?' When asked to elaborate they said that there was no causal connection between the two events. The others in the class said that they could not stick pins in the picture, and that if they did, they would feel guilty if the infection developed. For them, there would be a connection between the two events. The ®fteen were surprised to discover, however, that by `some connection', the others did not mean some causal connection. In discussion it emerged that what they meant was something like this: they felt that sticking pins in the picture would show something about themselves, perhaps their readiness to reduce serious possibilities to a game; it is playing around with life. I am told that as a child I would pose questions to my mother such as, `What would happen if a slate fell off the roof and killed Dad?' Apparently, my grandfather used to give me a clip round the ears and say, sternly, `No idle thoughts.' In religious circles it was called `tempting God'. Going back to my students: they said that if their mother's infection were to occur, they would feel guilty, since there would be a moral connection between their thoughts and that event. It does have something to do with them. For the ®fteen students, no causal connection implied no connection at all. For some of them, the reactions of the other students served as clari®cations of connections they had forgotten or never thought of. Others, however, could not understand these responses. Shall we say that they misunderstood? Not if this means misunderstanding the logic of the language. The language does not get off the ground with them. They fail to understand, but they do not misunderstand. Think again of Beattie's examples of contemporary beliefs in the power of words. He says that even we, let alone primitives, feel frightened or ashamed at hidden wishes for some-

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one's injury or death, and feel guilty if the event occurs. But there need be no confusion present here. The wishes show something about me which frightens me. When what I wished for occurs, there is an internal relation between the wish that frightened me or made me feel ashamed, and the actual occurrence. Such reactions are as common among ourselves as they are among the primitives. That is the reminder we stand in need of. Again, however, some will fail to understand such reactions; fail to see any sense in them. This is a constant problem for the hermeneutic task of contemplating possibilities of sense and of providing reminders to achieve clarity. 5 rituals and explanations We ended the last section by emphasising the central role of clari®cation in philosophy. This, it might be said, involves explaining what is obscure by making it clear. Yet, in his remarks on Frazer, Wittgenstein often seems violently opposed to attempts at explanation. For example, in discussions with Schlick and Waismann on the explanation of aesthetic value he says: `Whatever I was told I would reject . . . not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation.'80 Again: `The very idea of wanting to explain a practice ± for example, the killing of the priest-king ± seems wrong to me.'81 But after clarifying that beating the ground in fury with my stick need not involve a causal hypothesis, but can be an expression of my anger, Wittgenstein says: Ònce such a phenomenon is brought into connection with an instinct which I myself possess, this is precisely the explanation wished for; that is, the explanation which resolves this particular dif®culty. And a further investigation about the history of my instinct moves on another track.'82 It appears, then, that Wittgenstein is not opposed to all explanations of practices, which would be an absurdity in itself. Yet he does seem to think that there is something profoundly inadequate in Frazer's explanations of rituals. Clearly, these different uses of èxplanation' need further comment. We can begin by putting aside those explanations of rituals as erroneous scienti®c beliefs which obscure other possibilities from us. Our question is why anyone should say that our appreciation of 80 81 82

B. F. McGuinness, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Oxford: Blackwell 1979, p. 116. Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 119. Ibid., p. 139.

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these other possibilities does not depend on an explanation of them. We can commence on a journey towards an answer by noting that what is wrong with Frazer's depiction of the rituals is that they miss their spirit, or, at least, his explanations of them do. The second set of comments by Wittgenstein on Frazer make central the question: what do we mean by the spirit of the rituals? The problem can be illustrated by one comic attempt at explanation, an illustration of not knowing where to stop. Having said that `The weeping-willow, taken by the Elizabethans as a symbol of unhappy love, does resemble in its lines the drooping and hanging hands', Edwyn Bevan goes on to say that ìf convention had once made a holly-bush instead of a weeping-willow the symbol of unhappy love, an association would in time be created in the mind between them, so that the sight of holly would immediately suggest the other'.83 To speak of ìmmediacy' here is misleading, since, on Bevan's view, the signi®cance of the weeping-willow is the product of a created convention, and has to be learned like a rule of association. What this misses entirely is our natural inclination to see the weeping-willow in this way. Any explanation of its use in literature would have to rest on these inclinations in us, which would not themselves be further explanations. If it be said that the willow is seen differently in some other cultures, that is not a difference in convention, but a difference in people's inclinations. The same misunderstandings in the search for explanations can be found in Bevan's discussion of the religious signi®cance of height. He speculates, for example, that the reason why divinity is often expressed in terms of height originated in commanders needing to get on high ground to see the sweep of the land. Thus, those in authority become associated with height and need to be looked up to. The transition in this explanation is not convincing. If it is said that thrones are placed on high, that simply postpones the question. Why are they placed on high? The explanation takes us away from the naturalness of our inclinations, a naturalness shown in Isaiah's vision of the Divine Being as `sitting on a throne high and lifted up'. Here we have the language of exaltation. Bevan approaches the naturalness of our inclinations in this respect when he says that `the idea of height, as an essential characteristic of supreme worth, was so interwoven in the very texture of all human languages that it is 83

Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief, London: Fontana/Collins 1962, p. 11.


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impossible for us even today to give in words a rendering of what was meant by the metaphor. We are inevitably forced, if we try to explain the metaphor, to bring in the very metaphor to be explained.'84 Bevan, however, is not content to let matters rest in that inclination and proceeds, in an unfortunately absurd manner, to explain it: Of those symbols which are taken from the outside material world the signi®cance of height seems to have come to men everywhere immediately and instinctively. We may feel it today so obvious as not to call for any explanation. And yet if one ®xes the attention on what height literally is, the reason for this universal instinct seems problematic. For height literally is nothing but the distance from the earth's surface or extension of something on the earth's surface in a direction at right angles outwards. The proposition: Moral and spiritual worth is greater or less in ratio to the distance outwards from the earth's surface, would certainly seem to be, if stated nakedly like that, an odd proposition. And yet that is the premiss which seems implied in this universal association of height with worth and with the Divine.85

Here is an example of a confused explanation taking us in a completely wrong direction. The same may be said of Frazer's explanation of rituals as erroneous scienti®c theories. But even when explanations and hypotheses are not confused, even when they may explain, quite legitimately, the origin of a ritual, they are not what we need to account for our reactions to the ritual as awesome or sinister. Our puzzlement dissolves when we see that the force of our reactions, their very possibility, depend on their connections with our feelings and inclinations, connections which are not themselves based on hypotheses of any kind. It is these connections that illuminate the effect which the rituals have on us, and bring peace to us. Ciof® asks why, if Frazer was not engaged in this enquiry, it makes sense to say that he should have been. He points out that enquiries into origins, etc., will not bring out the depth that the rituals have for us. But it must also be added that given the analysis of rituals which Frazer does supply, the accusation of blindness to this depth, which Wittgenstein makes, is not unfounded.86 Wittgenstein makes two claims about the source of the rituals' depth which Ciof® thinks are different, but which I see as two aspects 84 86

85 Ibid., pp. 26± 7. Ibid., p. 25. See Ciof®, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, pp. 94f.

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of the same point. The ®rst claim is this: that the impression arises directly from the details of the ritual itself.87 Wittgenstein says: When Frazer begins by telling us the story of the King of the Wood of Nemi, he does this in a tone which shows that he feels, and wants us to feel, that something strange and dreadful is happening. But the question `why does this happen?' is properly answered by saying: Because it is dreadful. That is, precisely that which makes this incident strike us as dreadful, magni®cent, horrible, tragic, etc., as anything but trivial and insigni®cant, is also that which has called this incident to life.88

And again: Ìf a narrator places the priest-king of Nemi and `the majesty of death' side by side, he realizes that they are the same. The life of the priest-king shows what is meant by that phrase.'89 A genetic account of the ritual, its assimilation to other practices, creates an aspect to the investigation which takes us away from the disquietude that may puzzle us. That is why Wittgenstein says that it takes one on a different track. It might also be said that the emphasis on the inner nature of the ritual, what it shows and says, such as the majesty of death, contrasts with an instrumentalist view of the ritual, in which it is thought to be the causal means of securing ends independent of itself and which, in science, are seen to be secured by their real causes. The second claim which Wittgenstein makes Ciof® claims to be more radical than the ®rst. This claim is `that the impression of depth produced by a practice may be a function not of the mien of the performers, or any of its details, but of the background we bring to it'.90 The inner character of the ritual is too uncertain, Ciof® argues, while what we bring to it is not. I do not think this argument is sound, since that background would not overrule a discovery that the ritual is not what we took it to be. As Rhees says of children performing ®re-festivals in which human-like ®gures are burned: If what the children are performing here is obviously age-old, this gives it a depth. It would be different if we were told that these children just took to doing this, on their own invention, because of some recent happening that had never been known before. When we think of what they do as something their fathers observed and practiced every year at this time and generations long before their fathers, we see it as something pervasive and lasting: 87 88 89 90

Ibid., pp. 83f. Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 121. Ibid., p. 123. Ciof®, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, p. 91.


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anything but an idiosyncrasy of a man or a group. Not as something that sometimes happens and is of no consequence.91

Wittgenstein asks, [H]ow is it that in general human sacri®ce is so deep and sinister? For is it only the suffering of the victim that makes the impression on us? There are illnesses of all kinds which are connected with just as much suffering, nevertheless they do not call for this impression. No, the deep and the sinister do not become apparent merely by our coming to know the history of the external action, rather it is we who ascribe them from an inner experience.92

Rhees says that these remarks need to be read in conjunction with the following remarks about what we `see' in the Beltane ®refestivals: Can't I be horri®ed by the thought that the cake with the knobs had at one time served to select by lot the sacri®cial victim? Doesn't the thought have something terrible about it? ± Yes, but what I see in those stories is nevertheless acquired through the evidence, including such evidence as does not appear to be directly connected with them, ± through the thoughts of man and his past, through all the strange things I see, and have seen and heard about, in myself and others.93

There is an internal relation between a particular ritual and the background of what I see and have heard about in myself and others. I may be wrong about a particular ritual, but the impression of depth, of things that go deep, is not a hypothetical matter. These impressions are not matters of choice, something we could invent. Wittgenstein is underlining, not denying, this point when he says that if one did invent a ritual the spirit of the invention would have to be the same as that of the spirit of the rituals we did not invent. Otherwise, the invented ritual would not take root or go deep with us. What does Wittgenstein mean by speaking of a common spirit in the festivals and rituals? Rhees points out that he does not mean some common features that they all have, such as common ancestry, or common external features of their practices. Rather, the common spirit is the general inclination among the people to feel deeply about certain things. Rhees says that it is not like looking for an external characteristic which would show that this ritual belonged to all the 91 92 93

Rhees, `Wittgenstein on language and ritual' p. 92. Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 147. Ibid., p. 151.

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others in a tribe. It is more universal than that ± the ways in which we are not at a loss as to where to look when we meet what is majestic, terrible, sinister, anything but trivial, in the practices of different peoples. We do not look for a common form, but we look in a common spirit. But, then, is not this `we' too con®dent? Certainly, we do not all look at life in a common spirit, and we do not all react to what is majestic, terrible or sinister in it. Things do not have that aspect for everyone. That cannot be denied. We have seen, in the present chapter, how some could not see how there can be a moral connection between sticking pins in a picture and a later infection suffered by the person pictured. That things are such cannot be denied. Nevertheless, the recognition of this variety is important for the possibility of the hermeneutics of contemplation. A narrowness of recognition, therefore, would be a major ¯aw. Does this mean that philosophical contemplation entails actually being able to engage in the various reactions we have talked about? That would be going too far, but it would be odd if one were able to give attention to them without any such response having ever entered one's soul. On the other hand, to contemplate is not the same as to appropriate personally. But it is to be able to see in the rituals and practices which people ®nd majestic, terrible, or sinister, that human life can be like that.

chapter 7

Marett: primitive reactions

1 marett and anti-intellectualism In our discussion of philosophical objections to religion we have noted one fundamental distinction between the forms they take. On the one hand, in the Hume of the Dialogues, and in Tylor and Frazer, we have the view that religious beliefs are false. On the other hand, in the Hume of the Natural History, in Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, and in Williams' view of the gods of the Greeks, we have the view that religious beliefs are meaningless. On the former view, although religious beliefs are false, they could have been true. On the latter view, religious beliefs could not be true since they are the product of conceptual confusion, projection or ideological thinking. In the case of particular thinkers this distinction does not always remain clearcut. I argued that Hume, in the Dialogues, does not press his logical objections as far as he could. Had he done so, religious beliefs would be more than a vague, uncon®rmable hypothesis which atheists could agree with. They would be seen as logical blunders of various kinds which would not allow religious belief to be any kind of hypothesis at all. Similarly, although Frazer is consistent in thinking that religious beliefs are hypotheses which are ®nally toppled by the facts, Tylor's views are more complex. If we ask why the animistic hypothesis is framed in the ®rst place, Tylor says that it is rooted in the mistake of thinking that an ideal connection, a connection in thought, is a connection in reality. That, however, seems more like a conceptual confusion than a mistake. Still, both emphases have in¯uenced contemporary practice. Debates about religion still take the form of argument between hypotheses, a battle of probabilities, but they also take the form of discussions about whether religious beliefs mean anything at all. The fact that the theories of primitive religion we have discussed 183

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have had such an in¯uence on contemporary religion may seem surprising, since the major aim of these theories to arrive at the origin of religion is largely discredited. In 1965 E. E. Evans-Pritchard said that these theories were as dead as mutton: It was because explanations of religion were offered in terms of origins that these theoretical debates, once so full of life and ®re, eventually subsided. To my mind, it is extraordinary that anyone could have thought it worth while to speculate about what might have been the origin of some custom or belief, when there is absolutely no means of discovering in the absence of historical evidence, what was its origin.1

Further, as Clifford Geertz points out, once the origin is de®ned, there is a problem concerning exceptions to what is said to be the essence of religion. On the other hand, if the de®nition of the essence is too abstract, it threatens to become vacuous: If one de®nes religion generally and indeterminately ± as man's most fundamental orientation to reality, for example ± then one cannot at the same time assign to that orientation a highly circumstantial content; for clearly what composes the most fundamental orientation to reality among the transported Aztecs, lifting pulsing hearts torn live from the chests of human sacri®ces toward the heavens, is not what comprises it among the stolid ZunÄi, dancing their great mass supplications to the benevolent god of rain. The obsessive ritualism and unbuttoned polytheism of the Hindus express a rather different view of what the `really real' is like from the uncompromising and austere legalism of Sunni Islam.2

It is not surprising to ®nd Pals concluding that as far as the anthropological study of religion is concerned the future lies with the particularist studies of the disciples of Evans-Pritchard and Geertz. Within an anthropological context, such conclusions may be understandable, but they do not, in themselves, answer philosophical perplexities concerning religion. As we have seen, and as Geertz appreciates, interwoven with the theories we have considered were views concerning concept-formation in religious belief, an interest in how religious concepts get a foothold in human life. Hence, a variety of beliefs can be admitted while still holding that they are beliefs of a certain conceptual kind. Perhaps it is partly for this reason that the intellectualist theories Evans-Pritchard thought redundant are experiencing a contemporary revival.3 And when we view continuing 1 2 3

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965, p. 101. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, America: Basic Books 1973, p. 40. See John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, and the work of Robin Horton.

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philosophical battles about religious belief in terms of competing probabilities, we have to conclude that the animism which EvansPritchard thought was as dead as mutton is ¯ourishing in contemporary philosophy of religion. In this chapter I want to discuss the interesting work of R. R. Marett. My suggestion is that we can learn from it if we concentrate on the contribution it makes to the issue of concept-formation in religious belief. In order to do this it will be necessary, while not ignoring the place Marett occupies in the hermeneutics of suspicion, to work through to an appreciation of the positive contribution he makes. Marett felt, rightly, that the intellectualist theory of Tylor did not do justice to concept-formation in religion. His relation to animistic theory is, however, a complex one. He thought it absurd to characterise early believers as amateur scientists or amateur philosophers. That is not an intellectual but an intellectualist view of their beliefs. In suggesting otherwise, Marett argued, `The standpoint of the observer seems to be confused with the standpoint of the mind under observation.'4 Like Wittgenstein, Marett held that it was not feasible to hold that primitives engaged in rituals due to an intellectual error because of their ignorance concerning causal connections. Further, this simply leads to a condescending misunderstanding: How then are we to be content with an explanation of taboo that does not pretend to render its sense as it has sense for those who both practise and make it a rallying-point for their thought on mystic matters? As well say that taboo is `superstition' as that it is `magic' in Dr. Frazer's sense of the word. We ask to understand it, and we are merely bidden to despise it.5

Marett did not deny that at a later, more re¯ective stage, people may have thought that spirits are at work in the world, but animism, on his view, is itself an intellectualisation of something more primitive than itself. The more ultimate explanation of religion's roots ®nd them, not in people's intellect, but in their emotions. In a striking remark, which is rightly remembered, Marett said: `Savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out.'6 Marett is not alone in emphasising the importance of the emotions in relation to religion. In the context of the hermeneutics of suspicion, Freud, of course, comes immediately to mind. But others, 4 5

R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, London: Macmillan 1914, 2nd edn, p. xxxi. 6 Ibid., p. xxxi. Ibid., p. 84.

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in their re¯ections on religion, have made the emotions central in the analysis of religious belief. Kierkegaard, for example, said that proof in religion is from the emotions, while the unduly neglected Miguel de Unamuno said: No one has been unable to convince me rationally of the existence of God, but neither of his non-existence; the reasonings of the atheists seem to me even more super®cial and futile than those of their opponents. And if I do believe in God, or at least believe that I believe in Him, it is principally because I want God to exist, and next, because He reveals himself to me through my heart, in the Gospel, through Christ and through history. It is a matter of the heart.7

Clearly, since Freud, Kierkegaard and Unamuno are agreed on the importance of the heart in religion, yet come to radically different conclusions concerning it, everything depends on how one thinks the heart, the emotions, are related to religion. Where does Marett stand on this issue? I hope to show the pro®t in going beyond the usual answer given to this question. 2 marett and suspicion Evans-Pritchard sees both Tylor and Marett as giving psychological explanations of the origin of religion. He distinguishes between them by saying that whereas Tylor provides an intellectual psychological explanation, Marett provides an emotional psychological explanation. He sees both as being ®rmly within the hermeneutics of suspicion. In Marett's case it is not dif®cult to see why. He can be read, with considerable justi®cation, as saying that once we appreciate the intimate connection between our emotions and religious beliefs, we will give up those beliefs without a second thought. Evans-Pritchard tells us: According to Marett, primitive peoples have a feeling that there is an occult power in certain persons and things, and it is the presence or absence of this feeling which cuts off the sacred from the profane, the wonderland from the workaday world, it being the function of taboos to separate the one world from the other; and this feeling is the emotion of awe, a compound of fear, wonder, admiration, interest, respect, perhaps even love. Whatever evokes this emotion and is treated as a mystery is religion.8 7 8

Miguel de Unamuno, `My Religion' in Perplexities and Paradoxes, New York 1968, p. 4. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 33.

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This complex feeling is more primitive than animism, being prior to any distinction between the personal and the impersonal, or between the ethical and the non-ethical. The reason for attributing an hermeneutic of suspicion to Marett depends, largely, on his account of how the genesis of religious rituals from this complex feeling is supposed to come about. First, we are given the familiar account of primitive peoples involved in a world where there is much that is beyond their understanding. On the intellectualist view, this gap between involvement and understanding gives rise to curiosity and the desire to control. Hence the postulation of the hypotheses concerning spirits, based on analogy with human activity. Marett argues that what the gap between involvement and control gives rise to is frustration and tension. So intense is the tension between impotence and desire that primitives feel a compelling need to relieve it. Not only are death and disease part of every person's lot, but ordinary purposes and desires are constantly thwarted by an unyielding nature. Magic, Marett argues, is the means by which relief is obtained. Through the enactment of mimetic rites, the dramatic imitation of the desired ends, primitive people become convinced that they have attained what they long for. But they do not think their way to this satisfaction of desire, and to the release of the tensions of frustration. `Savage religion is something not so much thought out as danced out'.9 Through the dance of the spirit people feel, subjectively, that they have possessed what they had failed to attain by ordinary empirical methods. Thus, their tensions are eased, and their con®dence restored. In order to be effective rituals must put one in touch with powers thought to be in things, animals, and persons which can bring about results which ordinary methods cannot achieve. At ®rst, this may look like a modi®ed restatement of the intellectualist position. Primitives, it may be said, react emotionally in the ways they do because they have a prior belief in the special powers which reside in things, the powers which are called mana and tabu. Yet, to think in this way would be misleading. Marett is not saying that rituals are performed because of prior beliefs, but that beliefs are formed in the enactment of the rituals. One could put the point by saying that primitives do not dance because they believe, but that they dance their way to their beliefs, or arrive at their beliefs in and through the 9

Marett, The Threshold of Religion, p. xxxi.

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dance. This is the point of Marett's criticisms of Tylor and Frazer. They missed the origin of mana and tabu in inner experience and characterised them, wrongly, as intellectual constructs. No doubt the powers that possess mana and tabu are created in human images, but this animistic tendency plays a secondary role in Marett's thought. It is for this reason that the actual content of mystic notions, as he calls them, are of hardly any importance to him. They all have the same psychological function, that of reliving and transforming private stress: As regards theory, I would rest my case on the psychological argument, that, if there be reason to think, as I think there is, to hold that man's religious sense is a constant and universal feature of his mental life, its essence and true nature must then be sought, not so much in the shifting variety of its ideal constructions, as in the steadfast groundwork of speci®c emotion whereby man is able to feel the supernatural precisely at the point at which his thought breaks down. Thus, from the vague utterance of the Omaka, `the blood pertains to wakanda', onwards through animism, to the dictum of the greatest living idealist philosopher, `the universe is a spiritual whole', a single impulse may be discerned as active ± the impulse never satis®ed in ®nite consciousness yet never abandoned, to bring together and grasp as one the That and the What of God.10

Public rituals relieve private stress. They are the means by which primitive people cope with their tensions, and avoid complete nervous breakdown in face of intransigent nature. It is no objection to say that there is no necessary correlation between the times at which rites and rituals are performed and the actual experience of frustration and crisis. Marett points out that, once established, rituals perform a preventative role. They create a distance by which satisfaction can prevent crises occurring or becoming uncontrollable. Marett argues: ìt is surely better rather than worse that social routine interposes, as it were, between a man and the brute propensions of his day.'11 The ritualistic context brings a formality and, thus, a discipline to bear on what would otherwise be uncontrolled emotion: `The tendency of pent-up energy to discharge itself along well-worn channels or quite at random must be inhibited at all costs; and the ritual of tabu is, of all the forces of social routine, the greatest inhibitor, and therefore the greatest educator, of that explosive, happy-go-lucky child of nature whom we call the savage.'12 Rites and rituals do not simply have this negative function of 10

Ibid., p. 28.

11

Ibid., p. 197.

12

Ibid., pp. 197 ± 8.

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restraint, achieved through tabu. They also have a positive function achieved through mana. The rituals, through the distance they achieve, dissociate the rituals from their old physiological bases. The rituals have a regenerative function. After withdrawing within them from the practical round, the primitive returns to it transformed and strengthened. Thus rituals ease the threat of crises in life. At the heart of Marett's analysis is the claim that magic and religion are answers to the frustrations caused by lack of success in people's purposive activities. What the world of nature and human competitiveness has denied them, magic makes them believe has been realised after all through occult powers. What kind of confusion is involved here? If we say that wishes are granted in the wish; that words, in themselves, have the power to achieve what they utter, we should be reminded of the magical conception of language we discussed in section 4 of the previous chapter ± the deep mythology in our language. The confusion in mimetic rites, the idea that the portrayal of a wish involves its ful®lment, is another example of the magical, as opposed to logical, conception of signs and symbols. The power is in the rites. We do not need to repeat the discussion of these confusions which we explored in the previous chapter. If we link them to Marett's theory, we will read him as saying that the power is not in thought (the logical conception), but in the dance (the magical conception). It is because their world is ruled by the magical conception that the primitives can convince themselves that their dreams and wishes are ful®lled. But Marett is in no doubt that while the emotions which give rise to these dreams and wishes are real enough ± frustration, wrath, desire ± the powers in things which are thought to ful®l them are completely unreal. Now we need not suppose that because the primitive mind is able to explain away its doubts, there is therefore necessarily any solid and objective truth at the back of its explanations. Given suf®cient bias in favour of a theory, the human mind, primitive or even civilized, by unconsciously picking its facts and by the various other familiar ways of fallacy, can bring itself to believe almost any kind of nonsense.13

If this were the end of the story, Marett would simply be placed ®rmly within the hermeneutics of suspicion. 13

Ibid., pp. 44 ±5.

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Marett: primitive reactions 3 in the beginning was the dance

At the beginning of the chapter we drew attention to two features of contemporary philosophy. On the one hand, there are those who argue about the truth or falsity of religious belief by balancing probabilities. On the other hand, there are those who argue over whether religious beliefs are meaningful or meaningless. If these were the only alternatives the prospects for the subject might seem daunting. But there have been other developments within the subject in the last thirty-®ve years. These suggest that we do not have to regard religious beliefs as true or false hypotheses, or as conceptual confusions. To make these suggestions it has been necessary to philosophise against the stream. What do these other possibilities have to do with Marett? My suggestion is that the possibility of such developments was present in Marett's reply to sociological criticisms of his views. This reply could have led to a more promising version of his view that religion is not so much thought out as danced out. At ®rst it may seem that there are fatal logical objections to Marett's attempt to give feeling pride of place. Evans-Pritchard points out that the rituals Marett speaks of are part of the culture into which a primitive is born, and are imposed on him like the rest of his culture. It does not make sense, he argues, to treat the rituals as the product of either individual reasoning or individual emotion. In an individual's experience, the acquisition of rites and beliefs precedes the emotions which are said to accompany them later in life. He learns to participate in them before he experiences any emotion at all. The emotional state, therefore, whatever it may be, can hardly be the genesis and explanation of the rites.14 EvansPritchard makes his point in temporal terms, but logical considerations are involved. If we say that the feelings are prior to the rituals, how is one to identify the feelings in question? The identity of the feeling cannot be self-authenticating. There must be a wider context which makes it this feeling as distinct from another. Logically, it can be said that such contexts are the condition for the feeling being what it is. That is precisely what Evans-Pritchard says: ìf any emotional expression accompanies rites, it may well be that it is not 14

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion. p. 45.

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the emotion which brings about the rites, but the rites which bring about the emotion.'15 It may be said that Marett ignores the intentionality of emotions. In Marett's general claim that religion is the product of fear, the emotion is severed from its intentional object. Evans-Pritchard says that this would mean that a person ¯eeing in fear from a buffalo is performing a religious act. Similarly, to say, generally, that religion is relief from anxiety would imply that a doctor who relieves the anxiety of a patient by clinical means is performing a religious rite.16 One is tempted to ignore the intentionality of emotions by assimilating them to sensations. Sensations such as pains, itches, tickles, feeling hot, feeling cold, can be experienced in a wide range of circumstances. Not anything can be described as a sensation of a certain kind, but, compared with emotions, sensations are relatively context-free. Can one feel pride, indignation or fear no matter what the situation? Marett tells us that one function of rites is to alleviate fear. But what kind of fear? People can feel fear of the dark, fear of consequences, fear of death, and so on. There may be resemblances between these cases, but the differences between them will be more important. It is tempting, but confusing, to think that what the fear consists in is a physical sensation which is essentially the same in all the different circumstances. This can be brought out by a simple example where there is a common sensation present. I may have a sinking feeling as I await the results of an interview. I may have a sinking feeling when I hear the results of an interview. If I call the ®rst a feeling of apprehension, and the second a feeling of disappointment, how do I distinguish between them? Surely not by paying close attention to the quality of the sinking feeling. It is not the sinking feeling which teaches us the difference between apprehension and disappointment, but, rather, apprehension and disappointment which give signi®cance to the sinking feeling which may accompany them. In the case of fear there need not even be a common physical sensation present. In the cases where this is so, the same lesson needs to be learned as in the case of apprehension and disappointment. To speak as Marett sometimes does of emotions as physical sensations which explain the genesis of religious belief, obscures the internal relation which exists between emotions and their intentional objects. The emotion of pride, for example, must be a response to an 15

Ibid.

16

Ibid., p. 44.

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achievement, to something that belongs to one in that sense, or in an extended sense, as in the achievement of one's children, one's football team or one's country. But one cannot feel proud of the sky. Similarly, the feeling of indignation is a response to the fact that an offence of some kind has been committed. Feeling afraid is a reaction to danger of some kind. This is not to say that there cannot be misplaced pride, indignation, or fear. But there can only be misplaced pride because there is appropriate pride. There can only be groundless indignation because indignation has good grounds. There can only be fear of nothing in particular because normally we do fear something in particular. If a person only spoke of pride, indignation or fear in these exceptional circumstances, we would hesitate to say that he or she knew the meaning of pride, indignation or fear. Whatever Marett means by awe and fear, it must be awe and fear of something or other. Little sense can be made of Marett's attempts to speak of these emotions as physical sensations which underlie religious beliefs. These considerations are the primary reasons for thinking that the logical objections to Marett's appeal to the emotional genesis of rituals are insuperable. These objections, however, do not take account of the fact that Marett was aware of them and tried, to some extent, to come to terms with them in the preface to the second edition of The Threshold of Religion. He perceived the objections to be sociological, but they have logical implications which are also to be found in his response to them. Marett was aware of the importance of religious institutions. In fact he thought that it was a major defect of Tylor's intellectualism that it ignored them. He says: `We must say that religion is materialized, incorporated, enshrined, in the corresponding institution or group of institutions.'17 He was also aware of the kind of criticism Evans-Pritchard was to make concerning the fact that children are initiated into rites before they experience any of the emotions which are supposed to be their genesis. But this objection dos not have all its own way. Marett is right in thinking that rituals would be a dead formality without the affective responses of the participants. One could make a list of the beliefs a group is supposed to hold, but this does not take one very far. When Evans-Pritchard says that people acquire their beliefs before they show any affective 17

Marett, The Threshold of Religion, p. 136.

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responses, what does àcquiring a belief ' amount to here? Speaking of such an emphasis on customs and traditions as coming to know `the mind of society', Marett comments: Àt its best it is the mind of a public meeting, at its worst it is the mind of Babel.'18 Even if sense could be made of these beliefs without reference to affective responses, what would be religious about them? Marett tried to overcome these dif®culties in a number of ways. Social psychology, he thought, could account for the institutional aspects of religion, while the same phenomena, viewed dynamically, would be the concern of individual psychology. More importantly, he was aware of the dif®culties in seeking a priority, temporal or logical, for either `dance' or `thought'. He admitted, in his preface to the second edition, to having used the term `preanimistic' chronologically, but at other times he said that he tried to avoid this `chickenor-the-egg' question. He tried to suggest that `dance' and `thought' are bound up with each other in such a way that it does not make sense to ask which came ®rst. I am not suggesting that we can overcome all dif®culties in Marett's view of comparative religion as an empirical science, the main method of which is social psychology allied to individual psychology and social morphology. I am suggesting that Marett was struggling towards a view, how distant a one I let others judge, in which we should look at the formative responses of primitives as, in some sense, a fusion of `dance' and `thought'. Marett says: `My theory is not concerned with the mere thought at work in religion, but with religion as a whole, the organic complex of thought, emotion and behaviour.'19 Instead of saying that primitive religion is not so much thought out as danced out, Marett might have said that a kind of dance is a condition of thought, that what is primary is active response rather than re¯ection. Had he done so, such an account of the reactions of primitives would have been close to Wittgenstein's notion of primitive reactions. Wittgenstein said, `Language does not emerge from reasoning.'20 We do not reason our way to our primitive reactions concerning pain, colours, or sounds. At later, more re®ned stages, reasoning, doubting, discrimination, become appropriate. Such re®nements, however, are dependent on the brute fact that we react as we do ± 18 20

19 Ibid., p. x. Ibid., pp. 139 ± 40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell 1969, §475.

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have the different colour reactions that we do, have the soundreactions that we do which we call reacting to what is loud or quiet, pain-reactions in our own cases and at seeing pain in others. This point applies to our causal reactions too. At a primitive conceptual level these do not result from re¯ection and experimentation. Norman Malcolm asks us to consider the following example: `Suppose that a child runs into another child, knocking him down . . . The child would not be doubting or wondering what made him fall. He would not want to observe what happens in other cases. Nor would he be said to assume that in similar cases the same thing occurs.'21 Wittgenstein remarks: `There is a reaction which can be called ``reacting to the cause'' ± We also speak of ``tracing the cause'', a simple case would be, say, following a string to see who is pulling it. If I then ®nd him ± how did I know that he, his pulling, is the cause of the string's moving? Do I establish this by a series of experiments?'22 In calling attention to primitive reactions, Wittgenstein is opposing the rationalistic view of language which suggests that language is the result of intellectual re¯ection. Marett, at his best, wants to show that we do not reason our way to primitive religious reactions. In saying this he is not making a conceptual point which is peculiar to religion. There is a striking similarity between what Wittgenstein is saying and remarks by Simone Weil on concept-formation. She says, `The very nature of the relationship between ourselves and what is external to us, a relationship which consists in a reaction, a re¯ex, is our perception of the external world. Perception of nature, pure and simple, is a sort of dance, it is this dance that makes perception possible for us.'23 Peter Winch comments: Simone Weil's account, like Wittgenstein's, achieves this by making the notion of action central. Action is conceived, in the ®rst instance, as a series of bodily movements having a certain determinate temporal order. In its primitive form action is quite unre¯ective. Human beings, and other animate creatures, naturally react in characteristic ways to objects in their environments. They salivate in the presence of food and eat it; this already effects a rudimentary clari®cation which doesn't have to be based on re¯ection between `food' and `not food'. Our eyes scan objects and connect 21 22 23

Norman Malcolm, `The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour', Philosophical Investigations, vol. 5, no. 1, 1982, pp. 5 ± 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, `Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness', Philosophia, vol. 6, nos. 3± 4, 1976, p. 416. Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1978, p. 51.

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with other characteristic movements of our bodies, we sniff things (or sometimes hold our noses), we exhibit subtly different reactions to things we put in our mouths ± corresponding to such tastes as `sour', `sweet', `salty', etc. ± and so on. The reactions are developed and re®ned as we mature; and some of these re®nements and developments are responses to training by other human beings around us. A staircase is something to be climbed, a chair is something to be sat in: compare Wittgenstein's remark, Ìt is part of the grammar of the word ``chair'' that this is what we call ``to sit in a chair''.'24 As Simone Weil expresses it: èverything we see suggests some kind of movement.'25

Wittgenstein and Simone Weil are saying ± in the beginning was the dance. We can see how Marett's claim, that primitive religion is not so much thought out as danced out, could have been a farreaching one if he had developed it in certain ways. Language concerning fear, pain, surprise, causation and perception develops in a way which includes primitive reactions, the dance of the body; it is hardly surprising, then, that such reactions should be of central importance in magical and religious practices. Here we might speak of the dance of worship, a conception which would be close to Marett's heart. We do not ®rst assent to the belief that nature is majestic, or that the forest is a dreadful place, and then decide to react in certain ways. Rather, our reactions to nature as majestic, or reacting with dread to the forest, are primitive instances of conceptformation in this context. Think again of our discussion of the rain dances. Animism, the intellectualism Marett opposed, would say that primitives danced because they thought it would bring the rains. Rather, they danced at the coming of the rain. The intellectualised postulating of rain spirits misses the spirit in the rain.26 4 marett's other course It is essential that we pay attention to concept-formation in religion. Although Tylor and Marett tried to do so, the resolution of their dispute has more to do with primitive reactions, in Wittgenstein's sense of that term, than either of them recognised. Giving these reactions their proper place in our re¯ections depends on more than 24 25 26

Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Blackwell 1978, p. 51. Peter Winch, Ìntroduction' to Weil's Lectures on Philosophy, p. 12, quoting Weil, p.31. For a development of this theme see my Ìn the Beginning was the Proposition ± In the Beginning was the Choice ± In the Beginning was the Dance' in Recovering Religious Concepts, London: Macmillan 2000.

