Battleground God: Philosophy and the Methodological Developments in Religious Studies
The Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Religion takes up arguments for the existence of God, the nature of faith, rationality in religious belief, and other related issues usually focused within Judeo-Christian traditions, at least in Western Philosophy. The study of religion, in general, is much newer—separate Religious Studies Departments are 20th Century developments—and therefore, the current study of “religion” is said to be open to greater breath, understanding, and possible intelligibility of any phenomena—whether or not we pre-theoretically classify as religious, metaphysical, or purely a human creation. However, the methodologies of these kinds of investigations raise more philosophical problems; but, in reverse, the broader study of religion can give more insight into the classic debates in the philosophy of religion: can religious beliefs be true? Is religious knowledge possible? Are religious beliefs really different than other kinds of beliefs or other epistemic dispositions ( in-between beliefs, commitments, convictions)? Are there universal features of all religious activities? Is the preoccupation with “Science vs. Religion” problematic in the first place? What about the New Atheists debunking arguments? What is the normative relationship to religion and politics?
From the perspective of “all” religious phenomena as studied by the scholar, is it even possible to philosophically reason and debate about “religion” and its related concepts? How do we analyze arguments for “Intelligent Design” if it is difficult to even adjudicate whether not ID is religion or a kind of science— or even whether or not science also bleeds into religion? Moreover, much of the “bright” movement (as Dan Dennett unsuccessfully tried to coin) uses cognitive science and evolutionary thinking to analyze all belief formation, irregardless of whether such phenomena is pre-classified as religious (e.g. if a belief or behavior was pre-theoretically classified as religious, it becomes immune to “rational” analysis, and does not interfere with other scientific pursuits—because normative issues and questions of meaning could not be answered by science or other empirical investigations).
Perhaps there is some insight into these intractable questions by looking at where analytic philosophy of religion, Religious Studies, and normative-political analysis converge.
First, let’s do a philosophical/consistency health check about your rationality of God:
https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/god/Default.aspx
Once you get your score and a comparison to all the other people to have taken this test, what do you think about your rational consistency? Baggini and Stangroom book version1 has much more analysis of the different “hits” and “bullet biting” that you may have to do to square your beliefs: for example: a bullets = (1)“How can it be claimed that God exists, yet God is a logical impossibility” and (2)“It is strange to say that God is a logical impossibility, but you don’t know whether God exists” and (3)“If you don’t think that it is justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, paying not regard to external evidence, or lack to it, for the truth or falsity of this conviction, the how can you reject evolutionary theory..” —-and you take a “Hit” if you refuse to bite Bullet 3 and just accept this as a contradiction (Only about 2% if people take this hit).” There are many more bullets and hits, and your score if based on an analysis of your answers. Where are you taking hits, you think, and what bullets are you biting? If you know, do you accept this “contradiction?”
Zagzebski argues that
“We have undertaken an investigation of the topic of religious knowledge by starting from philosophy, not religion, but it is not obvious that this is the right way to proceed. If we think that we should begin with a treatment of knowledge outside of the domain of religion, and then apply that treatment to the question of what religious knowledge is and whether it is possible, we might end up with a distorted view of the nature of religious knowledge. That is because philosophers generally begin with certain paradigm cases of knowledge, and that limits the way the concept of knowledge is applied outside the domain of the paradigms. Typically, the paradigms consist of simple cases of perceptual knowledge, knowledge based on memory, and uncontroversial cases of scientific knowledge. This method creates problems for understanding many kinds of knowledge, particularly moral knowledge, knowledge that depends upon skill, and knowledge that depends upon special experience or wisdom. If there is knowledge that derives from the wisdom of a few exceptional persons or traditions, or which depends upon experiences that not every human being has, religious knowledge would undoubtedly be in that category. But it is hard to account for this kind of knowledge if we permit the standard paradigms of knowledge to dictate the way we understand religious knowledge…There are many different ways in which these principles and attitudes affect the way philosophers approach the reasonableness of religious belief and the possibility of religious knowledge. For instance, it is not generally noticed that discussions of the justification of religious belief, at least since Hume, assume two different forms of foundationalism…
“These two forms of foundationalism, together with intellectual egalitarianism and the suspicion of authority, explain a line of thought about religion that has persisted since the Enlightenment. This line of thought leads to a general doubt about the reasonableness of religious belief. It goes as follows:
From the perspective of “all” religious phenomena as studied by the scholar, is it even possible to philosophically reason and debate about “religion” and its related concepts? How do we analyze arguments for “Intelligent Design” if it is difficult to even adjudicate whether not ID is religion or a kind of science— or even whether or not science also bleeds into religion? Moreover, much of the “bright” movement (as Dan Dennett unsuccessfully tried to coin) uses cognitive science and evolutionary thinking to analyze all belief formation, irregardless of whether such phenomena is pre-classified as religious (e.g. if a belief or behavior was pre-theoretically classified as religious, it becomes immune to “rational” analysis, and does not interfere with other scientific pursuits—because normative issues and questions of meaning could not be answered by science or other empirical investigations).
Perhaps there is some insight into these intractable questions by looking at where analytic philosophy of religion, Religious Studies, and normative-political analysis converge.
The Consistency and Reasonableness of your Beliefs
https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/god/Default.aspx
Once you get your score and a comparison to all the other people to have taken this test, what do you think about your rational consistency? Baggini and Stangroom book version1 has much more analysis of the different “hits” and “bullet biting” that you may have to do to square your beliefs: for example: a bullets = (1)“How can it be claimed that God exists, yet God is a logical impossibility” and (2)“It is strange to say that God is a logical impossibility, but you don’t know whether God exists” and (3)“If you don’t think that it is justifiable to base one’s beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, paying not regard to external evidence, or lack to it, for the truth or falsity of this conviction, the how can you reject evolutionary theory..” —-and you take a “Hit” if you refuse to bite Bullet 3 and just accept this as a contradiction (Only about 2% if people take this hit).” There are many more bullets and hits, and your score if based on an analysis of your answers. Where are you taking hits, you think, and what bullets are you biting? If you know, do you accept this “contradiction?”
Modern Responses to the Enlightenment/Rationalist Conception of Religious Belief
Let’s take a look at central response by analytic philosophers about religious belief and religious knowledge: particularly Zagzebski and Plantinga.Zagzebski argues that
“We have undertaken an investigation of the topic of religious knowledge by starting from philosophy, not religion, but it is not obvious that this is the right way to proceed. If we think that we should begin with a treatment of knowledge outside of the domain of religion, and then apply that treatment to the question of what religious knowledge is and whether it is possible, we might end up with a distorted view of the nature of religious knowledge. That is because philosophers generally begin with certain paradigm cases of knowledge, and that limits the way the concept of knowledge is applied outside the domain of the paradigms. Typically, the paradigms consist of simple cases of perceptual knowledge, knowledge based on memory, and uncontroversial cases of scientific knowledge. This method creates problems for understanding many kinds of knowledge, particularly moral knowledge, knowledge that depends upon skill, and knowledge that depends upon special experience or wisdom. If there is knowledge that derives from the wisdom of a few exceptional persons or traditions, or which depends upon experiences that not every human being has, religious knowledge would undoubtedly be in that category. But it is hard to account for this kind of knowledge if we permit the standard paradigms of knowledge to dictate the way we understand religious knowledge…There are many different ways in which these principles and attitudes affect the way philosophers approach the reasonableness of religious belief and the possibility of religious knowledge. For instance, it is not generally noticed that discussions of the justification of religious belief, at least since Hume, assume two different forms of foundationalism…
“These two forms of foundationalism, together with intellectual egalitarianism and the suspicion of authority, explain a line of thought about religion that has persisted since the Enlightenment. This line of thought leads to a general doubt about the reasonableness of religious belief. It goes as follows:
(1) The justification of the practice of religion depends upon the justification of religious beliefs.
(2) The justification of religious beliefs depends upon the justification of the- ism.
(3) The justification of theism depends upon the success of arguments the premises of which must be accessible to any ordinary intelligent person. No special experience can be assumed, and no reliance on authority can be made.
These assumptions lead to skepticism about religion if we add one more claim:
(4) There is no sound argument for theism that begins with premises accessible to any ordinary intelligent person without reference to special experience or to authority.
In my judgment none of the claims (1)–(3) has been established. In fact, I believe that they are all false…Alvin Plantinga also is well known for his sustained attack on (3)”2
Moreover, Bruce Lincoln has attempted to take critics like Talal Asad seriously in his recasting of the definition of ‘religion,” which leads into our next critical discussion. Asad observed that classic theorist like Clifford Geertz made their analysis of religion based on “interiority:” beliefs, moods, conceptions, knowledge, motivations, etc. Lincoln explains, “This works well for certain styles of religiosity: above all (and not coincidentally), Protestantism, which thus becomes the implicit model of religion per se. There are, however, things one intuitively wants to call “religion”—Catholicism and Islam, for instance—that are oriented less toward “belief” and the status of the individual believer, and more to embodied practice, discipline, and community.”3
(2) The justification of religious beliefs depends upon the justification of the- ism.
