TLC: Thursby's Literary Canon

Richard A. Shweder in Shweder & LeVine, eds., Culture Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1984), 40:

A frame, paradigm, or absolute presupposition is a statement about the world whose validity can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed. A frame violates no empirical evidence, nor is it dictated by any evidence. A frame violates no principle of logic not does it follow from logic. The litmus test of a frame is that no evidence or experience can possibly count as disproof. "People have souls and they transmigrate." "Fetuses have souls possessed of infinite value." "God blesses men in the sign of their prosperity." "Man's only motive is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain." One either supposes these particular presuppositions and comprehends the world in their terms or one doesn't -- and if one person supposes and another doesn't, there is little of a rational sort for them to say to each other.

[This essay by Geertz is very lengthy, and has been very influential. It opens with an epigraph that quotes from the late Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana.]

"Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. . . . Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in: and another world to live in -- whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no -- is what we mean by having a religion." Santayana, Reason in Religion

Which brings us, at length, to ritual. For it is in ritual -- that is, consecrated behavior -- that this conviction that religious conceptions are veridical and that religious directives are sound are somehow generated. It is in some sort of ceremonial form -- even if that form be hardly more than the recitation of a myth, the consultation of an oracle, or the decoration of a grave -- that the moods and motivations which sacred symbols induce in [wo]men and the general conceptions of the order of existence which they formulate for [wo]men meet and reinforce one another. In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world, producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one's sense of reality to which Santayana refers in my epigraph. Whatever role divine intervention may or may not play in the creation of faith -- and it is not the business of the scientist to pronounce upon such matters one way or the other -- it is, primarily, at least, out of the context of concrete acts of religious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human plane.

Philosophy is the science of self-knowledge. But the outcome of any philosophical inquiry is determined by its starting place. The conception of philosophic method chosen in the beginning governs the conclusions at the end. The key focus for fruitful philosophical inquiry does not concern conclusions, nor even premises. It concerns the question of "horizon." A horizon is the limit of what can be seen from a determinate point of view; it has a subjective and objective pole; it relates the subject to the range of matters which he can investigate from that viewpoint. A philosopher rises or falls by how critical he is of his own starting place, and how broad his knowledge is of alternative points of view. Each conception of philosophic method has its advantages and disadvantages. What is crucial to a philosopher seems to be not so much what he can work out within his own horizon, but how capable he is of sharing other horizons and justifying the choice he has made of his own.

The primary emphasis in the discipline of philosophy, therefore, does not fall upon logical relationships between propositions, or the defining and establishing of terms. The enunciation of a system of propositions is at best secondary to philosophy. The primary task of the philosopher is to reflect upon his own horizon, his purposes, the tools he has been taught by his teachers, and the tools available in other philosophical traditions. The primary imperative in philosophy is not Construct a consistent system. The primary imperative is Know thyself.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 82-83:

Why is it that the discovery that Copernicus made could not directly and of itself change the world of his time? On the other hand, why did it, five generations later, become the great idea on which a radical mutation in the human horizon was based? Very simple: during the Middle Ages the individual sciences, therefore science as such, represented a kind of secondary knowledge; they were, we might say, a spiritual activity of the second class. It is not enough for something to appear true within the specialized vision of a science for it to become, without further ado, a conclusive truth, an active truth. In the last analysis only theology and philosophy are creators of faith on their own account.

Translating this well-known fact into our own terminology, let us say that during the Middle Ages and up to 1550 the sciences were no world-makers; just as today we may add, though with some element of exaggeration, that the technique of chess playing makes no new worlds. Consequently, in order that a single scientific discovery like the Copernican idea should produce an actual world change, it was necessary for men first to decide to acknowledge the fact that, generally speaking, scientific truth is truth of the first class, a creative truth. Only within that general change in the evaluation of the sciences could the Copernican theory radiate all the formidable and vital consequences which were pregnant within it.

Now then, the five generations from Copernicus to Galileo are precisely that many periods in the revindication of the sciences as such. . . .