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not being misled by the logic of our language. It depends, more fundamentally, on the spirit in which we respond to the language in question. Like Frazer we, too, may miss the spirit in the festivals. As we know, Marett did not go in the direction which I regard as a rewarding development of his insights. He went in very different directions in which rituals are still seen as rooted in confusions. These confusions, however, have as much to do with the emotions as they have to do with the intellect. In concluding I want to comment on this direction, one which will be given far more attention when we come to discuss Freud. It may seem in the emphasis given to primitive reactions that we are giving primacy to `dance' over `thought' in a way that Marett strove to resolve. More generally, it may seem that we are advancing a genetic account of language in the suggestion that language emerges from primitive reactions. This would be deeply misleading.27 Note that the reactions we have talked of are common reactions. They are identi®ed as primitive only from within the context of some area of discourse. There is no suggestion that discourse has to go in the direction it does as a result of the common reactions. All one can say is that it does go in those directions, that is all. These directions are mixed in character. For example, a fear of dying may be taken up in the language people speak in a number of ways, and hence may be taken up into their lives in a number of ways too. Some of these directions may be religious in character, but, here, too, `religious' will cover a wide variety of cases. People may attend rituals and acts of worship for all sorts of reasons. Many will not see in them anything from which they can learn. They may indeed provide nothing more, for many, than the emotional solace Marett speaks of. That solace may take the form of thinking that somehow, in a vague way, not fully articulated, one will be compensated for the ills one has suffered in this world. This will be far removed from those, present at the sacri®ce of the eucharist, who regard life as something which is to be a sacri®ce to God, a return in spirit of all we had no right to expect or receive. The needs which religion serves, and the religions which serve them, are very 27

See ibid. on the importance of avoiding these dif®culties. See, too, Rush Rhees, `Language as Emerging from Instinctive Behaviour', Philosophical Investigations, vol. 20, no. 1, 1997, where he discusses what he takes to be these misunderstandings in Malcolm's `The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour'.

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different in the two cases. Here is Simone Weil speaking from within the second conception of religion: When we have enjoyed something for a long time, we think that it is ours, and that we are entitled to expect fate to let us go on enjoying it. Then there is the right to a compensation for every effort whatever its nature, be it work, suffering or desire. Every time that we put forth some effort and the equivalent of this effort does not come back to us in the form of some visible fruit, we have a sense of false balance and emptiness which makes us think that we have been cheated. The effort of suffering from some offence causes us to expect the punishment or apologies of the offender, the effort of doing good makes us expect the gratitude of the person we have helped, but these are only particular cases of a universal law of the soul. Every time we give anything out we have an absolute need that at least the equivalent should come into us, and because we need this we think we have a right to it. Our debtors comprise all beings and all things; they are the entire universe. We think we have claims everywhere. In every claim which we think we possess there is always the idea of an imaginary claim of the past on the future. That is the claim which we have to renounce.28

Simone Weil would say that this is something we need to recognise. That is a moral and spiritual judgement on her part, not an observation in empirical psychology. There is, however, a very different emphasis on needs. These needs are often said to characterise human beings as such. With this assumption a dubious step is taken, namely, to claim that the ful®lment of these is the fundamental function of such activities whether the participants recognise it or not. The essentialism and reductionism involved can be illustrated as follows: It is not an explanation of the visions of St. Theresa to say (as Dr. Desmond Morris does, The Human Zoo, pp. 87±8) that they merely instance the occurrence of physiologically necessary orgasm among female celibates. She is certainly saying something sexual, and strongly sexual, when she describes her vision of an angel. In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of ®re. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely a®re with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several sharp moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it.' If St. Theresa does more than dream through some moments and motions of happy (and, for the liberal-minded, 28

Simone Weil, `Concerning the `Òur Father'' ' in Waiting on God, London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1959, p. 173.

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bene®cial) release, it is because she is making religious sense of what is unavoidably sexual in her life. That is what she is really doing or failing to do, and to that religious sense or failure of sense discussion of her `religious practices' must address itself. She is trying to weave the sexual and her life otherwise into such a pattern as means that the corruptible shall put on incorruption.29

In this example we have but one instance, and a rather remarkable one, of what religion can make of the sexual in a person's life. Not only will there be instances of different signi®cance within the same religion, but different religions may transform or redirect sexuality in various ways. Neither can one assume that sexuality has the same signi®cance in people's lives within or between cultures. What all this shows is that Marett's thesis, like others we have discussed, which postulates one underlying explanation of magico-religious beliefs, is conceptually untenable. There is no single impulse which can be discerned as active through all these varied contexts. On the contrary, what kind of religion appears in a person's life will depend on the character of that person. That story, I have argued, is a mixed one. In the end, Marett is placed within the hermeneutics of suspicion because he fails to do justice to the various possibilities which, in the hermeneutics of contemplation, demand our attention. For this reason, he fails to bring us to the threshold of religion. Read in a friendly spirit, however, it could be said that he brings us to the threshold of a discussion of primitive reactions which, if pursued, would have enabled him to have come to terms with possibilities of religious sense which remained outside the parameters of his analysis. 29

Ian Robinson and David Sims, `Sociology out of its place', editorial review in The Human World, no. 3, 1971, p. 87.

chapter 8

Freud: the battle for èarliest' things

1 contemplation of èarliest' things In the last chapter, I argued that Marett's emphasis on primitive reactions might have led to a fruitful discussion of conceptformation, including concept-formation in religion. It did not go in that direction because, like Tylor and Frazer, Marett held that religious beliefs are the product of confusion. His only disagreement with them, in this respect, was over whether that confusion is understood best in emotional rather than intellectual terms. Once this view is held it follows, of course, that religious concepts cannot be accepted at face value; they have to be something other than they claim to be; the confusion in them has to be unravelled. Within the hermeneutics of suspicion, religious beliefs are, necessarily, subject to this treatment. Freud is one of the great masters of suspicion. He wanted to show that religious beliefs admit of a deeper analysis in which they would not be explained in religious terms. When we want something explained, the answers we are given are in terms which do not stand in need of explanation themselves. The explanations, when satisfactory, bring our questions to an end. We rest content in them. For Freud, we should never come to rest, in this way, in religious belief. This would be to regard religious concepts as èarliest things'; that is, as irreducibly basic. It would be a failure to see how things are. Thus, Freud was unable to accept Wundt's view that the root of tabu could be explained in terms of the fear of demons and those objects thought to be possessed by demons. Beliefs in God and the Devil must be capable of analysis, without remainder, in terms of statements about man. `Neither fear nor demons can be regarded by psychology as `èarliest'' things, impervious to any attempt at discovering their antecedents. It would be another matter if demons 199

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really existed. But we know that, like gods, they are creations of the human mind; they were made by something and out of something.'1 How did Freud know this? Not as the result of his analysis. The situation is not that he discovered, through psychoanalysis, that God does not exist. Rather, knowing already that God did not exist, Freud tried to understand why people continued to believe in him. Pals tells us that despite his acquaintance with stories from the Hebrew Bible, and a general cultural acquaintance with Christianity, Freud, brought up in a non-religious home, was an atheist from beginning to end, one who saw no reason to believe in God, and no purpose or value in religious rituals.2 In short, religion meant little to him. This is important because it goes some way towards explaining why, from the outset, in the hermeneutics of suspicion, religious belief is regarded as an explanation of the phenomenon of religion, but only as one explanation among many competing explanations. What cannot be allowed is that religious concepts are constitutive of that phenomenon. The masters of suspicion know already, independent of their explanations, that this cannot be the case. In this respect, they are inheritors of Hume's legacy, and of the Enlightenment ambition for a uni®ed concept of rationality to which all activities are answerable. Given these assumptions it is impossible to see any place for the hermeneutics of contemplation. To acknowledge that religious concepts can be èarliest' things, it is thought, is to possess religious belief. Thus, in the case of prayer, one would have to say that a person is talking to God, and that God is listening. Yet this is precisely what masters of suspicion cannot say because they do not believe that the person is talking to God, or that God is listening. The choice is thought to be between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of recollection. The hermeneutics of contemplation shows that this is not so. It is concerned to understand what is meant by `talking to God' and `God listening'. But to possess such understanding is not itself to talk to God. The latter involves bending the knee. Someone may understand what prayer is, but still be unable to pray, or even want to pray. But misunderstanding may no longer be present. One may see that prayer is a spiritual practice, not a long-distance telephone call. 1 2

Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, London: Routledge 1960, p. 24. See Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996, p. 65.

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My point, at the moment, is to show what is missed if one thinks that one simply has to choose between suspicion or recollection with respect to religion. I am suggesting that one misses the sense in which philosophy can be a contemplative enquiry. This sense is missed by Preus when he argues: `The real crux of a religious objection to Freud is `paradigmatic' . . . that he failed to explain religion in terms `meaningful' to religious participants. For both Durkheim and Freud, the explanation differed from that of believers, and for that reason a divergent system of meanings emerged as well.'3 The crucial issue, however, concerns the relations of divergent meanings, or, better, different meanings, since, otherwise, one may wonder from what paradigm they are supposed to diverge. Preus confuses the pursuit of understanding the meaning of concepts in language with personal appropriation of what is understood: `The claim that religions can be studied and understood only from a religious perspective excludes fruitful intellectual interaction with people in other disciplines by staking out its own privileged universe of discourse and, so far, failing to show how that universe intersects with the one constituted by the rough consensus of the academy at large.'4 Philosophical contemplation of possibilities of sense is not a matter of `privileging' any of them, but of doing justice to them by giving them the intellectual attention they deserve. Such attention will involve noting the ways in which different kinds of discourse bear on each other. So far from denying these bearings, discourse would not be discourse without them.5 But these `bearings' do not form a system. To realise this would be a contribution to resolving the tension Preus continues to feel in this context: `We are still struggling with the question of how to address these problems in a more uni®ed way without creating a new dogmatism that would undermine pluralism.'6 From a philosophical point of view, contemplation provides the unity in the investigation. What is investigated, however, is the wonderful variety in what lies around us. In that variety it is important to recognise the diversity in èarliest' things. Only by recognising their conceptual irreducibility can we begin to appreciate what bearings they could and do have on each other. 3 4 5 6

J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1996, p. 180. Ibid., p. 180. See Rhees, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 210.

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Freud said that religious beliefs could not be èarliest' things. In this chapter we shall consider why. 2 `the unconscious' and conditions of intelligibility It would be dif®cult to appreciate Freud's distinction between what appears to be the case, and the èarliest' things which are the key to what is the case, without examining his notion of the unconscious. By invoking `the unconscious' Freud was able to bring out the sense in which things are not what they seem to be in people's lives, even when people themselves are unaware of this, or strenuously deny it. Clearly, if religious belief can be shown to be the product of the unconscious it would follow that religious beliefs are not what they claim to be. Before we can assess this possibility, we need to examine what the concept of the unconscious involves. Freud did not say that the notion of `the unconscious' is the product of psychoanalysis. He insisted that it has its roots in our ordinary lives, and that this had long been recognised by novelists and dramatists. We can see what he meant by considering a simple, but illuminating example.7 Consider a musically gifted mother who, nevertheless, fails to recognise that her son's voice is no more than average. In certain circumstances we would be prepared to say that the mother is deceiving herself. For example, every time someone points out to her the weakness in her son's voice, she has an excuse ready at hand: the performance was an exception, others were to blame, he had a cold, the music was not to his liking, and so on. Of course, all this could be true: some performances are better than others, others are to blame occasionally, singers do contract colds, performers do not like all music to the same extent. But of this particular mother we want to conclude that the excuses have turned into an unconscious evasion of the fact that her son's voice is of poor quality. This shows in the number of excuses she has to make, her strong desire for her son's success, her dogmatic refusal to entertain a contrary view or to examine the facts, and in the fact that she is musically able and makes sound judgements where other singers are concerned. If the voice were anyone's but her son's she would have come to an unfavourable conclusion long ago. It is the fact that she 7

I owe this example to H. O. Mounce. See his `Self-Deception', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 45, 1971, to which I am generally indebted on this topic.

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tries to avoid any counter-criticism, discussion or examination which makes us say that although she claims to be assessing her son's voice, unconsciously, she is defending him against adverse criticism and hiding from him and from herself the fact that his voice is of poor quality. Notice in particular the way in which we discover the unconscious character of the mother's actions. We do not do so by looking for some hidden entity below the surface of events. Thus, the suggested analogy of discovering the remainder of an iceberg when only its tip is visible is a particularly misleading one in this context. It is the behaviour of the mother which leads us to our conclusions. The fact that she resists so strenuously any attempt to show her the truth is one of our main reasons for saying that she is hiding from herself the truth about her son's voice. Freud himself is ambiguous about the logical status of the notion of the unconscious. Sometimes, he speaks as though it were an independent force which determines people's actions. Here, I shall pursue what I take to be the most powerful context in which the concept has its sense. My aim in doing so is to bring out the three conditions of intelligibility which talk of `the unconscious' in people involves. The ®rst condition of intelligibility concerning talk of the unconscious is to recognise its logical dependence on the notion of what is conscious. When we say that people have unconscious motives or reasons for their actions, we are noting a deviation in the situation. In our example, the mother's view of why she praises her son's voice deviates from the truth. Her ways of defending her judgement deviate, in important respects, from what we would call the defence of a judgement. The mother's description of the situation deviates from the description which ought to be given of it. As I have said, the description she offers could be true. Her son's voice could be a ®ne one, a performance could fail to bring this out, the son could have had a cold when someone heard him sing, and so on. These are the descriptions which the mother wants us to accept. They are perfectly natural descriptions; descriptions which have a familiar place in the lives we lead. Why, then, do we refuse to accept the mother's description as satisfactory? The reason is that there is a tension between the descriptions offered and features of the situation in which they are offered, features we have already noted. When we bring this tension to the mother's notice she resists it. Because of the nature of this resistance we say that she is unconsciously defending her son.

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The logical points I have been making about the unconscious are even clearer in the case of neurosis. In order to speak of neurotic behaviour we must imply a contrast with normal behaviour. That is not a contingent matter, but part of what we mean by the description `neurotic'. Psychoanalysts see their task as that of freeing people from their bondage to their unconscious or neurotic fears, hopes, desires, etc., by helping their patients to make them explicit. The second condition of intelligibility connected with the notion of the unconscious is that the unconscious motives, reasons, hopes or desires that we ascribe to people must make sense in the way of life of the people concerned. We may say to a person, `You want us to believe that the situation is such-and-such, but, as a matter of fact, it is like this.' A person deceiving himself or herself, or a neurotic, may be offered a new description of the situation. I may say to someone, `The disservice you did to that person was no accident, as you would have us believe, and as you believe yourself. The truth of the matter is that you were paying him back for being appointed to the post you wanted for yourself.' The description of what is happening must be intelligible within the way of life within which the person whom we want to so describe participates. In the ®rst condition, we emphasised the relation between `the conscious' and `the unconscious', but the limits of our own awareness are determined by the possibilities of sense and nonsense in our society and in our culture. Therefore, if a suggested description of a situation makes no sense in the social or cultural context in which the situation so described takes place, it follows that that cannot be the correct description of the situation. The third condition of intelligibility connected with the use of `the unconscious' which makes it possible to offer a person a description of his actions which shows him his unconscious designs, etc., is that the person himself must be capable of understanding the offered description. If someone does not understand what it means for a man to be appointed to a job that someone else wants, and for that someone to resent the fact, it follows that such considerations could not be attributed to his unconscious designs. 3 religion and the three conditions of intelligibility In the ®rst condition of intelligibility, we saw that to speak of `the unconscious' or of `the neurotic' they must be contrasted with `the

Three conditions of intelligibility

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conscious' or `the normal', respectively. Freud ignored this condition in his treatment of religion. Like Tylor, Freud, too, thinks that primitive rites and rituals are to be understood as practices which belong to an early stage in our development. He wanted to say that they can be compared with neurotic states in our own society. But we saw that in order to understand neurotic behaviour we need to contrast it with some concept of normality. The dif®culty is that Freud wants to call what is normal in the lives of people in cultures different from our own, a case of neurosis. In that case, how can a distinction be drawn between the normal and the neurotic? Freud's answer is to draw a distinction between primitive religion, which he regards as neurotic, and what is called normal in our own society. Primitive people can be compared with our own children. But this will not do. The meaning of an individual's life is bound up with his relationships with other people, the activities he engages in, how all these hang or fail to hang together for him, and so on. These relationships and activities in their turn are meaningful within the contexts of social institutions, movements and traditions. Distinctions between normality and neurosis have sense relative to such contexts. Freud, however, reverses this logical priority. He speaks as though social institutions, movements and traditions are dependent on the desires of the individual. He believes that these desires are essentially the same in all human beings. He is prepared to argue, furthermore, that different social practices in different cultures are analysable in terms of these fundamental desires. Freud has a static, anti-historical, view of human nature which consists of basic desires connected with human sexuality. These dif®culties are connected with the second condition of intelligibility in our talk of `the unconscious'. Ascriptions of unconscious reasons and motives must make sense within the way of life to which the ascriptions are made. What if someone suggested that what Abraham's wife really wanted, although she does not realise it, was the kind of freedom advocated today in terms of women's liberation. Does that suggestion make any kind of sense? Surely not. It does not make sense because these contemporary ideas about liberation played no part in the society of Abraham's day. It is not an accident that Abraham's wife did not have such desires. It would be meaningless to attribute such desires to her; the social and cultural conditions which give such desires their meaning were not part of the kind of lives the women of her time lived.

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Freud ignored these conditions. A good example of his doing so can be found in his treatment of very different examples as though they were the same. Here is the ®rst case: A Maori chief would not blow a ®re with his mouth, for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the ®re, which would pass it on to the pot on the ®re, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which stood on the ®re, which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief 's breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die.

Here is the second case: My patient's husband purchased a household article of some kind and brought it home with him. She insisted that it should be removed or it would make the room she lived in ìmpossible'. For she had heard that the article had been bought in a shop situated in, let us say, `Smith' Street. `Smith', however, was the married name of a woman friend of hers who lived in a distant town and whom she had known in her youth under her maiden name. This friend of hers was at the moment ìmpossible' or taboo. Consequently the article that had been purchased here in Vienna was as taboo as the friend herself with whom she must not come into contact.8

Freud wants to equate the two cases. He pays no attention to the idea of the sacred which is connected with the Maori practice. The ìmpossibility' of coming into contact with the sacred would have its sense in that practice, and would be quite different from the ìmpossibility' involved in one woman ®nding another quite impossible. Freud wants to get behind the description of the Maori practice to what he takes to be the psychoanalytic explanation behind it. Notice that he is ruling out the concept of the sacred as a possible account of the Maori practice. This leads to Freud's ignoring of the third condition of intelligibility for talk of `the unconscious', namely, that the unconscious reasons or motives ascribed must be intelligible to the person so analysed. In the example of the mother who deceived herself about her son's voice, her reasons could have been true. In the case of the tribesmen Freud is saying that their reasons cannot be true because they are inherently senseless. According to Preus, `Freud took very seriously what totemists (or others) said about their religion.'9 I fear that this was not the case. Freud, for example, said that it was a waste of time to listen to the reasons of the tribesmen. Their reasons, he 8 9

Freud, Totem and Taboo, pp. 27 ± 8. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 180.

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argues, can be analysed in the way we analyse neurotic behaviour in our own society. Yet, as we can see, these assumptions ignore the very conditions of intelligibility which make psychoanalysis possible. The form of neurosis and of unconscious desires depends on the kind of society within which the neurosis occurs. But Freud wants to explain primitive religion in terms of neurosis. The point which needs to be emphasised is that social institutions, movements and traditions cannot be explained in terms of neurosis, since it is within the contexts of such institutions, movements and traditions that neurosis has its meaning. When Freud speaks of the whole of primitive religion as a neurosis, he is employing an unhistorical notion of neurosis. Despite the dif®culties we have encountered, serious though they are, a corrective is possible which would make the relation between religion and psychoanalysis unproblematic. Let us suppose that the confusions involved in Freud's individualistic psychology were recognised; that the attempt to explain social movements in terms of a set of basic desires in the individual was abandoned. Further, let us suppose that the multiplicity of social movements within the same society and between different societies was recognised. It would then be true in practice that, as Peter Winch says, A psychoanalyst who wished to give an account of neuroses amongst, say, the Trobriand Islanders, could not just apply without further re¯ection the concepts developed by Freud for situations arising in our own society. He would have ®rst to investigate such things as the idea of fatherhood among the islanders and take into account any relevant aspects in which their ideas differed from that current in his own society. And it is almost inevitable that such an investigation would lead to some modi®cation in the psychological theory appropriate for explaining neurotic behaviour in this new situation.10

Extending this point, one might say that the determination of psychoanalytic treatment would also have to take into account whether religious ideas are involved in the patient's neurosis. If this is the case, due account would have to be taken of this fact. It would be impossible to do so without drawing on a distinction between normal religious practices and neurotic religious behaviour. I am not saying that this distinction will always be easy to draw.11 But one will not be 10 11

Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 2nd edn, London: Routledge 1995, p. 90. See M. O'C. Drury, `Madness and Religion' in The Danger of Words, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1973.

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able, in general terms, to call normal religious practice a neurosis, as Freud did. The task of psychoanalysis, in this context, is to free a person from his or her neurosis, and bring that person back to normality. But that normality might well involve the holding of religious beliefs. In this practice, the psychoanalyst does not impose any system of meanings on the patient. On the contrary, the psychoanalyst merely waits on the patient, helping, from a greater experience, to make explicit the pattern in the patient's life. In this account of psychoanalysis, the analyst is seen as someone who endeavours to bring out a latent meaning in a manifest muddle presented by the patient. Recalling our initial, simple example, and applying it to contexts of much greater complexity, one could say that the psychoanalyst is simply someone who helps the musically gifted mother to see that she has been unconsciously resisting the true description of the quality of her son's voice. Here, the ingredients of the situation have to do with a relationship between the mother and her son and musical criticism. But if the ingredients had consisted of religious ideas and relationships, the task of psychoanalysis would be the same. It would not be the task of psychoanalysis to explain away these ideas. It can recognise that, sometimes, religious ideas may be èarliest' things. I certainly have no quarrel with the conception of psychoanalysis just outlined. No doubt, that is how it is practised by many. Even when this is the case, however, one may have lingering doubts about the relation of theory to practice. When one psychoanalyst was asked what the status of religious belief amounted to in her eyes, she replied: Àre you referring to what we would tell the patient, or to what psychoanalysts would say to each other?' Still, accepting the practice I have outlined at face value, psychoanalysis would no longer be inherently suspicious of religious belief. For that very reason, however, one would no longer be talking of Freud's hermeneutics of suspicion. 4 freud's monistic vision Freud's hermeneutics of suspicion could not be content with the practice of psychoanalysis outlined in the concluding part of the previous section. Religious belief cannot be included among possible èarliest' things because, for Freud, not any resting place will do as a ®nal explanation. For him, psychoanalytic explanation leads us back

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to themes which have a sexual character, or which relate to the destructive tendencies of the death instinct. In this section I want to show, in the case of sexuality, how what Freud offers is a monistic vision rather than a testable hypothesis. That this is so has a direct bearing on the relation which can be said to exist between psychoanalysis and religion. The monistic view of Freud's vision can be illustrated by a consideration of a range of examples which move from the treatment of a familiar phenomenon in equally familiar terms, to the treatment of the familiar in the highly esoteric vision of psychoanalysis. In this progression the same conception of psychoanalysis cannot be maintained throughout. The emergence of various conceptual strains and tensions will illustrate why. Let us begin again with the example of the musically gifted mother who deceives herself about the quality of her son's voice. Here, the move from self-deception to a recognition of how things are is a move from the familiar to the familiar. Both the self-deception and the freedom from it are expressed in terms which are perfectly familiar to us. They allow us to say that the mother, when freed from her self-deception, comes to see things as they are. Let us now consider a second example. A woman, having been given generous leave by her employer, begins to develop violent headaches.12 The example does not strike us as so familiar as the previous example. Good fortune is not normally followed by violent headaches. If such headaches occur they might be put down to bad luck. Why should there be thought to be any deeper connection? But, through analysis in a given case, such a connection emerges. The woman's strong sense of independence felt threatened by her employer's generosity. Further, the strong sense of independence is found to conceal an unconscious need for dependence. Something called out for explanation, and the woman, through analysis, came to accept that this is how things were in her life. This result need not entail any claim that the woman has indulged in evasions, dogmatic assertions, half-recognitions, as was the case with the musically gifted mother of our previous example. Rather, the acceptance she comes to is a product of re¯ection on her life, the conclusion that, given the course it has taken, the new emphases make better sense of it than 12

This example is taken from Herbert Fingarette, The Self in Transformation, Harper Torchbooks 1963, p. 28.

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any alternative. This is what we would mean by coming to see how things are in such a context. Consider a third example taken from Freud himself. He describes the obsessive behaviour of a woman who, having straightened the tablecloth on a table in her house, rang for her maid, only to send her off each time on a trivial errand. Under analysis she recalled that there was a stain on the tablecloth and that she always adjusted it in such a way that the maid was bound to see the stain. What did analysis reveal about this odd behaviour? The whole scene proved to be the reproduction of an incident in her marriage. On the wedding-night her husband had met with a not unusual mishap. He found himself impotent, and `many times in the course of the night came hurrying from his room to hers' in order to try again. In the morning he said he would be ashamed in the eyes of the hotel chambermaid who made the bed, so he took a bottle of red ink and poured its contents over the sheet; but he did it so clumsily that the stain came in a place most unsuitable for his purpose. With her obsessive act, therefore, she was reproducing the bridal night.13

This third example differs from the previous two in that it does not begin with something wholly familiar, but with familiar actions performed obsessively. No amount of unaided re¯ection would lead us to Freud's conclusion. Yet, what clinches the matter are the actual events which took place on the bridal night. Since the evidence is strictly historical it is falsi®able. The analysis would fail were it discovered that those events did not occur. Let us now consider a fourth example which, at ®rst, seems similar to the third. In his analyses Freud often explains people's neuroses in terms of traumatic sexual experiences said to have taken place during childhood, such as a child witnessing parental intercourse, a male child wanting to kill his father because he is seen as a competitor for the mother's sexual favours, being threatened with castration, and so on. It is natural to think that Freud is appealing to historical events, in the same way as he did in the previous example in discovering the events of the bridal night. At one time, Freud took himself to be doing just that. He had to admit, however, that it was quite clear from many of his cases that such events had not occurred in the early childhood of his patients. This absence of historical con®rmation, even the proved absence of the alleged events, did not lead Freud to conclude that his analysis was worthless: 13

Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, London: Hogarth Press 1956, vol. II, p. 29.


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I should myself be glad to know whether the primal scene in my present patient's case was a phantasy or a real experience; but, taking other similar cases into account, I must admit that the answer to this question is not in reality a matter of very great importance. These scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic inheritance, but they may just as easily be acquired by personal experience . . . All that we ®nd in the prehistory of neuroses is that the child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He ®lls in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors.14

In this example we see how Freud's claim about the determining role of infantile sexuality has become unfalsi®able. Where the traumatic sexual events have not occurred in childhood, Freud insists that they are part of the fantasies of every child. Take, for example, the generality ascribed to the phenomenon which Freud calls the Oedipus complex. Every male child in infantile sexuality wants to kill his father and sleep with his mother. If these tensions are not resolved in childhood, Freud claims that they will become evident in adulthood. But what if no tensions show themselves? He would have to claim that they had been resolved in childhood. He has to make this claim because he holds that these tensions must be part of the unconscious experience of every child. This being so, he could not appeal to the adults who experienced no tension later in life to remember these tensions during their childhood, since the tensions were unconscious. The only other veri®cation would be from parents or other people noting features of the child's behaviour which would make the ascription of such tensions appropriate. Yet, even in the absence of such evidence Freud would say that this phenomenon must be part of every child's unconscious experience. This shows that the `must', the necessity, is not based on biographical evidence. The language of sexuality in Freud's developing explanations becomes quite technical. We hear not only of the Oedipus complex, but also of castration complex, penis envy, etc. The variety of explanations blurred the fact that the limits of possible explanations were always within the realm of the sexual. If we look at the sequence of our examples we see that we have come a long way. We began with familiar examples being explained in familiar terms, but end 14

Freud, Collected Papers, vol. III, pp. 577 ± 8.

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with the familiar ± jokes, slips of the tongue, legends, morality, religion ± being explained in terms of unfamiliar language concerning sexuality. What are the implications for Freud's appeal to the sexual? It would be absurd to deny that a sexual explanation can be the obviously correct one. The same can be said of Freud's claim that our dreams are the products of our unful®lled sexual wishes. Sometimes they obviously are. Again, the same can be said of the claim that adult neuroses must be explained in terms of childhood events. This may be true on particular occasions. But these admissions would not be enough for Freud. Wittgenstein says that Freud `wanted to ®nd some one explanation which would show what dreaming is. He wanted to ®nd the essence of dreaming. And he would have rejected any suggestion that he might be partly right but not altogether so. If he was partly wrong, that would have meant for him that he was wrong altogether ± that he had not really found the essence of dreaming.'15 Wittgenstein points out that if sex is a preoccupation for someone, he may account for the signi®cance of most things in his life in relation to it. This is what happens with Freud's analysis of dreams: `no matter what you start from, the association will lead ®nally and inevitably back to that same theme. Freud remarks on how, after an analysis of it, the dream appears so very logical. And of course it does.'16 The inevitability of the course of the association has led many to argue as follows: Freud had the original and suggestive idea that dreams were really wish ful®lments, and not only that but always sexual wish ful®lments. Some dreams obviously are. But others on the face of it were not. So in order to save his beloved hypothesis he had to invent a great many subsidiary hypotheses, those that he described under the name of the dream mechanisms: condensation, displacement of affect, symbolism, etc., etc. He does not seem to have observed that in so introducing all these extra hypotheses he has emasculated his original idea of all signi®cance. Let me make this clearer by an incident which Janet relates. Janet was talking to an enthusiastic pupil of Freud: `Last night,' said Janet, Ì dreamt that I was standing on a railway station: surely that has no sexual signi®cance.' Òh! Indeed it has,' said the Freudian; à railway station is a place where trains 15 16

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Oxford: Blackwell 1966, pp. 47 ±8. Ibid., p. 51.


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go to and fro, to and fro, and all to and fro movements are highly suggestive. And what about a railway signal; it can be either up or down, need I say more?' Now as Janet rightly went on to point out, if you allow yourself such freedom of symbolism, every possible content of your dream whatsoever can be forced into this type of interpretation. The theory has become `fact proof '; it just can't be refuted. But that which cannot be proved wrong by any conceivable experience is without meaning. 17

These remarks do show that Freud is not offering an hypothesis or explanation. But it does not follow that his monistic vision, his appeal to the sexual, is without meaning. Wittgenstein suggests that the meaning of the appeal lies elsewhere. One must not forget the obvious, namely, that Freud appealed to something which is a force in people's lives. Furthermore, the kind of appeal he is making is exciting to many people. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein says of Freud: He always stresses what great forces in the mind, what strong prejudices work against the idea of psycho-analysis. But he never says what an enormous charm the idea has for people, just as it has for Freud himself. There may be strong prejudices against uncovering something nasty, but sometimes it is in®nitely more attractive than it is repulsive.18

On rare occasions Freud himself admits this. In a letter to a friend he writes: `The sexual business attracts people; they all go away impressed and convinced, after exclaiming: No one has ever asked me that before.'19 People are prepared to bring various incidents in their own lives into relation with the sexual. Drury is right in saying that this does not have the force of an explanation or hypothesis. But why can't we say that what we have here is things being looked at from the aspect of the sexual? By looking at things in this way their aspect changes too. Wittgenstein shows how this can happen in connection with dreams: In considering what a dream is, it is important to consider what happens to it, the way its aspect changes when it is brought into relation with other things remembered, for instance. On ®rst awaking a dream may impress one in various ways. One may be terri®ed and anxious; or when one has written the dream down one may have a certain sort of thrill, feel a very 17 18 19

Drury, The Danger of Words, pp. 16± 17. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein ± A Memoir, London: Oxford University Press 1958, pp. 44 ± 5. Freud, Origins of Psychoanalysis, Letter 15, quoted by Frank Ciof® in `Wittgenstein's Freud' in Peter Winch, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Routledge 1969. I am indebted to Ciof®'s paper.

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lively interest in it, feel intrigued by it. If one now remembers certain events in the previous day and connects what was dreamed with these, this already makes a difference, changes the aspect of the dream. If re¯ecting on the dream then leads one to remember certain things in early childhood, this will give it a different aspect still. And so on. (All this is connected with what was said about dreaming the dream over again. It still belongs to the dream, in a way.)20

In such associations, what one has is not an explanation of a dream, but forms of re¯ection on a dream. When these re¯ections are sexual in character, they show you something about the person who re¯ects in this way. The fact that he or she is prepared to associate certain things with the sexual is itself revelatory. One may come to recognise something about oneself from the course those associations take. Wittgenstein introduces the necessary distinction we need to make when he says: Òne may be able to discover certain things about oneself by this sort of free association, but it does not explain why the dream occurred.'21 Nevertheless, because the limits of Freud's analyses do not have the status of explanations or hypotheses it does not follow that they do not have a bearing on people's lives, since the analyses changed the aspect of incidents in those lives which trouble people in one way or another. Furthermore, it must be remembered that the practice of psychoanalysis itself has an in¯uence on people's lives and on the society in which it is carried on. The practice itself becomes one factor in accounting for the increased emphasis which people may give to sexual matters. Freud's genius consisted in the analyses that he offered in this context. Ciof® says: Freud certainly produced statements to which an enormous number of people have said `yes', but there are good grounds for assimilating his achievements to that of the anonymous geniuses to whom it ®rst occurred that Tuesday is lean and Wednesday is fat, the low notes on the piano dark and the high notes light. Except that instead of words, notes and shades, we have scenes from human life.

Ciof® says that it is impossible to explain our interest in Freud, and the in¯uence he has had on us, `without invoking what Wittgenstein called ``charm''. We were caused to re-dream our life in surroundings such that its aspect changed ± and it was the charm 20 21

Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, p. 46. Ibid., p. 51.