(3) The justification of theism depends upon the success of arguments the premises of which must be accessible to any ordinary intelligent person. No special experience can be assumed, and no reliance on authority can be made.
These assumptions lead to skepticism about religion if we add one more claim:
(4) There is no sound argument for theism that begins with premises accessible to any ordinary intelligent person without reference to special experience or to authority.
In my judgment none of the claims (1)–(3) has been established. In fact, I believe that they are all false…Alvin Plantinga also is well known for his sustained attack on (3)”2
Moreover, Bruce Lincoln has attempted to take critics like Talal Asad seriously in his recasting of the definition of ‘religion,” which leads into our next critical discussion. Asad observed that classic theorist like Clifford Geertz made their analysis of religion based on “interiority:” beliefs, moods, conceptions, knowledge, motivations, etc. Lincoln explains, “This works well for certain styles of religiosity: above all (and not coincidentally), Protestantism, which thus becomes the implicit model of religion per se. There are, however, things one intuitively wants to call “religion”—Catholicism and Islam, for instance—that are oriented less toward “belief” and the status of the individual believer, and more to embodied practice, discipline, and community.”3
Essentially Contested Concepts
Is “Religion” an Essentially Contested Concept according to Gallie’s theory? Can we even talk about "religion" or "religious belief" in an agreed space of reasons?WB Gallie: Essentially Contested Concepts:
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4984622/mod_resource/content/4/Gallie-Essentially-Contested-Concepts.pdf
For a critical but helpful analysis of the usefulness of Gallie's conceptualization, see Collier, et al.:
https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3827/Collier%20Gallie.pdf
Gallie's criteria are identified throughout his essay with Roman numerals: (I) their appraisive character, (II) internal complexity, (III) diverse describability, (IV) openness, (V) reciprocal recognition of their contested character among contending parties, (VI) an original exemplar that anchors conceptual meaning, and (VII) progressive competition, through which greater coherence of conceptual usage can be achieved. Gallie directly discusses “an adherence to, or participation, in a particular religion” though does not directly use the singular concept of “religion.” However, Gallie’s concern is how applications and disagreements arise with the activities of “the achievements” associated within the “game” of religious activity. In his analysis of “live examples,” he argues:
“Of the concepts just mentioned the fourth seems to me to satisfy most nearly perfectly my several conditions. Consider, as illustration of it, the phrase " a Christian life ". Clearly this is an appraisive term; on reflection it can be seen, equally clearly, to signify an achievement that is internally complex, variously describable and " open " in the senses which I have given to those terms. Too often, if not always, it is used both " aggressively " and " defensively ". That any proper use of it conforms to the first of my two justifying conditions, (VI) above, is obvious; whilst that it conforms to my condition (VII) might be agreed (though no doubt with many different qualifying conditions) not only by liberal Christians, but by liberal spirits of other (or even of no) religious persuasions The most questionable case is that of its conformity to condition (V). Is the phrase " a Christian life " necessarily used both aggressively and defensively? The familiar pattern of the history of Christianity is certainly that of one dominant church, in any area or in any epoch, and usually a number of dissenting or protesting sects. But is there anything inherently necessary in this pattern? Is the Christian kingdom, here below also, essentially one of many mansions? Conformity to my conditions (I) to (IV) and to my condition (VI) cannot be said, in this or in any instance, to entail such a conclusion. But it makes it extremely likely that such a conclusion will be found to hold; and given its historical development to date-which is something that Christianity (in this like any other great religion) can never possibly shed-its contested character, or the aggressive and defensive use of many of its key doctrines and principles, would appear to belong inherently to it now.”
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4984622/mod_resource/content/4/Gallie-Essentially-Contested-Concepts.pdf
For a critical but helpful analysis of the usefulness of Gallie's conceptualization, see Collier, et al.:
https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3827/Collier%20Gallie.pdf
Gallie's criteria are identified throughout his essay with Roman numerals: (I) their appraisive character, (II) internal complexity, (III) diverse describability, (IV) openness, (V) reciprocal recognition of their contested character among contending parties, (VI) an original exemplar that anchors conceptual meaning, and (VII) progressive competition, through which greater coherence of conceptual usage can be achieved. Gallie directly discusses “an adherence to, or participation, in a particular religion” though does not directly use the singular concept of “religion.” However, Gallie’s concern is how applications and disagreements arise with the activities of “the achievements” associated within the “game” of religious activity. In his analysis of “live examples,” he argues:
“Of the concepts just mentioned the fourth seems to me to satisfy most nearly perfectly my several conditions. Consider, as illustration of it, the phrase " a Christian life ". Clearly this is an appraisive term; on reflection it can be seen, equally clearly, to signify an achievement that is internally complex, variously describable and " open " in the senses which I have given to those terms. Too often, if not always, it is used both " aggressively " and " defensively ". That any proper use of it conforms to the first of my two justifying conditions, (VI) above, is obvious; whilst that it conforms to my condition (VII) might be agreed (though no doubt with many different qualifying conditions) not only by liberal Christians, but by liberal spirits of other (or even of no) religious persuasions The most questionable case is that of its conformity to condition (V). Is the phrase " a Christian life " necessarily used both aggressively and defensively? The familiar pattern of the history of Christianity is certainly that of one dominant church, in any area or in any epoch, and usually a number of dissenting or protesting sects. But is there anything inherently necessary in this pattern? Is the Christian kingdom, here below also, essentially one of many mansions? Conformity to my conditions (I) to (IV) and to my condition (VI) cannot be said, in this or in any instance, to entail such a conclusion. But it makes it extremely likely that such a conclusion will be found to hold; and given its historical development to date-which is something that Christianity (in this like any other great religion) can never possibly shed-its contested character, or the aggressive and defensive use of many of its key doctrines and principles, would appear to belong inherently to it now.”
I will leave open the ways in which Gallie's framework can be applied to religious belief and the political debate around religion. However, Collier highlights that "analyzing Gallie and the
debate on his framework provides an opportunity to reflect on the intersection
of normative and empirical concerns in conventional political research." Therefore, if we take the issue of religion to be a social and political problem within goal of consensus, agreement, or understanding each other, should we understand "Religion" as an Essentially Contested Concept?
Before we come back and try to make a syntheses of the analytic and contemporary approaches, let’s continue with a critical overview of contemporary theory and methodology in the field of “Religious Studies.” The goal of religious studies was to find a global comparative framework in order to analyze any and all instances of “Religion” found in the world. Hence, the history of religion become a major international project, but in some ways with the implicit bias towards justifying the religious systems that the investigating scholars who were investigating were already committed to. This of course was an improvement of the previous “my religion is true, and I just need a priori, necessary arguments to prove it” —which automatically assumed that any “other” religion was not true. Like in anthropology, there remained the “insider/outsider” problem: how can you study the Other’s systems when you can only “stand” within your own preconditioned system (or positionality)?
The Field of Religious Studies
SEP: New entry on “The Concept of Religion”. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/Before we come back and try to make a syntheses of the analytic and contemporary approaches, let’s continue with a critical overview of contemporary theory and methodology in the field of “Religious Studies.” The goal of religious studies was to find a global comparative framework in order to analyze any and all instances of “Religion” found in the world. Hence, the history of religion become a major international project, but in some ways with the implicit bias towards justifying the religious systems that the investigating scholars who were investigating were already committed to. This of course was an improvement of the previous “my religion is true, and I just need a priori, necessary arguments to prove it” —which automatically assumed that any “other” religion was not true. Like in anthropology, there remained the “insider/outsider” problem: how can you study the Other’s systems when you can only “stand” within your own preconditioned system (or positionality)?
