CHAPTER IX
ETHNICITY,
CULTURE AND "PRIMORDIAL" SOLIDARITIES
GEORGE F. McLEAN
The Catholic University of America
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE
STUDY OF CULTURE
In
our consideration of the general theme of this Symposium, "Scriptural
Faith, Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict" reflection upon ethnicity seems
especially important, and this for at least two reasons. The first is the
particular bias of our own individualist culture from which vantage point we see
readily the human dignity and rights of the individual person, but only
secondarily what per-tains to the community or people. We easily follow a
contractarian interpretation of the polis, which conceives the social as a de-cidedly
secondary artifact. We hardly can imagine Socrates pre-ferring the hemlock to
being ostracized or his sense that the latter is the equivalent of simply being
dehumanized. Thus, though "the people of God" rather than the
individual is the central theme of the Scripture, it is necessary for us here in
America to reflect seriously in order to be able to take any real account of the
meaning and importance of belonging to a people.
Secondly,
the term "ethnic" has always carried a notably pejorative connotation;
indeed this seems to have been its primary meaning. For the Greeks and Romans it
meant those beyond the borders, the uncivilized, the barbarians (e.g., for the
Greeks this was used especially for those across the northern border in what
now, not incidentally, is called Bulgaria); for the Jews the ethnics were the
pagans; for anthropologists (or ethnographers) their concern was first with
primitive peoples, past or present. As this country was settled by West
Europeans those who came later from Eastern Europe and were less assimilated,
were called "ethnics". Thus, the term "ethnic conflict"
tends to reflect more disdain than human concern. The more ordinary response is
to divorce ethnicity from any religious significance and to seek its suppression
by any means.
But
if treating things dismissingly is always dangerous, because blind to reality,
to do so to persons, the greatest of creatures, tends to be downright
disastrous. For this reason rather than assuming the stance of the
self-enclosed, self-satisfied and unreflective citizens of the Greek polis,
it is important to look rather to the making of a people.
This
was reflected in the terms "civilization" and "culture". The
former referred especially to the citizen or civis of the city and to the
social modes characteristic thereof. The latter has rather the connotation of
the need to cultivate the soul in order that human life might flourish. The way
that this is done by a group is the key to an understanding of an ethnic group.
Thus, when the Micropedia cites Ashley Montagu’s notion of an ethnic
group as a local race, it adds that it means also a group of people sharing a
common cultural heritage. And when the United Nations condemned genocide as the
physical extirpation of a race, it followed immediately with a con-demnation of
cultural genocide as a radical undermining of a people’s humanity.
How
then can a people be studied in terms of its culture, indeed what can culture
mean? With the development of the phy-sical sciences in modern times,
observation and induction came to be considered the sure paths to scientific
knowledge. The sub-sequent development of the human sciences, in their concern
to assure the recognition of their conclusions, followed this lead of the
physical sciences. The examination of the externally visible and the reduction
or utilitarian relation of all thereto came to be considered the appropriate
methodology. Hence, the search was for patterns of action from which might be
abstracted increasingly universal principles, which were taken to be the keys to
human life. Read in this light, Levi-Strauss’s Totemism unfolds a tale
of the develop-ment of anthropology in this century as progressively it took
account of additional analytic levels of reality. Every twenty years a new
dimension of significance was added, from the empirical ap-proach of Elkins, to
the utilitarian added by Malinowski, to the psychological by Durkheim, to the
structural by Levi-Strauss him-self.
All
of this reflected the search for objective knowledge from which the attention to
the subject needed to be sedulously ex-cluded. For a study of humans, however,
it was precisely the sub-jectivity which was most definitory. This suggested the
need for attention to human intentionality. This was developed in a scientific
manner by Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological tradition and in terms of
signs by the burgeoning science of semiology. Clifford Geertz makes note of
Susan Langer’s work, Philosophy in a New Key,1 pointing to a shift of attention in anthropology and other
human sciences from an objective science of artifacts and behavior to the
hermeneutic science of meaning. Thus, ethnology as a scientific understanding of
people moved beyond the treatment of all aspects of human life as mere
assemblage as earlier reflected in E. B. Tylor’s and C. Kluckhohn’s
description of culture as consisting respectively of:
that
complex whole which includes knowlege, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any
other ca-pabilities and habits required by man as a member of society,2 (or) "patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for
behavior acquired and transmitted by sym-bols, constituting the distinctive
achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the
essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived
and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may,
on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as
conditioning elements of further action."3
In
contrast, Clifford Geertz came to focus on the meaning of all this for a people
and on how a people’s intentional action went about shaping its world. Thus he
contrasts the analysis of culture to an experimental science in search of law,
seeing it rather as an interpretative science in search of meaning.4
What is sought is the import of artifacts and actions, that is, whether "it
is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that, in their
occurrence and through their agency, is getting said."5 For this, one
must be aware "of the imaginative universe within which their acts are
signs."6
In this light, Geertz defines culture rather as "an historically
transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of intended
conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate,
perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life."7
Nevertheless,
one might ask whether this approach in terms of meaning is not itself subject to
the accented intellectualism characteristic of modern times. Hence, we are just
now beginning to reassemble the person: the physical that is subject to
objective observation, the intellectual which searches for meaning, the will
which searches for the good, and a yet more deeply human dimension at which we
integrate all of these in terms of beauty and the aesthetic.
If
this be the case, then in order to appreciate the nature and significance of
ethnicity and groups sharing a cultural tradition this paper will take a number
of steps. First, it will study human life at its core, that is in its most
proper exercise of freedom. Then, it will examine in this light the nature of a
culture tradition as the cumu-lative work of freedom over time by persons as
members of communities and by peoples. Next, it will study the adaptation of
their tradition to changing circumstances, and their relation to other cultural
traditions. Finally it will consider more particularly the na-ture of religion
as a dimension of culture with a view to under-standing its role in the
generation and resolution of ethnic conflict.
LEVELS OF FREEDOM: LEVELS
OF HUMAN MEANING
We
shall attempt to arrive at the appropriate level for attending to ethnicity as a
cultural phenomenon by considering the three levels of freedom identified by
Mortimer Adler through a survey of the body of Western philosophy by his
Institute for Philo-sophical Research: the freedoms first to choose what I
want; second to choose as I ought; and third to make myself the person I want to
be.8
Circumstantial Freedom of
Self-Realization
John
Locke, in order to assure the universal availability of the basis of decision
making, restricted knowledge to sense ex-perience and reflection. David Hume
concluded that all objects of knowledge must be mere matters of fact, i.e.,
neither the existence or actuality of a thing nor its essence, but simply the
determination of one from a pair of sensible contraries. For Rudolf Carnap this
came down to empirical "sets of facts", excluding speech about wholes
or God and all but the immediate content of sense ex-perience.
In
brief, all that concerns the culture and commitments of a people or nation is
outside the range of this first level of knowledge, and hence can be only
matters of blind and arbitrary will. This restriction of knowledge constitutes
an extremely limiting and intolerant ideology, no matter how hard its
practitioners strive within these limits to achieve openness and pluralism. For
their condition for such a pluralism inevitably becomes pervasive elimi-nation
from public discourse of all such notions of wholes as nations, peoples, or
cultures and all such grounds of meaning as spirit, self, community or God.
Though proposed as the condition for tolerance, this relegates commitment,
meaning and values to the private domain; public life then must be a battle of
self-interests in which self-ambition will have to be depended upon to check
self-ambition, for nothing else can be allowed public standing. Freedom will be
nothing but the right to be a wolf to the rest of humankind in the cause of
self-protection and all is sacrificed to protect this "right".
