Notes
EDITOR’S NOTE
1. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1997).
2. Luhmann’s Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft probably went to press around then, and doubtless he intended to focus on religion as a social system thereafter.
CHAPTER 1: RELIGION AS A FORM OF MEANING
1. For the contemporary sociological context, see Religionssoziologie um 1900, ed. Volkhard Krech and Hartmann Tyrell (Würzburg, 1995); for subsequent developments in the sociology of religion, see Hartmann Tyrell, “Religionssoziologie,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 428–457.
2. As the main work, see Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie, 5th ed. (1968; German trans., Frankfurt, 1981). See also “Détermination du fait moral,” in id., Sociologie et philosophie (Paris, 1951), 49–90 (German trans., Frankfurt, 1967).
3. See Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 3rd ed. (Tübingen, 1948), 1: 227.
4. For a brief overview see the chapter “Religionssoziologie,” in Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1: 227ff.
5. See Georg Simmel, “Zur Soziologie der Religion,” Neue Deutsche Rundschau 9 (1898): 111–123; and Georg Simmel, Die Religion (Frankfurt, 1912).
6. See René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972) and Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris, 1978).
7. Here see Philipp E. Hammond, “Introduction,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. id. (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 1–6.
8. Here I follow Rudolf Ott, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917; 31st–35th printing, Munich, 1963). It is not unimportant that this description is presumed to apply only to those who are familiar with such experiences. Whoever does not share that assumption “is asked not to read on” (ibid., 8). Written in 1917, this may have been a covert jab at Max Weber.
9. The sociological “phenomenologists” are typical in a different way, yet they misunderstand what phenomenology in its original sense intended.
10. “He may be in the thunder, but he is not the thunder” is the formulation of John S. Mbiti in his Concepts of God in Africa (London, 1970), 8. In Hegel, the distinction can already be found, e.g., in the rejection of pantheism as a possible religion (as incapable of intellectual development!); see his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I, in id., Werke (Frankfurt, 1969), 16: 89.
11. I am referring to the famous § 10 in Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6th ed. (Tübingen, 1949) 45ff.
12. See n. 8 above.
13. See Keiji Nishitani, Was ist Religion? trans. Dora Fischer-Barnicol (Frankfurt, 1982); trans. Jan Van Bragt as Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley, CA, 1982).
14. In Aristotle, this is a reference to being.
15. See the discussion of “meaning of meaning” [sens du sens], e.g., in Luc Ferry, L’homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie (Paris, 1996) 19, explained as “the ultimate signification of all these particular significations.”
16. Here reference to the construction of Gothic churches is unavoidable. If nothing else, their peculiarity consists in letting in only broken, distinguishable light and thus making the medium of light visible. We could understand this as symbolic of the fact that religion claims to make meaning observable and describable.
17. See, e.g., Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (Hamburg, 1948), §§ 8 and 9 (26ff.).
18. Gilles Deleuze, in Logique du sens (Paris, 1969), trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale as The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantine V. Boundas (New York, 1990, repr., London, 2004), seems to be saying something similar when defining the paradox of meaning as the meaning of nonsense, thus encountering in nonsense the reflection of meaning as meaning: “The name saying its own sense can only be nonsense” (79). Yet he then adds: “Nonsense . . . as it enacts the donation of sense, is opposed to the absence of sense” (83), ultimately calling this absence of meaning “sub-sense” or “a-sense” (103).
19. See with a view to a fully differentiated literary industry, Winfried Menninghaus, Lob des Unsinns: Über Kant, Tieck und Blaubart (Frankfurt, 1995).
20. Hölderlin to Niethammer, February 24, 1796: “In den philosophischen Briefen will ich das Prinzip finden, das mir die Trennungen, in denen wir denken und existieren, erklärt . . .”; see also Bernhard Lypp, “Poetische Religion,” in Früher Idealismus und Frühromantik: Der Streit um die Grundlagen der Ästhetik (1795–1805), ed. Walter Jaeschke and Helmut Holzhey (Hamburg, 1990), 80–111. On the transition from cosmos-oriented writing to (Romantic) poetry oriented toward self-reference and other-reference, see also Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1959).
21. The world is thus not realized as spirit [Geist] as Hegel claimed, saying: “Reason is spirit when its certainty that it is all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world and of the world as itself” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. J. B. Baillie, chap. 6, introduction).
22. Here I shall thus avoid the formulation “knowledge” used in similar theoretical conceptions such as “tacit knowledge” (see Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London, 1966), trans. as Implizites Wissen [Frankfurt, 1985]) or “background knowledge” (for a life-world), in Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt, 1992), 37ff.
23. See Fritz Heider, “Ding und Medium,” Symposion 1 (1926): 109–157. This distinction was revived particularly through the English translation of this essay in Psychological Issues 1, no. 3 (1959): 1–34. See also Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (Reading, MA, 1969), trans. as Der Prozeß des Organisierens (Frankfurt, 1985), esp. 163ff., 271ff.
24. On this insight, nowadays widely accepted, see Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford, 1988).
25. This formulate draws upon Eva Meyer, “Der Unterschied, der eine Umgebung schafft,” in Im Netz der Systeme, ed. Ars Electronica (Berlin, 1990), 110–122.
26. See Alois Hahn, “Sinn und Sinnlosigkeit,” in Sinn, Kommunikation und soziale Differenzierung: Beiträge zu Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, ed. Hans Haferkamp and Michael Schmid (Frankfurt, 1987), 155–164. See also Georg Lohmann, “Autopoiesis und die Unmöglichkeit von Sinnverlust: Ein marginaler Zugang zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie ‘Sozialer Systeme,’” ibid., 165–184.
27. I prefer the term “redescription” because it does not compel us to distinguish constantly between describing again and describing anew—a distinction that itself can be questioned.