Moreover, this modern comparativism lead to the assumption that all other religious phenomena qua religion had something true about it. The goal was to find those essential “elements” that would automatically make your research data “truly religious.” Mircea Eliade may have been one of most important scholars to emerge within this project of universal religious studies. The Sarced and the Profane is a masterwork, and helped the University of Chicago to became the center of religious scholarship in the 20th Century (He was friends with E Cioran while in Europe). So by the middle of the century, the question of how to study religion was well on its way, especially with the likes of Joseph Campbell, Wilfred C. Smith, J.Z. Smith, Diana Eck; but— with it came along the post-modern critique against grand narratives…
From this historical analysis, Smith argues that what the terms ‘religion,’ Christianity’ and the like designate do not represent the historical reality of religious traditions and discounts the possibility of those traditions changing and modifying into new forms. Nor do these reified concepts do justice to the ‘faith’ or personal quality of every religious person within those traditions. Smith therefore argues for a new dialectic of concepts that will hopefully do justice to the historical data of religious traditions and also for the personal quality of the religious person. The problem that arises from this new dialectic is not the form of the dialectic itself, but as I will argue, the failure of one side to distinguish itself from the other side. I hope to argue that Smith’s concept of ‘faith’ as ‘the personal quality of a religious person that signifies his or her relationship with some transcendent reality’ fails to refer to what Smith thinks the concept refers to. Even though we can see that the concept ‘cumulative tradition’ (“the entire mass of overt objective data that constitute the historical deposit, as it were, of the past religious life of the community in question”4) does do a better job than the reified concepts in representing the flux of history, what is left on the other side of the analysis (the faith of an individual religious person) cannot be said to be in a “supernatural or transcendent context,” for such a supposition misleads one to believe that all religious history contains a subject within that context. Therefore, I will argue that Smith’s analysis and dialectical suggestion works only so far as to understand many cumulative traditions and how historical individual persons were affected by and in turn affected such traditions; moreover, to posit a personal ‘faith’ category that refers to a subject-transcendent relationship begs the question of whether such a quality that a subject has can be really distinguished from the historical and immediate data (cumulative tradition), which is an accessible and multi-interpretable text.5
To understand my position, first we need to look at how Smith rightly argues for the concept of a ‘cumulative tradition.’ From there we can begin to see how the “personal quality” of a “subject” cannot be so easily separated from the text of the cumulative tradition. Smith argues that the reified concepts we have inherited are inadequate for the understanding of history in that these concepts by definition presuppose a limit or boundary around the continuing transformation of historical data. He points out that “neither the believer nor the observer can hold that there is anything on earth that can legitimately be called ‘Christianity’ or ‘Shintoism’ or ‘religion’ without recognizing that if such a thing existed yesterday, it existed in a somewhat different form the day before.”6 This statement makes the point that reality (or the history of reality) cannot be defined in essentialists definitions; that is, ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Christianity’ as it pertains to objective reality, is impossible to define. Furthermore, “to define is to set limits,” so to define is to rule out the possibility of what a religious tradition may become.7 Not only do these reified concepts misrepresent history and religious traditions, Smith worries about the spiritual calamity that follows when religious persons give allegiance to “the Religion” instead of to God. The concepts ‘religion,’ ‘Buddhism,’ ‘Christianity’ and the like are then inadequate for the person of faith. Instead, we must view our historical data to see a cumulative tradition that involves the individual person of faith inheriting a continuing context of religious history, who in turn affects and supplements that history do to his or her own religious experiences and personal religious quality. The cumulative tradition, then, cannot be understood without this personal involvement, and that personal involvement cannot be understood without the observable data of the cumulative tradition.
If we must understand the individual religious person through the cumulative tradition, how are we to understand the cumulative tradition through the individual? If this ‘personal quality’ is by definition a relationship to a “transcendent” and therefore inscrutable to the outsider, how is the outsider (or even the insider of the same tradition) to understand this quality?
Smith’s answer is that, like all other studies of the personal, it must be inferred with “imaginative sympathy.” In principle, for Smith, we can reach more accurate answers “as to what is, what has been, the particular faith of particular persons.”8 Still, looking more closely at Smith’s arguments, one can point out that he posits an assumed “unknown” element that signifies a subject-transcendent relationship, which then commits him to the fact that is “unknown” quality of persons is not ruled out a priori as being possibly “apprehended” by the other. This reasoning seems to stem from the analogies that ‘faith’ falls in line with, which are other modes of human qualities (i.e. love, strife, despair, joy). But such qualities or feelings are in the same way not understood by the persons themselves as by the outsider, other than having better knowledge of how one reacts and behaves within the context of such qualities occurring. If I experience myself in despair at any moment, I "understand" such “moments” only in intellectual reports to myself, which uses language and pre-established concepts that I have developed within my community (how ever large that is).9 Otherwise, all these immediate and ineffable “givens,” revelations or what ever they may be called, have no reportable cognitive content. Moreover, the supposed “subject” cannot have final authority over the “text” that he or she continues to engage in since one’s “personal” text is hardly discernible from the overall context of his or her cumulative tradition. Smith, in contrast, presupposes that there exists a stable subject who stands in relation to and experiences something that is “other.” If this is the case, then to propose a dialectic that contains a subject-transcendent relationship as one part, is to fail to make that dialectic, for I cannot discern any difference between a personal text (“quality is Smith’s terminology) and the overall text of the ‘cumulative tradition.’
By accepting Smith’s arguments for the rejection of the aforementioned reified concepts, one may object that I cannot then reject Smith’s proposal of having two intermingling concepts, which respectively do justice to both the person of faith and to the flux of history. Since these reified concepts were argued to do injustice to the personal quality of faith, it is a fact from this that we must find a new approach to understand and appreciate ‘personal faith’. We see in Smith’s argument that “the concept is necessarily inadequate for the man who believes and therefore cannot but be misleading for the outsider who does not.”10 Moreover, it is through this faith that the religious person sees his or her universe—the deeper the faith, the more he or she sees through it.11 But by accepting Smith’s argument that these reified concepts misrepresent history and the individuals who constitute such traditions with acts of faith, I by no means necessarily accept that a separate concept must be needed to pick out an individual subject as having authority over the meaning of any supposed transcendent experiences. The ‘what-it-is-like’ quality of any person—their subjectivity, is by definition an experience of self-consciousness. Translating such experiences adheres to the surrounding discourse, mapping one’s reflected experiences (a text) onto the context of one’s surrounding text. This special quality of the subject, what we call faith, is not identical to the ‘what-it-is-like’ of consciousness. If the previous statements read obtusely, then let me simplify: what one experiences in-itself (be it the transcendent) is conceptually inaccessible even for that person, so long as he or she posits himself or herself as a subject within a discourse.12
One may point out that what Smith actually says is that the useful distinction between the ‘cumulative traditions’ and ‘faith’ (however useful) does not truly represent what is really going on in the world. He points out that:
"In our final synthesis we shall argue that the two considerations are two faces of a single issue, with both of which my essentially personalistic interpretation will endeavor simultaneously to cope. In the meantime, we may look at the points one by one."13
I have to concede to this point. The conceptual dialectic proposed by Smith indeed is “two faces of a single issue,” but Smith goes on to state that there is indeed a “transcendent element in men’s participation [with the cumulative traditions],”14 which in turn cannot be left out of any historical consideration. Therefore, what I am arguing is that Smith is misguided in retaining the distinction that the transcendent context remains different from the rest of the historical data that makes up a cumulative tradition. Faith is a property of a subject, who resides within the text of any historical data. If the term ‘transcendent’ must be used, it must be so within the discourse; otherwise, “transcendent” is not a category. Furthermore, Smith rests on the proposal that faith is not identical with belief and that belief expresses faith. This proposal, however, does not help his argument if we reject his view that belief is a mere set of propositions. A belief can be thought of as a mode of action that becomes reinforced within interaction of the eternal world. If, then, faith is also a mode of behavior and attitude toward the external world (which can include the transcendent), then it seems that a belief can be an expression of faith. If the reader rejects these premises and/or conclusion, maybe my point can still be seen: positing a category of faith is misleading for many religious contexts, for it assumes that a subject-transcendent relationship or quality is responsible for certain beliefs, behaviors and continuing changes in a cumulative tradition.
Before looking at some implications and conclusions of how my objections will modify Smith’s project that started over 50 years ago, let me recapitulate my argument in this paper. First, Smith is correct for suggesting that we drop such reified concepts as ‘religion,’ ‘a religion,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘Buddhism’ and the like. Moreover, suggesting the new concept ‘cumulative tradition’ helps in the continual understanding of any religious tradition’s transformation. Still, Smith is presumptuous in making a concept ‘faith’ that picks out in the cumulative tradition the personal quality of religious persons that is observably different from the rest of the historical data. The presumption stems from the implicit commitment that is found in Smith that there exists a subject-transcendent relationship accounting for much of the historical data to be found. Even if one rejects that the transcendent exists, Smith argues that a subject--transcendent-like-illusion relationship still accounts for this data, and is objectively inscrutable to the observer unlike the rest of the cumulative tradition’s data. But this is not the case. The ‘what-it-is-like’ quality of consciousness is not identical to the subject that exists within a tradition. A subject is by definition an author of a text or exists within the text (in this case, belief, faith and the cumulative tradition).15 Therefore, ‘faith’ cannot be a different useful concept from the concept ‘cumulative tradition.’
So what are some possible implications of this critique on our study of religiousness through a Smithian construct? In terms of the methods, historical data (which includes the behavior of faith) and a sympathetic approach, I see no difference in what we may hope to understand. But instead of posing a problem in understanding personal “faith,” it looks as though we have a problem of understanding the unique phenomenological constructs that exist within a proposed cumulative tradition. A broader but related question of how a 'subject' might exist within these traditions needs to be addressed. For example, how do certain traditions deal with the 'subject?' Moreover, to what extent can we make sense of the cumulative tradition and the phenomenological categories/structures that exist within/constitute them? It seems as if I a proposing to recover Eliade's project through a Smithian construct. How the two methods may be married is further inquiry.