It
is amazing that this is proposed as the desirable pattern for social and
political life, for in such terms it is not possible to speak of appropriate or
inappropriate goals or even to evaluate choices in relation to self-fulfillment,
much less to social well-being. The only concern is which objects among the sets
of contraries I will choose by brute, changeable and even arbitrary will power,
and whether circumstances will allow me to carry out that choice. Such choices,
of course, may not only differ from, but even contradict the im-mediate and long
range objectives of other persons. This will require one to compromise his or
her freedom in the sense of Hobbes; John Rawls will even work out a formal set
of such com-promises.9 Throughout it all, however, the basic concern remains the
ability to do as one pleases.
This
includes two factors. The first is execution by which my will is translated into
action. Thus John Locke sees freedom as "being able to act or not act,
according as we shall choose or will;"10 while Bertrand Russell sees it as "the absence of
external obstacles to the realization of our desires."11 The second factor is individual self-realization understood
simply as the accomplishment of one’s own good as one perceives it in the
empirical, and hence material, terms of the senses.
In
these terms one’s goal can be only that which appeals to one’s senses, with
no necessary relation to real goods or to duties which one ought to perform.12
"Liberty consists in doing what one desires,"13
and the freedom of a society is measured by the latitude it provides for the
cultivation of individual patterns of life.14
If there is any ethical theory in this it can be only utilitarian, hopefully
with enough breadth to recognize other people and their good as well as one’s
own. In practice, over time this comes to constitute a black hole of
self-centered consumption of physical goods in which both nature and the person
are consumed; it is the essence of con-sumerism.
This
first level of freedom is reflected in the contemporary sense of
"choice" in North America. As a theory this is underwritten by a
pervasive series of legal precedents following Justice Holmes’ and Brandeis’
notion of privacy, which recently has come to be recognized as a constitutional
right. In the American legal system the meaning of freedom has been reduced to
this. It should be noted that this derived from Locke’s politically motivated
decision (itself an exercise of freedom) not merely to focus upon empirical
meaning, but to eliminate from public discourse any other know-ledge. Its
progressively rigorous implementation, which we have but sampled in the
references to Hume and Carnap, constitute an ideology in the sense of a selected
and restrictive vision which controls minds and reduces freedom to willfulness.
In this per-spective liberalism is grossly misnamed, and itself calls for a pro-cess
of liberation and enrichment.
In
sum, in the context of the Enlightenment and in order to make possible universal
participation in social life, Locke limited the range of meaning to what was
empirically available. This assured one sense of freedom, but limited it to
choices between contrary qualities. The effort was well-intentioned, but he
would seem to have tried too hard and compromised too much in a single-minded
pursuit of freedom of choice. As a result, the very notion of freedom has not
been able to sustain itself, but over time has turned gradually into a
consumerist black hole.
Acquired Freedom of Self
Perfection
The
second sense of freedom, namely, acquired freedom of self-perfection, was
introduced above where we saw how Kant in his second Critique opened a new and
much needed dimension of reason, namely, practical reason. Here freedom is
founded in law precisely as I assert for myself (autonomous) a law which is fit
for all men (universal). One is "able through acquired virtue or wisdom, to
will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting
human nature."
Freedom
here is then the ability to do, not as I want, but as I ought according to
formal principles. An extensive branch of enlightenment theory now is based upon
working out in theory what is dictated by this "ought"15
and how much of this can and should be formally agreed to in international
conventions in order to be converted into a set of internationally recognized
human rights. Certainly one would want no less and the considerable strength of
the position lies in fear that this minimum not be strongly protected.
But
this is exactly what happens when this second meaning of freedom is placed at
the service of the first for then it is turned into a set of individual human
rights which protect the right to choose. At the same time to promote this same
right of private acquisition and initiative all intermediate communities and
identities are rejected and the state is enlisted in the task of defending and
enforcing these individual rights. Minorities and the weaker peoples of this
world beware!
Existential Freedom:
Natural Freedom of Self-determination as
the
Life of Democracy
The
aesthetic sense of Kant dramatically enriches the pursuit of freedom. It
integrates body and spirit, opens all to high ideals and locates in one’s free
and creative response to the beauty and harmony of the whole the norm of
creative human engagement in reality. This greatly enriches the Enlightenment
effort at con-structing freedom by raising its goals and locating the exercise
of human freedom, not only in terms of the abstract essences of autonomous
individuals, but within our aesthetic response to a sense of beauty and harmony
which transcends all, inspires awe and delight in the good, revulsion at what is
evil and ugly, and the energy to transform one’s personal and social life.
If
structured in terms of an appreciation or feeling of har-mony, freedom itself at
the height of its sensibility serves as a lens presenting the richness of
reality in varied and intensified ways: freedom thus understood is both
spectroscope and kaleidoscope of being. Freely, purposively and creatively,
imagination weaves through reality, focusing now upon certain dimensions, now
re-versing its flow, now making new connections and interrelations. In the
process reality manifests not only universal scientific structures and their
potential interrelations, but its power to evoke our free response of love and
admiration, of hate and disgust, of love and commitment.
In
this manner freedom becomes at once the creative source, the manifestation, the
evaluator and the arbiter of all that we can imaginatively propose. It is goal,
namely to realize life as mean-ingful and free in this world; it is creative
source, for with the imagi-nation it unfolds the endless possibilities for human
expression; it is manifestation because it presents these to our consciousness
in ways appropriate to our capabilities for knowledge of multiple and limited
realities and relates these to the circumstances of our life; it is criterion
because its response manifests the ability of things to be variously desirable
or not in terms of a total personal response of pleasure or displeasure,
enjoyment or revulsion; and it is arbiter because it provides the basis upon
which our freedom chooses to affirm or reject, realize or avoid various ways of
self-realization.
This
is progress indeed, but in his own philosophy Kant both pointed out in theory
and illustrated in practice the potential this opens for a serious undermining
of the sense of freedom. For if the required context for freedom is based upon
proceeding hypothe-tically, ‘as if’ all is teleological then its very
reality is compromised. If its exercise is restricted to the confines of the
human imagination then freedom becomes, not only self-determining, but self-con-stituting.
Again one has tried too hard and become trapped within what he or she can make
or do.
One
needs instead to go beyond issues of nature or essence. Freedom is not only the
articulation of a law -- however autonomous and universal this might be in the
pattern of Kant’s second Critique, or at whatever stage of
universalization of the sense of justice in the pattern of Kohlberg’s stages
of moral reasoning. Freedom is not merely a nature reflected in moral judgements,
it is human life and action. It is to be humanly and to live
fully, pertaining not to the order of essence, but to that of existence.
Progress
in being human corresponds to one’s development of a sense of being. Its
deepening from forms and structures, essences and laws in Plato, to act in
Aristotle and especially to existence in Christian philosophy definitively
deepened the sense of human life with its triumphs and tragedies. This is the
drama we are living in our days as we are called insistently to humanize the
application of our technological abilities and indeed our realization of life
itself. This cannot be done simply in terms of essence, that is, of a moral law
or an ideal befitting human nature; rather it must be in terms of existence,
that is, of deciding for oneself in virtue of the power inherent in human nature
to change one’s own character creatively and to determine what one shall be
and become. This is the most radical freedom, namely, our natural freedom of
self-determination.