28. See George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (1969), new ed. (New York, 1979), 76. “An observer, since he distinguishes the space he occupies, is also a mark. . . . We see now that the first distinction, the mark, and the observers are not only interchangeable, but, in their form, identical.” Cf., closely following Spencer-Brown, Louis H. Kauffman, “Self-Reference and Recursive Forms,” Journal of Social and Biological Structures 10 (1987): 53–72 (here 53): “At least one distinction is involved in the presence of self-reference. The self appears, and an indication of that self can be seen as separate from the self. Any distinction involves the self-reference of ‘the one who distinguishes.’ Therefore, self-reference and the idea of distinction are inseparable (hence conceptually identical).”
29. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 56, 69ff.
30. See also Niklas Luhmann, Erkenntnis als Konstruktion (Bern, 1988).
31. This was the starting point of “second order cybernetics.” On this, see the interview with Heinz von Foerster in Cybernetics and Human Knowing 4 (1997): 3–15.
32. According to Spencer-Brown’s “law of crossing”: “The value of a crossing made again is not the value of the crossing” (Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 2). Or, put differently, the sides cannot specify themselves reciprocally. We cannot bring anything across, but wanting to accumulate or correct information, we have to stay on the inside of the form. The “form of cancellation” is also only valid if the other side remains indeterminable as an unmarked state.
33. Richard Harvey Brown, “Rhetoric, Textuality, and the Postmodern Turn in Sociological Theory,” in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, 1994), 229–241 (here 229); see also the considerations under the heading “The Rhetorical Construction of Social Reality.” Religion’s ability to use this rhetorical construction of the idea of reality in order to establish its immanent/transcendent code is already suggested here.
34. On this issue, see the distinction of Cartesian doubt, which can be remedied by self-signification to confirm the thinking “I,” and Nishitani, Was ist Religion? 55ff., on the “great doubt” in Buddhism. We should in any case not only think of Descartes here. Notions like “spirit” in Berkeley and “pour soi” in Sartre refer also to a consciousness that is co-conscious in conscious operations but is not an object to itself and not yet knowledge. See George Berkeley, Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, ([1710] London, 1957), 1.2, on “mind, spirit, soul, or myself”: “By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived” (114). On Sartre, see his L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, 30th ed. (Paris, 1950), 115ff. Even sociology of religion, from Simmel to Luckmann, has always referred to a subjective consciousness, thus presupposing a consciousness that is conscious of itself.
35. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 3.
36. Ibid., 1.
37. See W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London, 1956), 206ff., and id., “Requisite Variety and Its Implications for the Control of Complex Systems,” Cybernetica 1, no. 2 (1958): 83–99.
39. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 64–65.
40. See here David Roberts, “Die Parodoxie der Form: Literatur und Selbstreferenz,” in Probleme der Form, ed. Dirk Baecker (Frankfurt, 1993), 22–44.
41. Religious literature, particularly of Buddhist provenance, often reports the precise opposite: after returning from the religious experience of dissolution, the things of the world are no longer the same as before. Accordingly, it is precisely this logical point at which religion draws attention to its own performance.
42. According to Gudmund Hernes, “Comments,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Boulder and New York, 1991), 125–126.
43. See “Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations,” in Gotthard Günther, Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik (Hamburg, 1976), 1: 249–328.
44. According to Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness.
45. Aristotle, De anima, bk. 3.
46. For a similar view but with a somewhat different specification of the components, see Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 22ff.
47. For more on this topic, see Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1984).
48. On organisms, see A. Moreno, J. Fernandez, and A. Etxeberria, “Computational Darwinism as a Basis for Cognition,” Revue internationale de systémique 6 (1992): 205–221.
49. This is Bateson’s idea of information: a difference that makes a difference. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (New York, 1973), trans. as Ökologie des Geistes: Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven (Frankfurt, 1981), 488.
50. Here see esp. Magoroh Maruyama, “The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes,” American Scientist 51 (1963): 164–179. See also the postscript to “The Second Cybernetics,” American Scientist 51 (1963): 250–256.
51. This does not mean that every ritual of this kind has religious connotations. According to the custom in villages in southern Italy, after the death of a spouse, the widow or widower may not leave the house for a time, during which relatives, friends, and neighbors provide for her or him in a strict order of precedence based on relational proximity. The problem is thus as it were artificially duplicated and reformulated so as to be resolvable by prescribed conduct. Or, seen differently, the death is additionally encumbered with obligations and restrictions on conduct, thus displacing its difference and distracting attention onto a painstakingly precise fulfillment of the requirements.
52. St. Augustine, Confessions 11.12ff.
53. From a formal standpoint, this implies a reentry of the distinction between life and death into itself, with all the consequences of an unresolvable indeterminacy, as can be seen in Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 56ff.
54. Here we naturally have to distinguish again among notions of meaning. By reason of its inevitable appearance of being “meaningful” [Sinnförmigkeit], death can be experienced and communicated as meaningful with respect to given expectations of life.
55. St. Augustine, Confessions, esp. 11.14, 17–20.
CHAPTER 2: CODING
1. On this issue, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth, UK, 1970).
2. This formulation is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie, Darstellung seiner verschiedenen Modifikationen und Vergleichung des neuesten mit dem alten, in Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt, 1970), 213–272 (here 229). I am grateful to Karl Eberhard Schorr for this reference.
3. See Klaus Krippendorf, “Paradox and Information,” in Progress in Communication Sciences, ed. Brenda Derwin and Melvin J. Voigt, vol. 5 (Norwood, NJ, 1984), 45–71.
4. For a case study in the field of law, see Niklas Luhmann, “The Third Question: The Creative Use of Paradoxes in Law and Legal History,” Journal of Law and Society 15 (1988): 153–165.
5. Eric A. Havelock speaks of “preserved communication” in his Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 134 passim. See also id., Origins of Western Literacy (Toronto, 1976), 49.