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that made us do it.'22 But what captures our interest, as we have seen is a monistic vision in which the èarliest' things are sexual. 5 freud's monism and cultural movements At the beginning of the last section we saw how, because of his monistic vision, Freud would not be able to allow a conception of psychoanalysis which allows different things, including religious beliefs, to be èarliest' things in the lives of human beings. His monistic vision, however, is not the fundamental explanation he took it to be. He was offering us a speci®c aspect under which to see our lives. Freud would not be content with this suggestion. That he should be content with it can be shown by the dif®culties which occur if Freud's vision is taken to be the real explanation of other cultural movements. Freud's individualistic psychology will not allow him to give serious attention to the heterogeneity of social and cultural movements. This leads to a falsi®cation of personal and social facts. It involves a refusal to recognise the diversity of èarliest' things. For example, it will not do to say that people simply have one aim, namely, happiness, to which everything else is subordinated. Ernest Jones said: Even pure ùnhappiness' is now a medico-psychological problem. As a result of all this innumerable people now consult physicians who used either to suffer their troubles as best they could or to seek some form of consolation. I should be surprised to hear that Oscar Wilde ever sought medical advice for his mental condition, still less Dr. Johnson, Schopenhauer or Dean Swift; nor does Herr Hitler. Yet these, and thousands others, would probably have had a happier life had they done so.23

John Anderson replied: Can anyone seriously doubt that Hitler would not have wanted to lead a happier life, to engage in the activities which a physician might have shown him had been thwarted in his earlier days, that he would consider the activities in which he is now engaged to be vastly more important? And is it not at least arguable that a man who `suffers his troubles as best he can' will be a better worker in a movement than one who runs to a doctor to get relief ? More generally, can `heroic values', can heroism and devotion, be 22 23

Ciof®, `Wittgenstein's Freud', pp. 209 ± 10. Ernest Jones, Obituary Article on Freud, International Journal of Psycho-analysis, vol. 21, Pt I, p. 16.

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reduced to, or at all accounted for in terms of, the pursuit of happiness? The `medico-psychological' approach prevents the Freudians from getting more than a glimpse of these problems, and involves them (ùnconsciously' no doubt) in the use of a scale of importance which falsi®es the social facts.24

There are values of different kinds which cannot be reduced to a single notion of happiness. There are autonomous values inherent in various social movements and institutions. They cannot be accounted for as rationalisations, or as sublimations of institutional wishes which are said to have been transferred to a sphere in which they cannot be harmed. All sorts of pressures may interfere with a person's work as a scientist or as an artist, but this does not mean that, in general, science and art can be explained as escape routes from the frustrations caused by such pressures: For one thing the materials on which scientist and artist work are as òuter' as anything can be; but so, likewise, are their `workings' ± thinking and creating (more exactly, what thinks and what creates) exist in exactly the same sense (and in the same `world') as the things they deal with, and do not have a bogey existence which falls short of `reality'.25

Freud fails to recognise this, and as a result his account of science and art impoverishes these activities. This can be illustrated by an example from another context. If my support of a football team is to be explained in terms of narcissistic satisfaction, in a transfer of my thwarted instincts which ®nd ful®lment in `my team', the notion of genuine support for a team is impoverished. Supporting the efforts of others is always, on this view, a ful®lment of my own desires. In the same way, admiration for the art of one's culture is a case of the transfer of one's own thwarted artistic interests. We could never see how we could learn from art given this emphasis on narcissistic satisfaction. Because of Freud's postulation of fundamental sexual drives and desires which are supposed to underlie civilisation, he cannot account for any genuine development in, or interaction between, social movements. Anderson points out that although energy can be transferred from one activity to another, there is no ground for saying that the energy is always sexual in character. The energy exempli®ed in common work is just as original. Furthermore, if 24 25

John Anderson, `Freudianism in Society' in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Australia and New Zealand: Angus and Robertson 1962, p. 343. Ibid.

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Freud is serious in his talk of the transference of sexual energy, he must recognise the reality of the non-sexual. Thus, in the last section of the previous chapter concerning Saint Theresa's description of her vision of an angel, if we are to talk of the transformation of the sexual, we must also recognise the reality of the religion in which such transformation takes place. But once the conceptual distinctness of such realities is recognised it is no longer logically feasible to explain them all in terms of an èarliest' set of tendencies in human beings. Thus recognising the multiplicity of forms of activity in any man in any society, however primitive, we have no need to attempt the derivation of beauty from `the realms of sexual sensation'; and we can see immediately the falsity of the assertion (p.36 of Civilization and its Discontents) that `the love of beauty is a perfect example of a feeling with an inhibited aim'. For love of beauty is concerned with things just as de®nite, and brings about just as de®nite results, as sexuality does.26

Science, art, morality and religion are just as de®nite as sexuality and, therefore, cannot be explained in sexual terms alone. For the same reason, they cannot be explained in terms of early sexual events in childhood. The backward glance to childhood may be not simply unnecessary, but, at times, clearly unintelligible. As Anderson points out, to explain why X has become Y there is no reason to suppose that Y is somehow latent in X. There is obviously another possibility, namely, that the development has come about through C which may be an activity which has its place in adult life. It occurs there because the conditions for its development are simply not in the child. `Thus it is a plain fact of human history that many types of activity do not arise at all until later life, and to say that their potentiality, their basis, that out of which they come, must be present in infancy is really to deny interaction.'27 As we saw in discussing `Marxism and monism' in the ®rst section of chapter 5, the connection between monistic explanatory theories and the denial of interaction is not an accidental one; it is a logical consequence of such theories. There is no objection, of course, to talking of the in¯uences of earlier stages on the later stages of an individual's development. It would not be development without them. But it is a far cry from this to the description of work, war and religion . . . 26

Ibid., p. 344.

27

Ibid., p. 353.

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as `products of infantile neurosis', to the contention . . . that the extreme helplessness and long duration of man's infancy are ùltimately responsible for his neurotic anxiety and his animism ± or habit of projecting his own infantile feelings upon his environment ± and that his animism, in particular his tendency to rediscover the good and bad parents of his unconscious fantasy in the persons of his leaders and his enemies, is responsible both for his co-operative and competitive tendencies, for his social solidarity, and for his proneness to war'. These extraordinary claims would imply that infants make society; actually, they are born into society, into a set of interrelated social movements or institutions, which largely determine their history ± and, by being brought into new movements, the adult can develop activities of which no trace could be found in the infant.28

The desire for a monistic explanation prevents Freud from seeing that common work and common interest are often suf®cient in themselves to account for the engagement of human beings in common enterprises. Like Hobbes, Freud had to ask why human beings should engage in common activities, and, like his illustrious predecessor, gave an answer in terms of personal advantage. Freud tried to smuggle the social into his theory in his talk of the individual internalising cultural demands, but this only serves to underline the de®ciencies in his theory. Yet, even this concession to `the social' could not accommodate religious belief, since, given the content of Freud's monistic theory, there is not even the beginnings of any recognition of what religious possibilities of sense might be. 6 freud's blind spots Freud took himself to be giving an account, not simply of primitive religion, but of any form of religion. He put forward the alarming thesis that religion has its origins in a common complicity in a murder. According to Freud, patriarchal hordes broke up as the result of the murder of the father by his sons who envied his exclusive, sexual prerogatives. The reasons for killing the father are found in the Oedipus complex, in the father being envied because he is seen as a sexual competitor for the favours of the females. Once they had killed the father, however, the sons regretted their deed. The dead father now becomes more in¯uential in their lives than the living one had been. They want to appease his spirit for the wrong 28

Ibid., pp. 353 ±4.

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they have done. Freud offers this as the real explanation of why sacri®ces are offered to the totem animal. But the attitude of the sons to the dead father is highly ambivalent; it is not simply one of regret. They love and hate the dead father at the same time. Therefore, although sacri®ces are made to the totem animal (which is really a symbol for the father) one ®nds that at special times the killing of the totem animal is allowed. The original murder is re-enacted. Freud traces the theme of emotional ambivalence towards the dead father in a number of different historical contexts. He analyses belief in the divinity of kings in this way. He adapts the same analysis to the eating of bread and the drinking of wine in the Christian communion. Here, an attempt is made to lessen the guilt of the original murder by saying that the Father himself has provided the sacri®ce. Nevertheless, in eating ¯esh and drinking blood the original murder is repeated yet again. That is why Freud closes Totem and Taboo with the words, Ìn the beginning was the Deed'. What are we to make of all this? If one takes Freud's analysis as an historical account it has no foundation whatsoever. Yet, as Preus notes, `Freud called it history, insisting that the crime was real, that it happened ± must have happened ± over and over again, so that every human being is descended from one of those rebellious brothers and consequently inherits as an indelible and inescapable part of his makeup this psycho-historic legacy.'29 It could be said that such an account commits the genetic fallacy, the failure to distinguish between the meaning of a concept and its origin. It is one thing to say that God would not be called `Father' unless people had the idea of an earthly father, but quite another to conclude from this that anything we say about a heavenly father can be explained in terms of what we can say of earthly fathers. While this fallacy cannot be ignored, it seems to by-pass the peculiar power and hold which Freud's analysis can have. Preus suggests that this is best understood as the power of a myth, an insightful way in which to understand our lives. Freud's myth competes with that of Genesis in its account of èarliest things'. If we adopt the myth, we are saying, `This is how things are with us', or, even, `This is how things must be'. Wittgenstein, too, suggests that this is how Freud should be understood: Freud refers to various ancient myths in these connexions, and claims that 29

Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 192.

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his researches have now explained how it came about that anybody should think or propound a myth of that sort. Whereas in fact Freud has done something different. He has not given a scienti®c explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth. The attractiveness of the suggestion, for instance, that all anxiety is a repetition of the anxiety of the birth trauma, is just the attractiveness of a mythology. Ìt is all the outcome of something that happened long ago.' Almost like referring to a totem.30

Preus points out that in the case of the Genesis story, too, what we have is not history, but a myth. What we are confronted by, therefore, is a battle between myths, between Genesis and Freud's myth. Yet, Preus is not prepared to leave the matter there, since, he argues, unlike the static myth of Genesis, the critical difference in Freud and Durkheim ìs due to the reciprocal relation that holds between theory and data, and the progressive self-correcting results for research enabled by that reciprocity'.31 What Preus misses in this claim is that the strength of a myth lies precisely in the fact that it is not a theory, which is not to deny that it may be adapted to different times, or that it may be eroded by cultural change. It is precisely because the Freudian myth has theoretical pretensions in relation to all conceivable data that it can be accused of blindness with respect to those data which cannot, without distortion, be accommodated within its limited parameters. A consideration of speci®c examples will illustrate these inevitable shortcomings. Because Freud believed that religious beliefs are forms of neurosis, the explanations he gave of them set unnecessary limits on what can be of importance to human beings. The limits of acceptability set by his explanations blinded Freud to certain possibilities of meaning expressed in various religious beliefs and practices. As we have seen, Freud thought these could be explained in terms of emotional ambivalence towards a dead father. We shall consider how he does this in relation to tabus concerning the treatment of enemies and tabus concerning the dead. For reasons which are unclear, Freud tells us that we would expect primitives to be cruel to their enemies, but that this is not con®rmed by the facts. We shall be greatly interested to learn, then, that even in their case the killing of a man is governed by a number of observances which are included 30 31

Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, pp. 50 ±1. Preus, Explaining Religion, p. 195.

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among the usages of taboo. These observances fall easily into four groups. They demand (1) the appeasement of the slain enemy (2) restrictions upon the slayer (3) acts of expiation and puri®cation by him and (4) certain ceremonial observances.32

Freud borrows examples of rites of appeasement from Frazer. The ®rst concerns warriors returning home in triumph to the island of Timor: On the occasion of the expedition's return, sacri®ces are offered to appease the souls of the men whose heads have been taken. `The people think that some misfortune would befall the victor were such offerings omitted.' Moreover, a part of the ceremony consists of a dance accompanied by a song, in which the death of the slain man is lamented and his forgiveness is entreated: `Be not angry,' they say, `because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky, our heads might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered sacri®ce to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us in peace. Why were you our enemy? Would it not have been better that we should remain friends? Then your blood would not have been spilt and your head would not have been cut off.33

The second example is as follows: Other peoples have found a means of changing their former enemies after their death into guardians, friends and benefactors. This method lies in treating their severed heads with affection, as some of the savage races of Borneo boast of doing. When the Sea Dyaks of Sarawak bring home a head from a successful head-hunting expedition, for months after its arrival it is treated with the greatest consideration and addressed with all the names of endearment of which their language is capable. The most dainty morsels of food are thrust into its mouth, delicacies of all kinds and even cigars. The head is repeatedly implored to hate its former friends and to love its new hosts since it has now become one of them.34

Freud refuses to explain these practices as superstitions. For him, they are rooted in emotional ambivalence, a mixture of hatred, admiration, remorse, satisfaction in killing, and conscience in relation to the dead. The rituals are ways of coming to terms with this ambivalence. But charges of ambivalence need to be substantiated. They have to be contrasted with situations where this ambivalence is not in evidence. What the facts are about the tribes in question could be answered without knowledge of them. I do not pretend that we know the signi®cance of head-hunting, but other possibilities in relation to dead warriors come to mind which are simply ruled out a 32 33

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, London: The Hogarth Press 1962, p. 36. 34 Ibid. Ibid., p. 37.

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priori by Freud's psychoanalytic assumptions. The issue is not to determine which possibility is the right one, but to point out that Freud's analysis blinds him even to the existence of other possibilities. Consider the following example. In a ®lm called Zulu an incident is depicted which happened in the Zulu War at the battle of Rorke's Drift. Despite many charges which in¯icted heavy losses on the British garrison, the Zulus failed to overrun it. But, once again, the soldiers saw the hills lined, more than ever, with Zulu warriors. They expected what they thought would be a decisive attack. Instead, the Zulus raised their weapons in salute and departed. Here is a gesture, a tribute, which transcends the distinction between friend and foe. It is a tribute from warriors to warriors. It has nothing whatsoever to do with emotional ambivalence towards the enemy. The tribute to bravery and valour has its meaning from within a tradition of warrior values.35 A particular warrior's attitude to these values might be ambivalent, but one cannot analyse the values themselves in these terms. Could not the same be said of the examples Freud offers us concerning the treatment of slain prisoners? In these practices could not the dead be honoured in various ways? The songs and dances in their honour transcend the difference between the victor and the vanquished, between the slayer and the slain. That is not to postulate some emotional need the practices serve, but to point to the values they express. The ®rst example may involve appeasement and a belief that misfortune follows a failure to seek it, but what such appeasement and misfortune mean will be internally related to the sense of dishonouring the dead. The second example may not be an attempt to manipulate the dead in any pragmatic way, but the expression of honour through an act of adoption. Freud is simply blind to these possibilities. For him, the latent content of the rituals is something other than their manifest content. When they are explained they can be seen as attempts to come to terms with emotional ambivalence towards the dead. He does not see that the rituals can be expressions of values which are not for anything, but which constitute ways of regarding battle, defeat, victory, the slayer and the slain. Freud could have avoided these confusions if he had taken more seriously an objection he once put to 35

This is not to say that these values were always observed in wars, any more than they are now.

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himself: `But after all taboo is not a neurosis but a social institution. We are therefore faced with the task of explaining what difference there is in principle between a neurosis and a cultural creation such as taboo.'36 Freud never did take this task seriously. Had he done so, he would have seen that he was using one way of looking at life, a way deeply rooted in his own culture, as a yardstick to explain practices in other cultures. By doing so, his understanding of the variety in the lives human beings live is severely limited. Just as he wanted to ®nd the essence of dreaming, so Freud wanted to study man as man. Inevitably, since there is no such creature as universal man, such an enterprise must lead to distortion and conceptual confusion. For example, we can illustrate his confusion and blindness with respect to the treatment of prisoners by comparing it to Blanshard's attempt to determine, once and for all, as it were, how a rational person should behave in such circumstances. Blanshard says: Modern man would claim some advance over ancient Assyria in respect to the treatment of prisoners of war. Suppose that he could catch an ancient Assyrian by the beard and expostulate with him about the practice of torturing prisoners of war for his own pleasure. Could he offer any relevant argument to show that the Assyrian practice was wrong? He would have no doubt that he could. He could say that to act in this way was to produce gratuitous pain or at least pain that was far greater than any pleasure it produced; and that this was wrong; he could show that it was to indulge one's impulses to hatred and to satisfaction in others' misery, and that this was wrong too. If then he was asked why these should be called wrong, could he continue the argument? He would say that to produce intense pain was wrong because such pain was evil. If he were asked to give reasons for these judgements again, he would probably be nonplussed. He has arrived here at judgements that he would be content to regard as selfevident. But at any rate he has offered an ethical argument.37

In a critical review A. E. Murphy comments: Ànd surely it is one of the strangest arguments on record. I know little about the reasoning processes of the ancient Assyrian, but recalling that he came down like a wolf on the fold I should question this as a prudent approach to even the most ancient of the breed.'38 But Murphy's criticisms are not based on the imprudence, but, 36 37 38

Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 71. Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness, London: Allen and Unwin 1961, p. 229. A. E. Murphy, `Blanshard on Good in General', Philosophical Review, vol. 72, 1963, p. 238.

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rather, the intelligibility of Blanshard's argument. They are similar to the criticisms we have made of Freud: Suppose that Blanshard and his friend, the `modern' man, had really been concerned to reach an understanding with the Assyrian on the wrong of torturing prisoners, and not simply to argue with complete rational cogency from premises which were to them self-evident: is it thus that they would proceed? Of course not. A `common' argument requires common grounds or reasons, and so far none have been supplied that bear, save truistically, on the case at issue . . . the Assyrian's notion of what is proper to do with prisoners is bound up, as it is bound to be, with the form of life of which the glori®cation of war and warriors and `the right way' of treating enemies are a part.39

Blanshard describes the Assyrian as torturing the prisoners for his own pleasure. Freud said that tabus concerning prisoners are means of coming to terms with emotional ambivalence. But the torture need not be for anything: ìf the torture of prisoners glori®es the state and its gods and celebrates the triumph of the superior race over its enemies, it has served its purpose in a worthy cause. We need not go to Assyria for that kind of argument: there was plenty of it in Japan during the Second World War, and some much nearer home.'40 But there are other possibilities where talk of `torture' is premature. A warrior, in being captured, may be humiliated and shamed. He has been deprived of the opportunity to win honour and glory. This is understood by his captors when they in¯ict pain on him. This is a way of honouring the captive, not a form of torture. Importantly, this is understood by the captive. An opportunity is given to display bravery and resistance even though the opportunity of doing so in battle has been lost. How to treat prisoners of war, or what such treatment consists in, cannot be determined by a consideration of the essence of human nature. Freud and Blanshard are guilty of the same confusion: instead of explaining emotional ambivalence and ways of attaining pleasure in terms of human activities, where such states of affairs have meaning, they attempt to get `behind' the activities, and to explain them in terms of such states of affairs. Having considered Freud's treatment of tabus concerning the treatment of prisoners at some length, his discussion of tabus concerning the dead can be given briefer treatment. For Freud, these tabus are rooted in fear of the dead. As we have seen, they are feared because of the emotional ambivalence in our relationship to them, 39

Ibid., p. 239.

40

Ibid., p. 238.

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an ambivalence which was also present when they were alive. The ambivalence, as we have seen, is said to be essentially sexual in origin. We ®nd the essence of Freud's view in Schopenhauer: `For all love, however ethereally it may bear itself, is rooted in the sexual impulse alone, nay it absolutely is only a more de®nitely determined, specialised, and indeed in the strictest sense individualised sexual impulse.'41 But why must sexual love be the fundamental kind of love, the kind which explains all other forms of love? Sexual love is only one kind of love, and there are others from which people can learn. Why must relations with the dead be connected with sexual ambivalence? Why can't they be connected with honour, respect, identity, continuity, answerability, etc., etc.? Why must such connections be ruled out? What sort of a `must' is being employed here? No doubt there are plenty of examples of the dead being feared, a fact we noted in our discussions in chapter 4. But we also noted other possibilities. Here is another reminder provided by Cassirer: In most cases . . . the opposite tendency prevails. With all their powers the survivors strain to detain the spirit in their neighbourhood. Very often the corpse is buried in the house itself where it maintains its permanent dwelling place. The ghosts of the deceased become household gods; and the life and prosperity of the family depend on their assistance and favour. At his death the parent is implored not to go away. `We ever loved and cherished you', says a song quoted by Tylor, ànd have lived long together under the same roof; Desert it not now! Come to your home! It is swept for you, and clean; and we are there who loved you ever; and there is rice put for you; and water; Come home, come home, come to us again.'42

No doubt some contemporary philosophers will want to ask, Ànd did the departed one come home?' but that question shows that the superstitious ones are not the people who sang that song, but the philosophers who ask that question. As I have said elsewhere, as long as a people can sing that song, they are one with the dead, the song expresses that unity.43 But it is a unity of love, respect, identity, continuity and answerability. In his treatment of tabus concerning the dead, as with his treatment of tabus concerning prisoners, the parameters of Freud's psychoanalytic explorations blind him to other possibilities. 41 42 43

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, London: Routledge 1957, p. 339. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, New Haven: Yale University Press 1950, p. 87. Death and Immortality, London: Macmillan 1970, Chapter Four.

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Freud: the battle for èarliest' things 7 psychoanalysis and religion

The discussions in the present chapter should lead us to see why there can be no general answer to the question of the relation between psychoanalysis and religion. The variety within the practice of psychoanalysis itself would be suf®cient to make the search for an answer a daunting prospect. In this brief conclusion we shall attempt something different, namely, to relate three broad perspectives on psychoanalysis to Freud's hermeneutics of suspicion. The ®rst perspective on psychoanalysis sees it as simply waiting on the patient without imposing on him or her any preconceived notion of what constitutes èarliest' things in life. In the case of a given individual religious beliefs may feature among the èarliest things'. Clearly, if this view of psychoanalysis were accepted its relation to religion would no longer be inherently problematic. This view would certainly be unacceptable to Freud, and would involve the complete abandonment of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The second perspective on psychoanalysis rejects the pluralism involved in the ®rst, and tries to preserve the monistic character of Freud's vision. It does so by suggesting that what Freud offers us is a way of looking at human life which competes with others, including religious perspectives on life. It is clear that Freud has such a perspective, one which has no place for any conception of divine help: And as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them.44

On this view, psychoanalysis would enter the battle of the myths. It could certainly be a threat to religion, but it would not be suspicious of it, since it could challenge its emphasis without, necessarily, challenging its sense. In this way, the second perspective on psychoanalysis would also involve the abandonment of the hermeneutics of suspicion. For this reason, it certainly would not satisfy Freud. The third perspective on psychoanalysis is Freud's, one in which religious belief is seen as inherently problematic. Yet, as we have seen it is this conception of psychoanalysis which involves major 44

Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 46.

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problems of its own. Freud does not take the multiplicity of social and cultural movements seriously. For Freud, culture represents demands which curtail an individual's instinctual wishes, wishes which have already taken their form and character in the ®rst ®ve years of life. To ease the burdens of these demands one ®nds narcissistic satisfaction in the achievements of one's culture. Instinctual wishes, then, are the èarliest' things in terms of which cultural movements are to be understood. As Anderson points out, for Freud, `The individual is always the agent ± or the patient of other individual agents; there is no sense of him as a ``vehicle'' of social forces, as a member of movements which are just as real, just as de®nite as he is', and he goes on to argue, rightly, that ùnless we treat a person otherwise than as a unit, unless we consider the activities which pass through him (in which he participates without being the agent or the patient), we cannot even give an account of the activities which go on within him.'45 Freud argues in exactly the opposite way, claiming that `the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d'eÃtre, is to defend us against nature'.46 Confronted by religious beliefs Freud, therefore, asks, `What are these ideas in the light of psychology? Whence do they derive the esteem in which they are held? And, to take a further timid step, what is their real worth?'47 The answer Freud gives to this question in terms of primitive man's frustrations in the face of a demanding nature and his sustaining illusions ± the wish that things were otherwise ± is the same answer we found in Feuerbach, Marx, Tylor, Frazer and Marett. These alleged revelations concerning religion, to which Freud assents, are arrived at in the conviction that `scienti®c work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves'.48 We have had reason to conclude that what Freud called `scienti®c work' in relation to religion is a product of conceptual confusions. First, Freud fails to see the dif®culties involved in equating religious belief with a neurosis. Second, the treatment of this neurosis is in a language which limits and obscures other possibilities of sense in human life. Third, Freud's conception of the relation of the individual to society makes it impossible for him to treat seriously the heterogeneity of movements in a culture, including religious movements. 45 46 47

Anderson, `Freudianism and Society', p. 341. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 11. 48 Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 16.

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From the point of view of the hermeneutics of contemplation it could be said that we have to recognise a multiplicity of èarliest' things, a multiplicity of concepts and movements which cannot be reduced to a unity without distortion.

chapter 9

Durkheim: religion as a social construct

1 anti-animism In discussing Tylor, Frazer, Marett and Freud, we have seen how the question of the origins of religion loomed large in their analysis. To some extent, I have chosen not to dwell on this fact, preferring to treat their appeals to origins as discussions of concept-formation in religion. Nevertheless, it is important to bring out the logical dif®culties involved in giving the individual's wishes the kind of priority we ®nd in these thinkers; a priority which allows them to make social institutions and movements the product of an individualistic psychology. We saw, in chapter 7, how Marett wrestled with these problems without resolving them satisfactorily. At the end of the last chapter, we saw the dif®culties reach a culminating point in Freud's thought in the implication that infants make society. Anderson's criticisms of this claim are unanswerable. He shows how no adequate account of a culture can be given in individualistic terms; it cannot be shown to have its genesis in pre-social instinctual wishes in the individual. These logical criticisms have a more general application, as seen in the critique of social contract theories in political philosophy. Despite their variety, the essential claim of such theories is that society comes into being as the result of frustrations experienced by individuals in a pre-social state. In order to alleviate their condition, it is argued, individuals agree to a contract which obliges them to live together in social co-operation. The social contract is a special contract, since, in some sense, it is one which established the very possibility of agreement and co-operation between people. In this way, society is shown to be the product of the psychology of the individual. The sense of the contract is dif®cult to elucidate, simply because it is confused at its very roots. We are told that people, in a 229

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pre-social state, agree to have a contract without which social existence and agreement is impossible. But in agreeing to draw up the contract, the people seem to possess already that which the contract was supposed to create. Further, the very notion of a contract presupposes an agreement about its sense. We can see that it is not the contract which makes possible that agreement, but an agreement in understanding which makes contracts possible. And that agreement is not based on a contract, since it is not an agreement which people decide to come to. Rather, it is an agreement which shows itself in their common reactions, including their common political reactions. Does it not follow that the same logical argument should be applied to religion? Here, too, it should be seen that religion cannot be explained in terms of its genesis from the psychology of the individual. These conclusions seem to be in the foreground of EÂmile Durkheim's criticisms of psychological explanations of religion: For this school does not seek to locate religions in the social environments of which they are a part, and to differentiate them according to the different environments to which they are thus connected. But rather . . . its purpose is to go beyond the national and historical differences to the universal and really human bases of the religious life. It is supposed that man has a religious nature of himself, in virtue of his own constitution, and independently of all social conditions, and they propose to study this.1

We have seen the results of these psychological explanations of religion. From the point of view of animism, [S]acred beings are only the imaginary conceptions which men have produced during a sort of delirium which regularly overtakes them every day, though it is quite impossible to see to what useful ends these conceptions serve, nor what they answer to in reality. If a man prays, if he makes sacri®ces and offerings, if he submits to the multiple privations which the ritual prescribes, it is because a sort of constitutional eccentricity has made him take his dreams for perceptions, death for a prolonged sleep, and dead bodies for living and thinking beings.2

It seems, then, that religious beliefs are nothing but `the nightmares of primitive minds'.3 For those who propound intellectual or emotional psychological theories, `When they think that they have explained how men have been induced to imagine beings of a 1 2

EÂmile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, London: Allen and Unwin 1915, pp. 94 ± 5. 3 Ibid. Ibid., p. 69.

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strange, vaporous form, such as those they see in their dreams, they think the problem is resolved.'4 For Durkheim, the problem is not only not resolved, it is not even recognised. Like others, he found it incredible that the whole of religion should be thought of as illusory. What is more, given the nature of the illusions religion is supposed to harbour, the survival of religion becomes a mystery. Indeed, the illusions are so obvious, it is said, religion is bound to fade away when human beings come of age. Durkheim mocks this conception of a science of religion which involves the demise of its subject: `religion could not survive the animistic theory and the day when its truth was recognized by men, for they could not fail to renounce the errors whose nature and origin would thus be revealed to them. What sort of a science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?'5 Such a science can never be plausible, since, as we have seen, it gives a problematic priority to the psychology of the individual. Religion is not the product of such a psychology. The individual is introduced to religion, as he is to the rest of his language, by being born into a particular society. The institutions and traditions cannot be reduced to creations of forces in an individual. On the contrary, the activities in which an individual engages, his hopes and fears, thoughts and plans, are intelligible only in the context of the society in which he lives. This being necessarily the case, the search for the origins of religion which characterises animistic theories is already a conceptual blunder: `There was no given moment when religion began to exist, and there is consequently no need of ®nding a means of transporting ourselves thither in thought. Like every human institution, religion did not commence anywhere.'6 Thus, Durkheim is able to conclude that the psychological explanation of a social phenomenon is invariably the wrong one. If we left the matter with this negative aspect of Durkheim's thought, we would expect to conclude that religious belief cannot be seen as the product of a mistake, conceptual confusion, ideology, or emotional ambivalence, and must be understood in its own natural context. When we come to the positive aspect of Durkheim's theory, however, we shall ®nd that such expectations are not ful®lled. 4

Ibid.

5

Ibid., p. 70.

6

Ibid., p. 8.

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Durkheim: religion as a social construct 2 the science without a subject

As we have seen, Durkheim says in criticism of psychological theories of primitive religion, `What sort of a science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?' Durkheim wanted to face up to the fact that people in the modern world ®nd it impossible to believe what primitives believed. Given psychological theories of religion, it is not surprising that primitive beliefs are said to be doomed. How could it be otherwise when they are characterised as the product of mistaken hypotheses or emotional stress? Instead of speculating abstractly about the origins of religion, Durkheim says that we should examine an actual society. He examines aboriginal society and the centrality of the totem within it. Durkheim argues that we must decode totemic practices so that we arrive at their real meaning. When only the letter of the formulae is considered, these religious beliefs and practices undoubtedly seem disconcerting at times, and one is tempted to attribute them to some sort of a deep-rooted error. But one must know how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning. The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.7

In Durkheim's science, too, we have a distinction between the manifest content of religious belief and its latent content, except that the latter is to be made explicit, not by psychology, but by sociology. When we go below the symbol to the reality it represents, we ®nd it is society itself. Unlike Marx, however, Durkheim does not hold that religion is a mere epiphenomenon of society. Religion has a force of its own. For example, identi®cation with the totem is itself an expression of sympathetic, social bonds. Thus, the object of totemic religion is real enough. Evans-Pritchard says: Ìt is the cult of something which really does exist, though not the thing the worshippers suppose. It is society itself, or some segment of it, which man worships, in these ideal representations.'8 Durkheim believes that à society has all that is necessary to arouse 7 8

Ibid., pp. 2± 3. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965, p. 57.

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the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over them; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers'.9 Just as God is greater than us, the one on whom we depend, so society creates a feeling of perpetual dependence. Again, like God, society asks us to forget our own inclinations and desires, and subject ourselves to wider purposes. The individual is prepared to submit to them, not simply because of material sanctions, but because of the moral authority of society which, again, is akin to the authority of God. When social aspiration seems to be expressed in an individual, Òpinion will invest him with a majesty exactly analogous to that protecting the gods.'10 Principles may be divinised in the same way, as in the case of Fatherland, Liberty and Reason in the French Revolution. Such considerations vary in character, but they have a single function. They emphasise and perpetuate social cohesion and continuity. Durkheim concludes that this sociological explanation ìs applicable to every sort of society indifferently, and consequently to every sort of religion'.11 Durkheim contrasts the humdrum day-to-day existence of tribes in Australia with the excitement evoked at clan gatherings. All the savage knows is that his life is heightened by the clan. The totemic emblem is the visible body of the god. So the practices of the cult are ef®cacious: they strengthen the bonds which individuals have with each other and with society. Visible emblems make that unity more obvious, and also serve as a rallying point. All these considerations, according to Durkheim, explain what the psychological theories failed to explain: the persistence of religious beliefs: It is its ¯ag; it is the sign by which each clan distinguishes itself from the others, the visible mark of its personality, a mark borne by everything which is a part of the clan under any title whatsoever, men, beasts, or things. So if it is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one? How could the emblem of the group have been able to become the ®gure of the quasi-divinity if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities? The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personi®ed and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem.12

Religious force is the collective and anonymous force of the clan. 9 10

Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 206. 11 Ibid., p. 214. 12 Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 213.

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The force of society, like that of God, is both external and immanent: it is greater than the people, and yet they feel part of it, and that it is part of them. Thus, `Religion ceases to be an explicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality. In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: the power exists, it is society.'13 This, for Durkheim, is what the science of religion reveals. He obviously thinks it superior to the psychological theories he criticised. Religion is no longer thought of as a product of fear, or as harbouring a confusion at its core. Yet, there is an insuperable dilemma in Durkheim's theory which brings him closer to the psychological theories he criticised than he would care to think. He admits, of course, that the reality underlying religious symbols is not what religious believers take it to be. This in itself would not be fatal if this meant that they embraced a different aspect of the religious symbolism. But Durkheim admits that a more drastic consequence is involved. The sociological revelation of the reality underlying religious beliefs entails the demise of those very beliefs and their symbolism. When we look at Durkheim's account of how religious beliefs are formed these conclusions are hardly surprising. First, he holds that the notion of society is too abstract for the savage to grasp. Primitives need something more speci®c, hence the personi®cation of the impersonal force of society. Second, he holds that primitives confuse different kinds of ef®cacy. For example, the aboriginal reason for not eating the totemic animal is that they have a special relationship to it. It can be eaten by members of other clans. In this way, each clan contributes to the common food supply. The rites give them a feeling of well-being, but they do not secure the reproduction of the tribe as the aboriginals think. Unlike the psychological theorists, Durkheim is not saying that the rites are there to release emotion or energy. On the contrary, it is the rites which create the emotion and energy. Nevertheless the practitioners of the rites are confused: `The moral ef®cacy of the rite, which is real, leads to the belief in its physical ef®cacy, which is imaginary.'14 These accusations of personi®cation and confusions of ef®cacy could come from the mouth of Tylor, Frazer or Marett. They are all 13

Ibid., p. 225.

14

Ibid., p. 359.