It
takes us far beyond freedom as external choice between objects in our world and
beyond the internal selection of universal principles for the direction of our
action. It is rather self-affirmation in terms of our orientation or teleology
to perfection or full realization. This implies seeking when that perfection is
absent and enjoying or celebrating it when attained. In this sense, it is that
stability in one’s orientation to the good which constitutes a broad culture
and people and which in classical instances has been termed holiness. One might
say that this is life as practiced by the saints, but it would be more correct
to say that it is because they lived the life of their culture to perfection
that they are called "holy". It
would be radically insufficient to think in these terms of a human person in
isolation from others, as merely self-centered and self-concerned, for then life
would be limited to the vision or hopes of only one person or a set of persons
taken serially. Indeed, such person would have closed off the realization of
being which should rather be open to all of nature and especially to other
persons. One’s concern for perfection should extend to other persons beyond
what I could determine as my participation in being, and even beyond what I
determine for them as their participation in being, for such an exercise of
freedom on my part would return to me and remain limited within the confines of
my being. Instead, by opening to others as free, that is, as they uniquely
determine them-selves, my engagement in being extends definitively beyond myself
to their lives and self-realization of all both singly and in community their
community, all humankind and indeed all creation.
But
persons are still limited, whereas their minds and hearts are open to being
without end. Situated in an existential context the pointer of Kant’s third
Critique toward an infinite telos takes on further meaning. For it directs us
toward that infinite, self-sufficient and properly creative source of our being.
Corresponding to that act of infinite freedom by which we live, and breathe, and
have our being, we unite with the act of being by which we are made, the act of
love by which we have first been loved. Human growth in freedom is the process
of self-correction and self-perfection to the point at which we are fully opened
to that infinite act of freedom from which we come and to which we tend. The
achievement of this openness is the state of Hindu and Buddhist Enlightenment
and of Christian and Islamic Mystical Union in the divine in which God loves
himself in me: "I live now not I," says St. Paul, "but Christ
liveth in me." Kant himself would only say that to be authentically human,
life had to be lived "as if" all is teleological. But then its
exercise would be restricted by the limitations of the human imagination and
freedom, more than self-determining, would be self-constituting and thus
self-limited. In contrast, if the deepest striving of the human spirit is what
is most real in this world, then the transcendent principle it requires must be
the most real in heaven and earth; if freedom presents us with a limitless range
of possibilities, then its principle must be the Infinite and Eternal, Source
and Goal of all possibility. The Transcendent is the key to real liberation. It
frees the human spirit from limitation to the restricted field of one’s own
slow, halting and even partial creative activity. It gives absolute grounding to
one’s reality. It certifies one’s right to be respected; and it evokes the
creative powers of one’s heart. This is the reason why religion is the heart
of culture.
Hence,
to treat all this as a divisive force to be excluded from civil life and
identity, as something to be rendered bloodless till it disappears, is
fundamentally subversive of public life in the name of openness to abstract
rather than concrete persons; it would destroy multiple concrete peoples in
favor of an ideologized pluralism. Rather, the religious sense of transcendence
makes much needed contributions to modern life. To the liberal sense of freedom
as arbitrary choice, awareness of the transcendent Creator adds that life is not
only a matter of selecting between which physical realities we will consume, but
of being, with its characteristics of self-identity, communication and
sharing, justice and love.
To
the aesthetic awareness of Kant as described above, awareness of the
transcendent as the context of human life grounds the intuition of human
meaning, dignity and rights.
To
the enlightenment egalitarian search for universal parti-cipation in social
decision making, this aesthetic sense tempers the aggressive excesses of
self-centered personal identity with that broad sense of harmony both with man
and with nature needed in our ever more complex and crowded world.
This
indeed is freedom writ large. Beyond issues of pro-cedure or balances of
interests, it is the reason why such a divine Person provides a dynamic center
for free and constructive human efforts; it gives dramatic impulse to the very
essence of democracy as personal participation in social life; it is the
transforming presence in the heart of everyone who suffers injustice; it is the
source of new life for person and society. This is the real key to the
liberation of a people, indeed it is the issue of the foundation and extent of
reality and hence of human life itself. As with family and smaller community, to
exclude this from nation building or to attempt to erase religion from the
identity of a people is to condemn them to subservience to the state and its
predominant political power.
CULTURE
In
the light of this third constructive sense of freedom one can begin from within
to follow the components of the study of a culture: hermeneutics, values,
historicity, tradition, application and inter-pretation.
Hermeneutics
The
circumstances of the Greek messenger make manifest the basic dilemma of
hermeneutics (from Hermes, the ancient Greek messenger from the gods) and
interpretation, which has come to be called the hermeneutic circle. This
consists in the fact that any understanding of the parts requires an
understanding of the whole, while the grasp of the whole depends upon some
awareness of its parts. This appears in four ways. First, the herald had not
merely to pass on a written text, but to speak or proclaim it. This could be
done only by reading through all the parts of the message in sequence. But
grasping these as parts requires some understanding of the whole message from
the very beginning. How can a whole of meaning depend upon parts, which for
their very meaning depend upon the whole? Secondly, the message had to be
conveyed in a particular historical time and place, and with specific intonation
and inflection. But this would convey only one particular sense from the many
potentialities of the words. Thirdly, the messenger had not only to express, but
also to explain the message and its ramifications or meaning. This required a
certain awareness of the broader context of the issue and of the language as the
repository of the culture within which the message was composed. In sum, in
order to interpret, convey, or receive a message, some sense of the whole is
required for assembling and interpreting its parts; but how can one know the
whole before knowing its parts?
This
appears also from the task of the messenger in tran-slating or bearing the
meaning of the text from the source, in its own context, to others in their
distinctive set of circumstances and with their projects and preoccupations. The
etymology of the term underlines this task. ‘Interpret’ combines praesto:
to show, manifest or exhibit, with the prefix inter to indicate the
distinction of the one from whom and the one to whom the message is passed.16
This difference could be between past and present, as when an ancient text is
being reread today; between one culture and another, as when a text in another
language than one’s own is being interpreted; or indeed, between persons, even
in the same culture and time, provided full attention be paid to the uniqueness
of each person. But given this difference, how is communication and its implied
‘community’ between the two contexts possible, for were it not to be
possible we would be left with never-ending violent clashes between persons,
classes and values.
Values and Virtues
The
term ‘value’ was derived from the economic sphere where it meant the amount
of a commodity required in order to bring a certain price. This is reflected
also in the term ‘axiology,’ the root of which means "weighing as
much" or "worth as much." This has objective content, for the
good must really "weigh in" -- it must make a real difference.17
The
term ‘value’ expresses this good especially as related to persons who
actually acknowledge it as a good and respond to it as desirable. Thus,
different individuals or groups, or possibly the same but at different periods,
may have distinct sets of values as they become sensitive to, and prize,
distinct sets of goods. More generally, over time a subtle shift takes place in
the distinctive ranking of the degree to which they prize various goods. By so
doing they delineate among objective moral goods a certain pattern of values
which in a more stable fashion mirrors their corporate free choices. This
constitutes the basic topology of a culture; as repeatedly reaffirmed through
time, it builds a tradition or heritage.
By
giving shape to the culture, values constitute the prime pattern and gradation
of goods experienced from their earliest years by persons born into that
heritage. In these terms they interpret and shape the development of their
relations with other persons and groups. Young persons, as it were, peer out at
the world through cultural lenses which were formed by their family and
ancestors and which reflect the pattern of choices made by their community
through its long history -- often in its most trying circumstances. Like a pair
of glasses, values do not create the object, but reveal and focus attention upon
certain goods and patterns of goods rather than upon others.