6. On the genealogy of a preference for paradox in Renaissance literature, see A. E. Malloch, “The Technique and Function of the Renaissance Paradox,” Studies in Philology 53 (1956): 191–203.
7. On play (and fantasy), see Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (New York, 1973), trans. as Ökologie des Geistes: Anthropologische, psychologische, biologische und epistemologische Perspektiven (Frankfurt, 1981), 241ff.; on art, see Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA, 1981); on statistics and their inferences for probability, see George Spencer-Brown, Probability and Scientific Inference (London, 1957), 1ff. On (semiotic) markings per se, see also Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford, 1988).
8. See also Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (Harmondsworth, UK, 1971).
9. In the sense of Michel Serres, Genèse (Paris, 1982), 146ff.
10. See, e.g., Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea (Oslo and New Haven, CT, 1975), a study based explicitly on communication.
11. See Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie: L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris, 1987), 259ff.
12. On this comparison, see Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany, NY, 1982).
13. See David Daube, “Dissent in Bible and Talmud,” California Law Review 59 (1971): 784–794; Jeffrey I. Roth, “The Justification for Controversy Under Jewish Law,” California Law Review 76 (1988): 338–387.
14. Plato Cratylus 436Aff.
15. “J’entend par religion des choses oubliées depuis toujours,” Michel Serres writes in a simple, if inadequate, reversal (Serres, Genèse, 98), trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson, Genesis (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), 55, as “by religion I mean the things forever forgotten.”
16. On this term in linguistics, see Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), 5ff.; in sociology, see Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change, and Modernity (New York, 1973), esp. 133ff. and 321ff. Conceptual precision is not to be found in this literature. It is replaced by formulations such as cultural symbols, models, cognitive maps, and categorial structures, and by distinguishing between a structural level and a level of situative action. In most cases, we are required to figure out whether the symbols of a code are being applied accurately or not. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966), 20, thus regards even linguistic codes as normative structures. But this ultimately only means that it is a matter of formulating a binary schematism. I account for that here by distinguishing between coding and programming.
17. A different, conventional example would involve determining a coefficient that rules out all other numbers as inappropriate and ineffective. This too is called a “code.”
18. In the sense of Gotthard Günther, “Cybernetic Ontology and Transjunctional Operations,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1976), 136–182 (here 140ff.).
19. See, above all, Gotthard Günther, “Strukturelle Minimalbedingungen einer Theorie des objektiven Geistes als Einheit der Geschichte,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, vol. 3 (Hamburg, 1980), 136–182 (here 140ff.).
20. This has long been emphasized, even for morality. See, e.g., Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643; repr. London, 1965), 71: “They that endeavour to abolish Vice destroy also Virtue; for contraries, though they destroy one another, are yet the life of one another.” Note how this escalates into a paradox! In other versions, this problem of how moral codes refer to themselves is treated as a problem of theodicy, or it is seen religiously as an appearance of God in historical time.
21. Here I am interpreting the term “contexture,” which emphasizes an indifference toward the outside, with the help of Spencer-Brown’s definition of “distinction” as “perfect continence” (George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form [1969], new ed. [New York, 1979], 1).We shall have to leave it open whether this is entirely in Günther’s sense.
22. See Günther, “Cybernetic Ontology.”
23. On the lines of connection between observer theory and Günther’s logic, see Elena Esposito, Lóperazione di osservazione: Costruttivismo e teoria dei sistemi sociali (Milan, 1992).
24. For the sake of clarification, it should be noted that the use of a rejection value does not interfere with the rejected distinction (because that would indeed presuppose accepting the distinction). If law rejects the moral distinction of good/bad, that does not mean that distinctions cannot be made this way. It does not even mean that law could not be subject to moral evaluation. It only means that the pending operation does not use the distinction and instead focuses on the code of law. It is not the values of the rejected distinction that are being negated, which would only be possible by using this very distinction, but only the distinction itself. “The very choice is rejected” (Günther, “Cybernetic Ontology,” 287). The reader is asked to note this, since it would otherwise constantly lead to misunderstandings, precisely in questions that are normatively controversial.
25. That according to Francisco J. Valera, “A Calculus for Self-Reference,” International Journal of General Systems 2 (1975): 15–24.
26. See the critique of the ontological “filiation” of Aristotle and Hegel, which strives for an adequate understanding of time, in Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6th ed. (Tübingen, 1949), 432–433n2.
27. This distinction of condensation/confirmation derives from George Spencer-Brown and is elegantly explained by him by a further distinction, specifically that the equation ⌉⌉_⌉ can be read from left to right (as condensation) and from right to left (as confirmation) (Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 10). Here as always, it is assumed there is an observer who can distinguish these readings and decide on this distinction. The same idea can be formulated with Wittgenstein’s notion of a rule, which presupposes that it can be applied in more than one case, or with Derrida’s notion of différance.
28. See Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 26ff.; id., “Comparative Studies and Evolutionary Change,” Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory (New York, 1977), 279–320 (esp. 307ff.).
29. See here merely the numerous collections of essays by Paul de Man, such as Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London 1983), and The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis, 1986).
30. See Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and the Collective Memory in Mesopotamia (Leiden, 1995).
31. “One is never installed in transgression. One never lives elsewhere. Transgression implies the limit is still at work” (Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, rev. ed. [New York: Continuum, 2004], 10).
32. This has particularly been a theme in Gotthard Günther’s work; see his Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1976–1980).
34. See, e.g., Ways of Transcendence: Insights from Major Religions and Modern Thought, ed. Edwin Dowdy (Bedford Park, South Australia, 1982), and Thomas Luckmann’s equally generalizing definition of the function of religion as the socialization of dealing with transcendence in “Über die Funktion der Religion,” in Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. Peter Koslowski (Tübingen, 1985), 26–41.