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sceptical of the rites for precisely the same reason. But Durkheim is faced by a further dif®culty. On the one hand, he acknowledges that if believers embraced his analysis they would give up their beliefs. On the other hand, he holds that the very features which any society must have are precisely what generates religion. As Evans-Pritchard says, This put him on the horns of a dilemma, and all he could say to get off them was that, while religion in the spiritual sense is doomed, a secular assembly may produce ideas and sentiments which will have the same function . . . He hoped and expected, like Saint-Simon and Comte, that as spiritual religion declined, a secularistic religion of a humanistic kind would take its place.15

Durkheim would like to conclude: Ìn reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.'16 But when we see what he said these truths amount to, do we not want to ask of his science of religion the question he asked of the psychological theories he criticised: `What sort of science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?' 3 social solidarity: a case of logical inversion In the light of Proudfoot's claim that I object to any explanation of religion which contains conceptions which are not used or understood by religious believers, it is important to point out that my objections to Durkheim are logical and conceptual objections. As with the other thinkers we have discussed, the objections engage them on their own ground. As we pointed out in the third section of chapter 1, Proudfoot's accusation involves an absurd thesis which would rule out all intellectual enquiry, including philosophical enquiry. In the course of his work, Durkheim makes a large number of sociological observations which may be true or false, but to which there are no logical objections. For example, he has observations concerning connections between totemic rites and the clan structure, observations on the relations between religious status and social status, and so on. Such comparisons may reveal facts or aspects of 15 16

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 64. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, pp. 2± 3.

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their lives which have not occurred to believers, which may have various effects on their beliefs. Why should any of this be denied? Matters are different, however, when we turn to Durkheim's central thesis, namely, that religion is a social construct. This is because the thesis is philosophically confused, involving, as I hope to show, a logical inversion of the conceptual relationship between the notion of values and the notion of social solidarity. Durkheim's thesis, as Skorupski says, is that `ritual actions and beliefs belong to a system of symbolic discourse, the true referents of which are to be found in the social order. The Durkheimian thesis itself is neither an explanation of the phenomenon of `ritual' nor an analysis of its social functions, but an elucidation of its character.'17 The elucidation in question has conceptual and logical implications. It is tempting to discuss these, as Skorupski does, in terms of the difference between cosmocentric and anthropocentric conceptions of religion. Does religious belief have to do, primarily, with hypotheses about the external world, or is it an aspect of our social and practical relations with each other? Some, claiming an indebtedness to Kant, welcome the description of religion as anthropocentric, since they believe it reveals religion's true location. Others see in the retreat from the cosmocentric conception a descent into vacuity due to the challenge of science.18 These are questions I shall return to at the close of the chapter. For the moment, it is suf®cient to note that enough has already been said in this book to warn us against the conceptual straitjacket Skorupski's distinction would impose on us. Cosmocentric religion would purport to tell us truths about a world independent of us, while anthropocentric religion would tell us truths about ourselves. What science tells us about the world concerns matters of interest to science. Why should `truths about the world' be con®ned to such contexts? Is everything else to be reduced to some kind of secondary embellishment on the facts? While not wanting to deny the conceptual confusions which an intellectualist treatment of religion may reveal, we saw, in discussing Tylor, Frazer and Marett, that this intellectualism is itself an intellectually restricted view of the signi®cance of religious beliefs. At this point, in the discussion of Durkheim, it is more important to point out how an intellectualist preoccupation with religious belief 17 18

John Skorupski, Symbol and Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 25 ± 8.

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will take us away from the central philosophical issues which need to be addressed. That preoccupation will be concerned to show, despite protests to the contrary, that attempts to characterise religious beliefs anthropocentrically will still involve one in cosmocentric claims and presuppositions. The distinction between `truths about the world' and `truths about us' will simply be assumed to be unproblematic. Durkheim will be held to show us truths about ourselves, without any examination of the conceptual coherence of his claim, when that examination is precisely what is needed. What does it mean to say that the true referents of religious belief are to be found in the social order? It is to an examination of that question that we now turn. Durkheim claims that when sociology goes beneath religious symbolism to its real meaning, the essence of religion will be revealed: At the foundation of all systems of beliefs and of all cults there ought necessarily to be a certain number of fundamental representations or conceptions and of ritual attitudes which, in spite of the diversity of forms which they have taken, have the same objective signi®cance and ful®l the same functions everywhere. These are the permanent elements which constitute that which is permanent and human in religion; they form all the objective contents of the idea which is expressed when one speaks of religion in general. How is it possible to pick them out?19

Durkheim is in no doubt about how this question should not be answered: Surely it is not by observing the complex religions which appear in the course of history. Every one of these is made up of such a variety of elements that it is very dif®cult to distinguish what is secondary from what is principal, the essential from the accessory. Suppose that the religion considered is like that of Egypt, India or the classical antiquity. It is a confused mass of many cults, varying according to the locality, the temples, the generations, the dynasties, the invasions, etc. Popular superstitions are there confused with the purest dogmas. Neither the thought nor the activity of the religion is evenly distributed among the believers; according to the men, the environment and the circumstances, the beliefs as well as the rites are thought of in different ways. Here they are priests, there they are monks, elsewhere they are laymen; there are mystics and rationalists, theologians and prophets, etc. In these conditions it is dif®cult to see what is common to all. In one or another of these systems it is quite possible to ®nd the means of making a pro®table study of some particular fact which is specially developed there, such as sacri®ce or prophecy, monasticism or the 19

Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 5.

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mysteries; but how is it possible to ®nd the common foundation of the religious life underneath the luxuriant vegetation which covers it?20

But what lies beneath the luxuriant vegetation? As we have seen, the essential function of religion is said to be the forging and expressing of a solidarity which gives continuity, cohesion and authority to the social structure. While we might balk at the holistic character of this claim concerning the structure of society, there is a version of Durkheim's thesis, were it his, which might strike us as unobjectionable, namely, that common moral and religious beliefs form bonds between people; they are an important part of what they share in life, and often inspire and inform their collective activities. There are times when Durkheim seems to be saying just this. Sometimes, the occasions are striking: `The Crusaders believed that they felt God present in the midst of them, enjoining them to go to the conquest of the Holy Land; Joan of Arc believed that she obeyed celestial voices.'21 Sometimes, the occasions are common, as when a person feels satisfaction at having done the right thing, or what he believes to be the will of God: `Because he is in moral harmony with his comrades, he has more con®dence, courage and boldness in action, just like the believer who thinks that he feels the regard of his god turn graciously towards him. It thus produces, as it were, a perpetual sustenance of our moral nature.'22 If this were all Durkheim said, we could conclude that there was, for him, an internal relation between moral or religious values and the solidarity they engender among those who share them. On this view, our values are our bonds. Unfortunately, not only does Durkheim say more, but the `more' makes us doubt whether we can attribute to him the view that our values create bonds. His main view seems to be that our bonds, our coming together, creates the values, and that the values themselves are of secondary importance. This inverts the logical relation between them. We do not share values in order to have bonds; our values are our bonds. Evans-Pritchard brings out the logical tensions in Durkheim's thesis when he says: `The rites create the effervescence, which creates the beliefs, which cause the rites to be performed; or does the mere coming together generate them? Fundamentally Durkheim elicits a social fact from crowd psychology.'23 The justice of Evans-Pritchard's conclusion can 20 23

21 Ibid., p. 211. 22 Ibid. Ibid., p. 3. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 68.

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be seen from the following remarks by Durkheim: `So if a price is attached to these various manoeuvres, it is not because of their intrinsic value, but because they are part of a complex rite, whose utility as a whole is realized.'24 And again: If the real function of the cult is to awaken within the worshippers a certain state of soul, composed of moral force and con®dence and if the various effects imputed to the rites are due only to a secondary and variable determination of this fundamental state . . . they depend upon the fact that the group is assembled, and not upon the special reasons for which it is assembled . . . Thus the apparent ef®cacy will seem to change while the real ef®cacy remains invariable, and the rite will seem to ful®l various functions though in fact it has only one, which is always the same.25

Here we have a clear indication of Durkheim's logical inversion: instead of saying that our values are our bonds, he says that our bonds are our values. How often have we seen this inversion expressed in student essays which declare, as though it were a deep revelation, that religious beliefs are society's way of underlining what is important, instead of saying that, in certain societies, religious beliefs are held to be important. In those societies, religion is not a means of underlining anything, as though that were its function. It is an expression of what is important, the nature of which has yet to be explored. That exploration does not occur in Durkheim because, like Tylor and Frazer, he is already convinced that the religious reasons for the assembling of a group, the beliefs expressed in the rites, are the products of confused conceptions of ef®cacy, and the personi®cation of the impersonal forces of society. There are times when Durkheim speaks of special forces in ways akin to speaking of mechanical, physical forces, although he denies that we get these ideas from our physical nature. He insists that our sense of a hierarchy of forces is entirely a social matter. The problem is that he thinks that the substantive content of any actual social hierarchy is of secondary importance. What is important is the framework of society which he says is invariable. What is this framework? It is hard to see how it is anything other than the intensity created by the felt presence of society itself. The intensity of social pressure is the moral ascendency of society. Here is another example of the logical inversion I have referred to: matters are not intense because they are moral, but moral because they are intense. 24 25

Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 360. Ibid., p. 386.

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We can see why this emphasis on social pressure leads to the charge that Durkheim is trying to elicit social facts from crowd psychology. The problem is that the phenomenon he invokes is far too wide for his purposes. While we can invoke examples where an assembled company makes it possible for an individual to perform an admirable deed which he would lack courage to do alone, we can also invoke the very different examples of actions emanating from Nazi rallies and crowd hooliganism in soccer games. As Flannery O'Connor has said, whether one follows the herd should depend on what the herd is doing. Since social pressure is a wider category than moral pressure, the latter concept cannot be analysed adequately in terms of it. It is important to emphasise that these inadequacies in analysis are conceptual and logical inadequacies. By attempting to analyse the ideas people share, the beliefs they hold, in terms of the social bonds they express, Durkheim fails to see that the common bonds are only intelligible in terms of the common ideas and beliefs people share. Back to logical inversion. By analysing moral and religious authority in terms of social pressure he impoverishes the very concept of a tradition and of how it can make an independent contribution to society. Durkheim's analysis can take no account of the essential difference between a person who makes the moral or religious ideas current in his society his or her own, and a person who feels forced to conform with them. Both, on Durkheim's view, are responding to social pressure. Again, his generic concept cannot re¯ect essential distinctions which have to be made. It cannot account for the fact that people are related in a wide variety of ways to what may be admitted by them to be the prevailing social norms. It is true that Durkheim argues that we are not related by any policy to the social pressure we experience. We experience it whether we like it or not. Yet there are times when he suggests that our reactions to this pressure serve the function of keeping the society together and ensuring its continuity. The dif®culty is that this not only smacks of a means-end relation, but of one which does not do justice to social continuities. It provides another example of Durkheim's logical inversion, since solidarity is not achieved by people sticking together for the sake of solidarity (something of which, presumably, we become aware after Durkheim's analysis, even if it has not been a conscious motive on our part), but by their common

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regard for certain values, beliefs, standards, etc. It is precisely when solidarity becomes an end in itself that the solidarity of the groups or institution in question is beginning to weaken. We say it is important to stick together when there is some danger of things falling apart. It is true that loving my parents will contribute to the maintenance of family life, but I did not love them in order to maintain family life, nor can it be said, that, unknown to me, such maintenance was the real function of my love. The life of a family, the traditions of a clan, religious orthodoxy, etc., are not maintained by those who participate in them making social solidarity, or the maintenance of common bonds, their aim. Durkheim could say that he never attributed these conscious aims to participants in these contexts. True enough, but he sees these aims as the reality behind or in their activities whereas we are emphasising the internal conceptual relations, which he virtually ignores, between the unity of the people and the regard they have for other things for their own sake. Durkheim says: When men of an inferior culture are associated in a common life, they are frequently led, by an instinctive tendency, as it were, to paint or cut upon the body, images that bear witness to their common existence . . . the early Christians painted on their skin the name of Christ or the sign of the cross; for a long time, the groups of pilgrims going to Palestine were tattooed on the arm or wrist with designs representing the cross or the monogram of Christ . . . twenty young men in an Italian college, when on the point of separating decorated themselves with tattoos, recording in various ways, the years they had spent together. The same fact has frequently been observed among the soldiers in the same barracks, the sailors in the same boat, or the prisoners in the same jail . . . Its object is not to represent or bring to mind a determined object, but to bear witness to the fact that a certain number of people participate in the same moral life.26

Durkheim is claiming that the same instinctive tendency leads to the same fact: an expression of solidarity in a common moral life. Remember, however, that that moral life has been analysed, not in moral terms, but in terms of a con®dence experienced by conforming to the pressure of social forces. His remarks are yet another instance of his logical inversion: solidarity is not elucidated in terms of the values inherent in comradeship of various kinds, but that variety of values and comradeship is said to be, in reality, an expression of the same social solidarity. In the end, the content of the 26

Ibid., p. 236.

242


values or the comradeship is of little importance to him. Hence, he is able to ask: `What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life?'27 Durkheim's logical inversion is meant to reveal the reality underlying the ways in which we live in society. Taken as the primary account of those ways of living it does not begin to elucidate their signi®cance. 4 social constructs and independent realities I promised to return at the end of this chapter to the distinction between cosmocentric and anthropocentric conceptions of religion, and its connection with Durkheim's theory. The idea is that cosmocentric conceptions have to do with the world, whereas anthropocentric conceptions have to do with our social relations. Durkheim's achievement, it may be said, is to show that religious beliefs, mistakenly thought to be cosmocentric beliefs, are in fact, anthropocentric beliefs: `Religious forces are therefore human forces, moral forces.'28 What is at stake, it is said, is whether religious beliefs have a true referent independent of us, or whether they are social constructs whose true referent, as Durkheim would say, is the social order. I have said already that the distinction between cosmocentric beliefs and anthropocentric beliefs is a straitjacket we should not be constrained by. The same is true, on a wider scale, of the very terms in which we are asked to discuss the notion of ìndependent reality'. These terms do not dig deep enough, assuming that the meaning of ìndependent' is a simple given, and, as a result, do not engage with the central logical issues involved. In some ways, Durkheim's conclusions should remind us of those of Feuerbach, whom we discussed in chapter 4. Both, it might be said, want to bring religion down to earth from its cosmocentric meanderings. Durkheim concludes that from `the fact that a `religious experience', if we choose to call it this, does exist and that it 27

Ibid., p. 427.

28

Ibid., p. 419.

Social constructs and independent realities

243

has a certain foundation . . . it does not follow that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the idea which believers have of it'.29 The reason why this does not follow, apparently, is given in a remark about Feuerbach which Eugene Kamenka might have made, just as well, about Durkheim: `Man gets the ideas contained, rearranged and elaborated in religion precisely where he gets all other ideas ± from human experience.'30 But if this is the reason why the reality of religious beliefs cannot conform objectively to what religious believers think, why does this unfortunate consequence only apply to religion? If all our ideas have the same source, why aren't the consequences the same in all cases? What we see, here, is another unhappy consequence of Durkheim's logical inversion. We saw that from the fact that social movements have common bonds, it does not follow that the function of their substantive concerns is simply to have bonds. For similar reasons, it would not follow from the fact that we talk in language that the true referent of what we say is the language itself. The language in which we talk of trees, birds, beauty, ugliness is, of course, our language, but it would not follow that we were not really talking about these subjects. Yet, for this very reason it is said that it can make no sense to say that people are really in touch with God. But what of God's independent existence in this context? The issue which needs to be addressed can be illuminated by an interesting discussion between Stephen Mulhall and Peter Winch on the notion of a `social construct'.31 Put aside the use which suggests something voluntarily constructed, or made, and accept the wider use of `construct' as social phenomenon. In this use, we would not be able to keep the distinction between cosmocentric and anthropocentric beliefs, because, as Winch points out, in an obvious sense, chemistry is a social phenomenon too, as are music, historiography, the life sciences, physics and social phenomena. There is, therefore, nothing exceptional about religion in this respect. What is essential, Winch claims, is to distinguish between calling chemistry a social construct, and trying to say this of mercury. 29 30 31

Ibid., p. 417. Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, London: Routledge 1970, p. 59. See Stephen Mulhall, `Sources of the Self 's Sense of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity' and Peter Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due?' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, Part Four: `Religion as a Social Construct', pp. 129 ± 74.

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Similarly, it is essential to distinguish between calling religion a social phenomenon, and trying to say this of God. Winch says: Only in the context of the discipline of chemistry can one speak of, say, mercury as a chemical element. But from this, plus the fact that the discipline of chemistry is, in one of its aspects, a social phenomenon, it does not follow that either a given mass of mercury or indeed mercury sans phrase is a social phenomenon; nor can we conclude more generally that chemical elements are social phenomena from the fact that the term `chemical element' has the meaning it does in the context of (the social phenomenon of ) chemistry.32

By comparison, the same logical distinctions can be drawn in the case of religion: `God' is a term which has its home in religion, which (in one of its aspects) is a social phenomenon (or a complex of social phenomena). This does not mean or imply that God is a social concept, still less that God is a social entity. The existence of God does not depend on society any more than the existence of mercury, or more generally of chemical elements, depends on society. Just as one may ask how the concept of mercury came to be as it is, so one may ask how the concept of God (perhaps some particular concept of God ) came to be as it is; in each case the answer would include a great deal of human history, but it would clearly be absurd to conclude that either mercury or God came to exist or to be as they are as the result of human history.33

Yet, having made these important logical parallels, the detailed grammatical work remains to be done, since, as Winch points out, the relations of the Grand Canyon and God to the respective discourses in which they have their sense are not the same. Although discovering that the Grand Canyon exists may affect a man's view of the world in all sorts of ways, ìn another sense his pre-existing picture of the world already had room for the Grand Canyon'. He had perhaps known other canyons, or had seen pictures of them; he knows what a mountain is and what a valley is, etc. In other words, prior to seeing the Grand Canyon he had the conceptual resources to understand descriptions of it; and having understood such descriptions he was in a position to `know what to expect'.34

Winch contrasts this with Huckleberry Finn's discovery of what prayer is, a conception radically at variance with the conception of religion as a system of rewards and punishments taught to him as a child by Widow Douglas and Miss Watson. 32 33

Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', p. 163. 34 Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 163.

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245

The question of whether Huck has a concept of God has a personal dimension which makes it a complex issue. As Winch says, if you contrast him with a child who has had no religious education, perhaps you have to say that he does. Yet the spiritual insight Huck comes to frees him from the very religious education he has received. This would lead him to say that he came to God, a belief which, given its genesis, would not tempt one to call it a social construct. The grammar of that concept is unlike the grammar of òbject'. It has to do rather with `what we say, for instance in dealing with experiences of loss, in experiencing wonder at the beauty of things, or at certain kinds of conduct in others, or consciousness of de®ciencies, and worse, in oneself, and so on'.35 As Winch says these situations do not evoke the same response in everyone. Some respond religiously, others do not. And, as Huck illustrates, religious responses cover a wide variety. Winch's complaint, though in general agreement with Mulhall, is that the latter does not see the impurity involved in Charles Tylor's attempt to bolster a personal vision with philosophical reasons. That impurity belongs both to the presentation of a personal perspective, and to the exercise of philosophical enquiry. The latter point relates directly to the hermeneutics of contemplation. If reactions to the existential circumstances of life are as personal as we have suggested, what is the relation of philosophical contemplation to them? Winch replies that it is the problem how to present moral or religious world-views in such a way that the passion behind them, which has to be evident if one is to recognize them for what they are, is clearly in view, along with the conception of the good that they embody, while at the same time equal justice is done to alternative and even hostile conceptions. Achieving this is a task of enormous dif®culty, both at the technical level and also because of the moral demands it makes on the writer, who will of course him or herself have strong moral or religious commitments and will also be hostile to certain other possibilities. A writer who described these kinds of dif®culty as well as anyone I can think of was Simone Weil36 whose admiration ± not to say veneration ± for the author of The Iliad may well have been a re¯ection of her realization how dif®cult she herself found it to do justice to ethicoreligious views at variance with her own very passionately held ones.37 35 36 37

Ibid., p. 168. See especially her wonderful essay: `The Iliad, Poem of Might' (Winch). Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', p. 173.

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Among those passionately held views were Simone Weil's religious beliefs. She thought that Durkheim looked in the right direction in search of the signi®cance of such beliefs, but failed to take account of the speci®cally religious character of the beliefs: The French school of sociology is very nearly right in its social explanation of religion. It only fails to explain one in®nitely small thing; but this in®nitely small thing is the grain of mustard seed, the buried pearl, the leaven, the salt. This in®nitely small thing is God; it is in®nitely more than everything.38 38

Simone Weil, À War of Religions' in Selected Essays, ed. Richard Rees, London: Oxford University Press 1962, p. 235.

chapter 10

LeÂvy-Bruhl: primitive logic

1 `prelogical thought' The thinkers we have discussed so far have one thing in common: they claim to understand why religious beliefs, as such, are either mistaken or confused. LeÂvy-Bruhl questions whether we possess this understanding. We shall have reason to criticise the ways in which he discusses this issue, but it brings to the fore philosophical problems in religious studies which need to be addressed. That this should be so is not surprising, since LeÂvy-Bruhl, like Durkheim, was a philosopher, but one with a particular interest in questions of logic. He brought this logical emphasis to bear on the question of the meaning of religious beliefs and practices. LeÂvy-Bruhl saw good logical grounds for supporting Durkheim's claim that the psychological explanation of a social institution is invariably the wrong one: `The idea of an individual human mind absolutely free of all experience is, then, as fanciful as that of man prior to social life.'1 It is in terms of that social life, and the dominant concepts to be found in it, that the lives of individuals have their sense. If we pay attention to different cultures, LeÂvy-Bruhl argues, we have no good reason for taking for granted, as many psychologists and philosophers have done, that `the human mind [is] always and everywhere homogenous, that is, a single type of thinker, and one whose mental operations obey psychological and intellectual laws which are everywhere identical'.2 It is what LeÂvy-Bruhl went on to say about the heterogeneity of the human mind that separates him from both the French and English schools of sociology and anthropology. 1 2

Lucien LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, New Hampshire: Ayer 1984, p. 24. Ibid., p. 385.

247


248

This teaches us that the mentality of primitive peoples is essentially mystic and prelogical in character; that it takes a different direction from our own ± that is, that its collective representations are regulated by the law of participation and are consequently indifferent to the law of contradiction, and united, the one to the other, by connections and preconnections which prove disconcerting to our reason.3

There is no mention here of primitive beliefs having a common function, as Durkheim claimed, and certainly no claim that something akin to religious beliefs is necessary for the structure, stability, continuity and authority of any society. As for the English school, with thinkers like Tylor and Frazer, nothing could have shocked them more than LeÂvy-Bruhl's use of terms such as `mystical' and `prelogical'. LeÂvy-Bruhl saw the intellectualist thinkers as his main opponents, and understood why. For the likes of Tylor and Frazer, it is essential to see a continuity between the thought of the primitives and our own. We are all engaged in the task of explaining the natural world which surrounds us, and which impinges on our lives in so many ways. Were this not the case, we would be unable to say, as Tylor does, that the primitives propounded mistaken hypotheses, or to excuse them for doing so, as Frazer does, because these are understandable slips, given the stage of mental development of the primitives. But LeÂvy-Bruhl questions the very assumptions on which the intellectualist position depends, namely, that our relation to the world is that of would-be explainers and controllers of it. LeÂvy-Bruhl does not deny that relation, but insists that it is not the only relation to the world we ®nd among ourselves, let alone the primitives. But to approach the primitives as though they were primitive scientists is to distort the situation from the start: `The very enunciation of the problem implies a false hypothesis. We are supposing that his mind apprehends these phenomena like our own.'4 Once this false hypothesis is embraced, `The differences between institutions and beliefs must be explained, therefore, by more childish and ignorant use which is made of principles common to all aggregates. Accordingly a re¯ective self-analysis carried out by a single individual ought to suf®ce to discover the laws of mental activity, since all subjects are assumed to be constituted alike, as far as mind is concerned.'5 Unfortunately for the intellectualist, `such a postulate does not tally with the facts revealed by a comparative study of the mentality of the various human aggregates'.6 3

Ibid., p. 386.

4

Ibid., p. 45.

5

Ibid., p. 385.

6

Ibid., pp. 385 ± 6.

`Prelogical thought'

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To understand LeÂvy-Bruhl's position, we need to say more about the terms which caused such consternation to his English counterparts; terms such as `prelogical', `mystical', `law of participation', and `collective representations'. The latter term need not detain us long. By `collective representations' LeÂvy-Bruhl simply means the dominant concepts or beliefs in a culture. Thus, in our own culture, many of the collective representations are scienti®c or technological in character. More trouble is caused by LeÂ vy-Bruhl's use of `prelogical', since, at ®rst, it suggests that primitive beliefs are illogical, and that is not what LeÂvy-Bruhl is saying. He makes clear that by prelogical we do not mean to assert that such a mentality constitutes a kind of antecedent stage, in point of time, to the birth of logical thought. Have there ever existed groups of human or pre-human beings whose collective representations have not yet been subject to the laws of logic? . . . At any rate, the mentality of these underdeveloped peoples which, for want of a better term, I call prelogical, does not partake of that nature.7

He goes on to say: It is not antilogical; it is not alogical either. By designating it `prelogical' I merely wish to state that it does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradiction. It obeys the law of participation, ®rst and foremost. Thus orientated, it does not expressly delight in what is contradictory (which would make it merely absurd in our eyes), but neither does it take pains to avoid it. It is often wholly indifferent to it, and that makes it so hard to follow.8

The reader may not think this further elucidation to be helpful, but it does repay further attention. It is clear that LeÂvy-Bruhl does not want to call primitive beliefs and practices illogical, since, so far from putting them outside our ways of thinking, that would put them clearly within the bounds of our logical criticisms. Yet, he cannot bring himself to say that their practices are alogical since, clearly, some things do follow from others within them. What we ®nd hard to understand is how one thing follows from another in these contexts. In one sense, we can follow their reasoning, but, as EvansPritchard put it, LeÂvy-Bruhl says that they `start from different premisses, and premisses which are to us absurd'.9 Evans-Pritchard's conclusion is that in distinguishing between the `prelogical', àntilogical', and àlogical' LeÂvy-Bruhl was being too subtle for his own 7 9

8 Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965, p. 82.


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good. Is it not clear that `he means by ``prelogical'' little more than unscienti®c or uncritical, that primitive man is rational but unscienti®c or uncritical'?10 But if we say that primitives are rational, why not also say that they are logical, but that the logic of their practices differs from the logic of scienti®c enquiry? Yet, LeÂvy-Bruhl could not bring himself to say this either: Must we then infer that these representations obey some other system of logic than the one which governs our own understanding? That would be going too far, for such a hypothesis would exceed that which facts warrant us in af®rming. Nothing proves that the connections of collective representations must depend solely upon laws of a logical kind. Moreover, the idea of a logic different from our own could only provide us with a negative concept, devoid of meaning.11

The reasons for these remarks are interesting, and we shall have reason to return to them. For the moment we can be content with saying that the ascription of a logic to primitive practices can only be a negative one for LeÂvy-Bruhl. To make it a positive ascription would be to assert what he is at pains to deny, namely, that we understand the practices of the primitives. What makes these practices dif®cult to understand? LeÂ vy-Bruhl says it is because they involve mystical concepts. By `mystical' he simply means magico-religious beliefs. Such beliefs do not seem to operate according to the logic of scienti®c beliefs. Most prominently, they do not observe the law of contradiction. LeÂvy-Bruhl saw the ignoring of this law in the claim that an individual can also say of himself that he is a leopard, when that animal provides the totemic identity of the clan. Further, the same event may be explained in both causal and mystical terms. A person may be seen to be killed by a buffalo, but, at the same time, it will be said that unseen spirits have also been at work. The law of participation is simply involvement in mystical concepts which determine the very nature of the world in which the primitives move. It is a world which evidently brings a subjective satisfaction to the participants, but a satisfaction which, no less evidently, ignores objective factors which would be crucial in our ways of thinking. For example, if rain arrives even though the rites for rain have not been performed, or if no rains arrive, even though the rites have been performed, what would strike 10 11

Ibid., p. 82. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 69.

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us as crucial objective factors against the ef®cacy of the rites are explained in terms of the involvement of other friendly or unfriendly spirits respectively. LeÂvy-Bruhl is not saying that the primitives failed to observe these objective facts, since that would assume that the rites are incompetent examples of procedures familiar to us. But this is precisely what they are not. We must not impose on the primitives interests and purposes which are not the point of their practices. What, then is their point? That, LeÂvy-Bruhl tells us, is what is so dif®cult for us to understand. It is easy to assume, with LeÂvy-Bruhl's talk of a `primitive mentality', a `prelogical mind', and a participation in mystical concepts which gives subjective satisfaction, that he is, despite his criticism of the psychologism of the English school of anthropology, postulating a mental essence as the explanation of primitive culture; saying that the culture is as it is because the minds of primitives have a certain constitution. Evans-Pritchard brings out why this would be a bad misunderstanding of LeÂvy-Bruhl, despite the fact that many of his critics understood him in this way: When he says that `primitive mentality' or the `primitive mind' is prelogical, hopelessly uncritical, he is not speaking of an individual's ability or his inability to reason, but of the categories in which he reasons. He is speaking, not of a biological or psychological difference between primitives and ourselves, but of a social one. It follows, therefore, that he is not speaking of a type of mind such as some psychologists have delineated: intuitive, logical, romantic, classical, and so on. What he is speaking about are axioms, values and sentiments ± more or less what are sometimes called patterns of thought ± and he says that among primitive peoples these tend to be mystical and therefore beyond veri®cation, impervious to experience, and indifferent to contradiction . . . They are present before the individual who acquires them is born and they will be present after he is dead. Even the affective states which accompany the ideas are socially determined. In this sense, therefore, a people's mentality is something objective. If it were simply an individual phenomenon, it would be a subjective one; its generality makes it an objective one.12

These remarks are important for our philosophical purposes, since they bring out the central problem LeÂvy-Bruhl was confronting: to what extent can we understand patterns of thought radically different from our own? What does this task show us about patterns of thought, our relations to them, and the concepts of reality which 12

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, pp. 82± 3.

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may be involved? By now, it will be readily recognised that such issues are of central concern to the hermeneutics of contemplation. 2 can we understand magico-religious beliefs? How does LeÂvy-Bruhl conceive of the task of understanding magicoreligious beliefs? It is dif®cult to give an unequivocal answer to that question, since he is not consistent in what he says. Sometimes, his answer would seem to be brief and to the point. We cannot understand magico-religious beliefs, because we cannot understand either the whole primitive culture in which we ®nd them. The most basic categories of awareness are radically different. Thus, we are told that `primitives perceive nothing in the same way as we do. The social milieu which surrounds them differs from ours, and precisely because it is different, the external world they perceive differs from that which we apprehend.'13 Again: `Primitive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the mystic representations which form an integral part of every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, at any rate with regard to most of the objects which surround us. Nothing appears alike to them and to us.'14 But do they not speak a language we can endeavour to understand? LeÂvy-Bruhl replies: Òur language, without which we can conceive nothing, and which is essential to our reasoning, makes use of categories which do not coincide with theirs.'15 His general conclusion, in the context of these remarks, is that our attempt to understand is doomed to failure. He quotes, with approval, Elsdon Best's remarks: `We shall never know the inwardness of the native mind. For that would mean retracing our steps for many centuries, back into the dim past, far back to the time when we also possessed the mind of primitive man. And the gates have long closed on that hidden road.'16 On this view, we are simply confronted by a closed door when trying to understand primitive culture. But a major dif®culty confronted LeÂvy-Bruhl if he wanted to maintain this extreme thesis: the fact that communication does take place; a fact which LeÂvy-Bruhl himself acknowledged. His over-zealous thesis can be put down to his desire to emphasise differences in face of the bland assumption 13 14 16

LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 43. 15 Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 44. Elsdon Best, `Maori Medical Lore', Journal of the Polynesian Society, 13, 1904, p. 219. Quoted in ibid.

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that all practices and cultures can be reduced to a common kind and, hence, assessed by a common measure. If we accept the picture of primitive people enclosed in a mystical world, oblivious of practicalities, it is hard to see how they could have survived at all. But, as we have seen already in the course of earlier discussions, that picture is itself a grotesque caricature. As Evans-Pritchard says in criticism of LeÂvy-Bruhl, `Yet it is self-evident that, far from being such children of fancy as he makes them out to be, they have less chance to be than we, for they live closer to the harsh realities of nature, which permit survival only to those who are guided in their pursuits by observation, experiment, and reason.'17 And LeÂvy-Bruhl recognises this. He says of the primitive: Ìf he has brought down two birds, for instance, and only picks up one, he will ask himself what became of the other, and will look for it. If rain overtakes and inconveniences him, he will seek shelter. If he encounters a wild beast, he will strive his utmost to escape, and so forth.'18 LeÂvy-Bruhl tries to argue that these activities belong to the primitive to the extent that he acts independently of his collective representations. Then, he says, he `will usually feel, argue and act as we should expect him to do'.19 This distinction between mystical collective representations and individual action will not do, because, as we have seen, LeÂvy-Bruhl criticises the notion of an individual free of collective representations. He says that conception is a myth. What LeÂvy-Bruhl ought to have said is that different concepts are at work in the life of the primitive, mystical concepts, and causal and related concepts involved in practical affairs. To his credit, LeÂvy-Bruhl, unlike the intellectualists, does not treat the mystical concepts as inferior examples of their practical neighbours. There are times when he states that mystical concepts are thought important, not because primitives are unaware of the difference between them and the practicalities of life, but because it is that very difference which impresses them. But these insights are then blurred with others which confuse them. This can be illustrated by LeÂvy-Bruhl's discussion of dreams in which, within paragraphs, we have statements which pull in different directions. He wants to avoid saying that primitives are under the illusion that a dream is an event in waking life. He avoids this by 17 18 19

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, pp. 87 ±8. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 79. Ibid., p. 79.


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saying that both waking life and the dream are conceived in mystical terms. Thus, he says, `we may say that their dream is a perception like the others'.20 But this obscures the importance of the dream. So does the following: Thus the Indian who has a dream and risks his existence upon its truth, is not ignorant of the difference between this dream and a similar perception which he might have in his waking state. But, since his perception in the waking state and in the dream are alike mystic, this difference means very little to him. In our eyes, the objective reality of the perception is the measure of its validity; in his, such a consideration is only secondary, or rather, is of no importance at all.21

We have seen already that the practical life of the primitives shows that this last remark cannot possibly be true. A little earlier, however, LeÂvy-Bruhl, with considerable insight, had emphasised the importance of the dream as a dream: Ìnstead of saying, as people do, that primitives believe in what they perceive in the dream, although it is but a dream, I should say that they believe in it because it is a dream.'22 Of course, he goes on to say that this is because perception and dream mean something different to the primitives. Had LeÂvyBruhl stayed with his insightful remark, he would have been saying not that there is no difference between dream and waking state, or that the difference does not matter, but that the importance of the dream depends on how it is taken up into waking life. So far from this being unfamiliar to us, it is a familiar feature of our lives, one which we discussed in section 4 of chapter 8. There, we saw Wittgenstein, in opposition to the claim that Freud explained the origin of dreams, argue that Freud's patients, in being prepared, in analysis, to connect the dream with other things in their lives, were extending the signi®cance of the dream. For example, if I dream of the death of someone I dislike, and am told the next day that he died that night, I may well feel ashamed of my dream. What the dream becomes changes its aspect. I may not think that there is a causal connection between the dream and the death, but I see a moral connection between them. The dream tells me something about myself, and I may well feel that penance is called for. We can feel ashamed of our dreams, of course, without the actual occurrence of the events dreamt of. How the dream is taken up into waking life will depend on the life 20

Ibid., p. 59.

21

Ibid., p. 60.