Thus
values become the basic orienting factor for one’s affective and emotional
life. Over time, they encourage certain patterns of action -- and even of
physical growth -- which, in turn, reinforce the pattern of values. Through this
process we constitute our universe of moral concern in terms of which we
struggle to achieve, mourn our failures, and celebrate our successes.18
This is our world of hopes and fears, in terms of which, as Plato wrote in the
Laches, our lives have moral meaning and we can properly begin to speak of
virtues.
The
reference to the god, Hermes, in the term ‘hermeneutics’ suggests something
of the depth of the meaning which is sought and the implication of this for the
world of values. For the message borne by Hermes is not merely an abstract
mathematical formula or a methodological prescription devoid of human meaning
and value. Rather, it is the limitless wisdom regarding the source and hence the
reality, the priorities and hence the value of all. Hesiod had appealed for this
in the introduction to his Theogony: "Hail, children of Zeus! Grant
lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are forever. .
. . Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be."19
Aristotle
indicated this concern for values in describing his science of wisdom as
"knowing to what end each thing must be done . . . ; and this end is the
good of that thing, and in general the supreme good in the whole of
nature." Such a science will be most divine, for: "(1) God is thought
to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and (2) such a
science either God alone can have, or God above all others. All the sciences,
indeed, are more necessary than this, but none is better."20
Hence, rather than considering things in a perspective that is only temporal and
totally changing -- with an implied total relativization of all -- hermeneutics
or interpretation is essentially open to a vision of what is most real in itself
and most lasting through time, that is, to the perennial in the realm of being
and values.
Historicity
In
undertaking his search for unchanging and permanent guides for human action
Socrates had directed the attention of the Western mind away from the temporal
and changing. In redirecting attention back to this changing universe, the
modern mind still echoed Socrates by searching for the permanent structures of
complex entities and the stable laws of change. Nevertheless, its attention to
the essentially temporal character of mankind and hence to the uniqueness of
each decision, individual and corporate, opened important new horizons.
In
the term hermeneutics, the element of translation or interpretation stresses the
presentation to the one who receives the message. In this their historical
situation, and hence the historical character of human life, becomes essential.
This brings into con-sideration not merely the pursuit of general truth, but
those to whom truth is expressed, namely, persons in the concrete circumstances
of their cultures as these have developed through the history of human
interaction with nature, with other human beings and with God.
This
human history sets the circumstances in which one perceives the values presented
in the tradition and then mobilizes his or her own project toward the future.
Given the admixture of good and evil in human action the process of realizing
the good in human history always has been compromised with evil. Conse-quently,
the past as well as the present must always be deciphered or interpreted in
order to identify both its value content and the contradictions of that content;
and projections towards the reali-zation of values in the future must provide
also for encountering and overcoming evil.
Tradition
In
the light of the above it is necessary now to follow out culture in time and it
forms a tradition as the normative locus and summation of the ambiguous human
experience of values; to analyze the application and adaptation of the tradition
in the con-crete circumstances of history; and to consider hermeneutics as a
method for making positive use of the distinctiveness of one’s own point in
history in order more broadly to appreciate this content of the human experience
of other cultural groups.
To
situate and emphasize the relation of meaning to tradition John Caputo, in
Act and Agent: Foundations for Moral Education and Character Development,21
notes that from its very beginnings, even before birth, one’s experience is
lived in and with the bio-logical rhythms of one’s mother. Upon birth there
follows a pro-gressively broader sharing in the life of parents and siblings;
this is the context in which one is fully at peace, and hence most open to
personal growth and social development. In a word, from its be-ginning one’s
life has been historical: it has been lived in time and with other persons. In
the family one’s life and learning is realized in relation to the prior life
and learning of family members upon which it depends for development and
orientation. This is the universal condition of each person, and consequently of
the de-velopment of human awareness and knowledge.
In
terms of this phenomenological understanding interpersonal dependence is not
unnatural -- quite the contrary. We depend for our being upon our creator, we
are conceived in dependence upon our parents, and we are nurtured by them with
care and concern. Through the years we depend continually upon our family and
peers, school and community. Beyond our personal and social group we turn
eagerly to other persons whom we recognize as superior, not basically in terms
of their will, but in terms of their insight and judgment precisely in those
matters where truth, reason and balanced judgment are required. The preeminence
or authority of wise persons in the community is not something they usurp or
with which they are arbitrarily endowed, but is based upon their capabilities
and acknowledged in our free and reasoned response. Thus, the burden of
Plato’s Republic is precisely the education of the future leader to be
able to exercise authority, for while the leader who is wise but indecisive may
be ineffective, the one who is decisive but foolish is bound upon destruction.
From
this notion of authority it is possible to construct that of tradition by adding
to present interchange additional generations with their accumulation of human
insight predicated upon the wealth of their human experience through time. As a
process of trial and error, of continual correction and addition, history
constitutes a type of learning and testing laboratory in which the strengths of
various insights can be identified and reinforced, while their de-ficiencies are
corrected and complemented. The cumulative results of the extended process of
learning and testing constitute tradition. The historical and prophetical books
of the Bible constitute just such an extended concrete account of one’s
people’s process of discovery carried out in interaction with the divine.
The
content of a tradition serves as a model and exemplar, not because of personal
inertia, but because of the corporate character of the learning by which it was
built out of experience and the free and wise acts of succeeding generations in
reevaluating, reaffirming, preserving and passing on what has been learned. The
content of a long tradition has passed the test of countless ge-nerations.
Standing, as it were, on the shoulders of our forebears, we are able to discover
and evaluate situations with the help of their vision because of the sensitivity
they developed and communicated to us. Without this we could not even choose
topics to be in-vestigated or awaken within ourselves the desire to study those
problems.22
Tradition,
then, is not simply everything that ever happened, but only what appears
significant in the light of those who have appreciated and described it. Indeed,
this presentation by different voices draws out its many aspects. Thus tradition
is not an object in itself, but a rich source from which multiple themes can be
drawn according to the motivation and interest of the inquirer. It needs to be
accepted and embraced, affirmed and cultivated. Here the em-phasis is neither
upon the past or the present, but upon mankind living through time.
But
neither is tradition a passive storehouse of materials to be drawn upon and
shaped at the arbitrary will of the present inquirer; rather, it presents
insight and wisdom that is normative for life in the present and future. Just as
prudence (phronesis) without law (nomos) would be as relativistic
and ineffectual as muscular action without a skeletal substructure, so law built
simply upon tran-scendental or abstract vision, without taking account of
historicity, would be irrelevant idealism. Hence, there is need to look into
historicity to see if human action in time can engender a vision which
sufficiently transcends its own time to be normative for the present and
directive for the future.
This
would consist of a set of values and goals which each person should seek to
realize. Its harmony of measure and fullness would suggest a way for the mature
and perfect formation of persons and of mankind.23 Such a vision would be both historical and normative:
historical because arising in time and presenting an appropriate way to preserve
and promote human life through time; normative because presenting a basis upon
which to judge past ages, present actions and options for the future. The fact
of human striving manifests that every humanism, far from being indifferent, is
committed to the realization of some such classical and perduring model of
perfection.
It
would be erroneous, however, to consider this merely a matter of knowledge, for
then it would engage, not entire peoples, but only a few whom it would divide
into opposing schools. The project of a tradition is much broader and can be
described only in terms of the more inclusive existential and phenomenological
horizon as described Samay and Caputo in Act and Agent,24
namely, as including both body and spirit, knowledge and love. It is, in fact,
the whole human dynamism of reaching out to others in striving toward ever more
complete personal and social fulfillment through the realization of
understanding and love, and thereby of justice and peace.