35. This is based on Barth, Ritual and Knowledge. One gets the idea that the bones (like other kinds of relics) should be signified as a transformed, canonized “rubbish” in Culler’s sense (Culler, Framing the Sign, 108ff.), following Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford, 1979). Thompson, for his part, applies the catastrophe theory of René Thoms to give form to such discontinuities of valuation. But elsewhere in research on the religions of tribal societies, we also find a great deal of evidence for a completely pragmatic and yet distinction-focused treatment of the sacred—provided that the mystery is retained and tabooized along with it. That of course presumes that the question of whether one has faith [Glauben] never gets asked—or put differently, that faith here is not the “form” of religion that defines itself from the other side, i.e., nonfaith.
36. On the cultural history of heaven, see Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannell, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT, 1988). For examples from African religions, see John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London, 1970), where one finds striking myths of creation: God is said to have first lived with humans or at least near them, but He then distanced himself from them to avoid aggravation or to punish their disobedience (171ff.).
37. See Mbiti, Concepts of God, 12ff.
38. On this issue, there is much ethnographic evidence. For a short summary, see, e.g., Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected (Cambridge, 1976), 71ff.
39. On the evolution of religion, see chapter 7 in this volume.
40. “Reentry” in Spencer-Brown’s sense (see id., Laws of Form, 56ff., 69ff.).
41. See Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven, CT, 1967); id., “The Sacred in Human Evolution,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 2 (1971): 23–44; id., “Ritual, Sanctity and Cybernetics,” American Anthropologist 73 (1971): 59–76.
42. On this, see Roy A. Rappaport, “Maladaptation in Social Systems,” in The Evolution of Social Systems, ed. Jonathan Friedman and Michael J. Rowlands (Pittsburgh, 1978), 49–71.
43. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 3rd ed. (Tübingen, 1948), 1: 227, trans. in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 399.
44. “A process of abstraction, which only appears to be simple, has usually already been carried out. . . . Already crystallized is the notion that certain beings are concealed ‘behind’ and responsible for the activity of charismatically endowed natural objects, artifacts, animals, or persons. This is the belief in spirits.” (Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff [Boston, 1993], 3). Instead of behind, it would be better in many cases to say in.
45. In Hartmann Tyrell, “Das Religiöse in Max Webers Religionssoziologie,” Saeculum 43 (1992): 172–230 (here 194).
46. See Madeleine David, Les dieux et le destin en Babylonie (Paris, 1949); Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie: L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris, 1987), 243ff. See also chapter 5 in this volume.
47. See Louis Schneider, “The Scope of ‘The Religious Factor’ and the Sociology of Religion: Notes on Definition, Idolatry and Magic,” Social Research 41 (1974): 340–361.
48. “Just as the opposition of things bestows beauty upon language, then, so is the beauty of this world enhanced by the opposition of contraries, composed, as it were, by an eloquence not of words but of things” (St. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson [Cambridge, 1998], 472).
49. See chapter 1 in this volume.
50. This is probably best understood as a counter to the tradition in Mesopotamia. The god Marduk had fifty names (why not fifty-one, then?), and names were not only verbal significations there but themselves competencies. On this, see Bottéro, Mésopotamie, 125–126. At the same time, giving up the identity of name and being solves the problem of whether the name is correct and whether each list of divine names is complete or incomplete.
51. This principle is retained in the much discussed (and in turn controversial) legend of the Oven of Achnai. See, e.g., Ishak Englard, “Majority Decision vs. Individual Truth: The Interpretation of the Oven of Achnai Aggadah,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 15 (1975): 137–151.
52. This according to Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Social Division of Labor, Construction of Centers and Institutional Dynamics: A Reassessment of Structural-Evolutionary Perspective,” Protosoziologie 7 (1995): 11–22 (here 16–17).
53. Nonetheless, without being able to sustain this renunciation of any distinction in the margins of a possible theology. A case in point is that the personality and trinity of God cannot be subject to doubt. In Cusa’s “On the Pursuit of Wisdom,” we read that God is “before all things that differ”; for the original, see Nicolas of Cusa, Philosophisch-Theologische Schriften, ed. Leo Gabriel, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1964), 1–189, 56. Yet the inadequacy of human understanding (dependent on using distinctions) is being reflected on here. Moreover, we ultimately know what the Church is providing for us.
54. See Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris, 1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), 141–157.
55. The same outline of the problem can be found in Kant, where freedom is understood as a ratio essendi of the moral law [Sittengesetz] and where the moral imperative is assured in its canonicity (sit venia verbo) as a fact of reasonable consciousness. Finally, both are combined together in a single idea of the subject (a notion from which philosophers are today still deriving capital).
56. On such other codes, see Niklas Luhmann, “Codierung und Programmierung. Bildung und Selektion im Erziehungssystem,” Soziologische Aufklärung 4 (Opladen, 1987), 182–201; id., Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1988), 243ff. and passim; id., Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), 401ff.; id., Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1993), 165ff.; id., Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), 301ff.
57. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIae, q. 91, a. 2: “This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law.”
58. See here esp. Renate Blickle, “Hausnotdurft: Ein Fundamentalrecht in der altständischen Ordnung Bayerns,” in Grund- und Freiheitsrechte von der ständischen zur spätbürgerlichen Gesellschaft, ed. Günter Birtsch (Göttingen, 1987), 42–64.
59. For widely divergent evidence varying by region and on the axis of major/minor civilizations, see The Anthropology of Evil, ed. David Parkin (Oxford, 1985).
60. See specifically Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971); id., Man and the Natural World (London, 1983).