22

Ibid., p. 59.


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in question; what considerations surround it; its social and cultural context. LeÂvy-Bruhl gives a number of examples but, unfortunately, does not provide us with accounts of the wider context in which the dreams occur. His own gloss on the dreams is invariably causal and prudential, although, in many, it is easy to think of other possibilities. I shall simply give two examples. LeÂvy-Bruhl says that `the Indian will at once carry out what has been commanded or simply indicated to him in a dream'.23 This is an example which cries out for further information on what kind of authority, if any, the dream had. A second example could clearly be a case of shame and penance in reaction to what the dream reveals. LeÂvy-Bruhl says: [A] warrior, having dreamed that he had been taken prisoner in a battle . . . called his friends together and implored them to help him in this misfortune. He begged them to prove themselves true friends by treating him as if he were an enemy. They therefore rushed upon him, stripped him naked, fettered him, and dragged him through the streets with the usual shouts and insults, and even made him mount the scaffold.24

LeÂvy-Bruhl says that the actions of the friends were meant to àvert the fatal consequences of such a dream'. I am suggesting that those consequences can be understood in moral terms. The dream made the warrior doubt how he would deport himself in captivity. Hence the request to his friends to prove themselves, by helping him prove himself. LeÂvy-Bruhl's reading of the consequences is causal and prudential. He says the warrior `thanked them warmly, believing that this imaginary captivity would ensure him against being made prisoner in reality'.25 In LeÂvy-Bruhl's eyes this is simply an example of superstition. As so often in the writers we discuss, we notice the contrast between the striking character of their examples and the banality of the gloss they provide. I am not suggesting for a moment that there are no superstitious reactions to dreams but, in this case, it does not seem that LeÂvy-Bruhl does justice to his example, or to the general description of the signi®cance of dreams which he quotes: `Dreams are to savages what the Bible is to us, the source of Divine revelation.'26 LeÂvy-Bruhl's gloss on dreams hardly does justice to this conception. That LeÂvy-Bruhl is blind to other possibilities should not surprise us since, on his own admission, he does not understand the 23 26

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. Ibid., p. 57. A. Gatschet, The Klamath Language, p. 77 (Contributions to North American Ethnology ii 1). Quoted in ibid.


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primitives. In so far as we do understand them, it is not only because of the attention to practical affairs in their culture, but also because of the remnants of prelogical thought in our own. These remnants, however, he conceived of as familiar superstitions: `The Icelandic ®shing ¯eet, for instance, does not leave Paimpol without having received a priestly blessing; without it, many of the sailors would dread returning with a scarcity of ®sh, or that they might not return at all.'27 Putting aside the question of whether the blessing has to be understood in this way, LeÂvy-Bruhl ®nds it intelligible as a superstition which, though admittedly odd, looks to the effect we would expect. In the main, however, the mystical world of the primitive is an enigma to him and, he suggests, to us. It is to LeÂvy-Bruhl's credit that he does not minimise the dif®culty he believes we face. In fact, the way I expressed the dif®culty earlier in this section does not do justice to him. I suggested that the issue LeÂvy-Bruhl has to face is that of the relation between mystical concepts and practical concepts in primitive culture. This would be the kind of issue we discussed in relation to the intellectualist thesis of Tylor and Frazer in chapter 6. There I questioned the assumption that rituals must be causal supplements to the purposive, practical activities. LeÂvy-Bruhl argues, convincingly, that this simpli®es the problem. As Evans-Pritchard puts it, LeÂvy-Bruhl `says not merely that the perceptions of primitives embody mystical representations, but that it is the mystical representations which evoke the perceptions'.28 This is a conceptual priority which the intellectualist approach of Tylor and Frazer simply fails to understand. LeÂvy-Bruhl elucidates the confusion involved if we think in their way of the relation of the primitive to natural phenomena: We imagine that he simply perceives such facts as sleep, dreaming, illness, death, the rise and decline of the heavenly bodies, rain, thunder, etc., and then, stimulated by the principle of causality, tries to account for them . . . Their mentality has no need to seek an explanation of them; for the explanation is implied in the mystic elements of the collective representations of them.29

To modify LeÂvy-Bruhl's tendency, at times, to ignore the practical affairs in the life of the primitives, Evans-Pritchard emphasised that many objects only had mystical signi®cance when used in a rite. 27 28 29

LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 246. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 84. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 45.


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Outside the rite, their meaning and place in daily life would be one we would recognise without dif®culty.30 While not wanting to deny the importance of that point, it does not meet the depth of LeÂvyBruhl's puzzles concerning what Evans-Pritchard also recognises, namely, the way in which mystical concepts evoke perceptions. In short, how is it that mystical concepts can lead to the primitive seeing a different world? It is this puzzle which is inadequately expressed by asking how mystical concepts are related to practical concepts, or how ritual activities are related to purposive actions, as though we had two distinct realms which need to be brought into relation with each other. LeÂvy-Bruhl gives the much-needed corrective to this way of thinking of the dif®culty facing us: Ìn the mentality of primitive peoples, the logical and prelogical are not arranged in layers and separated from each other like oil and water in a glass. They permeate each other, and the result is a mixture which it is very dif®cult to differentiate.'31 This is a brilliant insight on LeÂvy-Bruhl's part which he did not build on. Indeed, its very complexity was a major obstacle to his going further in elucidating what `the mixture' of the logical and the prelogical involved. He confessed to being stumped, and left the matter there. And yet, the examples which he himself provided gave a way forward to the further understanding he sought. That he did not achieve that understanding was due to more than one factor, but prominent among them was his failure to see any more in his examples than superstitions, an ignoring of causal implications, or a baf¯ing disregard for the law of contradiction. I shall end this section with some suggestions of the further possibilities of sense his examples contained. We need not dwell long on LeÂvy-Bruhl's puzzles concerning the lack of correspondence between rain dances and the coming of the rain. He simply does not consider that the rain rites can be celebratory in character; they greet the coming of the rain. Suppose someone were to ask whether that `greeting' makes any difference to the rain. Are rains greeted the same rains as rains cursed? Is a day greeted the same day as a day cursed? I certainly do not want to deny the reasons which would lead someone to reply, `Yes'. But are there not reasons for replying, `No'? Consider again the elaborate 30 31

See Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, pp. 88± 9. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 106.

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rituals surrounding the killing of an animal: the anointing of the hunter, the forgiveness sought from the dead animal. Consider also the way in which we kill animals to supply our supermarkets and other recipients of food supplies. How are we to answer the question of what is involved in killing an animal? Does not the mixture of prevailing concepts with purposive acts testify to LeÂvy-Bruhl's point in both cultures? What sort of question would be troubling someone if he/she began to ask `What is it to kill an animal?' What of LeÂvy-Bruhl's worries about contradiction? Is he right in thinking that they must arise? If he is worried about how someone can be identi®ed with a leopard, should he not be equally worried about how someone can be called a child of God? There may be all sorts of dif®culty in understanding what it means to believe in God, but it is unlikely that a worry over whether being God's child contradicted being a child of human parents would rank high among them. Need there be any greater puzzle over the identi®cation with a leopard by a member of a leopard totemic clan? Think of LeÂvy-Bruhl's wider worries about the whole network of totemic relations, and about how trees, plants and the earth can be talked of as though they were human beings. Again, he sees the law of contradiction being ¯outed in this context. But need this be so? If we think back to our discussion of Ànimism, souls and spirits', in the second section of chapter 6, we saw there the ways in which Native Americans lamented the fact that white people did not listen to the pleas of the earth as they exploited it. They spoke of listening to nature, and of nature listening to them. They spoke of grieving the spirit of the earth by acts of desecration. To understand this talk, we need to appreciate the spiritual relations in which the speakers stand to the earth. But is the earth one thing, and the spiritual relations another? Do they not permeate each other in the way LeÂvy-Bruhl described? So if one asked what the earth really is, is it obvious that pure geology is the source of the only possible answer? LeÂvy-Bruhl says that, for the primitives, À road, like everything else, has its own peculiar mystic properties. The natives of Loango say of an abandoned path that it is ``dead''. To them, as to us, such an expression is metaphorical, but in their case it is fraught with meaning.'32 To ®nd that meaning, LeÂvy-Bruhl looks for mystic properties, and is puzzled when he can make little of the claim that 32

Ibid., p. 43.

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they are present, or that they have their own secret operations. Had he looked in another direction, he might have found what he wanted. Instead of trying to locate and understand properties, he would have looked to the spiritual signi®cance of roads in people's lives, the opening and closing of them, the signi®cance of places and roots. But, unlike the intellectualists, he did not take a wrong turning, con®dent that he was on the right road. No, he knew the road he puzzled over was different from the roads he travelled on. In the end, he thought it a no-through road, but, at least, not because it was an inferior example of his own. 3 lessons from lévy-bruhl It may seem strange, at ®rst, to claim that lessons can be learned concerning magico-religious beliefs from someone whose general claim is that they are a closed book not only for himself, but for us. Yet, as I said at the outset, his approach to a range of questions is philosophical, and thus brings to the fore logical issues which need to be faced concerning the nature of religious beliefs. What is the relation of these issues to the nature of philosophical enquiry into the nature of reality? In this concluding section, I want to give some indication of ways in which that question should be answered. LeÂvy-Bruhl comes to the ®nal conclusion that the primitive culture is pervaded by confusion, but his account of the confusion is radically different from that of the intellectualist tradition. Evans-Pritchard expresses that difference well: `For Tylor and Frazer primitive man believes in magic because he reasons incorrectly from his observations. For LeÂvy-Bruhl he reasons incorrectly because his reasoning is determined by the mystical representations of his society.'33 For the intellectualists, primitives argue incorrectly to magical and religious conclusions. For LeÂvy-Bruhl, they argue from confused magical and religious premisses; the confusion is in their very mode of reasoning. How does LeÂvy-Bruhl treat this primitive way of thinking? As we have seen, he does not fall into the trap of thinking that magic and religion are inferior forms of science. That was precisely the mistake of the intellectualist tradition. In contrast, for LeÂvy-Bruhl, as EvansPritchard says, `The representations of primitive peoples have a quality of their own, namely the quality of being mystical, which is 33

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 86.


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quite foreign to our own representations, and therefore we may speak of primitive mentality as sui generis.'34 But, if this is so, how is one to compare primitive thought and scienti®c thought? There does not seem to be an over-reaching logic in terms of which they can be assessed and compared. LeÂvy-Bruhl says: It would be idle to institute any comparison between the discursive processes of prelogical mentality and those of our thought, or to look for any correspondence between the two, for we should have no grounds on which to base a hypothesis. We have no a priori reason for admitting that the same process is used by both. The discursive operations of our rational thought ± the analysis of which has been made familiar to us through psychology and logic ± require the existence and the employment of much that is intricate, in the form of categories, concepts, and abstract terms. They also assume an intellectual functioning, properly so called, that is already well-differentiated. In short, they imply an ensemble of conditions which we do not ®nd anywhere in social aggregates of a primitive type. On the other hand, as we have seen, prelogical mentality has its own laws, to which its discursive operations must necessarily submit.35

It is not as though one can show that what LeÂvy-Bruhl calls logical thought is really logical. This would be an attempt to establish the logicality of logic, and would lead to an in®nite regress of justi®catory procedures. This is illustrated amusingly by Lewis Carroll in What The Tortoise Said to Achilles, quoted in a discussion of this point by Peter Winch: Achilles and the Tortoise are discussing three propositions, A, B, and Z, which are so related that Z follows logically from A and B. The Tortoise asks Achilles to treat him as if he accepted A and B as true but did not yet accept the truth of the hypothetical proposition C, Ìf A and B are true, Z must be true', and to force him, logically, to accept Z as true. Achilles begins by asking the Tortoise to accept C, which the Tortoise does; Achilles then writes in his notebook: À B C (If A and B are true, Z must be true) Z.' He now says to the Tortoise: Ìf you accept A and B and C, you must accept Z'. When the Tortoise asks why he must, Achilles replies: `Because it follows logically from them. If A and B and C are true, Z must be true (D). You don't dispute that I imagine?' The Tortoise agrees to accept D if 34 35

Ibid., p. 85. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 105.


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Achilles will write it down. The following dialogue then ensues. Achilles says: ` ``Now that you accept A and B and C and D, of course you accept Z.'' ` ``Do I?'' said the Tortoise innocently. ``Let's make that quite clear. I accept A and B and C and D. Suppose I still refuse to accept Z?'' ` ``Then Logic would take you by the throat, and force you to do it!'' Achilles triumphantly replied. ``Logic would tell you `You can't help yourself. Now that you've accepted A and B and C and D, you must accept Z'. So you've no choice, you see.'' ` ``Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down'' said the Tortoise, ``So enter it in your book, please. We will call it (E) If A and B and C and D are true, Z must be true. Until I've granted that, of course, I needn't grant Z. So it's quite a necessary step you see?'' ` `Ì see,'' said Achilles; and there was a touch of sadness in his tone.' The story ends some months later with the narrator returning to the spot and ®nding the pair still sitting there. The notebook is nearly full. The moral of this . . . is that the actual process of drawing an inference, which is after all at the heart of logic, is something which cannot be represented as a logical formula; that, moreover, a suf®cient justi®cation for inferring a conclusion from a set of premisses is to see that the conclusion does in fact follow. To insist on any further justi®cation is not to be extra cautious; it is to display a misunderstanding of what inference is. Learning to infer is not just a matter of being taught about explicit logical relations between propositions; it is learning to do something.36

LeÂvy-Bruhl in a related statement says, `Nothing proves that the connections of collective representations must depend solely upon laws of a logical kind.'37 This is from the passage quoted in the ®rst section of this chapter to which I promised to return. In it, LeÂvyBruhl puzzles over what to call the connections in primitive thought. He balks at calling them logical, because that would imply that we can understand them. He also balks at saying that they conform to a different logic, that is, to a logic different from that of science and practical reasoning, because, not understanding the connections of thought, he says that this would be, at best, a negative statement. On the other hand, given some of the ways in which LeÂvy-Bruhl spoke of primitive thought, it would seem that he ought to have gone in the direction of saying that magical and religious beliefs do seem to have a different logic although he could not follow the connections between concepts within it. LeÂvy-Bruhl might have said this, because he recognises that the connections are not free and undisciplined. He 36 37

Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 2nd. ed., London: Routledge 1995, pp. 55 ±7. LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 69.

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says that `the mentality is stable, ®xed and almost invariable, not only in its essential elements, but in the very content and even in the details of its representations'.38 As well as noting the stability and consistency of the conceptual connections in primitive magico-religious thought, LeÂvy-Bruhl, as we have seen, says that in primitive thought, `the logical and the prelogical are not arranged in layers and separated from each other . . . They permeate each other.'39 We have seen, by elucidating his examples in a way LeÂvy-Bruhl did not, how far-reaching an insight this could have been on his part. Indeed, the observation has much in common with Wittgenstein's treatment of aspect-seeing where he discusses a wide range of varying examples and what blindness to them involves. How is the dawning of an aspect to be described? Wittgenstein replies: Ìs being struck looking plus thinking? No. Many of our concepts cross here.'40 Suppose that my discussion of LeÂvy-Bruhl's examples brings about the dawning of an aspect not found in his treatment. You, too, see the shame in the dream. What is it not to see it? I might reply: only to see there the superstition LeÂvy-Bruhl ®nds in it. This failure to see, this aspect-blindness, infected his whole treatment of the primitives. He is an illustration of Wittgenstein's remarks in the course of his discussion of seeing aspects, and aspect-blindness: We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country's language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot ®nd our feet with them.41

LeÂvy-Bruhl cannot ®nd his feet with the primitives. Why should this be so? Let us put aside aspect-blindness which, in the end, must be a major consideration, and concentrate on philosophical considerations alone. As we saw, LeÂvy-Bruhl thought that primitive thought ¯outed the law of contradiction. How can reference to causal explanations be reconciled with reference to the operation of spirits? For LeÂvy-Bruhl, a contradiction must occur. But, as we saw, 38 40 41

39 Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 108. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell 1953, II xi, p. 211. Ibid., II xi, p. 223.


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this assumption is not justi®ed. For example, as Evans-Pritchard says of the primitives, They are as perfectly aware that a buffalo killed the man, but they hold that he would not have been killed by it if he had not been bewitched. Why otherwise should he have been killed by it, why he and not someone else, why by that buffalo and not by another? They are asking why, as we would put it, two independent chains of events crossed each other, bringing a certain man and a certain buffalo into a single point of time and space. You will agree that there is no contradiction here, but that on the contrary the witchcraft explanation supplements that of natural causation, accounting for what we would call the element of chance.42

The whole issue turns on the role witchcraft plays in responding to the contingencies of life. We, too, knowing all the causal explanations of the events which befall us, still ask, `Why do things have to be like this?' We are not looking for more explanations of the same kind. Often, there are no more. We are looking for something which makes sense of life, given the explanations we already have. There are many responses which enter life at such a point: Ìt's fate', Ìt's God's will', `That's life', and so on. These are not explanatory answers to the question, `Why must things be like this?' or, at least, they need not be. When they aren't, Evans-Pritchard is wrong to think of them as supplements to causal explanations. The responses are not answers to one's question, but a way of not asking it any more. The answers are modes of sustenance which do not depend on things going one way rather than another, since they are responses to life no matter how it goes. LeÂvy-Bruhl does not consider the possibility of belief in witchcraft being one such response. Another aspect of magico-religious beliefs which worries LeÂvyBruhl is their immunity to falsi®cation. Since he held them to be sui generis there was no wider framework within which they could be veri®ed or refuted. Yet, if these beliefs are the modes of response I suggest that they are, this is exactly what one would expect. Yet there are uses of `truth' and `falsity' which do not depend on veri®cation or falsi®cation in the ordinary sense. A way of responding to life can cease to be a truth for one, because, for some reason or another, one can't see things that way any more. But these are not `reasons' in the sense that there would be some illogicality involved if a person did not accept them. Looking at the suffering in the world, someone 42

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 90.

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cannot see how one can speak of a loving God: the same suffering that has led someone else to speak in this way. LeÂvy-Bruhl would have to take account of the difference between an error in reasoning, and the loss or acquisition of a whole perspective on life. To some extent, the difference is marked by LeÂvy-Bruhl's claim that magico-religious thought is sui generis, but this claim, too, can be misleading. For if there were no connection between the perspectives I have talked of and various events in human life, how could they inform those events or be threatened by them? In the context of rites and rituals such connections are of the essence. How could there be harvest, hunting, ®shing, or warrior rites, were there no harvests, hunting, ®shing or ®ghting? It is a general feature of language that words in one context owe their sense and force, partly, to the sense they have in other contexts. Things are no different, in this respect, in magic and religion. But the connections, in complex cultures, are not simply given, once and for all. It depends on how the various elements involved enter, if they do, the lives of particular individuals. That being so, we need to consider, as we shall in a future chapter, whether we can ask in general, with respect to religion, `Does this contradict that?' It may depend not simply on what the subject is, but, also, on what it means to the person asking the question. As we saw in section 4 of chapters 1 and 4, in our discussions of contradiction, this will not always come to the same thing. In that event, neither will the answers people arrive at. These issues can all be raised, as I have shown, from re¯ecting on the work of LeÂvy-Bruhl. In this sense, they are lessons we can learn from him. But, of course, he did not develop his views in these directions. He did not contemplate these further possibilities of sense. Instead, he thought that scienti®c reasoning would prevail, and that magico-religious beliefs were doomed to pass away. The reason he gave was the in¯exibility which comes from the sui generis character of magico-religious belief, its disregard of the facts. In his closing remarks, however, LeÂvy-Bruhl has a moving account of the tensions which may be experienced when logical and prelogical thoughts are present within the same culture. Logical thought is essentially open thought, since it must always be ready to revise its conclusions in the light of new facts. Its story, of necessity, can never have a ®nal chapter. For this very reason, logical thought may seem incomplete compared with the immediacy of experience which comes from participation in mystical realities. LeÂvy-Bruhl says that


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we need look no further than to belief in God for an example of such participation in our culture. Any rational attempt to know God seems both to unite the thinking subject with God and at the same time to remove Him to a distance. The necessity of conforming with the claims of logic is opposed to a participation between man and God which is not to be represented without contradiction. Thus knowledge is reduced to a very small matter. But what need is there of this rational knowledge to the believer who feels himself at one with his God? Does not the consciousness which he possesses of his participation in the Divine essence procure him an assurance of faith, at the price of which logical certainty would always be something colourless and cold and almost a matter of indifference?43

No doubt religious beliefs are regarded as illogical, but each time they reappear they come with a fresh fervour which is attractive. `This is because they promise that which neither a purely positive science nor any theory of philosophy can hope to attain: a direct and intimate contact with the essence of being, by intuition, interpenetration, the mutual communion of subject and object, full participation and immanence, in short, that which Plotinus has described as ecstasy.'44 LeÂvy-Bruhl even admits that the desire for such experiences is more intense in us than the desire for knowledge: Ìt lies deeper within us and its source is more remote.'45 It is important that we recognise the difference between logical and prelogical thought, and that both are present even in our own culture. Why, then, does LeÂvy-Bruhl believe that, in the end, logical thought will prevail? It is because it involves an inherent intolerance which will secure this end: `the greater the advance made by logical thought, the more seriously does it wage war upon ideas which, formed under the dominance of the law of participation, contain implied contradictions or express preconceptions which are incompatible with experience. Sooner or later such ideas are threatened with extinction, that is, they must be dissolved.'46 Yet, even granting the intolerance in logical and scienti®c thought, why must the outcome of its clash with religious thought be as LeÂvyBruhl envisaged? That primitive thought was and is being swamped by a scienti®c and technological culture, but what does it mean to say that this must happen? The anticlimax answer to why LeÂ vy-Bruhl thought it had to happen is provided by Evans-Pritchard: `LeÂvy43 44

LeÂvy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 384. 45 Ibid., p. 385. Ibid., pp. 384 ± 5.

46

Ibid., p. 383.


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Bruhl was dominated, as were almost all writers of the period, by notions of evolution and inevitable progress.'47 To the end, LeÂvyBruhl could not bring himself to speak of the logic of primitive thought, or the logic of religious beliefs. For him, these concepts remain prelogical. Had he looked in another direction, had he contemplated the variety of meanings in our discourse, including religious meanings, LeÂvy-Bruhl might have seen why Wittgenstein said: Àny logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us.'48 47 48

Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 91. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell 1984 (1929), p. 62e.

chapter 11

Berger: the avoidance of discourse

1 pluralism and marketing religion As we saw in the last chapter, LeÂvy-Bruhl differs from the other writers we considered in that whereas they advance reductionist theses concerning religion, convinced that they understood the confusion which is its essence, he posed the question of whether we do understand religious belief. The reductionists, of necessity, reduce religion to some confused version of other forms of activity. In considering the work of the sociologist Peter Berger we come up against something we began to explore in what I called logical inversions in Durkheim's thought, namely, the possibility of confusion in the very language we are offered to think about religion. Further, as we shall see, this language may be such that, by its very nature, it erodes our sensibilities with respect to religion. Having come thus far in an exploration of various theories which attempt to explain religion away, it will seem to be an extreme case of stating the obvious if we say that religion ®nds itself in a highly pluralistic culture. Yet, however obvious, the fact is worth stating, since the hermeneutics of contemplation is concerned with the question of what should be the philosophical reaction to that situation. It has to avoid a weakness often to be found in the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of recollection. Both pass each other like ships in the night because they do not choose worthy enough opponents. The point is not to deny that religion can be and always is, either occasionally or pervasively, what the hermeneutics of suspicion exposes and attacks. The point is to recognise that religion can be, and is, to varying extents, something else as well. Similarly, the point is not to deny the hermeneutics of recollection's complaint that religious belief is often caricatured, but to show that criticisms which are powerful opposing perspectives of religion are 267

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often caricatured in return by the hermeneutics of recollection. The opposition is characterised as religion gone wrong, as though its reasons and values cannot be what they claim to be. In this way, both forms of hermeneutics are guilty of the avoidance of discourse, of not allowing discourse to be itself in saying what it wants to say. As a result one fails to do justice to the very opposition between religious and anti-religious beliefs; that opposition is not shown in its strongest form and, hence, not fully understood. As we saw at the close of our discussions of Durkheim, in chapter 9, the task of doing justice to such opposition is not an easy one. To repeat: it is `the problem of how to present moral or religious world-views in such a way that the passion behind them, which has to be evident if one is to recognise them for what they are, is clearly in view, along with the conception of the good which they embody, while at the same time equal justice is done to alternative and even hostile conceptions'.1 It is this problem which faces the hermeneutics of contemplation. In its critical response to discussions of the problems facing religion in a pluralistic culture its central question will be this: do the discussions involve or lead to the avoidance of discourse? In the present chapter, this question will be asked of certain ways of discussing religion and questions of meaning and values to be found in the sociology of knowledge. The reason for doing so is that the kind of discussion we shall examine is common, not only in academia, but far beyond it. It is no small matter, therefore, if it can be shown to involve an extreme case of the avoidance of discourse.2 Peter Berger offers the following account of the pluralistic culture in which religion ®nds itself: `The pluralistic situation is, above all, a market situation.'3 This is said to have the following consequences: `the crucial sociological and social-psychological characteristic of the pluralistic situation is that religion can no longer be imposed, but must be marketed.'4 Thus, a problem faces religion which it shares with other social movements: Ìn such a situation, all social movements may be faced with the problem of how to keep going in a 1

2

3 4

Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, Part Four: `Religion as a Social Construct', p. 173. My interest in this chapter is in a speci®c sociological view, since it has invaded language and become a common parlance for many, not in whether Peter Berger continues to hold this view. Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1973, p. 142. Ibid., p. 148.

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milieu that no longer takes for granted their de®nitions of reality.'5 The vital question posed by the hermeneutics of contemplation is whether the language we are offered in which to understand religion's pluralistic situation, the language of the market, marketing, and strategies for survival, involves the avoidance of discourse. It is not dif®cult to see that it does. First, Berger characterises social movements as having the aim of `how to keep going'. Here we have another case of the logical inversion we found in Durkheim in section 3 of chapter 9. If a movement's interests are strong, it will keep going, but it does not have those interests in order to keep going. `Keeping going' becomes of primary interest when there is a threat of things falling apart. But, it may be retorted, there is a threat of things falling apart. Believers cannot simply bury their heads in the sand. True enough, but Berger's reaction leads to the second reason why his analysis involves the avoidance of discourse. Second, if a movement meets the challenges of others purely in terms of pragmatic accommodation what is distinctively its own will be lost. Other challenging discourses will be met by avoiding one's own. Yet, this is precisely the strategy Berger recommends: `The practical dif®culties must be met by means of ``social engineering'' ± in the accommodating posture, reorganising the institution in order to make it ``more relevant'' to the modern world; in the resisting posture, maintaining or revamping the institution so as to serve as a viable plausibility structure for reality-de®nitions that are not con®rmed by the larger society.'6 Third, Berger gives odd reasons for saying that challenges must be accommodated. He says that `the `òutside'' world is attractive'.7 But saying that worldliness is attractive will hardly be news to any religious believers, not simply to the neo-orthodox Christians whom Berger has in mind. Presumably that is why they agree that all have sinned. What will surprise them is the suggestion that the attractiveness of worldliness is the very reason for accommodating it! One seems to be given a theoretical justi®cation for Oscar Wilde's remark, `The only thing I can't resist is temptation'. Here, the language of sin and temptation is being ignored. Fourth, we see why accommodation is so easy in Berger's sociology of knowledge, namely, that, for him, religious movements are simply 5

Ibid., p. 158.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid., p. 163.

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`subjects of ``fashion'' '.8 This robs us of a language in which criticism and counter-criticism can take place. For example, is the ecumenical movement the ìncreasingly friendly collaboration between the different groups engaged in the religious market' as `demanded by the pluralistic situation',9 or a marriage of convenience born of political or economic prudence? My aim is not to answer that question, or even to suggest that it can be answered, unequivocally, in one way rather than another. It is to argue that the talk of `subjects of fashion' avoids a discourse in which it can even be a serious question at all. Fifth, as the result of the terminology we are offered, discussion degenerates, not into the pragmatics of legitimation, but into the legitimation of pragmatics. For example: `Psychologism, be it of a Freudian, neo-Freudian, or Jungian variety, allows the interpretation of religion as a ``symbol system'' that ``really'' refers to psychological phenomena. This particular lesson has the great advantage, realized particularly in America, of legitimating religious activities as some sort of psychotherapy.'10 The language of àllowing' and àdvantage' avoids a discourse, such as we had in chapter 8, which affords the opportunity for a detailed, critical discussion of relations between Freudianism and religion. Sixth, given the avoidance of discourse we have witnessed, it is not surprising to ®nd Berger, at times, equating the value of standards and beliefs with their survival, and their lack of value with their demise: Àt best, honour and chastity are seen as ideological leftovers in the conscience of obsolete classes, such as military of®cers or ethnic grandmothers.'11 J. L. Austin claimed that òur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetime of many generations',12 to which it has been replied: Àustin gives no reason for ignoring the possibility that some distinctions and connections which might be worth preserving have disappeared. How does their disappearance show they were not ``worth preserving''?'13 8 11 12 13

9 Ibid., p. 140. 10 Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 145. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hawsfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1974, p. 78. J. L. Austin, À Plea For Excuses', in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds., Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1961, p. 130. Henry Le Roy Finch, Wittgenstein ± The Late Philosophy, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1977, p. 22, fn.

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The same question can be put to Berger. His blunt reply is: `He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his de®nitions of reality.'14 We recognise, all too well, examples of coercion where one cultural big stick has swamped another, or even massacred it out of existence. But Berger's analysis is not offered as an analysis of such speci®c circumstances, but as a general analysis of cultural interaction. There are times when Berger seems to recognise the paucity of the language he offers: À lot will depend, naturally, on one's basic assumptions about man whether one will bemoan or welcome these transformations. What to one will appear as a profound loss will be seen by another as the prelude to liberation.'15 Quite so, but Berger's analysis makes it impossible to see why it should matter to anyone whether things go one way rather than another. Serious discourse is avoided. Seventh, it is no surprise, given Berger's analysis, that questions of truth are avoided. It is not that he does not raise the issue, but since he has ignored the substantive, normative content of various movements, what `truth' becomes, for him, is simply anything which does not change among what he regards as relativities. We ®nd him wondering whether there are `prototypical human gestures that appear timeless and that may be considered as constants in history',16 or whether there is an ìntrinsic linkage between certain institutional processes and certain structures of consciousness'.17 Because he has avoided a discourse in which people are seen to have absolute values, he cannot see that àbsolute', in such contexts, does not refer to universality, but to measures which people hold absolutely in their lives. Not realising this, Berger attempts to settle questions of value by surveys. But, as Flannery O'Connor says: `When we are invited to represent the country according to survey, what we are asked to do is to separate mystery from manners and judgements from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper. We are asked to form our consciences in the light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as absolute.'18 14 15 16 17 18

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin Books 1966, p. 127. Berger, et. al., The Homeless Mind, p. 87. Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels, New York: Doubleday 1970, p. 73. Berger, et al., The Homeless Mind, p. 159. Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being, sel. and ed. Sally Fitzgerald, New York: Random House, Vintage Books 1980, p. 100.

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Eighth, the avoidance of the discourse of values leads to the radical conceptual mislocation of the religious concept of transcendence. Berger thinks that his analysis is the necessary background to its location: Only after the theologian has confronted the historical relativity of religion can he genuinely ask where in this history, it may, perhaps, be possible to speak of discoveries ± discoveries, that is, that transcend the relative character of their infrastructures. And only after he has really grasped what it means to say that religion is a human product or projection can he begin to search, within this array of projections, for what may turn out to be signals of transcendence.19

We are not in a position to comment on all the concepts Berger makes use of in these remarks until we probe more deeply into the conceptual confusions about discourse, more generally, that lead to the analysis we are considering. We have seen enough in our discussions of Feuerbach and others, however, to see that there is a tension between the claim that religion is a product of projection, and the claim that it may possess a genuine insight concerning religious transcendence. Of course, ìnsight' is too strong a word for Berger's analysis. He can speak of no more than `signals' of transcendence because, as we have seen, he ignores the substantive content of religious traditions in which different conceptions of transcendence may be found. A religious person may be drawn to some of these, but not others. A person may think there is something to learn from more than one conception, and so on. It is in such contexts that a religious search for truth has its sense. One will never understand hopes of transcendence by transcending the contexts which give those hopes their sense. Even if one speaks of `signals' those contexts are essential, since to be a signal is to be taken in a certain way. A signal entails a setting wider than itself. That setting is the discourse Berger avoids. When we look back at the eight implications of the sociology of knowledge Berger advocates, we can appreciate the existence of the avoidance of language it implies. Berger says more than he realises in his claim that `The sociologist will be driven time and again by the very logic of his discipline, to debunk the social systems he is studying.'20 We have seen that, according to the logic of his argument, social movements have `how to keep going' as their aim; 19 20

Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 189. Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology, Harmondsmith: Penguin Books 1975, p. 51.

Berger's sociological story

273

that they will do anything to achieve this irrespective of their values; that any attractive temptation will be a suf®cient reason for succumbing to it; that these issues, anyway, are simply subjects of fashion; that anything is justi®ed as long as it works; that whatever survives is of value, and whatever dies is of no value; that `truth' must be found in what movements have in common; and that among the relativities of social movements there may be some signals of religious transcendence. This is the logic which leads to the radical avoidance of a discourse of seriousness. What we still have to explore are the routes by which someone is tempted to think of discourse in this way in the ®rst place. We have seen the consequences of the confusion, but we must uncover its source. 2 berger's sociological story It may seem odd, at ®rst, to accuse the sociology of knowledge of the avoidance of discourse, because it seems that its whole rationale is to protest against the impositions of theories of meaning on human practices. Language is apparently called back to its natural, practical contexts from theoretical distortions. The theoretical formulations of reality, whether they be scienti®c or philosophical or even mythological, do not exhaust what is `real' for the members of a society. Since this is so, the sociology of knowledge must ®rst of all concern itself with what people `know' as `reality' in their everyday non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, common-sense `knowledge' rather than ìdeas' must be the central focus for the sociology of knowledge. It is precisely this `knowledge' that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist.21

The sociology of knowledge has to undertake this task, we are told, precisely because philosophy has failed to perform it: The sociology of knowledge understands human reality as socially constructed reality. Since the constitution of reality has traditionally been a central problem of philosophy, this understanding has certain philosophical implications. In so far as there has been a strong tendency for this problem, with all the questions it involves, to become trivialized in contemporary philosophy, the sociologist may ®nd himself, to his surprise perhaps, the inheritor of philosophical questions that the professional philosophers are no longer interested in considering.22 21 22

Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 210 ±11.