Finally,
the classical model is not drawn forward artificially by overcoming
chronological distance; rather, it acts as inspiration of, and judgment upon,
man’s best efforts. Through time it is the timeless mode of history. We do not
construct it, but belong to it, just as it belongs to us -- for it is the
ultimate community of human striving. Hence, historical and cultural
self-criticism is not simply an individual act of subjectivity, but our
situatedness in a tradition as this fuses in us past, present and future.25
As
mentioned in the introduction, the sense of the good or of value which
constitutes tradition is required also in order to appreciate the real impact of
the achievements and deformations of the present. Without tradition, present
events become simply facts of the moment, succeeded by counter-facts in ever
succeeding waves of contradiction. This would constitute a history written in
terms of violence in which human despair would turn to a Utopian abstraction of
merely human origin -- a kind of 1984 designed according to the reductive
limitations of a modern rationalism.
This
stands in brutal contrast to the cumulative richness of vision acquired by
peoples through the ages and embodied in the figure of a Bolivar or Lincoln, a
Gandhi or Mother Theresa, or a Martin Luther King. Not mere matters of fact, but
eminently free and unique as concrete universals they exemplified the
above-men-tioned harmony of measure and fullness which is at once classical and
historical, ideal and personal, normative and free. Living in their own times,
they emerge out of history to judge and inspire peoples of all times and places.
APPLICATION: THE
ADAPTATION OF A CULTURAL
TRADITION
TO CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES
In
considering application we turn, as it were, from the whole to its parts, from
tradition to its particular meaning for each new time, to ordering the present
and constructing the future. This is a matter, first of all, of taking time
seriously, that is, of recognizing that reality includes authentic novelty. This
contrasts to the perspective of Plato for whom the real is the ideal, the forms
or ideas transcending matter and time, of which physical things and temporal
events are but shadows. It also goes beyond rationalism’s search for clear and
distinct knowledge of eternal and simple natures and their relations. A
fortiori, it goes beyond method alone without content.
In
contrast to all these, H.-G. Gadamer’s notion of appli-cation26
means that tradition, with its inherent authority or nor-mative force, achieves
its perfection in the temporal unfolding of reality. Secondly, it shows human
persons, not as detached in-tellects, but as inextricably enabled by, and
formative of, their changing physical and social universe. Thirdly, in the area
of moral values and human action it expresses directly the striving of persons
to realize their lives, the orientation of this striving and its development
into a fixed attitude (hexis). Hence, as distinct from the physical order
ethos is a situation neither of law or of lawless-ness, but of human and
therefore developing institutions and attitudes which regulate, but do not
determine.27
There
are certain broad guidelines for the area of ethical know-ledge which can serve
in the application of tradition as a guide for historical practice. The concrete
and unique reality of human freedom when lived with others through time
constitutes a distinctive and ever-changing process. This is historicity and
means that our responses to the good are made always in concrete and ever
changing circumstances. Hence, the general principles of ethics as a philosophic
science of action must not be purely theoretical knowledge or a simple
accounting from the past. Instead, they must help people exercise their
conscious freedom in concrete historical circumstances which as ever changing
are ever new
Here
an important distinction must be made between techné and ethics. In techné
action is governed by an idea as an exemplary cause which is fully determined
and known by objective theoretical knowledge (epistéme). Skill consists
in knowing how to act according to that idea or plan; and when it cannot be
carried out perfectly some parts of it are simply omitted in the execution.
In
ethics the situation, though similar in the possession of a practical guide and
its application to a particular task, differs in im-portant ways. First, in
action as moral the subject constitutes one-self, as much as one makes the
object, for agents are differentiated by their action. Hence, moral knowledge as
an understanding of the appropriateness of human action cannot be fully
determined in-dependently of the subjects in their situation.
Secondly,
adaptation by moral agents in their application of the law does not diminish,
but rather corrects and perfects the law. In a world which is only partially and
generally ordered, the law cannot contain in any explicit manner the concrete
possibilities which arise in history. It is precisely here that the freedom and
creativity of the person is located. This does not consist in an arbitrary
response, for Kant is right in saying that without law freedom has no meaning.
Nor does it consist simply in an automatic response determined by the historical
situation, for then deter-minism and relativism would compete for the crown in
undermining human freedom. Human freedom consists rather in shaping the present
according to a sense of what is just and good, and in a way which manifests and
indeed creates for the first time more of what justice and goodness mean.
Hence,
the law is perfected by its application in the circu-mstances. Epoché and
equity do not diminish, but perfect the law. Without them the law would be
simply a mechanical replication doing the work not of justice, but of injustice.
Ethics is not only knowledge of what is right in general, but the search for
what is right in the situation and the choice of the right means for this
situation. Knowledge regarding the means is not then a matter of mere
expediency; it is the essence of the search for a more perfect application of
the law in the given situation. This is the fulfillment of moral knowledge.28
It
will be important to note here that the rule of the concrete (of what the
situation is asking of us) is known not by sense knowledge which simply
registers a set of concrete facts. In order to know what is morally required,
the situation must be understood in the light of what is right, that is, in the
light of what has been discovered about appropriate human action through the
tradition with its normative character. Only in this light can moral
consciousness as the work of intellect, (nous) rather than of sensation,
go about its job of choosing the right means.
Hence,
to proceed simply in reaction to concrete injustices as present negations of the
good, rather than in the light of one’s tradition, is ultimately destructive.
It inverts the order just men-tioned and results in manipulation of our hopes
for the good. Destructive or repressive structures would lead us to the use of
correspondingly evil means, truly suited only to producing evil results. The
true response to evil can be worked out only in terms of the good as discovered
by our people, passed on in tradition and applied by us in our times.
The
importance of application manifests the central role played by the virtue of
prudence (phronesis) or thoughtful reflection which enables one to
discover the appropriate means for the cir-cumstances. This must include also
the virtue of sagacity (sunesis), that is, of understanding or concern
for the other. For what is required as a guide for the agent is not only
technical knowledge of an abstract ideal, but knowledge that takes account of
the agent in relation to other persons. One can assess the situation adequately
only inasmuch as one, in a sense, undergoes the situation with the affected
parties. Thus, Aristotle rightly describes as "terrible" the one who
can make the most of the situation, but without orientation towards moral ends,
that is, without concern for the good of others in their situations.
In
sum, application is not a subsequent or accidental part of understanding, but
co-determines this understanding from the be-ginning. Moral consciousness must
seek to understand the good, not as an ideal to be known and then applied, but
rather through discerning the good for concrete persons in their relations with
others.
This
can contribute to sorting out the human dilemma be-tween an absolutism
insensitive to persons in their concrete cir-cumstances and a relativism which
leaves the person subject to expediency in public and private life. Indeed, the
very statement of the dilemma reflects the deleterious aspect of the Platonic
view of ideas. He was right to ground changing and historical being in the
unchanging and eternal. This had been Parmenides’ first insight in metaphysics
and was richly developed in relation to human action through the medieval notion
of an eternal law in the divine mind. But it seems inappropriate to speak
directly in these terms regarding human life. In all things individual human
persons and humankind as a whole are subject to time, growth and development. As
we become increasingly conscious of this the human character of even our
abstract ideals becomes manifest and their adapted application in time can be
seen, not as their rejection, but as their perfection. In this, justice loses
none of its force as an absolute requirement of human action. Rather, the
concrete modes of its application in particular circumstances add to what can be
articulated in merely abstract and universal terms. A hermeneutic approach
directs attention precisely to these unfoldings of the meaning of abstract
principles through time. This is not an abandonment of absolutes, but a
recognition of the human condition and of the way in which this enriches our
knowledge of the principles of human life.