61. We shall return to this issue in chapter 4 when discussing the observer God.
62. For evidence from Africa, see Mbiti, Concepts of God, 17–18, 35–36, 247ff.
63. The “Ethics” of Peter Abelard is pathbreaking in this respect. For Abelard, vice (vitium) is defined as sin if we agree with it internally: “This consent is what we properly call ‘sin,’ the fault of the soul whereby it merits damnation or is held guilty before God. For what is this consent but scorn for God and affront against him?” (Peter Abelard, Ethical Writings, trans. Paul Vincent Spade [Indianapolis, 1995], 2–3). In and of itself, vice can be understood as a natural orientation (habitus), and to God, it only matters if we consent to it.
64. See St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, “De casu diaboli,” in Opera omnia (1938–, repr., Stuttgart, 1968), 1: 233–272.
65. As indicated in § IV of this chapter, it was precariously plausible to have such a circular self-legitimation of a code through its positive value.
66. For a brief overview, see Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1997), 413ff.
67. Michel Serres, Le parasite (Paris, 1980).
68. For more detail here, see Niklas Luhmann, “Die Paradoxie des Entscheidens,” Verwaltungsarchiv 84 (1993): 287–310.
69. This is only another, more decision-oriented formulation for what is termed “condensation” and “confirmation” in § IV of this chapter (following Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form).
70. See Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion I, in Werke, vol. 16 (Frankfurt, 1969), 215 (Hegel’s emphasis).
71. Bourdieu’s entire oeuvre could be cited here. A short sketch, supplemented by the concept of pieuse hypocrisie (pious hypocrisy) and referring to jurists, can be found in Pierre Bourdieu, “Les juristes, gardiens de l’hypocrisie collective,” in Normes juridiques et régulation sociale, ed. François Chazel and Jacques Commaille (Paris, 1991), 95–99. See also Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979) and Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges sociales (Paris, 1982).
72. Formulated based on Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), 76–77.
73. See, e.g., Keiji Nishitani, Was ist Religion? trans. Dora Fischer-Barnicol (Frankfurt, 1982), 379ff.; trans. Jan Van Bragt as Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley, CA, 1982), 258ff.
74. Charles Herle, Wisdomes Tripos, or rather its inscription, Detur sapienti (London, 1655), 49.
75. See Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, 105.
76. For the utmost clarity on this, see Horst Baier, Soziologie als Aufklärung—oder die Vertreibung der Transzendenz aus der Gesellschaft (Constance, 1989).
77. On the relationship of semantics and social structure, see Niklas Luhmann, “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, 1989), 149–258.
78. There is a “transcendence in self-immanence,” Luc Ferry maintains, e.g., in L’homme-Dieu ou Le sens de la vie (Paris, 1996), trans. David Pellauer as Man Made God: The Meaning of Life (Chicago, 2002), 137. Theologians also touch on the possibility of such changes in disposition. “If we ask how speaking of God can be possible, then we must answer: only by speaking about ourselves,” Rudolf Bultmann asserts in Glauben und Verstehen (Tübingen, 1960), 1: 33, quoted in Michael Hochschild, “Die Kirchenkrise und die Theologie” (Ph.D. diss., Bielefeld, 1997), 163.
79. On this tradition, see Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannel, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CT, 1988).
80. In “The New and the Old in Religion,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Boulder, CO, and New York, 1991), 167–182 (here 177), Thomas Luckmann speaks of a “sacralization of subjectivity.” We should consider whether “sacralization,” which in fact assumes openness to others, is the right word. In any event, the text above is not working with the distinction between sacred and profane but with that between transcendent and immanent.
81. On this, see Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–109.
82. In our culture, which tends to understand situations in which something is narrated according to the model of written texts, it is difficult to make this comprehensible. See, inter alia, Dennis Tedlok, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia, 1983).
83. For an approach from the viewpoint of externalization, see Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Connected (London, 1976), 37ff.
CHAPTER 3: THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION
1. See Alois Hahn, “Religiöse Wurzeln des Zivilisationsprozesses,” in Kultur im Zeitalter der Sozialwissenschaften: Friedrich H. Tenbruck zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Hans Braun and Alois Hahn (Berlin, 1984), 229–250.
2. For an example of such exceptions, see the critique of the notion of differentiation in Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984).
3. Specifically, this can be done by excluding the superfluous and by integrating the necessary. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–IIae q. 91, a. 2: “For nature neither lacks of necessary things nor abounds in the superfluous.”
4. Here, incidentally, as so often, seeking to do both simultaneously can be disastrous: think of Mister Pief falling in the pond when he tries to walk and look through his telescope at the same time in Wilhelm Busch’s Plisch und Plum (see http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/4189/27 [accessed June 16, 2012]).
5. The classic work normally cited in sociology is Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed. (Glencoe, IL, 1957), 60ff. The Marx-Freud genealogy is fairly obvious. Research has thus taken a tack that unavoidably restricts it to the question of ignorance. This leads among other things to a bracketing out of the problem of the foundational intransparency of all systems, as well as the problem of the blind spot in all observation.
6. As justifiably noted by Robert Spaemann, “Funktionale Religionsbegründung und Religion,” in Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. Peter Koslowski (Tübingen, 1985), 9–25.
7. For an explicit critique, see, e.g., Richard K. Fenn, “Toward a New Sociology of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 16–32. On the other hand, Fenn remains indebted to the idea when he can no longer perceive this function. He thus assigns a loss of function to religion, reducing it to residual functions. For an analysis of Durkheim’s thesis that is nearly functional, see also Horst Firsching, “Die Sakralisierung der Gesellschaft: Emile Durkheims Soziologie der ‘Moral’ und der ‘Religion’ in der ideenpolitischen Auseinandersetzung der Dritten Republik,” in Religionssoziologie um 1900, ed. Volkhard Krech and Hartmann Tyrell (Würzburg, 1975), 159–193.
8. See René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris, 1972); Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Paris, 1978); and Le bouc émissaire (Paris, 1982).
9. “Religion is just man seeking to know the basis of his dependency,” we are told in Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophy der Religion I, vol. 16 (Frankfurt, 1969), 308.