This shows that the perspective of life is different from the perspective of science. During the modern age, the two have been confused; this very confusion is the modern age. In it man makes science, pure reason, serve as a basis for the system of his convictions. He lives on science. This is why Taine observed that whereas in another age man received his dogmas from the Church councils, he now chooses to receive them from the Academy of Science. At first sight, nothing seems more logical and prudent. What can better give direction to our life than science? Are we to go back to theology?

The fact that this reasoning seems to us so effective only shows that we still have one foot in modernism. The exact purpose of this book is to make clear how it was that man came to have this ultimate faith in science, in pure reason. But as this becomes clear to us, we may discover that to confuse the perspective of science with the perspective of life has its inconveniences, that it creates a false perspective, just as did the acceptance of the religious, the theological, perspective as the vital perspective. We will see that life does not tolerate being supplanted either by revealed faith or by pure reason.

What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but the presumption of wholesale reflexivity -- which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself.

Probably we are only now, in the late twentieth century, beginning to realise in a full sense how deeply unsettling this outlook is. For when the claims of reason replaced those of tradition, they appeared to offer a sense of certitude greater than that provided by preexisting dogma. But this idea only appears persuasive so long as we do not see that the reflexivity of modernity actually subverts reason, at any rate where reason is understood as the gaining of certain knowledge. Modernity is constituted in and through reflexively applied knowledge, but the equation of knowledge with certitude has turned out to be misconceived. We are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised.

. . . . In the heart of the world of hard science, modernity floats free.

Reflexivity in [its] most limited form is a term used to describe the self-referring character of a statement or group of statements. Some statements self-refer in an obvious and unexceptional way: 'This sentence contains five words.' However, from the liar paradox onwards it has been recognized that statements of this self-referential nature can generate paradoxes. The original version of the liar paradox appeared in the sixth century BC, when the Cretan prophet Epimenides allegedly observed that 'All Cretans are liars.' Since he was a Cretan this claim appears to deny itself.

This form of reflexive problem is less easily dispatched when the introduction of another level itself generates a further paradox. Suppose we wish to say of sentences at the meta-level that 'There is no truth.' To avoid paradox we would have to resort to a meta-meta-level. This would successfully avoid the paradox in this instance, but if we wish to claim that 'There is no truth' generally, we are left with an endless hierarchy of meta-levels.

J. M. Cohen and J.-F. Phipps, The Common Experience (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979), 9:

The mystical path is not mysterious. It is not the private path of monks and yogins. It is open to all and has been liberally sign-posted by writers familiar with its various stages, men and women who have used the language of their own traditions -- Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Taoist, Platonic or Jewish -- to describe experiences which are not easily reduced to words, but which are sufficiently clear for anyone to understand who has a practical interest in exploring this universal path. The signposts are visible. There are even detailed maps of the terrain, which stretches from the bordering hills whence a preliminary vista may be obtained, as through a break in the mist, to the sunlit plains of enlightenment and beyond them to that paradoxical sea where being and non-being, selfhood and unity are one, to Nirvana or the heavenly state at the end of the journey.

What is needed is an extension of contemporary consciousness to include what can be defined as the translucent quality in all things; the quality by which an object or an event is seen not only as a thing-in-itself, but also as a membrane through which can dimly be discerned the foetal stirring of a different order of experience.

This once caught, even for a moment, transforms the sensible universe, investing all objects with a sharp intensity of being. The seeming-solid world grows permeable, beginning to transmit, not merely to reflect, the light. The quality of translucence is the key; a golden key that is the careless plaything of all children, and the conscious instrument of a few geniuses. In exceptional moments of their lives ordinary men and women may fleetingly hold it; in the first days of overwhelming love, in the final moments of overwhelming peril, in the presence of new life, and sometimes in the unheralded news of death.

At such moments a [wo]man stands on tiptoe, and may catch a startled glimpse of another level of being, where all values are changed, and everything is understood differently; the level of which Chekhov dreamed where "everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive"; that Goethe experienced when he murmured to his friend, "That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my windowsill quietly awaiting its future -- all these are momentous signatures"; the level touched in the Parables, the sixth book of the Aeneid, the "Ode to a Nightengale," and anonymously, and perhaps incomparably, in the mysterious golden light that shines through myth and fairytale; the level of the kingdom of heaven that is within.