In various essays in Imagining Region: From Babylon to Jonestown, Smith presents cautionary pointers to what the historian of religion must avoid, but also attempts to establish some strategies for attempting a truly academic model in the study of religion. For one, the scholar must be insistently self-aware that the category of ‘religion’ itself is a working category that the scholar has created for academic purposes. In this section, I will take two of Smith’s essays (Ch. 1 and 3 in his Imagining Religion) and extract some important elements to explicate and sketch a model of what the academic study of religion should look like. I believe Smith sets up a model that replaces the “given” a priori with a kind of contextual “modulation” of categories that may be used to study unfamiliar religious situations. This model accounts for irreducible differences in religious contexts, but makes these differences intelligible. I also hope to sketch some implications of Smith’s approach on the future interrelations of religious studies to the other fields of academic study. Smith’s thesis of human labor in the creation of religion, for one, implies explainable or intelligible causes and effects within the empirical world. Studying religion, then, is not a theological exercise, but the work of reconstructing particular empirical contexts of human interaction and rational ingenuity. Within the variegated academic counterparts, the historiography of religions may be, in ways, translatable. (It is also possible to argue that this study is non-reductive, perhaps; arguments in the philosophy of law demonstrate this possibility, as the nature of law is non-normative, but not reducible to social phenomena in a "scientific" way).
For Smith, the study of religions cannot remain in the search and application of phenomenological, sui generis structures or patterns (e.g. M. Eliade), or insist that faith is an irreducible personal quality that interacts with “cumulative” traditions (e.g. W.C. Smith). Otherwise, history would be imbued with unintelligible “inhuman” categories. The role of academia is explanation and understanding (among others), so we cannot rest on a taxonomy that prima facie defines religious phenomena as including a transcendent element and by definition wholly Other.
It is important it get clear Smith’s proposed method in the study of religion, but also what it is not. At face value, Smith’s seems to contend to the impossibility of formulating universal categories in relation to religious phenomena. This seems to preclude any possibility of integrating religious “truths” or universals into the general structure of our understanding of reality. But why is this so? In “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” Smith warns us of the problem of induction in making universal claims that humans are inherently religious: “no matter how many instances of human religiosity we have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that man is religious.”16 No matter how many examples we have of a phenomenon that is clearly “religious,” it is difficult or unjustified a priori to say that all humans are fundamentally religious. In the sciences, this reduction is the exemplar of how understanding is to be achieved. This is not to say all special sciences have been completely closed and explained (maybe with the exception of chemistry)—they run into similar problems of induction and the sheer fact of an infinite diversity of particulars (e.g. species of insects). The attempt to reduce phenomena to a similarity trait or universal undercuts the fact of diversity and difference in the world’s cultures. Smith stresses this difference and particularity when approaching an object of study. Therefore, to presuppose (wrongly) that the object of study is or is not in some way a religious phenomenon is to presuppose that there exists an element or taxon—which is out there to be found, that will reinforce the fact that it is or is not ‘Religion’. Smith says in “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism” that “scholars have engaged in the quest for the unique and definitive sine qua non, the “that without which” religion would not be religion but rather an instance of something else…[but] they have failed to achieve consensus.”17 Moreover, further attempts to find the “essence” of each religion is also “arbitrary and poorly defined, being determined by extrinsic apologetics.”1 These methods, then, are inadequate; but what are we left with?
In these two essays, Smith proposes a strict historical and contextual reconstruction of the object of study. When approaching to study a culture or established “religious” tradition, we must find an element of classification and discover how and when it is applied or left out/modified by the subjects of the tradition. This “taxic indicator” is the stepping block to explore the rich different phenomena in the tradition; in turn, those unique elements will become the explanatory indicators of that unique context. What has been the search for the enduring element of sacredness in human phenomena is replaced by the search for how humans create and labor to overcome limitations set by initial closed cultural canons (i.e., grounded precepts, truths, “a totalistic and complete systems of signs or icons”).19 But how and why where these canons set? That, I think Smith would argue is another historical and contextual question. What is important is that where there is a canon, “it is possible to predict the necessary hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is continually to extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that exists without altering the canon in the process.”20 However, canons are not necessarily static through time. The contrary to this statement has been a common misconception of previous historians of religion—we cannot look for the closed, eternal and sui generis canon.
Taxic indicators, in Smith’s terminology, are initial elements in a classificatory set or agenda. Those initial indicators help sort the unique set of polythetic classification of a historical context, which is to be revised and tediously selected when applying it to a different object of study.21 One may choose “Jew” as a taxic indicator or “circumcision,” as Smith does in the first essay, to begin one’s interpretive investigation. This indicator, however, cannot be conflated with some innate and essential element that is “out there” to be found. It is instead a familiar category used to inspect differences and modifications found in an unfamiliar object of study. “Jew” cannot function initially as, by definition, a religious indicator—that would disrupt the scholar’s true aim in un-presupposed understanding. What the category and identification of “Jew” may function as in a particular context will be determined by the situational human activity that the identification of “Jew” accomplishes. This thesis of “religious human labor” in Smith exemplifies the pragmatic and context-specific categorization in religious practice as well as in the academic practice. It is the task of the historian and scholar to explore the particular processes of exegetical ingenuity; that is, the task is to find how a person or group overcomes the limitations set by an inherited canon. As this new data and interpretation comes to fruition, categories and taxonomies are developed so as to apply them to other unfamiliar cultures and traditions. These unfamiliar traditions are then sorted and familiarized through a process of (1) preinterpretive reconstruction of historic context, (2) application of the familiar categories and sortals and (3) iteration of the new explanatory cluster of human responsiveness and ingenuity. These initial categories remain only tools in uncovering the unique but human situation and explaining phenomenon.
Though the two essays of Smith’s that I am addressing here may remain case studies, we may still wish to evaluate the implications Smith’s approach has on other endeavors of understanding and the general method of the study of religion in particular. How will particularized constructs of religious understanding fit into our broader system of social-scientific and humanistic understanding? Smith comments at he end of “Fences and Neighbors” that
"As the anthropologist has begun to abandon a functionalist view of culture as a well-articulated, highly integrated mechanism and has slowly turned to accepting the sort of image set forth by F. E. Williams of culture as a “heap of rubbish,” a “tangle,” a “hotch-potch,” only partially organized, so we in religious studies must set about an analogous dismantling of the old theological and imperialistic impulses toward totalization, unification, and integration."22
What is at the heart of the problematic for a “science of religion” is that of human agency23: the art of creation and ingenuity within a continuously changing history. How can there be static concepts or primordiums (continuous and primitively irreducible elements) if there is an element of human agency acting within the flux of history? In Smith’s words: “…ingenuity is often displaced as mere routinization or swallowed up by postulating some ontic primordiums which manifests itself in a variety of forms, apparently dependent to of human agency.”24 This “hotch-potch” view of the world’s cultures renders prima facie the “unification” project impossible. However, Smith does not seem to propose utter indeterminacy of translation between contexts and traditions, but a kind of “modulation” of categories between sets of contexts and traditions. This proposal espouses a reciprocal model of usable categories between two or more religious traditions. In concrete terms: we may apply the typical notion of a canon (closed and authoritative text) to cultures of nonliterate peoples in order to interpret the creative overcoming of a historical contextual situation that we find a tradition to exist in. This application of our familiar term in the west to the scholar’s contextual recreation of a nonliterate tradition will and must revise the definition of our original term; moreover, it will create a redescription of canon so that scholars may turn around and apply it to a context within a more familiar western tradition. Through this process, the historian will gain insight to the difference and uniqueness of each situational context, but at the same time render it intelligible.
So to return to our question about the possibility of Smith’s model interrelating to a broader model of socio-scientific understanding: can these usable categories and context related categories be refined as to close the explanatory gap between the reduced special sciences (e.g. psychology, cognitive science or biology) and religious phenomena? Though there exists the element of human agency and creativity, I think it is possible to build connective categories between our special sciences to our particularistic study of religion. Even if we maintain Smith’s contention that the study of religion and culture is a “messy” endeavor, we may still hope to find usable and static connective categories to the context specific religious phenomena. Though this line of thought is speculative, I just want to point out the fact that explanations derived from the sciences may bring out a familiar “divine” notion within the religious traditions. Though the academic study of religion (in J.Z. Smith’s view) should abstain from positing irreducible transcendent-elements as to fill in explanatory gaps, I cannot rule out that modulated categories from the sciences and the study of religion will have familiar “divine’ or “other-worldly” qualities. The question will be whether or not these explanations really link up with what we originally termed “divine.” The point Smith seems to push is the quest for rigorous understanding and to not give up in reducing understanding to an inhuman otherworldly category. If such a “divine” element does in fact have a causal role in reality and history, I think our dialectic refinement of socio-scientific categories and religious studies may bring out what that connection may be or analyze it away.