10. Aristotle Metaphysics 4.1006a19–24.
11. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913; The Hague, 1950), 3: 100–101 (Husserl’s emphasis).
12. On this, see Elena Esposito, L’operazione di osservazione: Costruttivismo e teoria dei sistemi (Milan, 1992).
13. Recall here Durkheim’s linking of sanction and sacré (which also explains why Durkheim’s ideas still require theoretical elucidation).
14. See chapter 2 in this volume.
15. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York, 1974).
16. One may share the view of Gotthard Günther that more than two logical values are necessary to represent such circumstances. Or we can conclude that realizing such circumstances requires time and cannot assure any determinable relationship to the (always simultaneous functioning) world. But such thoughts only raise additional questions, which then disappear into the unanswerable.
17. With reference to the situation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), see Detlef Pollack, “Kirche in der Organisationsgesellschaft: Zum Wandel der gesellschaftlichen Lage der evangelischen Kirchen und der politisch alternativen Gruppen in der DDR” (habilitation thesis, Bielefeld, 1993), 107ff.
18. See, e.g., the recourse to Torah at the end of a discussion on the paradox of self-amendment (the constitutional rule on changes to a constitution) in David R. Dow, “When Words Mean What We Believe They Say: The Case of Article V,” Iowa Law Review 76 (1990): 1–66 (62–63). The point is that a paradox can be condoned—one just has to refer to the Torah.
19. For more detail, see Niklas Luhmann, Funktion der Religion (Frankfurt, 1977), 225ff. Discussion of secularization has long been dominated by skeptical distance, attempts to form a multidimensional idea, all the way to outright rejection of the idea as unusable. We shall return to this subject in chapter 8.
20. See here Thomas Luckmann, “Über die Funktion der Religion,” in Die religiöse Dimension der Gesellschaft, ed. Peter Koslowski (Tübingen, 1985), 26–41. A more precise elaboration is needed than Luckmann’s, which defines the function of religion simply as the socialization of dealing with (great) transcendence.
21. For the case of Mesopotamia, see Gerdien Jonker, The Topography of Remembrance: The Dead, Tradition and Collective Memory in Mesopotamia (Leiden, 1995), 177ff.
22. On this, for Mesopotamia, see ibid., 180–81.
23. On this, see esp. John G. Gunnell, Political Philosophy and Time (Middletown, CT, 1968); Hartmut Gese, “Geschichtliches Denken im Alten Orient und im Alten Testament,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 55 (1958): 127–145.
24. Girard, Des choses cachées and Bouc émissaire.
25. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979).
26. “Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide,” is what we read in Heinz von Foerster, “Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 1 (1992): 9–19 (14).
27. For a parallel thought in systems theory, see W. Ross Ashby, “Principles of the Self-Organizing System,” in Principles of Self-Organization, ed. Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf (New York, 1962), 155–178; reprinted in Modern System Research for the Behavioral Scientist: A Sourcebook, ed. Walter Buckley (Chicago, 1968), 108–118.
28. We shall come back to this point in chapter 9, on the religious system’s self-descriptions.
29. For a refreshing approach to what follows, see Ronald W. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox: Critical Studies in Twentieth-Century Theology (New York, 1968). This analysis, however, lists the thematic categories as paradigms and limits itself to demonstrating their immanent paradoxes, without including a systematic viewpoint of classifying them according to dimensions of meaning. For that approach, see Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1984), 111ff.
30. Hepburn, Christianity and Paradox, 69ff., speaks here of the paradox of a “logical construction of God” on the basis of available sense data.
31. In the Hebraic context, the text given at Mount Sinai, the Torah, is at the same time the plan of creation that already existed prior to creation. In the social context, it is the law accepted by God’s people (and not an unquestioned heavenly code). And apart from that (and this too is paradoxical), this law has to be accepted precisely because the paradise of natural distinctions has become inaccessible through sin and has to be replaced by reflection, as called for by freedom.
32. A mundane interpretation would be that Jesus is trying to win time without being seen by the others. Or that he is mystifying the situation to heighten tension and so as to be able to offer his words as liberating.
33. See George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (1969), new ed. (New York, 1979).
34. Organizationally, there are other options, in particular, hierarchy and exclusion (masterfully handled by the Catholic Church), but it is predictably difficult to maintain that the result of using such organizational options is still “religion.”
35. See Georg Simmel, Die Religion (Frankfurt, 1906); Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (London, 1967).
36. On this, see Heinz Schlaffer, Poesie und Wissen: Die Entstehung des ästhetischen Bewußtseins und der philologischen Erkenntnis (Frankfurt, 1990), 11–88.
37. See, however, Bryan Wilson, “Secularization: The Inherited Model,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 9–20 (here 14–15).
38. See chapter 8 in this volume.
39. Clearly, it was different in a primarily agrarian economy, involving land and not liquid capital. And even back then, the administration of Church capital by Florentine banks led to considerable problems that could not be solved in a “pious” manner.
CHAPTER 4: THE CONTINGENCY FORMULA “GOD”
1. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1988), esp. 177ff.
2. For an early comparison of politics and religion from a similar standpoint, see Hans Kelsen, “Gott und Staat,” Logos 11 (1923): 261–284, and as a “refutation,” Wenzel Pohl, “Kelsen’s Parallele: Gott und Staat: Kritische Bemerkungen eines Theologen,” Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 4 (1925): 571–609.
3. See Helmut Willke, Ironie des Staates: Grundlinien einer Staatstheorie polyzentrischer Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1992), 35ff.
4. See Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr, Reflexionsprobleme im Erziehungssystem, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1983), 58ff.
5. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), 392ff.
6. See Niklas Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1993), 214ff.
7. See Francisco J.Varela and Evan Thompson, Der Mittlere Weg der Erkenntnis: Die Beziehung von Ich und Welt in der Kognitionswissenschaft (Bern, 1992).