What
then should we conclude regarding this sense of the good which mankind has
discovered, in which we have been raised, which gives us dominion over our
actions, and which enables us to be free and creative? Does it come from God or
from man, from eternity or from history? Chakravarti Rajagopalachari of Madras
answered:
Whether
the epics and songs of a nation spring from the faith and ideas of the common
folk, or whether a nation’s faith and ideas are produced by its literature is
a question which one is free to answer as one likes. . . . Did clouds rise from
the sea or was the sea filled by waters from the sky? All such inquiries take us
to the feet of God tran-scending speech and thought.29
INTERPRETATION AS
INTERACTION BETWEEN
CULTURAL
TRADITIONS
Thus
far we have treated the character and importance of tradition. This bears the
long experience of persons interacting with this world, with other persons and
with God. It is made up not only of chronological facts, but of insights
regarding human perfection which have been forged by human efforts in concrete
circum-stances, e.g., the Greek notion of democracy and the enlighten-ment
notions of equality and freedom. By their internal value these stand as
normative of the aspirations of a people.
Secondly,
we have seen the implications of historicity for novelty in the context of
tradition, the continually unfolding cir-cumstances of historical development,
and the way in which these not merely extend or repeat what went before but
constitute an emerging manifestation of the dynamic character of the vision
articulated by the art, religion, literature and political structures of a
cultural tradition. But the question arises, how can earlier sources which
express the great achievements of human awareness be understood in a way that is
relevant, indicative, and directive of our life in present circumstances? In a
word, how can we draw out the significance of tradition for present action?
First
it is necessary to note that only a unity of meaning, that is, an identity, is
intelligible.30 Just as it is not possible to understand a number three if we include
but two units rather than three, no act of understanding is possible unless it
is directed to an identity or whole of meaning. This brings us to the classic
issue, described above as the hermeneutic circle, in which knowledge of the
whole depends upon knowledge of the parts, and vice versa. How can we make this
work for, rather than against us?
The
experience of reading a text might help. As we read we construe the meaning of a
sentence before grasping all its indivi-dual parts. What we construe is
dependent upon our expectation of the meaning of the sentence which we derived
from its first words, the prior context, or more likely a combination of the
two. In turn, our expectation or construal of the meaning of the text is
adjusted according to the requirements of its various parts as we proceed to
read through the parts of the sentence, the paragraph, etc., con-tinually
reassessing the whole in terms of the parts and the parts in terms of the whole.
This basically circular movement continues until all appears to fit and to be
clear.
Similarly,
as we begin to look into our tradition we develop a prior conception of its
content. This anticipation of meaning is not simply of the tradition as an
objective or fixed content to which we come; it is rather what we produce as we
participate in the evolution of the tradition, and thereby further determine
ourselves. This is a creative stance reflecting the content, not only of the
past, but of the time in which I stand and of the life project in which I am
engaged. It is a creative unveiling of the content of the tradition as this
comes progressively and historically into the present and, through the present,
passes into the future.
In
this light, time is not a barrier, a separation or an abyss, but rather a bridge
and opportunity for the process of understanding, a fertile ground filled with
experience, custom and tradition. The importance of the historical distance it
provides is not that this enables the subjective reality of persons to disappear
so that the objectivity of the situation can emerge. On the contrary, it makes
possible a more complete meaning of the tradition, less by re-moving falsifying
factors, than by opening new sources of self-understanding which reveal in the
tradition unsuspected implica-tions and even new dimensions of meaning.31
Of
course, not all our acts of understanding are correct, whether they be about the
meaning of a text from another culture, a dimension of a shared tradition, a set
of goals or a plan for future action. Hence, it becomes particularly important
that they not be adhered to fixedly, but be put at risk in dialogue with others.
In
this the basic elements of meaning remains the sub-stances which Aristotle
described in terms of autonomy and, by implication, of identity. Hermeneutics
would expand this to reflect as well the historical and hermeneutic situation of
each person in the dialogue, that is, their horizon or particular possibility
for under-standing: an horizon is all that can be seen from one’s vantage
point(s). In reading a text or in a dialoguing with others it is ne-cessary to
be aware of our horizon as well as of that of others. It is precisely when our
initial projection of the meaning of a text (another’s words or the content of
a tradition) will not bear up under the progressive dialogue that we are
required to adjust our pro-jection of their meaning.
This
enables us to adjust not only our prior understanding of the horizon of the
other with whom we are in dialogue, but especially our own horizon. Hence, one
need not fear being trapped in one’s horizons. They are vantage points of a
mind which in prin-ciple is open and mobile, capable of being aware of its own
horizon and of transcending it through acknowledging the horizons of others. The
flow of history implies that we are not bound by our horizons, but move in and
out of them. It is in making us aware of our horizons that hermeneutic
consciousness accomplishes our liberation.32
In
this process it is important that we retain a questioning attitude. We must not
simply follow through with our previous ideas until a change is forced upon us,
but be sensitive to new meanings in true openness. This is neither neutrality as
regards the meaning of the tradition, nor an extinction of passionate concern
for actions towards the future. Rather, being aware of our own biases or
prejudices and adjusting them in dialogue with others implies re-jecting what
impedes our understanding of others, of texts or of traditions. Our attitude in
approaching dialogue must be one of willingness continually to revise our
initial projection or expectation of meaning.
There
is then a way out of the hermeneutic cycle. It is not by ignoring or denying our
horizons and prejudices, but by recognizing them as inevitable and making them
work for us. To do so we must direct our attention to the objective meaning of
the text in order to draw out, not its meaning for the author, but its
application for the present. Through this process of application we serve as
midwife for the historicity of a text, tradition or culture and enable it to
give birth to the future.33
METHOD OF QUESTION AND
ANSWER
The
effort to draw upon a text or a tradition and in dialogue to discover its
meaning for the present supposes authentic openness. The logical structure of
this openness is to be found in the exchange of question and answer. The
question is required in order to determine just what issue we are engaging in
order to direct our attention. Without this no meaningful answer can be given or
received. As a question, however, it requires that the answer not be settled or
determined. In sum, progress or discovery requires an openness which is not
simply indeterminacy, but a question which gives specific direction to our
attention and enables us to consider significant evidence. (Note that we can
proceed not only by means of positive evidence for one of two possible
responses, but also through dissolving counter arguments).
If
discovery depends upon the question, then the art of discovery is the art of
questioning. Consequently, whether working alone or in conjunction with others,
our effort to find the answer should be directed less towards suppressing, than
toward re-inforcing and unfolding the question. To the degree that its
pro-babilities are built up and intensified it can serve as a searchlight. This
is the opposite of both opinion which tends to suppress questions, and of
arguing which searches out the weakness in the other’s argument. Instead, in
conversation as dialogue one enters upon a mutual search to maximize the
possibilities of the question, even by speaking at cross purposes. By mutually
eliminating errors and working out a common meaning we discover truth.34
Further,
it should not be presupposed that the text holds the answer to but one question
or horizon which must be identified by the reader. On the contrary, the full
horizon of the author is never available to the reader, nor can it be expected
that there is but one question to which the text or tradition holds an answer.