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This is a bold claim. As we shall see, it cannot be substantiated. Instead, Berger's sociology of knowledge avoids that contemplative interest in discourse which is so intimately related to a philosophical investigation of the nature of reality.23 It offers us a terminology which obscures and, indeed, makes impossible that very interest. That terminology can be seen in what I shall call Berger's sociological story. In the ®rst stage of his story, Berger presents a human being as the radical inventor of the world in which he/she lives. `Man manufactures a tool and by that action enriches the totality of physical objects present in the world. Once produced, the tool has a being of its own that cannot readily be changed by those who employ it.'24 Ignoring the radical change of context, Berger proceeds: `Man invents a language and then ®nds that both his speaking and thinking are dominated by its grammar. Man produces values and discovers that he feels guilt when he contravenes them.'25 There is a difference between speaking of a language within which it makes sense to speak of inventive activities, and speaking of language itself as if it were the product of invention. Inventiveness presupposes intelligibility and therefore cannot be invoked to explain its origin. Similarly, grammar and guilt are not the consequences of language and values, but are their logical implications. One cannot have a language in which it makes no difference whether one says one thing rather than another, or values where it makes no difference whether they are infringed or not. In the second stage of his story, Berger presents human beings as the victims of their own inventions: `the basic co-ordinates within which one must move and decide have still been drawn by others, most of them strangers, many of them long in their graves.'26 Berger has to recognise that we are born into a society and a culture which we did not invent. People's relations to their world vary enormously. These cannot be reduced to `being a victim'. Further, the experience of those who do feel that they are victims cannot be equated with the fact that they did not make their world, since that is true of anyone, no matter what their relation to the world may be. 23

24 25

For an extended argument which attempts to establish the connection between contemplation and philosophical enquiry, see D. Z. Phillips, Philosophy's Cool Place, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 19. 26 Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 53. Ibid.

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In the third stage of his sociological story, Berger presents all social institutions as necessarily coercive. As with Berger's conception of people as victims of their own inventions, his general thesis concerning coercion prevents him from giving any account of particular instances of coercion and victimisation. Àbove all,' he says, `society manifests itself by its coercive power.'27 When he gives the law as an example of coercion, we might expect him to provide features of institutions, or institutions as such, that he regards as coercive. This he cannot do for he says that `the same coercive objectivity characterises society as a whole and is present in all social institutions, including those institutions that were founded on consensus'.28 Clearly, for Berger, `coercive' cannot refer to a feature of some institutions, but not others. He insists: Ìt is important to stress that this controlling character is inherent in institutionalization as such.'29 The problem is that although Berger does not want to equate this control with tyranny, he does equate it with coerciveness: This (most emphatically) does not mean that all societies are variations of tyranny. It does mean that no human construction can be accurately called a social phenomenon unless it has achieved that measure of objectivity that compels the individual to recognise it as real. In other words, the fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute itself and impose itself as reality. 30

Berger seems to be referring to the various parameters of meaning that one ®nds in a culture. The puzzle is why these should be called coercive. Why are they said to impose themselves on us? After all, when the child or the adult is initiated into various activities, they come to possibilities of sense in their lives which would not be a reality for them otherwise. At the fourth stage of his sociological story, Berger asks for the reason why human beings, who have been said to be the inventors of language, become its victims, and live their lives in institutions said to be necessarily coercive. He answers as follows: `What lies at the bottom of this apparently inevitable pressure towards consensus is probably a profound human desire to be accepted, presumably by whatever group is around to do the accepting.'31 Here we are back with the familiar logical inversion we found in Durkheim. People do 27 29 30 31

28 Ibid. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 21. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 72. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 21. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 87.

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not have common interests in order to be accepted, their mutual acceptance, their bonds, are in their common interests. Berger sublimes a motive for having interests, the need to be accepted, which cannot account for genuine immersion in those interests. The person Berger depicts simply wants to be accepted, no matter by whom. This is the slavish conformist who craves acceptance, in Berger's words, `by whatever group is around to do the accepting'. But this servile state is offered as the analysis of genuine interest. The ®fth and ®nal stage of Berger's sociological story follows from the fact that we are all supposed to have this deep need to be accepted. It becomes natural to ask what it is we fear, if we are not accepted. Berger replies: èvery nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle',32 and concludes that `to live in the social world is to live an ordered and meaningful life'.33 Berger's identi®cation of `the meaningful' and `the social', and of `being social' with `being sane' cannot be maintained. We saw in discussing Prometheus' gift of ®re to humankind, in chapter 2, that the conditions under which we can arrive at what is worthwhile in life are the same conditions under which life can seem disappointing, destructive, and worthless. This is why `the meaningful' and `the social' cannot be identi®ed. Family relationships have their sense within the social institution of the family, but those relationships can be destructive as well as constructive, can tear apart as well as bind together. If the ordered and the meaningful were entailed by the social context, we would have to say that the bankrupt businessman who commits suicide, whose distress is unintelligible apart from social factors, dies an ordered and meaningful death. Similar dif®culties arise from Berger's equation of `being social' with `being sane'. Sometimes, when Berger speaks of the difference between sanity and insanity, he has in mind the distinction between a language-user and a person devoid of language. But this distinction will not serve the purposes he has in mind when he speaks of the threat of meaninglessness in life. Living a social life is no protection against that threat, because that is the very context in which it has its sense. Once again, this is the mixed character of Prometheus' gift. So it will not do to say, `Seen in the perspective of the individual, every 32 33

Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 33. Ibid., p. 30.

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nomos represents the bright ``dayside'' of life, tenuously held onto against the sinister shadows of the ``night''.'34 So far from our social world having the function of staving off nightmares, it gives to those nightmares such sense as they have. Neither will it do to say that `the individual is provided by society with various methods to stave off the nightmare world of anomy and to stay within the safe boundaries of the established nomos',35 since but for the established nomos there would not be anything to stave off. So far, we have seen that Berger's sociological story is made up of ®ve metaphysical abstractions which, in a more general sense than that discussed in the previous section, involve the avoidance of discourse. Human beings, the inventor of meanings, become coerced by their own meanings. They submit to coercive institutions due to their desire to be accepted, an acceptance which is protection against anomy. We can see how this sociological story avoids recognising the centrality and importance of discourse. It is easy to think of many scenarios which would ®t the story. For example, a desperately lonely person invents a naval background for himself in order to join a local club. Soon he is trapped by his own creation, since although he dislikes much that goes on in the club, he cannot free himself because the club is the means to social acceptance, an acceptance which protects him against the desperate loneliness in his heart. But the particularity of this example, or of any other, is of no use to Berger, since he claims to be giving a general account of our being in the world. His language is supposed to re¯ect `what people ``know'' about reality in their everyday non- or pre-theoretical lives'.36 The story we are offered is supposed to be grounded in the common-sense which philosophy is said to distort. What has happened is that by generalising from particular cases or some version of them, Berger avoids the wider discourse in which these cases have their sense. 3 the fate of values and criticism What happens to values in Berger's sociological story? They become organisational concepts. This can be seen in individual and social contexts. First, in the context of the individual, moral integrity becomes 34 36

35 Ibid. Ibid., p. 33. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p. 27.

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equated with personal integration. From this psychological perspective, what is important is whether I feel comfortable with myself. The problem is that this requirement is met by a well-integrated rogue, or any form of mediocrity at peace with itself. There is no room here for a religious ethic in which supreme goodness is out of reach, and where grace is needed to account for the gap between ourselves and it. As Flannery O'Connor has said, the need for comfortable emotions would be anathema to such an ethic: `There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that the journey is often impeded by emotion.' 37 Religious faith is not a function of integrated emotions. On the contrary, emotions are subject to the demands of faith. Second, in a social context, values are treated as the means by which social solidarity is achieved. But no concern with good and evil can give primacy to rules of association as such. To allow such primacy is to remain at the level of manners where no logical space can be found for good or evil, grace or mystery. There is a level at which we are content with relativistic judgements about the customs, practices and values we see around us. We are content with saying that according to one group, such-and-such is of value, but that according to another group, something else is of value. Here there are descriptions, but no evaluations. Within such relativities, there is little room for mystery. There is no room for the question, `What is of value?' Flannery O'Connor will not allow such questions to be put aside. She says, in her typically forthright manner: `My standard is: when in Rome, do as you have done in Milledgeville.'38 Writing to John Hawkes, she says: You say one becomes èvil' when one leaves the herd. I say that depends on what the herd is doing. The herd has been known to be right, in which case the one who leaves it is doing evil. When the herd is wrong, the one who leaves it is not doing evil but the right thing. If I remember rightly, you put that word, evil, in quotation marks which means the standards you judge it by are relative: in fact you would be looking at it there with the eyes of the herd.39

We can see how, at an individual and social level, Berger's story 37 38

O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 100. 39 Ibid., p. 456. Ibid., p. 220.

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robs us of a discourse of value. Discussion in terms of personal integration or social solidarity cannot accommodate the concept of value. Whether organisation at an individual or social level is worthwhile depends on its character, not simply on its ef®cacy. To call something `moral' simply because it belongs to some form of organisation can never be a mode of vindication, let alone a ®nal vindication. In these matters, the values are primary, a primacy in terms of which any form of organisation would be subject to an additional moral, political or religious mode of discrimination. The fate of criticism follows the fate of values in Berger's sociological story. Criticism of movements and institutions is simply characterised as threats to the status quo, and answers to such criticism are simply characterised as legitimations of the status quo. Legitimations, we are told, pass for knowledge in a social collectivity. They have the function, it is said, of defending and obscuring the inherent fragility of the nomos being questioned: `Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group.'40 This language robs us of familiar distinctions we want to draw. We know that there is a difference between reasons and rationalisations, but, in Berger's analysis, reasons are rationalisations. Again, what Berger does is to trade on circumstances we know which give his analysis its surface plausibility. Genuine criticisms of institutions can run into a blank wall of protectiveness. Kafka and Solzhenitsyn have shown us how soul-destroying that lack of response can be. But Berger robs this very phenomenon of its force by his general thesis about all social movements and institutions. Berger can give no account of intellectual movements such as science or philosophy which are themselves critical in character. How can they be threatened by the very critical enquiry which is their concern? Berger's generalities rob us of a responsible discourse in this context, as they do at the other end of the institutional spectrum, as it were. We cannot assume, simply because criticism is forbidden, that this is due to a strategy by which the character of the institution is obscured or even falsi®ed. Think of myths, sagas or other traditions which proclaim eternal truths. One either accepts 40

Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 42.

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such truths or is estranged from them. They are not there to be bargained with. This is because of the kind of truths they are. Criticism is not forbidden in order to hide the fragility of the beliefs, although there are other situations where this would be the case. Berger's generalities rob us of a discourse where these distinctions can be made. For similar reasons, a person who ®nds himself in an institution, and does not criticise it, is said by Berger to be necessarily a victim of bad faith: `The professor putting on an act that pretends to be wisdom comes to feel wise. The preacher ®nds himself believing what he preaches. The soldier discovers martial stirrings in his breast as he puts on his uniform.'41 As given, these are examples of bad faith. We can recognise them as such, however, only because we are aware of that in academic, clerical or military vocations which they distort. Berger presents them as though they are the whole story. Although Berger is committed to the view that absorption in an activity is necessarily bad faith, he wants to deny that such absorption is deliberate play-acting: Deliberate deception requires a degree of psychological self-control that few people are capable of. That is why insincerity is rather a rare phenomenon. Most people are sincere, because this is the easiest course to take psychologically . . . Sincerity is the consciousness of the man who is taken in by his own act. Or as it has been put by David Riesman, the sincere man is the one who believes in his own propaganda.42

The analogy throughout Invitation to Sociology is with the theatre: an actor is more than his/her roles. The analogy does not hold. Actors have a life apart from the roles they play. Of course, an actor or actress may say that acting is his/her life, and they need not be acting when they say that. We can distinguish between `playing at things' and `being in things', but, in Berger's hands, `being in things' becomes playing at them, just as sincerity becomes self-deception. Berger's discourse is not genuine because it avoids discourse in which what is genuine has any application. 4 the fate of alienation and liberation The concepts of àlienation' and `liberation' play an important part in Berger's sociological story. He de®nes alienation as follows: `The 41

Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 113.

42

Ibid., p. 127.

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281

essence of all alienation is the imposition of a ®ctitious inexorability upon the humanly constructed world' by which `choices become destiny'.43 In criticism of my earlier remarks about the bankrupt who commits suicide, it might be said that I am insensitive to the fact that the poor devil who goes out of the window is coerced by the institution within which he works. What he needs is precisely to realise that he has a choice where he thinks he has none. Is not this an example of Berger's alienated person, someone who thinks that a social construct is an inescapable fact? Isn't this why he kills himself ? Within the parameters of his institutional life, he thinks he has no option. His institutional rejection, his bankruptcy, leads, tragically, to his personal destruction, his suicide.44 My point, however, is not to deny those particular situations of which we ®nd distorted echoes in Berger's work. It is certainly not to deny that people may think they have no choices when, in fact, they have. (Although, whether this is so can itself be the subject of moral disagreement.) My point is that the perverse generality of Berger's analysis robs us of a discourse in which distinctions between choice and necessity are made, and in which disagreements about these can be expressed. Berger seeks to by-pass this discourse in such a way that constitutes a denial of its very possibility. He says: [T]the faithful husband tells himself that he has `no choice' but to `programme' his sexual activity in accordance with his marital role, suppressing any lustful alternatives as ìmpossibilities' . . . Or again, the faithful executioner may tell himself that he has `no choice' but to follow the `programme' of head-chopping, suppressing both the emotional and moral inhibitions (compassion and scruples, say) to this course of action, which he posits as inexorable necessity for himself qua executioner.45

The indiscriminate nature of Berger's analysis can be seen in the way he runs together the case of the executioner who has genuine scruples, and the case of a faithful husband who rules out in®delity as impossible. He presents both as victims of alienation. Berger does not see that the husband's refusal to regard in®delity as an option is itself an expression of the moral perspective he embraces. Berger seems blind to the possibility of a person regarding that perspective as 43 44 45

Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, pp. 101± 2. I owe these criticisms to C. G. Prado. They were made of an unpublished 1976 paper based entirely on The Social Reality of Religion. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 99.

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absolute. His allegiance to it need have nothing to do with the threat of anomy. Berger suggests that such an allegiance is confused, since, he claims, `the plurality of social worlds in modern society' implies that `the structures of each particular world are experienced as relatively unstable and unreliable'.46 Again, the generality of this claim cannot be sustained. Why should noting the mere existence of values other than one's own lead one to regard one's own values as relatively unstable or unreliable? Of course that may happen. For Berger, it must happen. But it may not: one's allegiance to one's own values may be strengthened, and one may combat the others in a ®ght which will be informed and instructed by the values of the perspective one embraces. Given Berger's analysis of alienation, it is not surprising to ®nd him characterising religion as a prime agent of alienation. Religion makes us think that there is an order which is ®xed and unchanging. It is `the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly signi®cant'.47 How does it succeed? `The fundamental ``recipe'' of religious legitimation is the transformation of human products into supra- or non-human facilities. The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production.'48 This analysis should remind us of the discussion of Feuerbach. There, too, instead of waiting on distinctively religious meanings, divine realities become human realities. There is an important difference between Feuerbach and Berger, however. In the former, but not the latter, a religion of humanity replaces divine ®ctions. We get something very different in Berger's analysis. For example, the religious claim that God remembers when we forget is said to be a protective device against the precariousness of human memories. The religious fear of sinning against God is analysed as a sanction against any form of questioning, and a protection against anomy. `To go against the order of society is always to risk plunging into anomy. To go against the order of society as religiously legitimated, however, is to make a compact with the primal forces of darkness.'49 Again, the point is not to deny that this may happen. Religiously, it would be recognised as a deviation. But Berger avoids a discourse in which a distinction between the genuine and the deviant can be drawn. 46 47 48

Berger, et al., The Homeless Mind, pp. 73 ±4. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 37. 49 Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 96.

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This is because the deviant cases are offered as an analysis of standard religious beliefs. This becomes all the more obvious when Berger offers more detailed analyses of what he takes religious belief to be. For him, as for some of the other thinkers we have studied, it is a craving for comfort and shelter. He could make little of those for whom dying to the desire for compensation, realising that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, is one of the hallmarks of truth in religion. On the occasions he does try to account for such beliefs, he gives grotesque analyses of them. For example, `dying to the self ' is seen as a masochist surrender of the self due to fear of loneliness. Just imagine trying to give such an account of someone like St John of the Cross. Is he to become a case of sublimated self-interest? This would not be surprising given Berger's analysis of surrender to God: The Ì am nothing ± He is everything' now become enhanced by the empirical unavailability of the other to whom the masochistic surrender is made. After all, one of the inherent dif®culties of maschoism in human relations is that the other may not play the sadistic role to satisfaction. ± The sadistic fellowman may refuse or forget to be properly all-powerful, or may simply be incapable of pulling off the act. Even if he succeeds in being something of a credible master for a while, he remains vulnerable, limited, mortal ± in fact remains human. The sadistic god is not handicapped by these empirical imperfections. He remains invulnerable, in®nite, immortal by de®nition. The surrender to him is ipso facto protected from the contingencies and uncertainties of merely social masochism ± for ever.50

The objection to this analysis is extremely simple: it is the depiction of twisted, vulgar motivation which can be contrasted with genuine self-surrender. Having concentrated on religion as one of the prime agents of alienation, Berger shows how it can also legitimise de-alienation: Ìn the Biblical tradition the confrontation of the social order with the majesty of the transcendent God may also relativize this order to such an extent that one may validly speak of de-alienation ± in the sense that, before the face of God, the institutions are revealed as nothing but human works, devoid of inherent sanctity or immortality.'51 True enough, but Berger does not understand the religious character of this relation, one that cannot be reduced to his sociological terminology. For these reasons, his disclaimer, `We would also 50

Ibid., p. 65.

51

Ibid., p. 105.

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emphasize very strongly that religion need not necessarily entail bad faith',52 does not carry any conviction. Having seen what Berger means by alienation, what account does he give of human liberation? His main account is sociological, but he also gives a psychological account of liberation. The latter kind of liberation depends on a brute fact which puzzles Berger: we ®nd ourselves making absolute judgements in face of evil monstrosities. He is puzzled, because, scienti®cally, he thinks that although `we may be outraged or appalled . . . that is only because we come from a certain background and have been socialized into certain values'.53 No wonder absolute moral judgements puzzle him; he ®nds them a curiosity: `The imperative to save a child from murder, even at the cost of killing the putative murderer, appears to be curiously immune to relativizing analysis.'54 But they are only curious imperatives because Berger analyses moral regard in terms of conformity to convention. He does not distinguish between such conformity and a genuine regard for values. Unsurprisingly, such conformity does not do justice to the horror we feel at a child-murderer. To appreciate that horror we have to give up the analysis of values in terms of conformity. Berger's main analysis of freedom is sociological. We come to see we are free when we realise that nothing has an absolute hold on us. We are then free to manipulate things for our own ends. This is why, according to Berger, we admire the swindler, the charlatan, and the cheat: `These ®gures symbolize a social Machiavellianism that understands society thoroughly and then, untrammelled by illusions, ®nds a way of manipulating society for its own ends.'55 On Berger's analysis, the liberated person is simply an unprincipled opportunist. Ònly he who understands the rules of the game is in a position to cheat.'56 Berger, at times, seems to realise the cynical consequences of his own analysis and he tries to draw back from them: `Let no one quickly jump to the conclusion that such an ambition is always ethically reprehensible. That depends, after all, on how one evaluates the ethical status of the system in question.'57 That escape route is not open to Berger, given the analysis he has already made of morality: Ànother system of social control that exerts its pressures 52 54 56

Ibid., p. 101. Ibid. Ibid., p. 173.

53 55 57

Berger, A Rumour of Angels, p. 66. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 155. Ibid.

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towards the solitary ®gure in the centre is that of morality, custom and manners.'58 The ®gure at the centre is solitary indeed, and Berger has to admit that, on his analysis, `The concept of the naked self, beyond institutions and roles as the ens realissimum of human being, is at the very heart of modernity.'59 But now this `self ', the liberated person, turns out to be the alienated, rootless person. Berger wants to claim that there is à humanity behind or beneath the roles and norms imposed by society, and that this humanity has profound dignity'.60 But where is this to be found? Berger replies: in an individual's choice. `For instance, it is possible to be fully aware of the relativity and the precariousness of the ways by which men organize their sexuality, and yet commit oneself absolutely to one's own marriage. Such commitment, however, does not require any ontological underpinnings. It dares to choose and to act.'61 Our lives are indeed, precarious, but not because they lack such underpinnings. The precariousness belongs to life itself. In that life, choice will not play the role Berger assigns to it. The act of choice cannot, in itself, create what is worthwhile, since unless one had some conception of worth, the occasion for choice would not arise. By placing the self beyond everything that could inform its choices, Berger robs us of a discourse in which humanity and dignity can be bestowed on a person's choices. There are times when Berger seems to realise the implications of his own analysis. His sociological story turns full circle and ends in contradiction. At the beginning of the story, we were told that to be alienated was to ®nd one's identity within institutions and relationships and to think they create necessities in one's life. Liberation, at the end of the sociological story, is said to be freedom beyond all institutions and relationships. Liberation resides in sheer choice. Does such liberation have a price? Berger replies: ` `àlienation'' is the price of individuation.'62 5 the language of sociology and the sociologising of language Why is it important, from the perspective of the hermeneutics of contemplation, to criticise the language of the sociology of language 58 60 62

59 Berger et al., The Homeless Mind, p. 190. Ibid., p. 90. 61 Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 180. Ibid., p. 83. Berger et al., The Homeless Mind, p. 175.

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in Berger's analysis? We saw, at the outset of his sociological story, that Berger characterised such sociology as the successor to philosophy. He suggested that whereas philosophy had failed to do so, sociology will bring realities back from distortions of them in philosophical and other theories: `The sociologist tries to see what is there. He may have hopes or fears concerning what he may ®nd. But he will try to see regardless of his hopes and fears.'63 These aims sound close to those of the hermeneutics of contemplation, but are they realised? We have seen that Berger's sociological story has a certain plausibility, because it can create echoes of situations in which moral and religious concepts are distorted in various ways. But Berger offers us the language of deviance and distortion as the analysis of the standard use of these concepts. But deviations and distortions are parasitic on normal use. This analysis is no slip on Berger's part. It is related to the very conception of his subject he advances. This conception is elucidated in the following comments: [T]he sociologist, but for the grace of his academic title, is the man who must listen to gossip despite himself, who is tempted to look through keyholes, to read other people's mail, to open closed cabinets . . . What interests us is the curiosity that grips any sociologist in front of a closed door behind which there are human voices. If he is a good sociologist, he will want to open that door, to understand these voices.64

And again: `Sociological perspective can then be understood in terms of such phrases as ``seeing through'', ``looking behind'', very much as such phrases would be employed in common speech ± ``seeing through his game'', ``looking behind the scenes'' ± in other words, ``being up on all the tricks''.'65 It is obvious from these remarks that Berger's analysis belongs to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Things are not what they seem; reality is to be found below the surface of things. That is a claim that we have come across again and again in the thinkers we have discussed. The hermeneutics of contemplation, however, makes us suspicious of this kind of suspicion. We may have every right, in certain circumstances, to speak of things not being what they seem, but any account we give will have to include among its features things we are not suspicious of. We need not take some things at face 63

Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 16.

64

Ibid., p. 30.

65

Ibid., p. 42.

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value, only because some things can be taken at face value. Such is the case with Berger's comments. When I look behind the scenes, I ®nd what is the case, as distinct from what appeared to be the case. When I see through someone's game, or am up to all his tricks, I see what he is doing as distinct from what he wants me to think he is doing. In short, Berger's analysis, the language he uses, the distinctions he makes, are themselves unintelligible without a conception of truth. But that is precisely what he denies. Further, he analyses `truth' in terms of tricks. In opposing his analysis, the hermeneutics of contemplation is concerned to defend the discourse it avoids. Not denying that things can go on below the surface, it restores, for our contemplative attention, surfaces of which that cannot be said. It can be said that the philosophical effect of a critique of Berger's story is a radical reversal of its emphasis. Berger's story claims that reality is below the surface of things. The critique asserts that what we need to pay attention to is the surfaces of things in all their rich variety. And if things do go on below them, it will be by reference to such surfaces that this claim will be understood. If we left the story there, however, we would have ignored a feature of the language of sociology which makes it all the more important to expose its confusions. In the case of some philosophical theses, although they are confused, life goes on without them. The solipsist sympathises with me in my pain as well as the next person. The idealist and the empiricist go and get the same chair when asked to. But things are different where Berger's language is concerned. If this language became one's own, it would actually blind one to genuine possibilities. Berger's fear of cynicism in his views is not misplaced. If it does involve cynicism, then, if it becomes a used language, one's view of things will be cynical too. What we have to face is not simply that this language of sociology distorts the ways we use concepts when not doing sociology. We have to recognise too that the language of sociology can sociologise our language, such that our use of language outside that subject becomes corrupted. It may be thought that if the sociological story is conceptually confused it cannot have the effects I describe. How can it, it will be asked, if the story cannot say what it wants to say? I adapt words used by Hanna Pitkin in reply to the same question asked of rationalism in politics:

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[The sociological story] as an interpretation of what we do is always wrong, because it is logically impossible to do what [the sociological story] says we do. Yet people may ± and many do ± believe in the truth of this false, impossible doctrine and act on it. The result is not that they act [out the story] for that is impossible, but that they act differently from people who believe otherwise . . . There is thus an identi®able and pernicious style . . . that results from believing in the false doctrine of [the sociological story]. That is why [the believer in the story] misunderstands what he is doing, `fails to recognise' the `true spring' of his activity. Acting in accord with [the sociological story] is impossible, acting on it, unfortunately is not.66

As Berger recognises, `non-existent sticks can draw real blood'.67 What would Berger make of these conceptual objections? It is hard to say, since, in these works, for one so given to accommodations between different cultural movements, he is strangely reluctant to enter into any kind of dialogue with other disciplines. The same reluctance, however, is not afforded to other disciplines. For example, he says that ìf the theologian asserts something that can be shown to have never taken place historically or to have taken place in quite a different way from what he asserts, and if this assertion is essential to his position, then he can no longer be reassured that he has nothing to fear from the historian's work'.68 But this cuts both ways. If having claimed to have taken over the philosopher's conceptual tasks, the sociologist of knowledge makes assertions that can be shown to be conceptually confused, or to have a place in discourse quite other than the one being assigned to them, the sociologist can no longer be reassured that there is nothing to fear from the philosopher's work. In the context of our concern with religion, it can be seen that in this sociological context, too, the hermeneutics of suspicion is answerable to the hermeneutics of contemplation, not so that religious beliefs may be retrieved through the hermeneutics of recollection, but so that a discourse may not be avoided in which belief, unbelief, advocacy of religion and opposition to it, can be themselves. 66 67 68

Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, `The Roots of Conservatism', Dissent, Fall 1973, p. 503. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, p. 185. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion, p. 184.

chapter 12

Winch: trying to understand

1 language, belief and reality In chapter 10 we noted an important distinction between LeÂvy-Bruhl and the intellectualism of Tylor and Frazer. They argued that the faulty reasoning of the primitives led to a belief in magic, whereas LeÂvy-Bruhl argued that it was their belief in magic which led to their faulty reasoning. The confusions derive from the fact that primitives live in a world of mystical notions. Evans-Pritchard, as we saw, praised LeÂvy-Bruhl for emphasising differences between the primitives and ourselves, and the distinctiveness of magico-religious beliefs. On the other hand, in treating these beliefs as illusions, LeÂvy-Bruhl had failed, according to EvansPritchard, to discuss `religious facts in terms of the totality of the culture and society in which they are found'.1 Interestingly, the view for which Evans-Pritchard criticises LeÂvyBruhl is, in many ways, similar to an earlier view of his own, one expressed in his classic work, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande.2 Further, there are parallels between his criticisms of LeÂvyBruhl and the criticism of Evans-Pritchard's classic by Peter Winch in his famous paper, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society'.3 An examination of Winch's criticisms and their relation to later developments in his own work will help us to face further complexities in the task which confronts the hermeneutics of contemplation. Just as Evans-Pritchard praised LeÂvy-Bruhl for not attributing faulty reasoning to the primitives, so Winch praises Evans-Pritchard 1 2

3

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965, p. 112. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1937. Evans-Pritchard's views changed, later, in ways sympathetic to religion. See Nuer Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1956. Peter Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society' in Ethics and Action, London: Routledge 1972.

289

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also for refusing to do so. In an earlier exposition of LeÂvy-Bruhl Evans-Pritchard said: The fact that we attribute rain to meteorological causes alone while savages believe that God or ghosts or magic can in¯uence the rain-fall is no evidence that their brains function differently from our brains. It does not show that we `think more logically' than savages, at least not if this expression suggests some kind of hereditary psychic superiority. It is no sign of superior intelligence on my part that I attribute rain to physical causes. I did not come to this conclusion myself by observation and inference, and have, in fact, little knowledge of the meteorological processes that lead to rain. I merely accept what everybody else in my society accepts, namely that rain is due to natural causes. This particular idea formed part of my culture long before I was born into it and little more was required of me than suf®cient linguistic ability to learn it. Likewise a savage who believes that under suitable and natural conditions the rainfall can be in¯uenced by the use of appropriate magic is not on account of this belief to be considered of inferior intelligence. He did not build up his belief from his own observations and inferences but adopted it in the same way as he adopted the rest of his cultural heritage, namely, by being born into it. He and I are both thinking in patterns of thought provided for us by the societies in which we live.4

Having made these important observations, however, EvansPritchard, like LeÂvy-Bruhl, goes on to argue that the primitives are in the grip of illusion in their magical beliefs: It would be absurd to say that the savage is thinking mystically and that we are thinking scienti®cally about rainfall. In either case like mental processes are involved and, moreover, the content of thought is similarly derived. But we can say that the social content of our thought about rainfall is scienti®c, is in accord with objective facts, whereas the social content of savage thought about rainfall is unscienti®c since it is not in accord with reality and may also be mystical where it assumes the existence of supra-sensible forces.5

Like LeÂvy-Bruhl, Evans-Pritchard, in these early views, equates ìn accord with reality' with `scienti®cally veri®ed', the very equation for which, later, he was to criticise LeÂvy-Bruhl. This equation, as Winch says, leads to the following attitude: We know that Zande beliefs in the in¯uence of witchcraft, the ef®cacy of magic medicines, the role of oracles in revealing what is going on and what 4 5

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, `LeÂvy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality', Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Egypt 1934. Quoted in ibid., p. 10. Evans-Pritchard, `LeÂvy-Bruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality'. Quoted in ibid.

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is going to happen, are illusory. Scienti®c methods of investigation have shown conclusively that there are no relations of cause and effect such as are implied by these beliefs and practices. All we can do then is to show how such a system of mistaken beliefs and inef®cacious practices can maintain itself in the face of objections that seem to us so obvious.6

This is the response we have met throughout the book. Combined with the stronger charge of conceptual confusion, it is a classic statement of the hermeneutics of suspicion. One of the most important criticisms Winch makes concerns the claim that whereas science corresponds to reality, magic does not. He is concerned to unravel the confusions which he thinks lead to this conclusion. These have two sources. First, there is the tendency which Wittgenstein called `subliming the logic of our language', that is, taking a concept or a phrase out of its natural contexts, and talking of it as if it had an application where none exists. Winch shows how this happens with the notion of `corresponding to reality'. It is, of course, important to know whether our beliefs correspond to reality. Unless there were an independent check on our beliefs, anything could be said to be true simply by virtue of believing it to be so. So we need to check our beliefs to see whether they are true or false. It is important to note, however, that how they are checked depends on the kind of beliefs they are. This is not simply `given' prior to any context. Once this is realised, we see that the notion of `the independently real' does not belong exclusively to science. That is one way of checking beliefs, but not the only one. Within religion, too, there are ways of checking beliefs. Saint Paul insists that spirits must be tested to see whether they are of God. The Gospel says that if a man claims to love God, but hates his brother, he is a liar. The response to Job's questions is: `Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?' So, as in science, there is a difference between what is the case, and what is thought to be the case. But the difference between the two cases is important. Think of the difference between deciding whether a person is walking alone or with another person, and deciding whether a person is walking with God. But, then, Evans-Pritchard wants to say that the scienti®c criteria for settling scienti®c matters have a true link to an independent reality, whereas religious criteria for determining religious matters do not. What does that mean? Evans-Pritchard cannot refer to scienti®c 6

Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 9.

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procedures without begging the question. Winch says: `We have then to ask how, by reference to what established universe of discourse, the use of those expressions [that is, ``true link'' and `ìndependent reality''] is to be explained; and it is clear that Evans-Pritchard has not answered this question.'7 He has sublimed the logic of these notions. As yet, however, we have not got to the root of the temptation to do so. The deeper reason is found in the second reason why we are tempted to say, in the way Evans-Pritchard does, that science corresponds to reality, but magic does not. This reason is one of the deepest pathologies in philosophy, namely, the assumption that the language in which we express our beliefs, true or false, is itself a belief or set of beliefs about reality. This assumption appears again and again in misunderstandings of the logical point Winch is making. Winch says: `Notice that I am not saying the `èxistence'' of what is spoken of simply consists in the fact that people talk in a certain way; I am saying that what the èxistence' of whatever it is amounts to is expressed (shows itself ) in the way people apply the language they speak.'8 Winch ®rst made these comments in 1975 in response to the misgivings of John Hick who, to the best of my knowledge, still has them and has reiterated them in many discussions. The same confusion is expressed by Alvin Plantinga when he contrasts what he calls mere moves in a language-game with sober truths about the world.9 Recently, Nicholas Wolterstorff falls into the same trap when he says I embrace conceptual relativism, meaning, apparently, `that there is no way things are except relative to some conceptual scheme'.10 But one of the most explicit examples of the confusion Winch is discussing is expressed by Roger Trigg when he says, as though in opposition to Winch, that while a language certainly èxpresses a community's beliefs' these may be mistaken. Trigg wants to insist that Àn essential function of language . . . is to concern itself with what is actually the case. Its business is to attempt to communicate truth.' He thinks that Winch's remarks about science and magic lead 7 8 9 10

Ibid., pp. 13 ±14. Peter Winch, `Meaning and Religious Language' in Trying To Make Sense, Oxford: Blackwell 1987, pp. 113± 14. Alvin Plantinga, Àdvice to Christian Philosophers', Faith and Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 3, July 1984, p. 419. Nicholas Wolterstorff, `Reformed Epistemology' in D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Philosophy of Religion for the Twenty-First Century, London: Macmillan.

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to the view that different languages are `thought of as different attempts to describe the same reality. ``Reality'' is made relative to a language, and if different languages portray the ``the world'' differently, then there must be different worlds.'11 Winch, it seems to me, has an extremely powerful logical rebuttal of these construals of the points he is making. To begin with, he says: Unlike Trigg, I did not speak of a language as expressing a community's beliefs about reality. On the contrary, my main objection to EvansPritchard's treatment of Zande thought was precisely that he did so treat their language . . . But it is speakers of a language who attempt to say what is true, to describe how things are. They do so in the language they speak; and this language attempts no such thing, either successfully or unsuccessfully. Trigg is right to say that, on my view, `different languages cannot be thought of as different attempts to describe the same reality', but wrong to suppose that the alternative which I must accept is that different languages attempt to describe different realities: they do not attempt to describe anything at all.12

Philosophers, of course, raise questions about the reality of our talk of physical objects, or about the reality of our talk of God. These investigations, however, concern the sense of such talk, including what assertions or denials come to in these contexts. A sceptic may deny that one or both of these contexts have the sense which, ordinarily, they are said to have. But to deny this, to show the sceptic that he/she cannot say what he/she wants to say, to bring the sceptic to appreciate the sense, would not be to assert the existence of any particular physical object, or to assert or deny the existence of God. The philosophical investigation of reality is an investigation into the various senses which assertions and denials can have. Winch brings out the confusion which ensues if we think that language itself is a belief or set of beliefs about the nature of reality. I have not seen a reply to this refutation which deserves to be quoted in full: If Tom believes that Harry is in pain and Dick that he is not, then, in the ordinary sense of the world `belief ', Tom and Dick have different beliefs. But according to Trigg's way of speaking, Tom and Dick, because they both speak the same language and mean the same thing by the word `pain', share a common belief: even though their descriptions of Harry are mutually contradictory ± indeed, precisely because they are ± they in a 11 12

Roger Trigg, Reason and Commitment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, p. 15. Peter Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism' in Trying to Make Sense, pp. 195 ±6.