If credence is given to accounts of the mystic experience, we are forced to recognize that certain mystics have succeeded in achieving a special state that goes beyond the usual feelings and perceptions of ordinary life. These men and women describe an experience of union, of Unity with life or God or the Ultimate. Visions, feelings of love, and similar sensate phenomena are regarded as transitional stages on the way to a higher, transcendent state -- "the cloud of darkness" -- in which thoughts and images no longer exist but, instead, a new dimension is perceived. Although the lower sensate phenomena can occur regardless of religious orientation, prior training or life context, the transcendent experience seems always to require long practice in contemplative meditation and is achieved by only a few.

The Divine . . . is beyond knowledge and doubt, which are only ordinary conventions of mind and experience. The Divine is Realized only through ecstasy, or self-transcendence, beyond knowledge and doubt. The Living God may be neither doubted nor known, but only Realized.

The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is easy enough to state. We begin by simply assuming that human beings do in fact have access to three general realms of being and knowing -- the sensory, the mental, and the spiritual. Those three realms can be stated in any number of different ways: subconscious, self-conscious, and super-conscious, or prerational, rational, and transrational, or prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal. The point is simply that, for example, since prerational and transrational are both, in their own ways, nonrational, then they appear quite similar or even identical to the untutored eye. Once this confusion occurs -- the confusion of "pre" and "trans" -- then one of two things inevitably happens: the transrational realms are reduced to prepersonal status, or the prerational realms are elevated to transrational glory. Either way a complete and overall world view is broken in half and folded in the middle, with one half of the real world (the "pre" or the "trans") being thus profoundly mistreated and misunderstood.

The task of [a] philosophy which recognizes that there are no distinctions in Reality must be that of discerning the structures of being which are disclosed in many forms of experience. The criterion by which distinctions between orders of being can be made is "subration" -- the axio-noetic process whereby we disvalue contents of consciousness because of their being contradicted by other experience. The content of non-dual spiritual experience cannot be subrated by any other experience and hence is Reality. In another form of spiritual experience, that in which the subject/object situation is harmonized but not transcended, the structure of love-order-will is discerned. Love-order-will is a level of being that is subratable by non-dual experience, but is not subratable by any phenomenal experience. It is thus taken as the creative ground of experience.

'Spiritual' in this book means the forms of consciousness we have evolved beyond the sensory-dominated, physically adaptive forms of awareness which we must use every day to avoid injury and death as well as to succeed in the complex tasks which assail us as soon as we wake. This definition frees spirituality from religion (which for most of its history has not in the main been spiritual but rather largely another means of adaptation to the material world) that spirituality has nurtured. It is time to liberate it from the evolutionary structure which gave it birth, and to cultivate our generic, human spirituality, whether we choose to be religious or secular in our commitment to seeking the ultimate meanings in our existence. 'Spirituality' is thus the consummation rather than the means . . . to love rather than . . . to kill or be killed, to participate in the fullness of the Other (in I-Thou relations), rather than to take the Other solely as an object for instrumental survival actions (I-It forms).

Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1984), 56:

It is all very well to use crumbs of Zen to assert the principle that existence is existence, that every manifestation contains within it all of everything, and that a slap on the face, a tweak of the nose or a custard pie are all equally Buddha. All religions assert that the invisible is visible all the time. But here's the crunch. Religious teaching -- including Zen -- asserts that this visible-invisible cannot be seen automatically--it can only be seen given certain conditions. The conditions can relate to certain states or to a certain understanding. In any event, to comprehend the visibility of the invisible is a life's work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we arrive at a definition of a holy theatre. A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible.

Infinite play is always dramatic; its outcome is endlessly open. There is no way of looking back to make a definitive assessment of the power or weakness of earlier play. Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.

Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play. It is for this reason they play as mortals.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.