8. On this, see Burkhard Gladigow, “Der Sinn der Götter: Zum kognitiven Potential der persönlichen Gottesvorstellung,” in Gottesvorstellung und Gesellschaftsentwicklung, ed. Peter Eicher (Munich, 1979), 41–62.
9. See here Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris, 1969).
10. See here Niklas Luhmann, “Inklusion und Exklusion,” Soziologische Aufklärung 6 (Opladen, 1995): 237–264.
11. For a detailed discussion, see L’argomento ontologico, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Padua, 1990).
12. The problem of standardizing and impoverishing this ultimate referent continues to exist in spite of all the richness of cosmological elaborations and moralistic casuistry, and it is reinforced by the organized use of forms. On this, see Jean-Pierre Decouchy, L’orthodoxie religieuse: Essai de logique psycho-sociale (Paris, 1971), esp. 57ff. See also L’analyse du langage théologique: Le nom de Dieu, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris, 1969).
13. The category of emanation had the logical advantage that nothing historically new was planned. It could therefore deal with time in a “time-abstract” way, as it were—or, put differently, as though seen from the perspective of omnipresence. It did not have to count on a momentary present in which solely a difference between past and present could be observed or effectuated. That is why it also did not have to break the frame of classical binary logic. On this, see Gotthard Günther, “Logik, Zeit, Emanation und Evolution,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik (Hamburg, 1980), 3: 95–135 (with a structural-theoretically more complex idea of emanation).
14. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; Cambridge, MA, 1950), 49; on the problem of sterility, see 43ff.
15. See Gotthard Günther, “Cognition and Violence: A Contribution to a Cybernetic Theory of Subjectivity,” in Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik (Hamburg, 1979), 2: 203–240. I have not modified Günther’s presentation significantly here.
16. By contrast, it will lead to very deep theological doubts about our ability to perceive divine criteria if one continues to uphold the primacy of the power of will, the potentia absoluta of God (as in late medieval voluntarism) and if one also accepts (as in nominalism) that every reality is only given in the form of individuals and not in the form of universals. God’s will is not guided by rules and his access to individuals does not allow us to draw conclusions about how he operates in other cases. In such preliminary matters, theology starts by such an admission of weaknesses in perception—an old reservation predominant in the divination practice of early Mesopotamia—and has to shift to a fundamental inability to perceive God’s mode of observation. It must then be consistent and retreat from giving any advice about life, instead appealing only to the self-affirmation of faith by individuals.
17. That only men are being thought of is almost self-evident, yet clear evidence can also be found for the claim. See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643; repr., London, 1965), 79: “The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman. Man is the whole World and the Breath of God, Woman the Rib and the crooked piece of it.”
18. Benjamin Nelson, in particular, has indicated the specifically religious grounds for the unreasonable demand that science limit itself to hypotheses, which science in its own interest had to contradict by appealing to the possibility of natural knowledge of nature. See Nelson, “The Quest for Certitude and the Books of Scripture, Nature, and Conscience,” in The Nature of Scientific Discovery, ed. Owen Gingerich (Washington, DC, 1975), 335–372; id., “Copernicus and the Quest for Certitude: ‘East’ and ‘West,’” in Copernicus Yesterday and Today: Proceedings, ed. Arthur Beer and K. A. Strand, Vistas in Astronomy 17 (New York, 1975), 39–46. See also the contributions in Benjamin Nelson, Der Ursprung der Moderne:Vergleichende Studien zum Zivilisationsprozeß (Frankfurt, 1977).
19. See, e.g., Jean Paul, “Das Kampaner Tal oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele,” in Jean Pauls Werke: Auswahl in zwei Bänden (Stuttgart, 1924), 2: 170–229.
20. See, e.g., in the form of a critique of Spinoza and Hegel, Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris, 1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), 71ff.
21. From the period of the Counter-Reformation, see Gregorio Comanini, “Il Figino overo del fine della pintura,” in Trattati d’arte del cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi (1591; repr., Bari, 1962), 3: 239–379. The starting point is associated with Plato (Sophist 236) in a universalizing of the principle of imitation by an internal paradox: there are imitations of things that exist (imitazione icastica) and imitations of things that do not exist (imitazione fantastica). The image of God thus has to be brought onto the side of imitazione icastica even though God has no form, as the theologians assure us.
22. See, e.g., Nicolas of Cusa, “De Deo Abscondito,” in id., Philosophischtheologische Schriften (Vienna, 1964), 1: 299–309 (here 304), in addition to many other passages.
23. Material on the development of this problem can be found, e.g., in research on Duns Scotus. See Karl Heim, Das Gewißheitsproblem in der systematischen Theologie bis zu Schleiermacher (Leipzig, 1911), 181ff.
24. For many instances in African religions, see John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London, 1970).
25. But there are indeed suggestions of this, above all in Sufi mysticism. An easily accessible treatment is Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology (Leiden, 1983). In the area of Christianity, there is the idea of punishment as proof of God’s love, but as far as I can see, it does not refer to the devil as the most beloved angel. See, e.g., “whomever God loves, He corrects and castigates” as a way to indoctrinate princes, not to doubt their faith, in Joannes Jovianus Pontano, De principe, quoted in Opera omnia (Basel, 1556), 1: 256–283 (here 261).
26. That is what the archangel says in Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth (New York, 1962).
27. Banished to earth, Satan reports upward (ibid.).
28. See, e.g., Nicolas of Cusa, “De visione Dei,” in id., Philosophisch-theologische Schriften (Vienna, 1967), 3: 93–219, with the metaphor of the image that looks at the observer from wherever he may be looking at it.
29. What follows from this is that divinatory religions cannot distinguish in the end between space and time. Religions of revelation, by comparison, can free time from spatial connotations.