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sense share a common belief about reality: perhaps that it contains such a thing as pain. But if it is possible to af®rm that there is such a thing as pain, it ought to be possible to deny it too. The language in which the denial is couched must be meaningful; and it must mean the same as the language in which what is denied might be af®rmed, else the denial would not contradict the af®rmation. So to deny that there is such a thing as pain, I must mean by `pain' just what someone who af®rms that there is such a thing means by `pain'. Hence we are both still speaking the same language and still, according to Trigg's way of thinking, offering the same `description of reality'. This incoherence illustrates how important it is to recognize that the grammar of a language is not a theory about the nature of reality, even though new factual discoveries and theoretical developments may lead to grammatical changes.13

These conclusions are central in understanding the contemplative task facing philosophers in enquiring into the reality of magic and religion. They are concerned with the sense of that language, an issue logically prior to particular assertions of belief or non-belief. 2 understanding a primitive culture To assent to the logical point Winch is making is not, in itself, to appreciate the sense of magico-religious beliefs, but it is to appreciate the direction in which we have to look. Looking in that direction may seem to be a simple descriptive exercise. Thus, if there is a dispute between Evans-Pritchard and Winch about the Azande it is clear, it may be said, that we must take the word of the anthropologist over that of the philosopher. The former has worked in the ®eld, whereas the other has reached his conclusions from his armchair. Yet, as Evans-Pritchard himself points out, matters are not so simple as that. Missionaries returned with bizarre tales which emphasised differences while ignoring similarities between us and the primitives. Further, even those trained in philosophy and sociology could impose certain theories from those subjects on the lives observed. Evans-Pritchard criticised Durkheim in this respect. Further, he criticised his own earlier view of the Azande when he came to write Nuer Religion. In all these criticisms, the contrast is with the role concepts, practices and beliefs play in the lives of the people being studied. How are these to be understood? That is the complex question Winch tries to answer in his work. 13

Ibid., p. 196.

Understanding a primitive culture

295

It is important to note that Winch is not presenting what he says as a thorough understanding of what Zande beliefs and practices amount to. Indeed, he thinks there is something confused in the notion of thinking that one could have the same understanding as the Azande themselves possess; a point to which I shall return. What he is doing is suggesting the kind of contexts to which these African magical beliefs belong, beliefs which must be distinguished from magical beliefs in our own culture. His suggestions are to be contrasted with those who claim, with such con®dence, to have seen through Zande beliefs. As Winch says, `The philosophically important point here is not the correctness or otherwise of any particular suggested interpretation of Zande thought so much as the kind of reasoning needed to support an interpretation.'14 The previous section has illustrated one kind of reasoning which leads to incoherence. Winch wants to bring out the complex dif®culties which are involved in asking what it is to understand Zande beliefs, dif®culties which, even at the time, he did not think he had faced satisfactorily in Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society'. Some, but not all, of these have to do with the cultural gap between ourselves and the Azande. As Evans-Pritchard says: When a Zande speaks of witchcraft he does not speak of it as we speak of the weird witchcraft of our own history. Witchcraft is to him a commonplace happening and he seldom passes a day without mentioning it . . . To us witchcraft is something which haunted and disgusted our credulous forefathers. But the Zande expects to come across witchcraft at any time of the day or night. He would be just as surprised if he were not brought into daily contact with it as we would be if confronted by its appearance. To him there is nothing miraculous about it.15

How, then, are we related to this phenomenon? In 1976, twelve years after the ®rst publication of Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', Winch was expressing the dif®culty in this way: Despite nuanced differences between English and French, the common culture which they share is suf®cient to enable translation from the one language to the other. In learning French, I am learning a new language, but no new ideas. When I learn French, I learn, for example, how to order in French, but I am not learning what an order is. I learned that in learning how to speak. With mathematics, 14 15

Ibid., p. 202. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, p. 64.

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matters are different. In learning mathematics I am learning how to do mathematics. Winch wants to argue that coming across, say, consulting the poison oracle among the Azande, is like coming across mathematics for the ®rst time; we have to learn what it is to consult a poison oracle. But there is an additional complexity: Even if I know little mathematics I have grown up with and live in a community which cultivates mathematics and I am familiar with the position it occupies in our cultural landscape. The poison oracle on the other hand, is a feature of a cultural landscape which is itself alien to me. Our own culture provides a well-established and well-understood route by which a non-mathematician can learn mathematics. When learned, mathematics has a multitude of well-established applications in the lives people lead in this culture. But there is no place for any àpplication' of Zande magical beliefs and practices in the life which it is open to anyone to lead in contemporary England. And the interest of an English anthropologist in learning about and trying to understand such beliefs and practices will not be directed towards any such practical application.16

It is not that a greater or lesser understanding is called for than in mathematics, but that a different kind of understanding is called for. These points do not mean that there is no contact at all between our culture and that of the Zande, but that we cannot assume that the English language already has the resources, without any extension of its concepts, to understand Zande magic. If it is a matter of extending concepts, the vital question is: which of our concepts are we referring to? In Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society' Winch argues that it is a mistake to assimilate magical practices with our scienti®c practices. Instead, he suggests that it is more fruitful to look for connections between Zande magic and certain religious beliefs and concepts with which we are already acquainted. He is not, of course, identifying our beliefs with theirs, but he is suggesting a direction in which to look if understanding is to be achieved. Let us examine some of these. We have already had reason to note, in the course of this work, one of the major places at which the appeal to magic seems to enter the lives of the practitioners, but another reminder will do no harm: Witchcraft explains why events are harmful to man and not how they happen. A Zande perceives how they happen just as we do. He does not see a witch charge a man but an elephant. He does not see a witch push over the granary, but termites gnawing away its supports. He does not see a 16

Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism', pp. 198 ±9.


297

physical ¯ame igniting thatch, but an ordinary lighted bundle of straw. His perception of how events occur is as clear as our own.17

So while it is true that the Zande do not have the categories of science and non-science, they do have a working distinction between the technical and the magical. These categories may be confused from time to time, as when any illness may be thought of as a liquid which can be sucked out of the body in a magical rite, but confusions of categories occur in any culture. The conceptual confusion is in thinking that the magical practices cannot survive scrutiny by a scienti®c and technological culture. Thus, Alasdair MacIntyre argued: The Azande believe that the performance of certain rites in due form affects their common welfare; this belief cannot in fact be refuted. For they also believe that if the rites are ineffective it is because someone present at them had evil thoughts. Since this is always possible, there is never a year when it is unavoidable for them to admit that the rites were duly performed, but they did not thrive. Now the belief of the Azande is not unfalsi®able in principle (we know perfectly well what would falsify it ± the conjunction of the rite, no evil thoughts and disasters). But in fact it cannot be falsi®ed. Does this belief stand in need of rational criticism? And if so by what standards? It seems to me that one could only hold the belief of the Azande to be rational in the absence of any practice of science and technology in which criteria of effectiveness, ineffectiveness and kindred notions have been built up. But to say this is to recognise the appropriateness of scienti®c criteria of judgement from our standpoint. The Azande do not intend their belief as a piece of science or as a piece of non-science. They do not possess these categories. It is only post eventum, in the light of later and more sophisticated understanding that their belief and concepts can be classi®ed and evaluated at all.18

In MacIntyre's remarks many questions are begged concerning notions such as `welfare', èffectiveness', èvil thoughts', `disaster', `falsi®cation', `classi®cation' and èvaluation'. Are we to say that an understanding of the life of such concepts in our lives is given its most sophisticated analysis in scienti®c or technological terms? It is not a question of jettisoning or revising any of these terms, but of seeing what they come to in different contexts. Philosophical enquiry into the Azande may be sophisticated in the sense that it involves a kind of cultural re¯ection they do not have, but, often, that very 17 18

Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, p. 72. Alasdair MacIntyre, Ìs Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?' in John Hick, ed., Faith and the Philosophers, London: Macmillan 1964, p. 121.

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`sophistication' is not sophisticated enough. For example, here is an anthropological datum MacIntyre says he can make no sense of: According to Spencer and Gillen some aborigines carry about a stick or stone which is treated as if it is or embodies the soul of the individual who carries it. If the stick or stone is lost, the individual anoints himself as the dead are anointed. Does the concept of `carrying one's soul about with one' make sense? Of course we can re-describe what the aborigines are doing and transform it into sense, and perhaps Spencer and Gillen (and Durkheim who follows them) misdescribe what occurs. But if their reports are not erroneous, we confront a blank wall here, as far as meaning is concerned, although it is easy to give the rules for the use of the concept.19

Winch responds: But it does not seem to me so hard to see sense in the practice, even from the little we are told about it here. Consider that a lover of our society may carry about a picture or lock of hair of the beloved; that this may symbolize for him his relation to the beloved and may, indeed, change the relation in all sorts of ways: for example, strengthening it or perverting it.20 Suppose that when the lover loses the locket he feels guilty and asks his beloved for her forgiveness: there might be a parallel here to the aboriginal's practice of anointing himself when he `loses his soul'. And is there necessarily anything irrational about either of these practices? Why should the lover not regard his carelessness in losing the locket as a sort of betrayal of the beloved? Remember how husbands and wives may feel about the loss of a wedding ring. The aborigine is clearly expressing a concern with his life as a whole in this practice; the anointing shows the close connection between such a concern and contemplation of death. Perhaps it is precisely this practice which makes such a concern possible for him, as religious sacraments make certain sorts of concern possible. The point is that a concern with one's life as a whole, involving as it does the limiting conception of one's death, if it is to be expressed within a person's life, can necessarily only be expressed quasi-sacramentally. The form of the concern shows itself in the form of the sacrament.21

A great deal of the trouble comes from MacIntyre's separation of belief and practice, as though the sense of `belief in the soul' could be separated from the rite, as though the latter were a consequence of the belief. He does not see that the possibility of the belief is made possible in the rite. The same confusion is found in the earlier quotation from MacIntyre in which beliefs about welfare and 19 20 21

Ibid., pp. 122± 3. `Compare the role played by Clawdia Chauchat's X-ray photographs in Hans Castorp's affair with her in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain' (Winch). Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', pp. 45 ±6.


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ef®cacy are thought to be separable from the rites, being the ends to which the rites are the means. He does not see that the rites make possible certain conceptions of welfare and ef®cacy, which a purely instrumental view of action cannot capture. The internal relation between belief and practice is expressed by Wittgenstein when he says of Frazer: When he explains to us, for example, that the king must be killed in his prime, because, according to the notions of the savages, his soul would not be kept fresh otherwise, we can only say: where that practice and these views go together, the practice does not spring from the view, but both of them are there.22

The ritual killing is not performed in order to keep the king's soul fresh. The rite itself is an expression of whatever force that idea has. Similarly, that is why Wittgenstein says that if we put `the majesty of death' alongside the slaying of the priest-king we see that they come to the same thing. In his later views, Evans-Pritchard makes the same point: we must beware of imposing a conception of belief on the primitives in which `perception and representation have already fallen apart'. If we do, `We can then say that a person perceives his shadow and believes it to be his soul.' But this would not do justice to the primitives: The question of belief does not arise among primitive peoples. The belief is contained in the shadow. The shadow is the belief. In the same way, a primitive man does not perceive a leopard and believe that it is his totembrother. What he perceives is his totem-brother. The physical qualities of the leopard are fused in the mystical representation of totem, and are subordinated to it.23

Of course, if we take Zande rites as supplements to practical and technological measures, MacIntyre has no dif®culty in showing their underlying incoherence. They are seen as misguided steps to secure the same ends. But must they be seen in this way? Are there no other possibilities? Winch shows that there are. It is true that it is extremely important to the Azande that their crops thrive, and they take careful practical steps to secure that they do. But sometimes crops fail. What is to be said then? It is put down to bad magic. MacIntyre says that this means that since the ef®cacy of the rites cannot be 22

23

Ludwig Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912 ± 1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis and Cambridge, Hackett 1993, p. 119. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 84.

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falsi®ed, there is no year in which they do not thrive. But what does this mean? Surely not that they say the crops thrive when they have failed. They know the consequences of failed crops only too well. But they ®nd a sense in things despite the failure; they are enabled to embrace this sense, and, in that way, to thrive and not be defeated by circumstances. Life is contemplated, not only in efforts to secure good crops, but in face of the possibility of the crops being good or bad. People may come to terms with this in a number of ways. Magic may be one of them. The modes of acceptance win one freedom from dependence on things, not by ensuring that they won't let one down, not by securing one's lot, but by offering something which sustains one no matter what one's lot. The rites are not attempts to secure an outcome, but to express a relation to life no matter what the outcome. To this extent, Winch sees an analogy with the JudaeoChristian conception of `Thy will be done'. Before leaving this suggestion concerning magical practices, we have to consider a major objection to so regarding them, namely, the claim that the incoherence of the practices is demonstrated by the contradictions they contain. Winch responds to this objection by showing that it is rooted in the same dualism between belief and practice which is imposed on primitive thought. Let us consider three examples of alleged contradictions to illustrate this point. The ®rst alleged contradiction has to do with the way the poison oracle is administered. In the consultation of the oracle, a substance, benge, is administered to a fowl of whom a question is asked, say, concerning someone's guilt. It is speci®ed beforehand whether the fowl's death means `yes' or `no'. The procedure is then repeated, so that you can, and often do, have `yes' and `no' to the same question. Is not this contradictory and a proof of the futility of the exercise? Such is the argument of H. O. Mounce who takes the second consultation of the oracle as a case of checking on the reliability of a witness.24 Winch responds: But we have to remember that though the oracle is consulted by administering poison to chickens, it is not the chickens that are being consulted, it is the oracle. So the grammar of the consultation is not that one chicken's answer is being checked against another's. It is of one and the same oracle that the same question is asked twice; and what sort of `check on its reliability' is that? What we must say is that two posings of the same question while benge is being administered to two fowls constitute one 24

See H. O. Mounce, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', Philosophy, Oct. 1973, p. 352.


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complete consultation of the oracle. And there is an obvious reason for this procedure quite different from the (confused) one suggested by Mounce. Given the importance of the benge being neither too weak nor too strong a poison ± since this would predetermine the outcome and make the consultation negatory ± a good way of checking on the goodness of the benge is to do precisely what the Azande do do. This illustrates the importance of what I have wanted to emphasize: that we should view any particular utterance or procedure in the context of the other utterances and procedures to which it belongs.25

When we do so we are confronted, not by a dubious method of checking the facts, but with how an oracular pronouncement is to be brought to bear on questions of guilt and innocence. And this will depend on how the oracle is used. This leads to the second contradiction which is attributed to consultations of the oracle. According to Evans-Pritchard it is mainly consulted to determine whether it is propitious to undertake a potentially hazardous enterprise. We may want to say that saying that an undertaking is propitious is akin to a prediction, but, as Winch says, its grammar is complex, depending on the meaning of `propitious'. A venture may be so described even though it fails in its aims. Again, as Winch says, there is no one single reading of `things turned out well'. He points out the numerous examples in Greek literature where `the ful®lment of the oracle' is quite different from the agent's expectations at the time of his actions. He is said to come to a new understanding of what was best for him. This feature is essential to an understanding of the sense in which an oracle pronounces: the feature of seeing whatever happens as the ful®lment of the oracular pronouncement. The grammar of òracle' has no room for the notion of `mistaken pronouncement'. As Winch says, Àny analogue to this literature in Zande folklore would be an essential feature of the grammar of the Zande poison oracle; essential, therefore, too to the possibility of distinguishing between what is and what is not superstitious in the thinking of individual Azande.'26 It may be thought that the most serious contradiction is our third example, where the contradiction is said to be inherent in the very conception of witchcraft inheritance. A person's family may seek to 25 26

Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism', pp. 204 ±5. Ibid., p. 206.

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have his name cleared of witchcraft by having his intestines examined in a post-mortem examination. Evans-Pritchard comments: To our minds it appears evident that if a man is proven a witch the whole of his clan are ipso facto witches, since the Zande clan is a group of persons related biologically to one another through the male line. Azande see the sense of this argument but they do not accept its conclusions, and it would involve the whole notion of witchcraft in contradiction were they to do so.27

As Winch says, `Contradiction would presumably arise because a few positive results of post-mortem examinations, scattered among all the clans, would very soon prove that everybody was a witch, and a few negative results, scattered among the same clans, would prove that nobody was a witch.'28 Surely that shows the superiority of European over Zande thought. At this point we need to remind ourselves of our earlier discussion of contradiction, in section 4 of chapter 1 and in section 4 of chapter 4, in which we emphasised that we deal with contradictions when they arise. The vital question is: does a contradiction arise for the Azande? Winch compares the situation with Wittgenstein's discussion of a game: . . . such that whoever begins can always win by a particular simple trick. But this has not been realised ± so it is a game. Now someone draws our attention to it ± and it stops being a game. What turn can I give this, to make it clear to myself ? ± For I want to say, ànd it stops being a game' ± not: ànd now we see that it wasn't a game'.29

Wittgenstein does not say that the play before the possible move is pointed out was not a game. We could simply rule out the move in the new game, but this seems arti®cial to us. But since the point of both games is winning, revealing the simple move to the participants makes the game pointless. This, though, is precisely where there is a disanalogy with the Azande, for when what we regard as a contradiction is raised, it does not render their practice pointless for them. Evans-Pritchard says: Àzande do not perceive the contradiction as we perceive it because they have no theoretical interest in the subject and those situations in which they express their belief in witchcraft do not force the problem upon them.'30 27 28 29 30

Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, p. 24. Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 24. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Oxford: Blackwell 1956, Part II, §77. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, p. 25.


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Winch says: This suggests strongly that the context from which the suggestion about the contradiction is made, the context of our scienti®c culture, is not on the same level as the context in which the beliefs about witchcraft operate. Zande notions of witchcraft do not constitute a theoretical system in terms of which Azande try to gain a quasi-scienti®c understanding of the world.31 This in its turn suggests that it is the European, obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not naturally go ± to a contradiction ± who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande. The European is in fact committing a category- mistake.32

Winch makes a similar point about the accusation that although the interests of the Azande are not theoretical, they may be said, nevertheless, to be in the grip of pervasive superstition. H. O. Mounce suggests, as we have seen, that the Azande use notions such as `causal in¯uence' and `prediction' ìn situations where the conditions needed for making the sort of sense desired for them are lacking'.33 But, as with the charge of contradictions, the vital question in discussing superstitions concerns what conditions we have in mind. Winch points out that Mounce does not offer an aetiology for beliefs in witchcraft comparable to that which he offers for superstition in our culture. He does not see the difference made by the centrality of magic in the life of the Azande. But the centrality of science in our culture is central in his account of superstition, since he says that what justi®es the rejoinder `Come now, don't be stupid' is that the superstitious belief `will not ®t into the network of beliefs about the physical world which has been developed by western science and which has been taught to us since childhood; or, rather, it does not even qualify as something which could possibly ®t into such a network of beliefs'.34 Winch retorts: `Such a resource is not obviously available within the context of Zande life.'35 By 1976, in the two papers we have discussed, what kind of conclusion does Winch hope he has reached? In the main, it can be expressed as follows: 31

32 33 34 35

`Notice that I have not said that Azande conceptions of witchcraft have nothing to do with understanding the world at all. The point is that a different form of the concept of understanding is involved here' (Winch). Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 26. Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism', p. 203. Mounce, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 354. Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism', p. 203.

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I have wanted, in the foregoing discussion, to distinguish between the beliefs people hold and the language in which those beliefs are expressed and which makes them possible. And I have tried to undermine the seductive idea that the grammar of our language is itself the expression of a set of beliefs or theories about how the world is, which might in principle be justi®ed or refuted by an examination of how the world actually is. This temptation is hard enough to resist in the case of our own language; so much the harder when we are dealing with a language the forms of which are alien, and even perhaps repugnant, to us. A large part of the dif®culty springs from the fact that the distinction is not a clear-cut or stable one (as is brought out, probably more forcefully than anywhere else, in Wittgenstein's On Certainty). Furthermore, the grammar of a language has its concrete realization in the expression of particular beliefs (though not only there) . . . The grammar of the Zande word we translate as òracle' ®nds expression in what individual Azande say and do in connection with particular oracular consultations. But . . . what the Azande mean by their word for òracle' is not the sum of their particular beliefs about oracles. Indeed, the whole notion of a `sum of beliefs' in this connection is highly suspect.36

3 extending our understanding The changes which occur in Winch's argument after 1976 are important for an understanding of the complexities which face the hermeneutics of contemplation. He came to feel dissatis®ed with the account he had given of the way in which we extend our understanding in coming to understand Zande magic. In that account, the notion of `rules' and `following a rule' play a central role. Even in Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society' Winch had said that àn account of this matter cannot be given simply in terms of any set of rules and conventions to all: our own or anyone else's; it requires us to consider the relation of a set of rules and conventions to something else',37 but he came to think that he had not developed this insight suf®ciently. With the emphasis on rules remaining central, it is hard to see how that development could have occurred. When Winch came to write the preface to the second edition of his classic The Idea of a Social Science, he said that had he rewritten it, one central notion he would have treated differently was `rules': Ì was far from suf®ciently careful in the way I expressed the relevance of 36 37

Ibid., pp. 206 ±7. Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 40.

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the notion of a rule, both to language and to other forms of behaviour.'38 In a passage which his critics have quoted again and again Winch had written: [C]riteria of logic are not a direct gift of God, but arise out of, and are only intelligible in the context of, ways of living or modes of social life. It follows that one cannot apply criteria of logic to modes of social life as such. For instance, science is one such mode and religion is another, and each has criteria of intelligibility peculiar to itself. So within science or religion actions can be logical or illogical . . . But we cannot sensibly say that either the practice of science itself or that of religion is either illogical or logical; both are non-logical.39

By emphasising the rules internal to each context, the impression is created of self-contained institutions which have little to do with each other. Passages such as these gave rise to the concerns about ®deism discussed in section 6 of chapter 1. Even at the time, Winch quali®ed his remarks immediately: `(This is, of course, an oversimpli®cation, in that it does not allow for the overlapping character of different modes of social life . . . But I do not think this affects the substance of what I want to say, though it would make its precise expression in detail more complicated.)40 But in his preface, Winch ®nds this quali®cation far too weak: `Different aspects of social life do not merely `òverlap'': they are frequently internally related in such a way that one cannot even be intelligibly conceived as existing in isolation from others.'41 On the new view, it no longer looks as though the problem is how to understand one self-contained aspect of social life (religion), from a culture dominated by another self-contained aspect of social life (science). Winch was never tempted to correct this view by seeking some kind of logical foundation for these aspects of life. For him, that would be like looking for the logicality of logic. Instead, he emphasises relations between them. But what kind of relations are we talking about? That is the vital question. Winch's talk of ìnternal relations' is not an altogether satisfactory answer to this question. It is true that given a harvest festival, there must be harvests for it to have whatever sense it has. But it does not follow that given harvests there must be harvest festivals, any more than it follows that primitives must wonder at the world around them. They did wonder, that is all. Harvests did lead to, or went hand-in-hand with, harvest 38 39

Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, 2nd edn, London: Routledge 1995, p. xiii. 41 Ibid., pp. xv ±xvi. 40 Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., pp. 100 ± 1.

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festivals, that is all. What does it add to speak of ìnternal relations'? Such talk seems too close to the idealisation of logic Winch said he was in the grip of while making this accusation of others. He says in his preface: `The logico-conceptual dif®culties which arise when different reaches of human life are brought to bear on each other cannot be resolved by any appeal to a formal system ± whether a God-given system of logical principles or a system of modes of social life, each with criteria of intelligibility peculiar to itself.'42 So the problem of the relations between different aspects of our lives remains. In his preface, Winch refers to the ®rst ®ve papers in Ethics and Action, including Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', and says that the problem is not resolved satisfactorily there. The parallels with The Idea of a Social Science are obvious. He says, for example, in Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society': `Reality is not what gives language sense. What is real and what is unreal shows itself in the sense that language has.'43 Winch came to feel that this gives a far too easy picture of a compartmentalised life which does not do justice to the fragility of the conditions under which ethical or magico-religious beliefs are or can be active in our lives. In his preface, Winch's verdict on his early view is severe: `This does not just constitute a gap in the argument, but results in serious distortion.'44 In this section, I want to show what Winch took these distortions to be in his earlier position. Winch asks how we, from within our culture, can extend our understanding in such a way so as to come to some understanding of the Azande. He says: We are not seeking a state in which things will appear to us just as they do to members of S [the alien society], and perhaps such a state is unattainable anyway. But we are seeking a way of looking at things which goes beyond our previous way in that it has in some way taken account of and incorporated the other way that members of S have of looking at things. Seriously to study another way of life is necessarily to seek to extend our own ± not simply to bring the other way within the already existing boundaries of our own, because the point about the latter in their present form, is that they ex hypothesi exclude that other.45

And again: the intelligibility of the primitive practice `cannot be 42 43 44 45

Ibid., p. xvi. Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 12. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, p. xvii. Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 33.


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decided by whether or not it belongs to an existing stock of descriptions, since this would rule out precisely what is being discussed: the addition of new development to the stock. `What can intelligibly be said' is not equivalent to `what has been intelligibly said', or it would never be possible to say anything new. Mutatis mutandis it would never be possible to do anything new. Nevertheless the intelligibility of anything new said or done does depend in a certain way on what has already been said or done and understood. The crux of this problem lies in how we are to understand that ìn a certain way'. 46

In his early view, Winch thinks that the comparison between language and games, borrowed from Wittgenstein, will help to answer this problem. He says: There is certainly con¯ict between European and Zande modes of thinking and even a sort of mutual exclusion; but this is not so far to say that they logically `contradict' each other. It could be that people who interest themselves in cricket ®nd it impossible to take baseball seriously, and vice versa: there would be con¯ict here too, but no contradiction. It would make little sense to ask in the abstract, which game it was `right' to support (though of course in particular circumstances a man might have reasons for supporting the one rather than the other).47

Winch's emphasis on games goes hand-in-hand with his emphasis on rules. By combining them he ®nds an answer to his question. Rules within a game are not closed, but open. Any set of rules can be extended to embrace new applications, both within a game and as between games. In fact, in grasping any rule, we do not simply repeat what we have been taught. Our teaching ends with the instruction: ànd so on'. This point applies, not simply to our games, but to our language-games; it applies to speaking generally. Winch argues that [H]aving learned to speak, etc., rationally does not consist in having been trained to follow those norms; to suppose that would be to overlook the importance of the phrase ànd so on' in any description of what someone who follows norms does. We must, if you like, be open to new possibilities of what could be invoked and accepted under the rubric `rationality' ± possibilities which are perhaps suggested and limited by what we have hitherto so accepted, but not uniquely determined thereby.48

Winch's emphasis on games and rules means that Winch poses the 46 47 48

Ibid., p. 29. Winch, `Language, Belief and Relativism', p. 201. Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 34.

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issue of understanding a primitive culture in a very general way. There is no reference to any speci®c speakers. The question is how anyone extends an understanding to new applications of a rule, or from one game to the embracing of new games. A general solution is offered: anyone who is taught rules is taught, at the same time, to go on in the same way, and to extend the rule when necessary. Hence the force of ànd so on'. Further, we are told, in general terms, that the games, the different modes of life, do not contradict each other. This is very different from Winch's later discussions of contradiction where, as we have seen, he argues against this abstract treatment of `contradiction'. He says that contradictions must be treated when they arise. The general treatment does not do justice to the fact that the Azande do not see any contradiction in their post-mortem examinations to determine witchcraft-inheritance. What is important to note is that the question does not arise for the Azande. Winch admits in Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society' that he does not think his treatment of these issues is altogether satisfactory. The tension he feels is shown in the fact that, in his discussion of rules, he has to say that whether in fact a proposed extension to a rule is rational will depend on the point the rule has in the contexts in which it is applied. But does the rule have the same point for everyone? Does everyone grasp the point? Winch knows that this is not the case. His criticism of the blindness of certain philosophers and others, in this respect, testi®es to this fact. But, in that case, how does his general discussion address this fact? ± a problem he himself expresses when he says: Òur blindness to the point of primitive modes of life is a corollary of the pointlessness of much of our own life.'49 Winch is certainly alive to the complexities in the notion of understanding he wants to address: Language-games are played by men who have lives to live ± lives involving a wide variety of different interests, which have all kinds of different bearings on each other. Because of this, what a man says or does may make a difference not merely to the performance of the activity upon which he is at present engaged, but to his life and to the lives of other people. Whether a man sees point in what he is doing will then depend on whether he is able to see any unity in his multifarious interests, activities, and relations with other men; what sort of sense he sees in his life will depend on the nature of this unity. The ability to see this sort of sense in life depends not merely on 49

Ibid., p. 42.


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the individual concerned, though this is not to say it does not depend on him at all; it depends also on the possibilities for making such sense which the culture in which he lives does, or does not provide.50

As we shall see, the issues are even more complex than this; something which Winch, too, came to realise. The issue is whether Winch's early emphasis on the analogy between speaking and playing games, following rules, and his analogy between growth of understanding and the extension of a rule afforded by ànd so on', can possibly do justice to the issues he is wrestling with. In his later views, he comes to see that these analogies are quite inadequate. In reaching the view that his position up to 1976 needed to be revised, Winch was deeply in¯uenced by Rush Rhees' classic paper, `Wittgenstein's Builders'.51 He had mentioned the paper in Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society' in emphasising that activities need to be seen, not in isolation, but in relation to their wider social and cultural contexts, but had not worked out its far-reaching implications for the way he had treated language in terms of rulefollowing. Rhees argued that the analogy between games and language was useful in pointing out that forms of language vary, but that it is harmful if we want to address what `saying something' amounts to. This can be brought out by ®rst noting a disanalogy between games and language-games. All games are not part of one larger game, but language-games are part of the same language. Were that not so, Rhees argued, we wouldn't be saying anything in any of them. What kind of unity does language have? Wittgenstein says it is a family of language-games. In that case, Rhees retorts, nothing would be said. Rhees' reasons for these conclusions have been elucidated in far greater detail in his book, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse.52 He argues that if I dream of making a move in a game, the move may be just as brilliant, as a move, as a move I make in an actual game. This is because this is determined within the formal constraints of the game. Saying something in a language is not like that; it depends on how it is taken, the force it has, among others who speak the same language. To say something to another involves a 50 51 52

Ibid., p. 41. Rush Rhees, `Wittgenstein's Builders', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1959 ±60. Reprinted in Rhees, Discussions of Wittgenstein, London: Routledge 1970. Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse, ed. D. Z. Phillips, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998.

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common intelligibility. Relations between speakers cannot be captured in terms of reactions to moves in a game. At the beginning of the Investigations, Wittgenstein discusses the game-like context of one builder giving an order to a colleague who then brings the slab that has been ordered. Wittgenstein suggests, but Rhees denies, that this could be the whole language of a tribe. Rhees' objection has nothing to do with the limited vocabulary in the example. Rhees' point is that the builder is emitting a signal, but not saying anything. To be language, the giver and receiver of the order should be capable of reversing their positions. The order comes as something understood in the course of building. The person who obeys is waiting for the order, not simply reacting to a signal. It makes sense to speak of checking the order, discussing it, being surprised that an order is this one, and not another one, and so on. There is also the question of what the builders bring as people to the work, the way the work, perhaps its snags and dif®culties, is discussed at home or elsewhere when the day's work is over. In short, the order, the giving of it and the obeying of it, the building activity, discussions of work outside work, all come in the course of the lives people are leading, and the wider social and cultural contexts in which those lives are placed. This is far removed from the formalities of a game. These issues affect the issue of what is meant by ùnderstanding what is said' in a language, and what might be meant by `growth in understanding'. Here, the disanalogy between games and dialogue or conversation is clear. We can speak of mastering a game, or of knowing one's way around in a game. But it makes little sense to speak, in that sense, of mastering a dialogue or conversation, or of knowing one's way around them. Again, having completed a game, one may decide to play it again. We may report a conversation, but we do not repeat it; that is, repeat the same one. The notions of rules, following rules, going on in the same way, have their most natural applications in the context of games or mathematical procedures. It is unnatural to speak in this way of conversations. What would it mean to speak of mastering the rules of a conversation? And if, in following a rule, we can say after any application of the rule, Ànd so on', what is the way a conversation should go on? Growth of understanding in discourse is not like mastering the complexities of a game. More generally, that is why living is not a skill, and why it makes no sense to talk of mastering it.

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If these lessons are taken to heart, they will have an important bearing on what it is to understand cultures other than our own. It will no longer seem like mastering strange games we had not heard of, or getting to know the rules people are following. Rather, it will be a matter of extending our understanding of human lives which are, in important respects, different from our own. We have seen Winch say, already, `Language-games are played by men who have lives to live.'53 We have also seen that some see a point where others see none. What are the consequences for the notion of understanding, the distinction between our culture and an alien culture, and the bearing of these matters on the hermeneutics of contemplation? After 1976, Winch sees, increasingly, the need to give more complex answers to this question than his earlier analyses would have allowed. 4 whose understanding? In his preface, Winch says that his earlier view was too easy. By emphasising the involvement of concepts in human affairs, including war, Winch says that this led him to treat all social relations as though they are conversational interchanges, ignoring, in those interchanges, the part played by `strategies of deceit, blackmail, emotional bullying, punches on the nose, etc'.54 These complexities, too, will have to be understood in giving an account of human lives, a fact which makes the task even further removed from the picture of giving an account of the rules which govern self-contained games. For example, Winch asks us to think of Simone Weil's discussion of the plight of human beings in her essay `The Iliad ± A Poem of Force'. The complexity does not simply lie in what we are trying to understand, but also in us, who are trying to understand. We have seen already that Winch acknowledges that a failure to see the point in magico-religious rites may be due to a pointlessness in our own lives. If religion means little to someone, by which I mean that its meaning and signi®cance elude him/her, it is unlikely that that person will understand magico-religious practices in other cultures. (I say ùnlikely' because I do not want to rule out the possibility of an aspect dawning for the ®rst time.) Even so, we can no longer say of 53 54

Winch, Ùnderstanding a Primitive Society', p. 41. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, p. xviii.