The postmodernists critique the “totalizing” and universalizing agenda of modernity. Moreover, modernity has been blind-sighted by the relentless search for the immutable a priori. For the postmodernist’s argument, the concepts of text and representation are the key tools; that is, the epistemological fact that a mental concept is a representation undercuts the very possibility of formulizing a truth that is “out there.” I shall return to the epistemological question latter, for I believe it is key in reconstructing the comparativists’ outlook. For now, I want to stress that J.Z. Smith has argued (in a deconstructivist manner) that any religious phenomena cannot be divorced from the culture or context to which they are located. To universalize patterns or postulate sui generis primordial categories de-particularizes the inherently particular object of study. The postmodernist, in general, also stresses this line of thought: words are representations, and since all knowledge is language-bound, truth is forever arbitrary.25 There are of course weaker and stronger forms of postmodernism—the affirmative and skeptical postmodernists. Skeptical postmodernists will not even let a new Comparativism get off the ground, since discourse inevitably does not refer to anything beyond itself (i.e. a sign signifies another sign, and so ad infinitum). This, I believe, is bad epistemology (at least, it leaves out pragmatic effects that we conceptually experience in the world—if I do this, this experience will happen; also the arguments are usually obscure nonsense); hence I only take seriously the affirmative postmodernist’s arguments and the possibility of a new comparativism. The affirmative postmodernists emphasize the importance of particular cultures and languages constructing their own language-games and hence, one can only understand and evaluate particular traditions within their own discourse. Prima facie, comparativism cannot make cross-similarities—to do so would have to engage in a discourse outside of the objects of study and therefore misrepresent the particular traditions or cultures. Ray and Paden respond to this charge differently. Let us see what they say and then move to construct a possible epistemology that can make since of these authors goals. Ray sees the problem expressed by postmodernists:
"The basic problem is the widely held assumption that cultures constitute independent domains with their own languages and standards of meaning and truth. Outsiders should not talk of truth or engage in moral evaluation of other cultures because that would only privilege the outsider’s cultural domain…all that anthropologists actually do is “represent” other cultures because their language cannot adequately connect with the other’s “world."26
But Ray objects to this view in that to be a western studying a non-western culture is not, by default, to be a western scientific realist; but, it is because he thinks we have the ability to learn a foreign culture’s language and customs first-hand that western academia can check their understanding through indigenous discourse. Ray cites examples of ethnographers who become fully engaged participants of indigenous cultures so that they could experience what the natives experienced. The anthropologist, then, must express and evoke what he or she really experiences to the academic discourse. The reader of these narratives would then “become receptive to experiences that would otherwise seem implausible.”27 The difficulty is when the participant of the foreign culture becomes “other” than him or herself and tries to reconcile the indigenous experiences with his or her western (or native) knowledge and beliefs. I will return to this, but when the anthropologist is able to reflectively translate his or hers experience into the academic discourse through narrative (and without reducing the experience to a different or more “scientific” language), the comparative enterprise is renewed—for we can now find common human experiences in cross-cultural studies.
Paden’s view rests not on the narratives of ethnographers “going native,” but in finding relationships and generalizations that “insiders” of a tradition do not understand. But the agreement between Ray and Paden is view that cultures and religious traditions share a common human and biological experience. Ethnographer’s narratives can help solidify those common experiences; but in the field academia, we need categories and explanations to assess this new “data” of the ethnographer’s narratives. Ray takes the postmodern challenge too seriously. Paden, however, constructs a model of comparativism that approaches categories as usable and changeable tools—they unlock similarities and differences across cultures and religious traditions. These categories are not the universal patterns modernists looked for, but more or less workable forms that the different content of traditions fill. Categories initially applied to an object of study will eventually transform such categories through the uniqueness of the object’s particular context and content. Similar to J.Z. Smith’s methods of study, categories are tools in which the historian of religions may make particular objects of study intelligible. In Paden’s words:
"So a major function of comparative categories is heuristic: to provide instruments of further discovery. This includes the possibility of their own further differentiation, subtypologization, and problematizsation through historical analysis."28
Paden and Ray, then, both suggest the possibility of making different and unique religious traditions intelligible within the western academic discourse. But this presents a problem that postmodernists would be likely to exploit in Paden and Ray’s reasoning: how does the intelligibly of an explanation within the western discourse relate to the intelligibility within a particular culture? Since the two forms of discourse are different, the forms of intelligibility will be different too—hegemonic privilege of one form of intelligibility will compete with the other. In Ray’s examples, the competing “otherness” within the ethnographer his or herself will force him or her to privilege western intelligibility in order to communicate his or her experiences to western academia. I think Paden and Ray’s models can hold up to this charge once we understand an epistemological framework that remains within a specific discourse but without discounting the veridical nature of an experience within another discourse.
What is “intelligibility?” Through concepts of our own language and its semantics, we make exotic cultures become “intelligible.” But this needs explaining. To merely “translate” between discourses fails the postmodern test; to do so would create multiple meanings that are situated by the difference of meanings surrounding the final translation existing within the interpreter’s language. However, intelligibility in my view happens only in the sense that we have seen "verified" effects in our own experience from the use of certain concepts. Though we cannot ever “be in the mind” of a foreign culture or religious tradition, we can (from the outside) test pragmatic categories of similarity and difference. “Intelligibility” is an earthly phenomenon and means that something has anchored on to the semantics of a specific discourse. “Intelligibility,” by definition, precludes the inclusion of a semantics of “divine.” I believe Jean-Francois Lyotard is correct in saying that the Real, or divine in our case, if it has any meaning in a working semantics, must be in a way “alluded” to. I believe that within our academic and even western scientific framework, we can include the possibility of a category that is “pointed to” outside the semantics of our closed and “earthly” taxonomies and explanations. Moreover, for intelligibility to be possible, a comparative model is a necessary ingredient: cross-cultural categories (responsive and amendable to context) verify common human experiences and give them more meaning. Also, as Paden concludes,
"it is the basic, proper endeavor of religious studies as an academic field of inquiry [to find] explanatory linkages and differentials among religious expressions, at either regional or cross-cultural levels, and seeking to discover otherwise unnoticed relationships among religious data."29
W.C. Smith’s Conceptual Dialectic of the Cumulative Tradition/Faith
From this historical analysis, Smith argues that what the terms ‘religion,’ Christianity’ and the like designate do not represent the historical reality of religious traditions and discounts the possibility of those traditions changing and modifying into new forms. Nor do these reified concepts do justice to the ‘faith’ or personal quality of every religious person within those traditions. Smith therefore argues for a new dialectic of concepts that will hopefully do justice to the historical data of religious traditions and also for the personal quality of the religious person. The problem that arises from this new dialectic is not the form of the dialectic itself, but as I will argue, the failure of one side to distinguish itself from the other side. I hope to argue that Smith’s concept of ‘faith’ as ‘the personal quality of a religious person that signifies his or her relationship with some transcendent reality’ fails to refer to what Smith thinks the concept refers to. Even though we can see that the concept ‘cumulative tradition’ (“the entire mass of overt objective data that constitute the historical deposit, as it were, of the past religious life of the community in question”4) does do a better job than the reified concepts in representing the flux of history, what is left on the other side of the analysis (the faith of an individual religious person) cannot be said to be in a “supernatural or transcendent context,” for such a supposition misleads one to believe that all religious history contains a subject within that context. Therefore, I will argue that Smith’s analysis and dialectical suggestion works only so far as to understand many cumulative traditions and how historical individual persons were affected by and in turn affected such traditions; moreover, to posit a personal ‘faith’ category that refers to a subject-transcendent relationship begs the question of whether such a quality that a subject has can be really distinguished from the historical and immediate data (cumulative tradition), which is an accessible and multi-interpretable text.5
To understand my position, first we need to look at how Smith rightly argues for the concept of a ‘cumulative tradition.’ From there we can begin to see how the “personal quality” of a “subject” cannot be so easily separated from the text of the cumulative tradition. Smith argues that the reified concepts we have inherited are inadequate for the understanding of history in that these concepts by definition presuppose a limit or boundary around the continuing transformation of historical data. He points out that “neither the believer nor the observer can hold that there is anything on earth that can legitimately be called ‘Christianity’ or ‘Shintoism’ or ‘religion’ without recognizing that if such a thing existed yesterday, it existed in a somewhat different form the day before.”6 This statement makes the point that reality (or the history of reality) cannot be defined in essentialists definitions; that is, ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Christianity’ as it pertains to objective reality, is impossible to define. Furthermore, “to define is to set limits,” so to define is to rule out the possibility of what a religious tradition may become.7 Not only do these reified concepts misrepresent history and religious traditions, Smith worries about the spiritual calamity that follows when religious persons give allegiance to “the Religion” instead of to God. The concepts ‘religion,’ ‘Buddhism,’ ‘Christianity’ and the like are then inadequate for the person of faith. Instead, we must view our historical data to see a cumulative tradition that involves the individual person of faith inheriting a continuing context of religious history, who in turn affects and supplements that history do to his or her own religious experiences and personal religious quality. The cumulative tradition, then, cannot be understood without this personal involvement, and that personal involvement cannot be understood without the observable data of the cumulative tradition.
If we must understand the individual religious person through the cumulative tradition, how are we to understand the cumulative tradition through the individual? If this ‘personal quality’ is by definition a relationship to a “transcendent” and therefore inscrutable to the outsider, how is the outsider (or even the insider of the same tradition) to understand this quality?