The sense of the text reaches beyond what the author intended; because of the
dynamic character of being as it emerges in time, the horizon is never fixed but
continually opens. This constitutes the effective historical element in
understanding a text or a tradition. At each step new dimensions of its
potentialities open to understanding; the meaning of a text or tradition lives
with the consciousness and hence the horizons -- not of its author -- but of
persons in history. It is the broadening of their horizons, resulting from their
fusion with the horizon of a text or a partner in dialogue, that makes it
possible to receive answers which are ever new.35
In
this one’s personal attitudes and interests are, once again, most important.
If our interest in developing new horizons is simply the promotion of our own
understanding then we could be in-terested solely in achieving knowledge, and
thereby domination over others. This would lock one into an absoluteness of
one’s pre-judices, for being fixed or closed in the past they would disallow
new life in the present. In this manner powerful new insights can become with
time deadening pre-judgments which suppress freedom.
In
contrast, an attitude of authentic openness appreciates the nature of one’s
own finiteness. On this basis it both respects the past and is open to
discerning the future. Such openness is a matter, not merely of new information,
but of recognizing the historical nature of man. It enables us to escape from
what had deceived us and held us captive, and enables us to learn from new
experiences. For example, recognition of the limitations of our finite planning
enables us to see that the future is still open.36
This
suggests that openness consists not so much in sur-veying others objectively or
obeying them in a slavish and un-questioning manner, but is directed primarily
to ourselves. It is an extension of our ability to listen to others, and to
assimilate the implications of their answers for changes in our own positions. In
other words, it is an acknowledgment that the cultural heritage has something
new to say to us. The characteristic hermeneutic attitude of effective
historical consciousness is then not method-ological sureness, but readiness for
experience.37 Seen in these terms our heritage is not closed, but the
basis for a life that is ever new, more inclusive, and more rich.
From
this what emerges is that a culture is the creation of a people’s freedom
through time. It is the condition for their living humanely as the exercise
freedom in time and building thereby a life worthy of themselves with others.
This then is not a matter for suppression, indeed its suppression would unleash
upon the world a dehumanized horde.
RELIGION AS A CULTURAL
PHENOMENON
It
remains now to look at the character and role of religion from the perspective
of an anthropology as a hermeneutic science. Geertz defines religion as
(1)
a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura
of actuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.38
In
this formulation Geertz builds progressively to identify the level of insight,
to identify the characteristic moods and motiva-tions, to ground these in a
religions sense of reality and then to align all three in an act which is
simultaneously one of insight conviction, and commitment. Following Geertz, let
us look in greater detail at the elements of his definition.
(1)
Religion is a set of symbols. Symbols are concrete embodiments of ideas,
attitudes etc. They are models for function by providing sources of
information in terms of which other non-symbolic processes can be patterned.
Thus, they serve as temp-lates for producing reality. But especially cultural
patterns are models of the non-symbolic processes which they represent,
express and render intelligible in a different medium. In this sense doctrines
and rites "give meaning or objective conceptual form, to social and
psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to
themselves."39 Geertz sees the essence of human thought as the perception
of the congruence between these two sets of processes one serving as a program
or symbol of the other as programmed.
(2)
Religion establishes pervasive, and long-tasting moods and motivations
in men. Motivations are directional in character and hence have their
meaning in terms of the ends towards which they point. Moods, lead nowhere but
pervade all; their meaning re-flects the conditions from which they arise. Thus
charity is religious motivation when it is enclosed in a conception of God’s
purposes; hope is a religious mood when grounded in a conception of the divine
nature.40
(3)
Religion does this by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence.
The emerging appreciation of the importance of meaning enables us to see, in
turn, the importance of symbols and cultural patterns. Without these we would be
functionally in-complete, "a formless monster with neither sense of
direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague
emotions."41
This threat appears especially in three forms: mean-inglessness, suffering and
evil.
First,
we are deeply disquieted by questions regarding the ability of received cultural
patterns or myths, no matter how im-probable if taken literally rather than
symbolically, to enable us to understand our world. These set ordinary
experience in a broader metaphysical context lest we "be adrift in an
absurd world." This disquiet reflects our mega-concern, namely, regarding
what it is to be human and whether our existence, and indeed existence itself,
is intelligible, makes sense and has meaning.
A
second point of central concern is suffering and evil. This is the affective
correlate of the above problem of meaning. Here re-ligion faces not the question
of how suffering can be dismissed, but rather of how it can be faced and
endured. This is done ritually by placing the suffering in a context in which it
can be expressed, hence understood, and thus endured by ordering our emotions.42
Thirdly,
the problem of evil raises a challenge not only to our emotions, but more deeply
to the adequacy of our culture and its symbolic structure to provide the ethical
criteria needed to rule our action. How is one to bridge the gap between things
as they are and as they ought to be?
In
all these three dimensions of the understanding, emotional response and moral
action the role of religion is not to deny that something are unexplained,
painful and unjust, but to deny that life as such is inexplicable, unendurable
or unjust.43
Religious sym-bolism enables both this affirmation of ignorance, pain and
injustice which denying that such are the supreme characteristics of reality as
a whole.
(4)
Religion clothes these conceptions in an aura of special actuality. The
existence of the above-noted bafflement before the unexplained, suffering and
injustice drives one toward belief in gods, totems and the like, but is not the
basis for their beliefs. One must believe in order to understand ("crede ut
intelligas", Au-gustine). What then is the religious perspective and how is
it adopted?
Geertz
contrasts the religious to the common sense and the scientific perspectives. In
the former things appear as givens to be accepted and acted upon pragmatically.
These realities need to be situated in the wider perspective accepted in faith.
The scientific perspective is marked by systematic doubt and inquiry, whereas
the religious perspective is characterized by non-hypothetical truths, by
commitment rather than detachment, and by encounter rather than analysis.44
Thus Geertz sees the essence of religious actions as imbuing with persuasive
authority a complex of symbols along with the metaphysics they formulate and the
style of life they recommend.
It
is in ritual as consecrated behavior that the conviction in the soundness of
religious conceptions and directives is generated. The ceremonial brings
together the moods and motivations induced by sacred symbols with general
conceptions of the order of existence; "the world as lived and the world as
imagined (are) fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms (and)
turn out to be the same world."45 This fusion of dispositional ethos and conceptual worldview
is had especially in "the more elaborate cere-monies. For the outside
observer these are only presentations of a particular religious perspective,
subject to scientific analysis and aesthetic appreciation, but for participants
they are also its en-actment, materialization and realization. Such ceremonies
are not only models of but models for in which "men attain
their faith as they portray it."46 By
inducing a set of moods and motivations -- an ethos -- and defining an image of
cosmic order -- a world view -- by means of a single set of symbols, the
performance of the ceremony or ritual readers religious belief as model for
and model of true trans-positions one of the other.
(5)
Religion thus renders the moods and motivations uniquely realistic.
Because our life is lived in the everyday world of common sense and practical
acts, the impact of religious rituals have their greatest human impact in
reflecting back and coloring the in-dividual’s conception of the ordinary
world. The sociological in-terest in this is not as a description of the social
order, but -- along with political power, personal affection, etc. -- as shaping
that order.
Geertz
would stress the movement back and forth between the religious perspective
experienced especially in rituals, which engulf the total person transporting
him or her into another mode of existence, and the common sense perspective
lived in the midst of everyday life. This is recognized by religions in setting
special times for prayer, through the year, at the beginning and of each day,
the noon "Angelus" or the five prayer times of Islamic practice.