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that person that the dif®culty resides simply in understanding an alien culture. What cannot be understood there is linked to a pointlessness in that person's own life with respect to religion. That much is evident in many of the thinkers we have discussed in this book: religion was a blind spot for them. In this section, I want to illustrate Winch's discussion of these complexities in two papers, one, Èthical Relativism', written in 1982 but published in a revised form in 1987, and a second paper, `Can We Understand Ourselves?', published in 1997, but written in 1994. In the ®rst paper, Winch says that he must take seriously the point that `the ethical' cannot always be expressed in a uniform way. He says that it is tempting to make the distinction in terms of the culture we share with each other, and other cultures. But although that distinction remains an important one, Winch now warns us that it cannot be drawn in a clear-cut way. He gives as an example George Orwell's fascination with Gandhi. Gandhi's asceticism involved turning away from human relationships which involve emotional entanglements. Orwell, like Gandhi, recognised the moral dangers such relationships involve, but, unlike Gandhi, he thought that avoiding them leads to an inhuman conception of purity. Winch asks whether or not Orwell and Gandhi share the same culture: Obviously there can be no simple answer to that. Their backgrounds were indeed enormously different, no doubt sometimes engendering a certain mutual incomprehension. But one can press that too far. Orwell understood very well much of what Gandhi was saying. Not merely were the cultures of India and Britain deeply intertwined, but there are ascetic paradigms in the moral traditions of Europe as there are in Hinduism. They certainly had enough in common to engage with each other on certain matters, if not on all. But one can go further than that. It is not just that Gandhi's and Orwell's conceptions of morality may engage with each other; in a sense they necessarily do so: they require each other. They are internally related to each other in the sense that standing in a certain relation to each other helps to constitute what each is. Gandhi's ascetic morality can hardly be formulated except by specifying a relation in which it stands to a conception of morality like Orwell's and vice versa.55

In the second paper I want to discuss, Winch says that there may be patterns of thought in other cultures which we come to understand by ®nding parallels within our own. Here we can speak of an extension in our understanding ± the kind we discussed in the 55

Peter Winch, Èthical Relativism' in Trying to Make Sense, pp. 187 ±8.


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previous section. But he also says that we must admit that, sometimes, a practice, or pattern of thought and behaviour, we come across stumps us ± we cannot understand it. When this happens, the problem is often said to reside in the fact that the culture is other than our own. As Winch says: `The ``hermeneutical'' problem of understanding alien cultures is sometimes located at this point.'56 Winch, however, invites us to turn in a different direction, namely, to recognise further complexities in the notion of ùnderstanding', for, he argues, when we cannot understand some aspect of an alien culture, `whatever the nature of this problem, it is not one that arises only when we are dealing with historically or geographically remote cultures. Mistakes and uncertainties are as liable to arise concerning our own culture as concerning another.'57 Winch's point is not to deny that there are special problems relating to other cultures, but to criticise over-simple constructions of `dif®culties of understanding'; for example, the view that, whereas we understand ourselves, our dif®culty is in understanding others. This distinction between ùs' and òthers' is too simplistic. One way in which Winch is challenging this is to ask who are `the others'. He asks us to consider the following example: How, for instance, should we think of the practice of certain youth groups within contemporary British pop culture of assembling at Stonehenge once a year to celebrate the summer solstice? How much, and what kind of, relation does it have to ancient Druidical religious practices on which it is ostensibly modelled? To what extent is it a manifestation of contemporary pop culture commercialism? Does it in any way mark a genuine recrudescence of an authentic sun worship? And if we are to think of it in this latter way, what sort of sense can we make of such a form of worship given the role that nature plays, or perhaps fails to play, in the life of modern industrial societies? Such questions are real enough. Sometimes they may receive a satisfactory answer, sometimes not. But there are no good grounds for thinking it impossible ever to know how to interpret a cultural phenomenon.58

What Winch is doing, here, is to break up the generality of his earlier discussion concerning understanding other cultures, albeit a discussion which, as we have seen, was far more sensitive to

56 57

Peter Winch, `Can We Understand Ourselves?', Philosophical Investigations, vol. 20, no. 3, July 1997, p. 197. 58 Ibid., pp. 197± 8. Ibid.

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differences between cultures than were those of the thinkers we have criticised. Winch says: It is in any case misleading to distinguish in a wholesale way between òur own' and alien cultures; parts of òur' culture may be quite alien to one of ùs'; indeed, some parts of it may be more alien than cultural manifestations which are geographically or historically remote. I see no reason why a contemporary historical scholar might not feel himself more at home in the world of medieval alchemy than in that of twentieth century professional football.59

In relation to pop culture and Stonehenge, Winch says that the unnecessarily heavy weather British police authorities sometimes make of it ìs a different, and in its own way equally hard to make sense of, contemporary cultural phenomenon'.60 Evans-Pritchard, too, in criticism of LeÂvy-Bruhl's notion of two mentalities, that of the primitives and ours, objects to the generality of the division, but links the distinctions which need to be made too closely to distinctions of class and occupation which, no doubt, will be relevant in certain contexts. Evans-Pritchard asks: [W]hen LeÂvy-Bruhl contrasts us with primitives, who are we, and who are the primitives? He does not distinguish between the different sorts of us, the different social and occupational strata of our society, more pronounced ®fty years ago than today; nor between us in different periods of our history. In his sense of the word, did the philosophers of the Sorbonne and the Breton peasantry, or the ®shermen of Normandy, have the same mentality?61

If we are tempted to judge the direction in which `the primitive' lies in these distinctions alone, however, we should do well to remember Wittgenstein's remark we quoted when discussing Frazer: `Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of a spiritual matter as a twentiethcentury Englishman.62 His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices.'63 Winch, as we have seen, wants to recognise a far greater variety and complexity. He wants us to recognise that: A `culture' is not a seamless web and this is true in more than one sense. On 59 61 62 63

60 Ibid., p. 198, fn. Ibid., p. 198. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 87. Here, Wittgenstein is guilty of some generalising of his own. By which I do not mean simply his failure to acknowledge the presence of the Welsh, the Irish and the Scots! Wittgenstein, `Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough', p. 131.


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the one hand individuals are variously exposed, in the course of their upbringing and after, to different facets of a single culture. But at least as important as this is the fact that different individuals respond to what they encounter in enormously varied ways. The importance of this factor is obscured by the passive sounding term ìnternalization', so beloved of sociologists and social psychologists. We do not merely imbibe or absorb those aspects of our culture with which we come into contact, we react. The characters of individual reactions to what we may be prepared to call `the same' cultural manifestation, are enormously diverse. The diversity may extend to quite radical con¯ict; in some areas of life, indeed, this is characteristic. (Think of morality, politics, religion.) The fact that some cultural manifestations are less intelligible (if intelligible at all!) to some than they are to others is clearly closely connected with this phenomenon, as is the possibility that an individual may fail to respond signi®cantly to, and hence to see any sense in, most of the culture into which he is born.64

Thus, Winch comes to his conclusion: `The idea, then, of one's own culture, in contrast to others, as somehow transparent to one, will not bear examination.'65 Yet, having said this, Winch says that there is something important this account leaves out. He returns to his discussion of the use of the poison oracle among the Azande. A sensitive anthropologist who gives a good account of it may, in that sense, bring us to understand what is going on. Nevertheless, Winch argues, this does not mean that I have the kind of understanding the Azande themselves possess. It makes no more sense to say that the poison oracle could play a role in our lives than it does to apply a map of Central London to the Sahara desert. What are we to make of Evans-Pritchard's claim that, during his ®eld-work among the Azande, he organised his practical affairs by consulting oracles as the Azande did, and found it as satisfactory a way of running his affairs as any other? Winch says that this was possible only `because the oracle and related institutions played a living role in the lives of the people amongst whom he was living. His actions, therefore, could be met with the kinds of response and resonance which would give them sense.'66 I do not think these remarks meet Winch's earlier suggestion that it does not make sense to speak of our possessing the same understanding as the Azande. I remember Rush Rhees' comment on hearing of the way Evans-Pritchard had organised his affairs among the Azande: `But he still had the return air-ticket in his pocket.' For 64 65

Winch, `Can We Understand Ourselves?', pp. 198 ±9. 66 Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 199.

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Evans-Pritchard, consulting an oracle is more like a technique he chose to adopt. But it is not a choice for the Azande, any more than their lives are choices for them. If practices were adopted in the way Evans-Pritchard adopted consulting oracles, then life itself would be a collection of skills. Such a view would leave out the whole aspect of cultural roots and their connection with what constitutes the identity of a people. To think that such an identity is a matter of choice would be an instance of what J. R. Jones called technological barbarism. 67 In technology, replaceability and repeatability are absolutely essential. If a part is damaged, it must be replaced by another part. The production of such parts is repeated again and again. But one cannot say this of `my country', `my birthplace', `my parents', `my faith', `my principles', `my friends', and so on. Here one cannot say that another country, birthplace, parent, faith, principle, or friend will do just as well. To think otherwise is what Jones calls technological barbarism. It would lead to a situation in which, as J. L. Stocks said, `The convenience of a utensil would be the highest form of praise.' 68 Still, Winch's main emphasis in his paper is on the fact that `failing to ®nd one's feet among people', `failing to get the hang of it', can happen between cultures, or within the same culture. As we saw in section 4 of chapter 6, what we are dealing with here is not a misunderstanding, but a lack of understanding. It is not a philosophical matter either of misunderstanding the logic of the language, since the language does not get off the ground for the people concerned. For some, the poison oracle among the Azande may fall into this category. For Winch, so does `the kind of attitude to World Cup football that led to the murder of Escobar in Medellin for having scored an own goal against the Colombian side'.69 The conclusion Winch comes to which is most relevant for our purposes is expressed as follows: `that the dif®culties with which we are concerned do not pertain exclusively to so-called `àlien'' cultures. Indeed, they show that the line between what is and what is not `àlien'' is quite indeterminate, and this reinforces my point. The 67 68 69

J. R. Jones, Ac Onide, Carmarthenshire: Llyfrau'r Dryw Press, 1970. For a discussion see D. Z. Phillips, Writers of Wales: J. R. Jones, Cardiff: University of Wales Press 1995. J. L. Stocks, `Desire and Affection' in J. L. Stocks, Morality and Purpose, ed. D. Z. Phillips, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969. Winch, `Can We Understand Ourselves?', p. 202.


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problems spring in large part from certain peculiarities of our notion of understanding, rather than from peculiarities about the relation between one culture and another.'70 A central issue in understanding any culture will be whether we can get the hang of the people, whether we can ®nd our feet with them. As long as that is a problem, understanding will be problematic too. Winch ends: `This may be curable in particular cases: and in others it may not.'71 In breaking down generalities and clear-cut distinctions which obscure the complexities of the notion of understanding, Winch shows the importance of asking whose understanding we are talking of. Apart from certain quali®cations and modi®cations I have suggested, I have no quarrel with his conclusions. But they do raise further questions. Given the indeterminacy in the notion of understanding to which he has drawn our attention, how is this related to the imperative of understanding involved in philosophy? Is this subject to the same indeterminacy? If so, what are the implications for the hermeneutics of contemplation? It is to that question we shall turn in the ®nal chapter. 70 71

Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 204.

chapter 13

Understanding: a philosophical vocation

1 a problem for contemplative philosophy This book runs parallel, in some ways, to my Philosophy's Cool Place. That work, too, is concerned with a contemplative conception of philosophy. In it, I contrast Kierkegaard's qualitative dialectic with Wittgenstein's philosophical methods, arguing that although Kierkegaard makes conceptual (philosophical) distinctions in the service of clarity, his desire for clarity is not rooted in the wonder at reality and the possibilities of sense that comes from philosophy. Kierkegaard is a religious thinker whose main concern is with clearing away confusions about Christianity. Wittgenstein, unlike Kierkegaard, does not take the categories of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious for granted. He is prepared to leave the relations between them, the problems they pose for each other, the ragged scene that it is. More importantly, he wrestles with the sceptical possibility that these categories have no sense, in bringing out the senses that they have. He says: `My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.' 1 He wants to contemplate the world without meddling with it. This is extremely dif®cult to achieve. In the remainder of Philosophy's Cool Place I illustrate this dif®culty by reference to the work of Rorty, Cavell, Annette Baier and Nussbaum, all of whom, it seems to me, fail to settle for contemplative understanding, and want to provide us with some kind of message to guide us in life; a message said to be underwritten by, or to emerge from, philosophy. Yet, in the light of the last chapter, especially its ®nal section, is there not good reason to question my contemplative conception of philosophy? Does it not conjure up a picture of the philosopher 1

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell 1980 (1929), p. 2e.

318

A problem for contemplative philosophy

319

hovering over the limitations and indeterminacy of our comprehension, or lack of comprehension, understanding all he surveys? If our actual situation makes such transcendence impossible, why make it the aim of philosophy? Are philosophers, or relations between philosophers, exempt from the limitations to which everyone else is subject? So far from denying this, Winch cites these relations as one example of the incomprehension we may experience. But, surely, this makes the questions we have asked all the more urgent. Winch says: The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood described in his Autobiography his alienation from the sort of philosophy practised by his Oxford colleagues. He did not really understand the point of what they were discussing, though he was perfectly well able in a sense to `follow' their discussions and even make remarks which were recognized as contributions to the debates! (I have found myself in a similar position in some kinds of company.)2

How is this undeniable phenomenon to be related to philosophy's hermeneutic, contemplative task which, as we saw in section 4 of chapter 9, Winch describes as follows? Now there is a philosophical tradition which has concerned itself precisely with the problem of how to present moral or religious world-views in such a way that the passion behind them, which has to be evident if one is to recognize them for what they are, is clearly in view, along with a conception of the good that they embody, while at the same time equal justice is done to alternative and even hostile receptions.3

If our understanding of each other is characterised by the kind of indeterminacy discussed in the previous chapter, how is this to be reconciled, or even brought into a working relation with, the philosophical task of doing justice to different points of view, some of which react with radical incomprehension to each other? As we have seen, Wince recognises the dif®culty facing the philosophical task: Àchieving this is a task of enormous dif®culty, both at the technical level and also because of the moral demands it makes on the writer, who will of course him or herself have strong moral or religious commitments and will also be hostile to certain other possibilities.' 4 When I say that the task is that of reconciling the indeterminacy in 2 3

4

Peter Winch, `Can We Understand Ourselves?', Philosophical Investigations, vol. 20, no. 3, July 1997, p. 202. Peter Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?, London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press 1996, Part Four, `Religion as a Social construct', p. 173. Ibid.

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our understanding of each other with philosophy's contemplative task, even that way of expressing the problem does not do justice to its complexity. What do I mean by `reconciliation'? What am I looking for? Winch, too, asks the same question. He ®nds examples of `doing justice' to different points of view in three famous thinkers: `Plato (writing in dialogue form), Kierkegaard (representing different viewpoints pseudonymously) and Wittgenstein. In that last case I think particularly of the interweaving of internal voices so characteristic of Philosophical Investigations, a technique by the way that expresses best, it seems to me, that the con¯icting views are frequently to be found together in one's own breast.'5 But, then, Winch comes to our question: Part of the `peace' that Wittgenstein thought philosophy should bring was a peaceful `resolution' of such inner con¯icts. My use of (single) scare quotes there is meant to indicate that precisely one of the main dif®culties of achieving peace in such a context springs from the obscurity about what a word like `resolution' can mean here.6

It should be evident by now that our response to these issues will not be a simple or seamless one. Seeing this, however, is itself the fruit of contemplating different contexts of human understanding. 2 a philosophical imperative The complexities we are attempting to face may seem so varied and multi-faceted, as to make us wonder whether it is worth quarrelling over whether there is a distinctive philosophical imperative of the understanding. Perhaps there is no clear distinction, after all, between speaking for oneself about moral or religious questions, and making philosophical observations about such questions. I want to show how, via a dispute between Stephen Mulhall and Peter Winch, certain re¯ections about `honesty' may lead to this conclusion. Mulhall and Winch discuss the kind of appeal to his readers Charles Taylor takes himself to be making in his book, Sources of the Self.7 Winch says that it matters `that one should be clear about the sort of appeal that is being made to one; particularly if what is at 5 7

6 Ibid. Ibid. See Stephen Mulhall, `Sources of the Self 's Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity' and Peter Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due' in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Can Religion Be Explained Away?.

A philosophical imperative

321

stake is something as important as one's spiritual orientation'.8 If the person making the appeal is not clear about this, one may feel that one is being got at, or even cheated. Winch says that didactic literature may have this effect. It lacks honesty in ignoring what can be said from the other side. This can happen in philosophy too. Winch agrees with Mulhall that Taylor is often speaking in the ®rst person while thinking, in his text, that he is propounding a general philosophical thesis. Winch disagrees, however, with Mulhall's reaction to this situation. Mulhall thinks that Taylor should recognise that he is advocating his own theistic position, and give his reasons for thinking it superior to any alternative. Winch, on the other hand, thinks that such a strategy will lead to inevitable dishonesty, the dishonesty of thinking that there is such a demonstration of superiority. Winch says: Ìf there is going to be argument about such matters then, to be above board, one must not conceal cases inimical to the conclusion one wishes to draw.'9 Wittgenstein gives a vivid portrayal of the dangers involved. I shall quote it in full: Religious similes may be said to move on the edge of an abyss. Bunyan's for example. For what if we simply add: ànd all these traps, quicksands, wrong turnings, were planned by the Lord of the Road, and the monsters, thieves and robbers were created by him'? Certainly that is not the sense of the simile! But such a continuation is all too obvious! For many people, including me, this robs the simile of its power. But more especially if this is ± as it were ± suppressed. It would be different if at every turn, it were said quite honestly: Ì am using this as a simile, but look: it doesn't ®t here.' Then you wouldn't feel you were being cheated, that someone was trying to convince you by trickery. Someone can be told for instance: `Thank God for the good you receive, but don't complain about the evil: as you would of course do if a human being were to do you good and evil by turns.' Rules for life are dressed up in pictures. And these pictures can only serve to describe what we are to do, not justify it. Because they could provide a justi®cation only if they held good in other respects as well. I can say `Thank these bees for their honey, as if they were kind people who have prepared it for you'; that is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: `Thank them because, look, how kind they are!' ± since the next moment they may sting you. Religion says: Do this! ± Think like that ± but it cannot justify it and, if it tries to, becomes repellent; because for every reason it offers there is a valid 8 9

Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', p. 170. Ibid., p. 173.

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counter-reason. It is more convincing to say: `Think like this! ± however strangely it may strike you.' Or: `Won't you do this ± however repugnant you ®nd it.'10

It seems to Winch that Taylor gets into the kind of trouble that Wittgenstein describes. Taylor argues, for example, that religious sources provide greater moral energy than non-religious sources. Winch retorts: `Be careful! the bees may sting you (inquisitors and heretics). Or again, there are other species of bee that may derive their moral energy precisely from opposition to the ®rst sort ( Jeremy Bentham?).'11 Such justi®cations may be sought by a philosopher because he thinks that moral differences, no matter how great the conceptual gap between them, are different perspectives on a common reality. Winch admits that he had tended to talk like that sometimes.12 Now he retorts: `Tell that to the heretic tied to the stake and the Inquisitor ordering the ®re to be lit! (Of course, there are plenty of other less extreme examples, but also many more equally extreme ones.)'13 I take Winch's point that moral differences, where the conceptual gap between them is great, are not perspectives on a common reality. I think it is rather different if one says they are viewpoints in the same reality, by which I mean that they cut across and impinge on each other in countless ways in the hubbub of voices in our own and other cultures. I do not mean, of course, that we are all morally or religiously confronted by all these voices, and certainly not that we respond to those which do confront us in the same way. Part of the dif®culty in understanding comes from the fact that the description of an action in our own and other cultures is often tied up with traditions and institutions whose terms already have moral import. We have no hesitation in saying that anyone who does not understand what a loan is could hardly make judgements about the making or receiving of one. Yet we sometimes call `torture', without hesitation, the in¯iction of pain on captured warriors, even though `torture' is in the mind of neither the victor or the vanquished. The captured warriors may be being honoured. Such misunderstandings give point to Winch's remark in Èthical Relativism': Ìf we do not understand, we are in no position to know what we are getting 10 11 12 13

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 29e. Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', pp. 172 ±3. See Winch, `Moral Integrity' in Ethics and Action, London: Routledge 1972. Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', p. 171.


323

indignant about, or, as the case may be, what forgiving.'14 But, even here, we must beware of generalisations since, as we saw in `Can We Understand Ourselves?', lack of comprehension of how a footballer can be killed for scoring an own goal does not prevent Winch from reacting morally. Indeed, it is part of the sense his reaction has: moral or religious incomprehension. In all these cases, then, it seems that there is little point in distinguishing between a moral and an intellectual virtue: why not simply say that we should strive to be as honest as we can? After all, Winch does speak of the moral demands of philosophy, and it is no accident that he speaks of doing justice to other points of view. Is this any different from the way he speaks of honesty in the lives of people who have no philosophical interests at all? Winch says that there is a `difference between someone who accepts and lives by a position with clear understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, of where it may lead him, of what the alternatives are, and someone who does not understand these things'. 15 The descriptions of the philosophical and non-philosophical contexts are so similar that one might think that we do not need to speak of a philosophical imperative at all. That conclusion, however, would be a mistake. We look at the philosophical and non-philosophical contexts, concentrating on the honesty in each, thinking that a qualitative difference in it must emerge, and being puzzled if this does not happen. We forget the two contexts themselves. It would be foolish to deny interaction between them, but equally foolish to deny their differences. The philosopher re¯ects in a subject which has a history, and its own distinctive questions. We have met some of them even in the way we have stated our problems in the present chapter, but also throughout the book. For example, the philosopher may puzzle over whether moral or religious viewpoints can have any objectivity. It can be thought, and is thought, that unless different views can be resolved in terms of reasons wider than themselves which they all appeal to, they are reduced to personal preferences and thus lose their imperative. To avoid this unsatisfactory conclusion, it may be thought necessary to say that different viewpoints are perspectives on the same reality. But how can this be when there is a radical conceptual distance between them? The distance may be particularly 14 15

Winch, Èthical Relativism' in Trying to Make Sense, Oxford: Blackwell 1987, p. 193. Ibid., p. 189.

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marked when we re¯ect on practices in cultures other than our own. These re¯ections, however, may be dominated by a crude picture: On the one hand, we may think, are people's actions; on the other hand are the standards, ideals, principles, etc., that are applied to them. The former are open to view and can be seen by anyone who looks carefully enough, irrespective of his cultural background. Cultural background becomes relevant only when it comes to passing moral judgement. Of course, the picture has only to be described in these explicit terms for us to see that it is a gross distortion.16

Yet, concentrating on what is distinctive in other cultures may hide from us the conceptual moral and religious distances, and the indeterminacy in the notion of understanding, in our own culture. We need to see the importance of the distinction between making a mistake within a moral or religious viewpoint, and coming to regard one's viewpoint as mistaken. This need not lead back to the conclusion that viewpoints are perspectives on the same reality, but may bring us to see that they are viewpoints in the same reality, and how this is connected with the point discussed in the previous chapter that language-games have their sense in the same language, otherwise they would say nothing. This does not mean, as many sociologists and anthropologists seem to think, that all viewpoints are èqual', or that we must be tolerant of them all. The moral or religious response which comes in the wake of clarity cannot be predicted from that clarity itself. This is itself an insight which comes from philosophical contemplation. These, and many other philosophical questions, need not occur or bother the moral or religious agent who strives to be clear about other viewpoints. Nor is there any reason why they should. People are not obliged to be puzzled by such questions. But when they are, it is a caricature to describe them as uninterested, uninvolved spectators who transcend the busyness of life. This is because disinterestedness is not a lack of interest, but an interest of a special kind which has a moral imperative of its own. Philosophical contemplation, in trying to do justice to what it surveys, is not itself an attempt to arrive at a speci®c moral or religious viewpoint, but an effort to understand the kinds of phenomena we are confronted by in morality and religion. No doubt one's own moral or religious views will affect this endeavour but, nevertheless, they are different from it. 16

Ibid., p. 192.


325

As we have seen, Mulhall accuses Taylor of confusing `stage setting' with `stage-strutting'. Taylor speaks in his own religious voice without realising it, and Mulhall invites him to do so consciously. By contrast, Winch brings out an analogy with a philosophical vocation: He seems to forget that to stand on the stage and speak in one's own voice is not the only, or even the most characteristic, use of the stage. One also stages dramas in which a diversity of characters speaking in different voices are portrayed . . . One need only think of Shakespeare, for instance. The aim may be to portray as faithfully as possible a segment of life, without shying away from the possibility of there being irresolvable con¯icts (not merely divergencies) which can only have a tragic outcome.17

In the course of this book we have seen how dif®cult it is, philosophically, to do justice to the world around us. My main concern has been with doing justice to possibilities of religious sense. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in its zeal to deny these possibilities, generalised from confusions rightly identi®ed. It was not careful enough, and got stung by the bees! It does not see that recognising possibilities of religious sense need not entail abandoning the antireligious or non-religious values it espouses. On the contrary, the opposition may be seen to be all the stronger. For example, it can now be seen as a genuine clash which does not depend on showing the opposition to be confused. Similarly, the hermeneutics of recollection, in its efforts to retrieve faith in face of criticism, does not allow opposing values to be themselves. It is not careful enough in what it says about them and, like its suspicious counterpart, gets stung by the bees. Here, too, clarity would show opposition in a truer light. Both hermeneutics are clouded by their apologetic resolve. The hermeneutics of contemplation strives against this temptation. Its inspiration comes from wonder at the world in all its variety, and the constant struggle to give a just account of it. This is a struggle which never ends. Wittgenstein said he was mistaken when he said that he could give up philosophy whenever he wanted to. He undoubtedly attained `peace' in resolving particular philosophical problems, but I do not think he would have talked of a ®nal peace in which contemplative philosophy has been put to rest. Old problems keep coming back in new forms, and cultural developments may occasion new problems. There is also, of course, the philosophical dissatisfaction of wishing one had done a better job of 17

Winch, `Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due', p. 171.

326


expressing what one wanted to say; a dissatisfaction realised when someone says of what one has written, `What about this? What about that?' For example, it occurs to me now that the last two chapters of this book might have improved Philosophy's Cool Place. But someone, and perhaps myself, will ask of the present work, `What about this? What about that?' And so it will go on.

Index of names

Adams, Marilyn McCord 111, 142 Aeschylus 34, 40 Anderson, John 215±16, 227, 229 Aristotle 34, 48 Austin, J. L. 270

Euripides 37, 44, 49 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. xiv, 184, 186, 190±2, 232, 235, 238, 249, 251, 253, 256±7, 259, 263, 266, 289±91, 294±5, 297, 299, 301±2, 314±15

Bacon, Francis 72, 155 Baier, Annette 318 Barabas, Marina 63 Beardsmore, R. W. 74±5 Beattie, John 170, 176 Beckett, Samuel 105 Berger, Peter xiv, 3, 20, 267±88 Berkeley, George 131 Best, Elsdon 252 Bevan, Edwyn 178 Blanshard, Brand 223±4 Bouwsma, O. K. 97±9 Bridges, Robert 123±4 Buber, Martin 90

Feuerbach, Ludwig xii, 8, 9, 16±17, 23, 25, 87±93, 95±7, 99±117, 120, 124, 126, 128±32, 141 Finch, Henry le Roy 270 Fingarette, Herbert 209 Frazer, James xi, xiii, 24, 146, 162±8, 170±1, 178±80, 183, 188, 195, 199, 220, 229, 234, 236, 239, 248, 256, 259, 289, 299 Freud, Sigmund xi, xiii, 1, 2, 4, 14, 16, 23±4, 90, 141, 143, 185±6, 199±203, 205±27, 229, 254, 314 Gandhi, Mahatma 312 Gatschet, A. 255 Geertz, Clifford 6, 7, 184 Gosse, Edmund 20, 160

Camus, Albert 144 Carroll, Lewis 260 Cassirer, Ernst 162 Cavell, Stanley 318 Chesterton, G. K. 164 Cicero 72 Ciof®, Frank xiii, 168, 179, 214 Clarke, Samuel 72 Collingwood, R. G. 319 Cook, John 14±15, 168±9 Darwin, Charles 20, 149 Deloria, Jr., Vine 161 Drury, M. O'C. 166, 207 Dupuis, Charles 7 Durkheim, EÂmile xi, xii, 2, 4, 14, 16, 24, 147, 201, 229±43, 246±9, 267±89, 294 Eddy, W. H. C. 132, 136±7 Engels, Friedrich xii, 130±1, 133±7, 141±3, 145, 183

Hamann, J. G. 57 Harvey, Van A. xi, xii, 8±10, 16±20, 22±3, 25, 78, 80, 83, 85, 89, 101±4, 106±7, 113±15 Hawkes, John 278 Hegel, Friedrich 38, 88±90, 93, 105, 130, 132 Helm, Paul 27 Henry, Matthew 173 Hick, John 292 Hobbes, Thomas 41, 143, 218 Holland, R. F. 77 Homer 34±5, 37, 53 Horace 47±8 Hume, David xi, xii, 10, 14, 54±7, 64±75, 77±88, 143, 183 Huxley, Aldous 65±6 James, William 10 Jones, Ernest 215

327

328

Index of names

Jones, J. R. 316 Kafka, Franz 279 Kamenka, Eugene 87±8, 243 Kant, Immanuel 10±11, 38, 79, 236 Kierkegaard, Sùren 9, 46, 57, 81, 89, 104, 125±6, 186, 318, 320 LeÂvy-Bruhl, Lucien xiii, xiv, 247±67, 289±90, 314 Locke, John 131 Lucretius 35, 47 MacIntyre, Alasdair 279±9 Mackie, J. L. 64 Malcolm, Norman 77, 194, 213 Mann, Thomas 298 Manser, A. R. xiv Manuel, Frank E. 7 Marett, R. R. xi, xiii, 183, 185±96, 198, 199, 229, 234, 236 Marlowe, Christopher 44 Marx, Karl xii, 24, 90, 104, 130±43, 145, 149, 183, 232 Massey, James A. 102 McGuinness, B. F. 177 McLellan, David 105, 139 McLuhan, T. C. 159±60 Meickle, Scott 132, 134±5 Mill, John Stuart 38 Moore, G. E. 95 Mounce, H. O. 77, 175±6, 202, 300, 303 Mulhall, Stephen 243, 245, 320±1, 325 Murphy, A. E. 233 Nielsen, Kai 4, 25, 142±3 Nussbaum, Martha 43, 318 O'Connor, Flannery 118, 120, 240, 271, 278 Orwell, George 312 Palmer, Anthony 77 Pals, Daniel L. xi, 2±5, 7, 24, 154, 184, 200 Parry, Gwenlyn, 29 Penelhum, T. 55 Phillips, D. Z. 4, 14, 21, 26, 28±9, 64, 77, 84, 151, 274 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel 287±8 Plantinga, Alvin 292 Plato 38, 40, 131, 320 Potter, Dennis 85 Prado, C. G. 281 Preus, J. Samuel xi, 1, 2, 6, 7, 20, 23±4, 201, 206, 219, 220 Proudfoot, Wayne xi, 10±16, 235

Rhees, Rush xiii, 21, 75±7, 93±9, 107±11, 116±17, 127±8, 140, 145, 169, 170±4, 180±1, 195, 201, 309 Ricoeur, Paul 1 Robinson, Ian 198 Rorty, Richard 318 Rowe, Williams 28 Ruhr, Mario von der xiv, 158 Sartre, J.-P. 90, 123 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 9, 10, 100, 115 Schlich, Moritz 177 Schopenhauer, Arthur 225 Sims, David 198 Skorupski, John xiii, 146±9, 159, 184, 236 Smith, Norman Kemp 66, 79, 80, 83±4, 86 Snell, Bruno 33, 43 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 279 Sophocles 48 Stocks, J. L. 316 Swinburne, Richard 55 Taylor, Charles 32, 320±2, 325 Tennessen, H. 60±2 Thomas, R. S. 63,120 Thucydides 52 Tillich, Paul 104, 115 Trigg, Roger 292±3 Tylor, E. B. xi, xiii, 2, 4, 143, 146, 148±57, 159, 164, 183, 185±6, 188, 192, 195, 199, 205, 229, 234, 236, 239, 248, 256, 259, 289 Unamuno, Miguel De 186 Wainwright, William 28 Waismann, Friedrich 177 Wartenburg, Thomas E. 88 Weil, Simone 34, 42±4, 51±3, 63, 121, 194±6, 246, 311 Wilde, Oscar 269 Williams, Bernard xii, 31±45, 48±51, 54, 183 Wilson, John Cook 79 Winch, Peter xiv, 20±1, 34, 40±2, 51±2, 54, 62, 75±6, 101, 121±3, 134, 194, 207, 213, 243±5, 260±1, 268, 289±96, 298±309, 311±17, 319±23 Wisdom, John 59, 117, 120, 122, 125±6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xiii, 19, 23, 28, 45, 54, 71±2, 82±3, 90±2, 105, 130, 140, 145, 147±9, 151, 156, 165, 167±75, 177, 179±81, 185, 194±5, 212±14, 220, 254, 262, 266, 299, 302, 307, 309, 314, 318, 320±3, 325 Wollheim, Richard 73 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 292 Wundt, Wilhelm 199

Index of subjects

alienation, 105, 141, 280±1, 282±4 animism, 146±63, 187, 195, 218, 230±1 anthropomorphism, 36, 43, 61, 62, 64, 109, 149±50, 159, 185, 236, 242±3 anti-intellectualism, 183±6 apologetics, 2, 5, 12, 13, 17, 33, 60 argument cosmological, see cosmological argument from design, see design argument aspect-blindness, 262 atheism, 5±6 class struggle, 138 coercion, 275 concepts, 18 contradiction, 105±12 cosmological argument, 57±65 creation, 62, 67±9, 100 death, 112±30, 149, 222, 224 demysti®cation, 87±92 design argument, 65±7, 78±80 divine power, 95±6 dualism, 72 emotions, 191±2 essentialism, 197 explanation causal, 74±5 naturalistic, 35±6 religious, 6±8, 10 ®deism, 25±30, 86, 305 frameworks conceptual, 20, 22 religious, 17±19 God sacri®ce to, 109±10 gods Greek, 36±9

hell, 111 ideology, 139±46 immortality, 116±20, 127±9 intellectualism, 146±8, 151, 153±4, 162, 167, 175, 185, 192, 194±5, 236, 253±4, 259, 289 justice, 51±3 magic, 155±7, 162±3, 165, 169, 171±7, 189, 195, 252, 259, 264, 289, 290±1, 295±300 miracles, 8, 21, 73±83, 106 mysticism, 250, 252±3, 256, 258 myths, 220, 226 necessity, 45±50 neurosis, 204±5, 207±8, 218 Oedipus complex, 218 philosophy, 5, 318±26 power, divine, see divine power predestination, 82 primitives, 249±52, 259±63, 265, 294±303 progress, 145, 162±3 reductionism, 11±15, 267 rei®cation, 89±90 religion interpretation of, 9 and psychoanalysis, 226±9 and science, 20±1, 160 and sociology, 273±7, 285±9 religious experience, 10 minimalism, 84 pluralism, 268±9 studies, 1, 3 ritual, 162±82 self-deception, 202±4

329

330

Index of subjects

sexuality, 197±8, 209±10, 212, 213±14, 215±18, 225, 285 soul, 151±2 superstition, 170, 255±6, 262, 303 tabu, 188±9, 221, 223±4 theodicy, 41±2, 60±4, 142 theology, 6

totem, 232, 235, 250, 258 unconscious, 202±14 values, 278±9, 282 witchcraft, 263, 301±3, 308

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