Smith’s answer is that, like all other studies of the personal, it must be inferred with “imaginative sympathy.” In principle, for Smith, we can reach more accurate answers “as to what is, what has been, the particular faith of particular persons.”8 Still, looking more closely at Smith’s arguments, one can point out that he posits an assumed “unknown” element that signifies a subject-transcendent relationship, which then commits him to the fact that is “unknown” quality of persons is not ruled out a priori as being possibly “apprehended” by the other. This reasoning seems to stem from the analogies that ‘faith’ falls in line with, which are other modes of human qualities (i.e. love, strife, despair, joy). But such qualities or feelings are in the same way not understood by the persons themselves as by the outsider, other than having better knowledge of how one reacts and behaves within the context of such qualities occurring. If I experience myself in despair at any moment, I "understand" such “moments” only in intellectual reports to myself, which uses language and pre-established concepts that I have developed within my community (how ever large that is).9 Otherwise, all these immediate and ineffable “givens,” revelations or what ever they may be called, have no reportable cognitive content. Moreover, the supposed “subject” cannot have final authority over the “text” that he or she continues to engage in since one’s “personal” text is hardly discernible from the overall context of his or her cumulative tradition. Smith, in contrast, presupposes that there exists a stable subject who stands in relation to and experiences something that is “other.” If this is the case, then to propose a dialectic that contains a subject-transcendent relationship as one part, is to fail to make that dialectic, for I cannot discern any difference between a personal text (“quality is Smith’s terminology) and the overall text of the ‘cumulative tradition.’
By accepting Smith’s arguments for the rejection of the aforementioned reified concepts, one may object that I cannot then reject Smith’s proposal of having two intermingling concepts, which respectively do justice to both the person of faith and to the flux of history. Since these reified concepts were argued to do injustice to the personal quality of faith, it is a fact from this that we must find a new approach to understand and appreciate ‘personal faith’. We see in Smith’s argument that “the concept is necessarily inadequate for the man who believes and therefore cannot but be misleading for the outsider who does not.”10 Moreover, it is through this faith that the religious person sees his or her universe—the deeper the faith, the more he or she sees through it.11 But by accepting Smith’s argument that these reified concepts misrepresent history and the individuals who constitute such traditions with acts of faith, I by no means necessarily accept that a separate concept must be needed to pick out an individual subject as having authority over the meaning of any supposed transcendent experiences. The ‘what-it-is-like’ quality of any person—their subjectivity, is by definition an experience of self-consciousness. Translating such experiences adheres to the surrounding discourse, mapping one’s reflected experiences (a text) onto the context of one’s surrounding text. This special quality of the subject, what we call faith, is not identical to the ‘what-it-is-like’ of consciousness. If the previous statements read obtusely, then let me simplify: what one experiences in-itself (be it the transcendent) is conceptually inaccessible even for that person, so long as he or she posits himself or herself as a subject within a discourse.12
One may point out that what Smith actually says is that the useful distinction between the ‘cumulative traditions’ and ‘faith’ (however useful) does not truly represent what is really going on in the world. He points out that:
"In our final synthesis we shall argue that the two considerations are two faces of a single issue, with both of which my essentially personalistic interpretation will endeavor simultaneously to cope. In the meantime, we may look at the points one by one."13
I have to concede to this point. The conceptual dialectic proposed by Smith indeed is “two faces of a single issue,” but Smith goes on to state that there is indeed a “transcendent element in men’s participation [with the cumulative traditions],”14 which in turn cannot be left out of any historical consideration. Therefore, what I am arguing is that Smith is misguided in retaining the distinction that the transcendent context remains different from the rest of the historical data that makes up a cumulative tradition. Faith is a property of a subject, who resides within the text of any historical data. If the term ‘transcendent’ must be used, it must be so within the discourse; otherwise, “transcendent” is not a category. Furthermore, Smith rests on the proposal that faith is not identical with belief and that belief expresses faith. This proposal, however, does not help his argument if we reject his view that belief is a mere set of propositions. A belief can be thought of as a mode of action that becomes reinforced within interaction of the eternal world. If, then, faith is also a mode of behavior and attitude toward the external world (which can include the transcendent), then it seems that a belief can be an expression of faith. If the reader rejects these premises and/or conclusion, maybe my point can still be seen: positing a category of faith is misleading for many religious contexts, for it assumes that a subject-transcendent relationship or quality is responsible for certain beliefs, behaviors and continuing changes in a cumulative tradition.
Before looking at some implications and conclusions of how my objections will modify Smith’s project that started over 50 years ago, let me recapitulate my argument in this paper. First, Smith is correct for suggesting that we drop such reified concepts as ‘religion,’ ‘a religion,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘Buddhism’ and the like. Moreover, suggesting the new concept ‘cumulative tradition’ helps in the continual understanding of any religious tradition’s transformation. Still, Smith is presumptuous in making a concept ‘faith’ that picks out in the cumulative tradition the personal quality of religious persons that is observably different from the rest of the historical data. The presumption stems from the implicit commitment that is found in Smith that there exists a subject-transcendent relationship accounting for much of the historical data to be found. Even if one rejects that the transcendent exists, Smith argues that a subject--transcendent-like-illusion relationship still accounts for this data, and is objectively inscrutable to the observer unlike the rest of the cumulative tradition’s data. But this is not the case. The ‘what-it-is-like’ quality of consciousness is not identical to the subject that exists within a tradition. A subject is by definition an author of a text or exists within the text (in this case, belief, faith and the cumulative tradition).15 Therefore, ‘faith’ cannot be a different useful concept from the concept ‘cumulative tradition.’
So what are some possible implications of this critique on our study of religiousness through a Smithian construct? In terms of the methods, historical data (which includes the behavior of faith) and a sympathetic approach, I see no difference in what we may hope to understand. But instead of posing a problem in understanding personal “faith,” it looks as though we have a problem of understanding the unique phenomenological constructs that exist within a proposed cumulative tradition. A broader but related question of how a 'subject' might exist within these traditions needs to be addressed. For example, how do certain traditions deal with the 'subject?' Moreover, to what extent can we make sense of the cumulative tradition and the phenomenological categories/structures that exist within/constitute them? It seems as if I a proposing to recover Eliade's project through a Smithian construct. How the two methods may be married is further inquiry.
Context and Modulated Categories
In various essays in Imagining Region: From Babylon to Jonestown, Smith presents cautionary pointers to what the historian of religion must avoid, but also attempts to establish some strategies for attempting a truly academic model in the study of religion. For one, the scholar must be insistently self-aware that the category of ‘religion’ itself is a working category that the scholar has created for academic purposes. In this section, I will take two of Smith’s essays (Ch. 1 and 3 in his Imagining Religion) and extract some important elements to explicate and sketch a model of what the academic study of religion should look like. I believe Smith sets up a model that replaces the “given” a priori with a kind of contextual “modulation” of categories that may be used to study unfamiliar religious situations. This model accounts for irreducible differences in religious contexts, but makes these differences intelligible. I also hope to sketch some implications of Smith’s approach on the future interrelations of religious studies to the other fields of academic study. Smith’s thesis of human labor in the creation of religion, for one, implies explainable or intelligible causes and effects within the empirical world. Studying religion, then, is not a theological exercise, but the work of reconstructing particular empirical contexts of human interaction and rational ingenuity. Within the variegated academic counterparts, the historiography of religions may be, in ways, translatable. (It is also possible to argue that this study is non-reductive, perhaps; arguments in the philosophy of law demonstrate this possibility, as the nature of law is non-normative, but not reducible to social phenomena in a "scientific" way).
For Smith, the study of religions cannot remain in the search and application of phenomenological, sui generis structures or patterns (e.g. M. Eliade), or insist that faith is an irreducible personal quality that interacts with “cumulative” traditions (e.g. W.C. Smith). Otherwise, history would be imbued with unintelligible “inhuman” categories. The role of academia is explanation and understanding (among others), so we cannot rest on a taxonomy that prima facie defines religious phenomena as including a transcendent element and by definition wholly Other.
It is important it get clear Smith’s proposed method in the study of religion, but also what it is not. At face value, Smith’s seems to contend to the impossibility of formulating universal categories in relation to religious phenomena. This seems to preclude any possibility of integrating religious “truths” or universals into the general structure of our understanding of reality. But why is this so? In “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” Smith warns us of the problem of induction in making universal claims that humans are inherently religious: “no matter how many instances of human religiosity we have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that man is religious.”16 No matter how many examples we have of a phenomenon that is clearly “religious,” it is difficult or unjustified a priori to say that all humans are fundamentally religious. In the sciences, this reduction is the exemplar of how understanding is to be achieved. This is not to say all special sciences have been completely closed and explained (maybe with the exception of chemistry)—they run into similar problems of induction and the sheer fact of an infinite diversity of particulars (e.g. species of insects). The attempt to reduce phenomena to a similarity trait or universal undercuts the fact of diversity and difference in the world’s cultures. Smith stresses this difference and particularity when approaching an object of study. Therefore, to presuppose (wrongly) that the object of study is or is not in some way a religious phenomenon is to presuppose that there exists an element or taxon—which is out there to be found, that will reinforce the fact that it is or is not ‘Religion’. Smith says in “Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism” that “scholars have engaged in the quest for the unique and definitive sine qua non, the “that without which” religion would not be religion but rather an instance of something else…[but] they have failed to achieve consensus.”17 Moreover, further attempts to find the “essence” of each religion is also “arbitrary and poorly defined, being determined by extrinsic apologetics.”1 These methods, then, are inadequate; but what are we left with?