Without recognition of this transition back and forth life comes to be read
reductivistically either as simply spiritual or simply material, neither of
which is self-sufficient.
This
passing back and forth does not mean, however, that the life is alternately
purely religious or purely secular. The common sense world when seen in the
context of the wider reality is changed, completed and corrected. Placing
ordinary acts in ultimate context alters radically one’s outlook on life in
its entirety so that religiously induced moods and motivations come to be
considered supremely practical, and indeed the only sensible ones in view of the
religious understanding of how things really are. It can be said that what men
believe is what they are, and vice versa, and if this is a radically personal
act, then the impact of religion upon personal and social systems is infinitely
varied. This excludes general conclusions regarding the value of religion in
moral or fun-ctional terms.
The
significance of religion in terms of anthropology or ethnology lies in its
capacity to serve individuals or groups, on the one hand, as a model of
general yet distinctive concepts of the world, the self and the relations
between the two, and, on the other hand, as a model for rooted
"mental" dispositions, from which cultural functions flow other social
and psychological ones.47
Be-yond or, more correctly, through their direct metaphysical context religious
concepts provide a general framework which lends meaningful form to our
intellectual, moral, emotional and moral experiences. This is not only a matter
of interpreting social and psychological processes. Even more, it is a matter of
shaping these by setting them in a sense of what is "really real". The
derivative dispositions then color one’s sense of what is reasonable,
practical, human and moral. Anthropology thus has two tasks with regard to
religion: first, analyzing "the systems of meaning embodied in the symbols
which make up the religions, and, second, relating these systems to
socio-cultural and psychological processes."48
For
the issue of scriptural faith and ethic conflict, the above would appear to open
a number of distinct roads for analysis and hence for response. Anthropological
analysis identifies four issues at play: (a) the nature of the "really
real" and hence of all derivative reality (b) the pervasive mood set by
religion, (c) its motivational power, and (d) the relation of all these to the
concrete circum-stances of everyday life.
(a)
If the religious view consists in seeing all in terms of an ultimate
"really real", the scriptural faith agree that this is an absolute and
good creator and goal of all. Frithjof Shoun senses a certain difference in
emphasis in appreciating the absolute: an Islamic stress upon unity, a Jewish
stress upon truth, and a Christian stress upon love. The three are mutually
complementary -- indeed technically convertible such that the true is the good
and vice versa -- in such wise that the three scriptural faith experiences
should be complementary and mutually enriching. The metaphysics of this relation
of the transcendental properties of being is important for overcoming conflict
which arises from less adequate conceptions that might allow them to appear
conflictual rather than complementary.
(b)
If mood is generated by the conditions in which it arises then it is important
that these conditions be religious, that is, predicated upon a sense of reality
as ultimately and hence radically unified, just and good. This requires that the
sense of religion be lively. It requires further that its implications be
universal or ex-tended to include all humankind and indeed physical nature as
well. This sense can -- indeed must -- come from within in ethnic culture but
must reach out beyond it to include the "other".
(c)
Given the motivating power of a culture, Geertz does not see violent clashes
between ethnic or cultural groups as being due to a lessening of cultural
identity for that would result rather in confusion and passivity. Violent ethnic
conflict would appear to be due rather to the sense of cultural identity being
situated in circumstance where its motivational and mood generating power are
misdirected. "Social conflict is not something that happens when, out of
weakness, indefiniteness, obsolescence, or neglect, cultural forms cease to
operate, but rather something that happens when . . . such forms are pressed by
unusual situations or unusual intentions to operate in unusual ways."49
This
suggests the importance of (d), namely, the relation of the religious to the
circumstances of daily life. It was noted that one does not live entirely or
simply in one or the other dimension, but moves back and forth carrying messages
from one to the other. As the order of reality bespeaks the primacy of the
absolute or creator over the creature, it is for the latter to be modeled on the
former as one, just and loving, rather them vice versa, that is, rather than
modelling the divine on the multiple and hence potentially con-flictual created
world.
The
above analysis of tradition and hermeneutic interpretation suggested that the
relation between cultural groups and scrip-tural faiths is not a matter of
compromise or of attenuation of one’s religion or of the culture that reflects
it. Rather, it is the real op-portunity to deepen that religious commitment,
unfold its meaning, and live it afresh in our days.
But
these are new insights, their realization does not follow automatically. If the
situations and intentions are unusual that press the religious culture to
operate in unusual ways, then the challenge to be faithful to the religious
roots of one’s cultural identity requires acute analysis of the situation and
creative appreciation of one’s religious tradition. Only thus will it be
possible to fashion an ap-propriate response to present challenges and to
realize the spiritual growth needed to respond to religious motivation and set
the mood required for cooperation. In this in the words of President Kennedy
remain true: "in this world God’s work is truly man’s own."
NOTES
1.
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass.: 1960).
2.
E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture VII (London, 1871), p. 7.
3.
Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts
and Definitions (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprint, 1978), p. 357.
4.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson,
1973), p. 5.
5. Ibid.,
10.
6. Ibid.,
p. 13.
7. Ibid.,
85.
8.
Mortimer J. Adler, The Idea of Freedom: A Dialectical Examination of the
Conceptions of Freedom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 187.
9. The
Theory of Justice, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).
10.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A.C. Fraser, ed. (New York:
Dover, 1959), II, ch. 21, sec 27; vol. I, 329.
11.
Skeptical Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1952), p. 169.
12.
See The Idea of Freedom, p. 187.
13.
J.S. Mill, On Liberty, ch. 5, p. 15.
14.
Adler, p. 193.
15.
John Rawls, Theory of Justice, op. cit.
16.
Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1969), pp. 12-29.
17.
Ivor Leclerc, "The Metaphysics of the Good," Review of Metaphysics,
35 (1981), 3-5. See also Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie,
ed. André Lalande (Paris: PUF, 1956), pp. 1182-1186.
18.
J. Mehta, Martin Heidegger, The Way and the Vision (Honolulu: Univ. of
Hawaii Press, 1967), pp. 90-91.
19.
Hesiod, Theogony, trans. H.G. Everland-White (Loeb Classical Library)
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 85.
20.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 2.
21.
R. Carnap, Vienna Manifesto, trans. A. Blumberg in G. Kreyche and J.
Mann, Perspectives on Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
l966), p. 485.
22.
R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, I.
23.
H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1975), pp. 240,
246-247, 305-310.
24.
John Dewey, Existence as Precarious and Stable; see J. Mann & G.
Kreyche, Perspectives on Reality (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
l966), p. 379.
25.
G. McLean et al., eds. (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and
Philosophy and The University Press of America, 1986).
26.
H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method. op.cit., pp. 281-286.
27.
Ibid., pp. 278-279.
28.
Ibid., pp. 281-286.
29.
Ramayana (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1976), p. 312.
30.
Gadamer, p. 262.
31.
Ibid., pp. 263-264.
32.
Ibid., pp. 235-242, 267-271.
33.
Ibid., pp. 225-332.
34.
Ibid., pp. 336-340.
35.
Ibid., pp. 327-334.
36.
Ibid., pp. 324-325.
37.
Ibid., p. 90.
38.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson,
1973), p. 98.
39.
Ibid., p. 99.
40.
Ibid.
41.
Ibid., 105
42.
Ibid., p. 108.
43.
Ibid., pp. 111-112.
44.
Ibid.
45.
Ibid., p. 114.
46.
Ibid., p. 123.
47.
Ibid., p. 125.
48.
Ibid., p. 28.