In these two essays, Smith proposes a strict historical and contextual reconstruction of the object of study. When approaching to study a culture or established “religious” tradition, we must find an element of classification and discover how and when it is applied or left out/modified by the subjects of the tradition. This “taxic indicator” is the stepping block to explore the rich different phenomena in the tradition; in turn, those unique elements will become the explanatory indicators of that unique context. What has been the search for the enduring element of sacredness in human phenomena is replaced by the search for how humans create and labor to overcome limitations set by initial closed cultural canons (i.e., grounded precepts, truths, “a totalistic and complete systems of signs or icons”).19 But how and why where these canons set? That, I think Smith would argue is another historical and contextual question. What is important is that where there is a canon, “it is possible to predict the necessary hermeneute, of an interpreter whose task it is continually to extend the domain of the closed canon over everything that is known or everything that exists without altering the canon in the process.”20 However, canons are not necessarily static through time. The contrary to this statement has been a common misconception of previous historians of religion—we cannot look for the closed, eternal and sui generis canon.
Taxic indicators, in Smith’s terminology, are initial elements in a classificatory set or agenda. Those initial indicators help sort the unique set of polythetic classification of a historical context, which is to be revised and tediously selected when applying it to a different object of study.21 One may choose “Jew” as a taxic indicator or “circumcision,” as Smith does in the first essay, to begin one’s interpretive investigation. This indicator, however, cannot be conflated with some innate and essential element that is “out there” to be found. It is instead a familiar category used to inspect differences and modifications found in an unfamiliar object of study. “Jew” cannot function initially as, by definition, a religious indicator—that would disrupt the scholar’s true aim in un-presupposed understanding. What the category and identification of “Jew” may function as in a particular context will be determined by the situational human activity that the identification of “Jew” accomplishes. This thesis of “religious human labor” in Smith exemplifies the pragmatic and context-specific categorization in religious practice as well as in the academic practice. It is the task of the historian and scholar to explore the particular processes of exegetical ingenuity; that is, the task is to find how a person or group overcomes the limitations set by an inherited canon. As this new data and interpretation comes to fruition, categories and taxonomies are developed so as to apply them to other unfamiliar cultures and traditions. These unfamiliar traditions are then sorted and familiarized through a process of (1) preinterpretive reconstruction of historic context, (2) application of the familiar categories and sortals and (3) iteration of the new explanatory cluster of human responsiveness and ingenuity. These initial categories remain only tools in uncovering the unique but human situation and explaining phenomenon.
Though the two essays of Smith’s that I am addressing here may remain case studies, we may still wish to evaluate the implications Smith’s approach has on other endeavors of understanding and the general method of the study of religion in particular. How will particularized constructs of religious understanding fit into our broader system of social-scientific and humanistic understanding? Smith comments at he end of “Fences and Neighbors” that
"As the anthropologist has begun to abandon a functionalist view of culture as a well-articulated, highly integrated mechanism and has slowly turned to accepting the sort of image set forth by F. E. Williams of culture as a “heap of rubbish,” a “tangle,” a “hotch-potch,” only partially organized, so we in religious studies must set about an analogous dismantling of the old theological and imperialistic impulses toward totalization, unification, and integration."22
What is at the heart of the problematic for a “science of religion” is that of human agency23: the art of creation and ingenuity within a continuously changing history. How can there be static concepts or primordiums (continuous and primitively irreducible elements) if there is an element of human agency acting within the flux of history? In Smith’s words: “…ingenuity is often displaced as mere routinization or swallowed up by postulating some ontic primordiums which manifests itself in a variety of forms, apparently dependent to of human agency.”24 This “hotch-potch” view of the world’s cultures renders prima facie the “unification” project impossible. However, Smith does not seem to propose utter indeterminacy of translation between contexts and traditions, but a kind of “modulation” of categories between sets of contexts and traditions. This proposal espouses a reciprocal model of usable categories between two or more religious traditions. In concrete terms: we may apply the typical notion of a canon (closed and authoritative text) to cultures of nonliterate peoples in order to interpret the creative overcoming of a historical contextual situation that we find a tradition to exist in. This application of our familiar term in the west to the scholar’s contextual recreation of a nonliterate tradition will and must revise the definition of our original term; moreover, it will create a redescription of canon so that scholars may turn around and apply it to a context within a more familiar western tradition. Through this process, the historian will gain insight to the difference and uniqueness of each situational context, but at the same time render it intelligible.
So to return to our question about the possibility of Smith’s model interrelating to a broader model of socio-scientific understanding: can these usable categories and context related categories be refined as to close the explanatory gap between the reduced special sciences (e.g. psychology, cognitive science or biology) and religious phenomena? Though there exists the element of human agency and creativity, I think it is possible to build connective categories between our special sciences to our particularistic study of religion. Even if we maintain Smith’s contention that the study of religion and culture is a “messy” endeavor, we may still hope to find usable and static connective categories to the context specific religious phenomena. Though this line of thought is speculative, I just want to point out the fact that explanations derived from the sciences may bring out a familiar “divine” notion within the religious traditions. Though the academic study of religion (in J.Z. Smith’s view) should abstain from positing irreducible transcendent-elements as to fill in explanatory gaps, I cannot rule out that modulated categories from the sciences and the study of religion will have familiar “divine’ or “other-worldly” qualities. The question will be whether or not these explanations really link up with what we originally termed “divine.” The point Smith seems to push is the quest for rigorous understanding and to not give up in reducing understanding to an inhuman otherworldly category. If such a “divine” element does in fact have a causal role in reality and history, I think our dialectic refinement of socio-scientific categories and religious studies may bring out what that connection may be or analyze it away.
Comparativists’ Reconciliation of the Postmodern Critique
The postmodernists critique the “totalizing” and universalizing agenda of modernity. Moreover, modernity has been blind-sighted by the relentless search for the immutable a priori. For the postmodernist’s argument, the concepts of text and representation are the key tools; that is, the epistemological fact that a mental concept is a representation undercuts the very possibility of formulizing a truth that is “out there.” I shall return to the epistemological question latter, for I believe it is key in reconstructing the comparativists’ outlook. For now, I want to stress that J.Z. Smith has argued (in a deconstructivist manner) that any religious phenomena cannot be divorced from the culture or context to which they are located. To universalize patterns or postulate sui generis primordial categories de-particularizes the inherently particular object of study. The postmodernist, in general, also stresses this line of thought: words are representations, and since all knowledge is language-bound, truth is forever arbitrary.25 There are of course weaker and stronger forms of postmodernism—the affirmative and skeptical postmodernists. Skeptical postmodernists will not even let a new Comparativism get off the ground, since discourse inevitably does not refer to anything beyond itself (i.e. a sign signifies another sign, and so ad infinitum). This, I believe, is bad epistemology (at least, it leaves out pragmatic effects that we conceptually experience in the world—if I do this, this experience will happen; also the arguments are usually obscure nonsense); hence I only take seriously the affirmative postmodernist’s arguments and the possibility of a new comparativism. The affirmative postmodernists emphasize the importance of particular cultures and languages constructing their own language-games and hence, one can only understand and evaluate particular traditions within their own discourse. Prima facie, comparativism cannot make cross-similarities—to do so would have to engage in a discourse outside of the objects of study and therefore misrepresent the particular traditions or cultures. Ray and Paden respond to this charge differently. Let us see what they say and then move to construct a possible epistemology that can make since of these authors goals. Ray sees the problem expressed by postmodernists:
"The basic problem is the widely held assumption that cultures constitute independent domains with their own languages and standards of meaning and truth. Outsiders should not talk of truth or engage in moral evaluation of other cultures because that would only privilege the outsider’s cultural domain…all that anthropologists actually do is “represent” other cultures because their language cannot adequately connect with the other’s “world."26
But Ray objects to this view in that to be a western studying a non-western culture is not, by default, to be a western scientific realist; but, it is because he thinks we have the ability to learn a foreign culture’s language and customs first-hand that western academia can check their understanding through indigenous discourse. Ray cites examples of ethnographers who become fully engaged participants of indigenous cultures so that they could experience what the natives experienced. The anthropologist, then, must express and evoke what he or she really experiences to the academic discourse. The reader of these narratives would then “become receptive to experiences that would otherwise seem implausible.”27 The difficulty is when the participant of the foreign culture becomes “other” than him or herself and tries to reconcile the indigenous experiences with his or her western (or native) knowledge and beliefs. I will return to this, but when the anthropologist is able to reflectively translate his or hers experience into the academic discourse through narrative (and without reducing the experience to a different or more “scientific” language), the comparative enterprise is renewed—for we can now find common human experiences in cross-cultural studies.
Paden’s view rests not on the narratives of ethnographers “going native,” but in finding relationships and generalizations that “insiders” of a tradition do not understand. But the agreement between Ray and Paden is view that cultures and religious traditions share a common human and biological experience. Ethnographer’s narratives can help solidify those common experiences; but in the field academia, we need categories and explanations to assess this new “data” of the ethnographer’s narratives. Ray takes the postmodern challenge too seriously. Paden, however, constructs a model of comparativism that approaches categories as usable and changeable tools—they unlock similarities and differences across cultures and religious traditions. These categories are not the universal patterns modernists looked for, but more or less workable forms that the different content of traditions fill. Categories initially applied to an object of study will eventually transform such categories through the uniqueness of the object’s particular context and content. Similar to J.Z. Smith’s methods of study, categories are tools in which the historian of religions may make particular objects of study intelligible. In Paden’s words:
"So a major function of comparative categories is heuristic: to provide instruments of further discovery. This includes the possibility of their own further differentiation, subtypologization, and problematizsation through historical analysis."28
Paden and Ray, then, both suggest the possibility of making different and unique religious traditions intelligible within the western academic discourse. But this presents a problem that postmodernists would be likely to exploit in Paden and Ray’s reasoning: how does the intelligibly of an explanation within the western discourse relate to the intelligibility within a particular culture? Since the two forms of discourse are different, the forms of intelligibility will be different too—hegemonic privilege of one form of intelligibility will compete with the other. In Ray’s examples, the competing “otherness” within the ethnographer his or herself will force him or her to privilege western intelligibility in order to communicate his or her experiences to western academia. I think Paden and Ray’s models can hold up to this charge once we understand an epistemological framework that remains within a specific discourse but without discounting the veridical nature of an experience within another discourse.
What is “intelligibility?” Through concepts of our own language and its semantics, we make exotic cultures become “intelligible.” But this needs explaining. To merely “translate” between discourses fails the postmodern test; to do so would create multiple meanings that are situated by the difference of meanings surrounding the final translation existing within the interpreter’s language. However, intelligibility in my view happens only in the sense that we have seen "verified" effects in our own experience from the use of certain concepts. Though we cannot ever “be in the mind” of a foreign culture or religious tradition, we can (from the outside) test pragmatic categories of similarity and difference. “Intelligibility” is an earthly phenomenon and means that something has anchored on to the semantics of a specific discourse. “Intelligibility,” by definition, precludes the inclusion of a semantics of “divine.” I believe Jean-Francois Lyotard is correct in saying that the Real, or divine in our case, if it has any meaning in a working semantics, must be in a way “alluded” to. I believe that within our academic and even western scientific framework, we can include the possibility of a category that is “pointed to” outside the semantics of our closed and “earthly” taxonomies and explanations. Moreover, for intelligibility to be possible, a comparative model is a necessary ingredient: cross-cultural categories (responsive and amendable to context) verify common human experiences and give them more meaning. Also, as Paden concludes,
"it is the basic, proper endeavor of religious studies as an academic field of inquiry [to find] explanatory linkages and differentials among religious expressions, at either regional or cross-cultural levels, and seeking to discover otherwise unnoticed relationships among religious data."29
So it seems that Paden and Ray appropriately respond to the postmodern argument and construct a new comparativism that is responsive to context, the impossibility of total translation and the non-reduction of explanation between the particular object of study and the western academic discourse. Ray’s suggestion of learning and experiencing a culture’s language and beliefs, however, must be supplemented with Paden’s suggestion of heuristic bound categories. With the conjunction of these two models and a deeper understanding of a pragmatic epistemology (looking for intelligibility through the effects that categories have on religious data), we have a new possibility of finding common elements across the world’s cultures. Moreover, Paden and Ray agree that it is part of the human linguistic world to create and construct their worlds. For Ray, it is part of the human experience to “do” things with words as speech acts. So it is part of the human social evolvement in creating a system that identifies and demarcates “their world.” Within the western epistemological framework, scholars are in the position to “do” things with their categories and concepts in order to make foreign cultures and religious tradition intelligible. This endeavor attempts to “advance the conversation of mankind”30 and to open a cross-cultural dialogue that attempts to make categories usable to the academics and the particular cultures being studied.
To recap: Ray and Paden take seriously the postmodernist’s concern and revise the comparativists’ agenda. However, with my suggestion of a pragmatic view of knowledge I think we can link the two models and move away from the postmodern insistence that knowledge is purely a representation of something “out there.” We as humans engage with the external world using concepts and categories to sort through those real effects/affects that the world has on us.
Though it now seems Zagzebski has returned us to the place we started: what methods do we have to evaluate religious truth claims in a complex globalized world of competing wisdom and authority within and across those very communities? Many scholars point to a renewed focus on the power of Dialogue. I am one of those—but coming from the field of education instead of inside a religious community or as a historian of religion. I will return to a longer analysis of dialogue in another place—instead, let’s move to a more focused analysis of the nature of belief and other propositional attitudes.
To recap: Ray and Paden take seriously the postmodernist’s concern and revise the comparativists’ agenda. However, with my suggestion of a pragmatic view of knowledge I think we can link the two models and move away from the postmodern insistence that knowledge is purely a representation of something “out there.” We as humans engage with the external world using concepts and categories to sort through those real effects/affects that the world has on us.
The Return to an Analysis of Belief
Though it now seems Zagzebski has returned us to the place we started: what methods do we have to evaluate religious truth claims in a complex globalized world of competing wisdom and authority within and across those very communities? Many scholars point to a renewed focus on the power of Dialogue. I am one of those—but coming from the field of education instead of inside a religious community or as a historian of religion. I will return to a longer analysis of dialogue in another place—instead, let’s move to a more focused analysis of the nature of belief and other propositional attitudes.
1 Baggini, J and Stragroom. 2006 Do You Think What You Think You Think? The Ultimate Philosophical Handbook. New York: Penguin Group.↩
2 Zagzebski, Linda. 2011. “Religious Knowledge” In The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard. New York: Routledge.↩
3 Lincoln, Bruce. 2003 Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago.↩
4 W. C. Smith. The Meaning and End of Religion. Fortress Press, 1962; p. 156↩
5 Here I mean the postmodern notion of ‘text,’ which assumes that the world is constituted by text. In other words, whatever is by means a representation (art, language, informational systems and thought), it is by definition a text.↩
6 Smith. TMER. p.142↩
7 Ibid., p. 145↩
8 Ibid., p.189↩
9 This line of reasoning I take from the arguments given by Wittgenstein, Dewey and Quine against “private language.” In short, language can only have meaning by its use in a community (at least two beings); therefore, meaning is a property of behavior. See J. P. Murphy. Pragmatism. Notably p. 80-1. ↩
10 Ibid, p. 134↩
11 Ibid, p. 138↩
12 Here, I leave open the possibility of ultimate “understanding” through certain occurrences or methods (i.e. enlightenment as in certain Buddhists traditions or as taught by some mystic traditions). This does not hurt my argument since such conceptions “point” outside discourse and the subject-object distinction.↩
13 Smith. TMER. p.134↩
14 Ibid, p. 171↩
15 Whether there is such a thing as a ‘subject’ does not have bearing on my argument, and is another question I cannot touch on, but has a large history of literature on it.↩
16 J. Z. Smith. Imaging Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1982. p.38↩
17 Ibid., p. 5↩
18 Ibid., p. 7↩
19 Ibid., p. 49↩
20 Ibid., p. 48↩
21 This term might be defined as: each member of the category must possess a certain minimal number of defining characteristics, but none of the features has to be found in each member of the category.↩
22 Ibid., p. 18↩
23 Issues of freewill and determinism may be relevant here. Smith’s model remains justified within the compatiblist or libertarian stances. But determinism has a striking blow to the “hotch-potch” world-view, for causal laws would exist as reducible elements through all human endeavors. Of course, epistemic problems arise in uncovering such causal elements if they exist. I am not sure determinism, if true, would change the force of the Smithian model, for human agency as an a posterioi category would remain useful and in some ways what the historian is out to verify.↩
24 J. Z. Smith. Imaging Religion. P. 42↩
25 Pauline Rosenau. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. Princeton: Princeton Press: 1992, p. 77↩
26 Benjamin Ray. “Discourse About Difference.” In A Magic Still Dwells. Ed. Patton and Ray. California: University of California Press, 2000, P. 104↩
27 Ibid., p, 114↩
28 William Paden, “Elements of a New Comparativism.” In A Magic Still Dwells. Ed. Patton and Ray California: University of California Press, 2000. p. 186↩
29 Paden, p. 190↩
30 Ray, p. 115↩
Comments
Post a Comment