30. It should only be mentioned as a precaution that this is a modern conclusion, which presupposes a functional differentiation of society and thus the abandonment of a consistent religious ontology.
31. This thought should not, however, compel us to accept the widespread opposition of cyclical (mythical) and linear (historical) time, which in the case of Babylon is a historical fiction and can probably only to be explained as Christian apologetics against comparisons of “Bible and Babel.” For a critique, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Slip in Time Save Nine: Prestigious Origins Again,” in Chronotopes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA, 1991), 67–76 (69ff.).
32. See here, e.g., Peter Eicher, “‘Offenbarungsreligion’: Zum sozio-kulturellen Stellenwert eines theologischen Grundkonzepts,” in Gottesvorstellung und Gesellschaftsentwicklung, ed. Peter Eicher (Munich, 1979), 109–129.
33. Only in this way (and this was why it is done) can the revelatory text be concurrently understood as a legal text that is supposed to be valid for all times and thus open to interpretation.
34. See chapter 2, § VII, in this volume.
35. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640; repr., Gainesville, FL, 1971), 462.
36. Ibid., 497ff.
37. See Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, expanded ed. (1601; repr., Urbana, IL, 1971).
38. See Aron Ronald Bodenheimer, Warum? Von der Obszönität des Fragens, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1985).
39. On this issue, see Henri Atlan, A tort et à la raison: Intercritique de la science et du mythe (Paris, 1986).
40. On the inviolability of faith in the “Doctrines of our Holy Church, as by Law Establish’d,” see Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed. (1714; repr., Farnborough, Hants, UK, 1968), 3: 316 passim.
41. In theoretical terms, this assumes that the problem is shifted to modal theory, that there are no longer the old schematisms of logic (true/false) and causality (cause/effect). This enabled the new science of physics to be released from its theological implications. Science may then decide whether physics is true or not and how the causes and effects fit together here independently of assumptions about the origin of the world.
42. For more detail, see chapter 8, § VII, in this volume.
43. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (I and II), in Werke, vols. 16 and 17 (Frankfurt, 1969). On historicization as a sign of the declining significance of dogmas, see esp. pt. I in 16: 47ff.
44. This has been done with a great deal of methodological care. For (randomly selected) examples, see Godelier Vercruysse, “The Meaning of God: A Factor-Analytic Study,” Social Compass 19 (1972): 347–364; and Mark van Aerde, “The Attitude of Adults Toward God,” Social Compass 19 (1972): 407–413.
45. This is the conclusion in Konstantin Kolenda, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Logical Conflicts in the Traditional Concept of God,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8 (1969): 72–78. To continue in this vein: instead of speaking paradoxically and incomprehensibly, one should instead make sure there are parking places near the church.
46. Based on George P. Murdock, Ethnographic Atlas (Pittsburgh, 1967), see Ralph Underhill, “Economic and Political Antecedents of Monotheism: A Cross-Cultural Study,” American Journal of Sociology 80 (1975): 841–861. He arrives at the result that only 25 percent of societies studied are familiar with a high god interested in the morality of humans; 36 percent do not know any high god; and the remaining societies know one (active or inactive) who is not, however, concerned with human morality. The material suggests that the state of economic development makes a difference in such contexts, and it is indeed plausible that religious guarantees of morality are more necessary when a society has to cope with property distinctions, contractual relations, uncertainty about the future, etc.
47. One indicator of this is the question of whether or not social conduct in one’s lifetime has an effect on one’s destiny after death. These connections are not found until the rise of the major religions. On this, see Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, “The After-Life in Indian Tribal Belief,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 83 (1953): 37–49; id., Morals and Merits: A Study of Values and Social Controls in South Asia Societies (London, 1967); Gananath Obeyesekere, “Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology of Buddhism, Dialectic in Practical Religion, ed. Edmund R. Leach (Cambridge, 1968), 7–40 (especially 14–15). See Mbiti, Concepts of God, 253ff., on African religions that (with few exceptions) also do not anticipate a settling of sins or fate in life in the other world, and thus expect no judgment in the hereafter, but at most difficulties in transitioning to the realm of the dead. In principle, the powers of the other world punish and reward us in this world.
48. See Fürer-Haimendorf, Morals and Merits, esp. 126ff.
49. Monica Wilson sees in this nonetheless an argument that relationships exist between religion and morality; id., Religion and the Transformation of Society: A Study of Social Change in Africa (Cambridge, 1971), 76ff.
50. See Mbiti, Concepts of God, 16–17, passim.
51. See, e.g., Michel de Certeau, “Du système religieux à l’éthique des Lumières (17e–18e s.): La formalité des pratiques,” Ricerche di storia sociale e religiosa 1, no. 2 (1972): 31–94.
52. Plentiful evidence of a deity in early Israel who is not yet fully disciplined by ethics can be found in Johannes Hempel, Geschichte und Geschichten im Alten Testament bis zur persischen Zeit (Gütersloh, 1964).
53. One of the rather puzzling, but illuminating, refinements of theological history is that this knowledge was originally prohibited and could only be regained by sin. Clearly, God resolves this moral paradox by a positive value, humanity by a negative one. For God it is good, and for man bad, to let oneself be oriented by the difference of good and bad, since that way man ends up in opposition to himself and then has to (first) be rehumanized by a prolonged history of redemption.
54. This is more understandable if one replaces God with the reading public, like Rousseau in his Confessions (1.3). See also Henry Adams, who writes “that the Eternal Father himself may not feel unmixed pleasure at our thrusting under his eyes chiefly the least agreeable details of his creation” (The Education of Henry Adams [1907; Boston, 1918], ix).
55. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall” (1937), in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), 277–295, with references to older sources; see Herbert Weisinger, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall (London, 1953); further, see several contributions in Text und Applikation:Poetik und Hermeneutik 9 (Munich, 1981), esp. Odo Marquard, “Felix culpa?—Bemerkungen zu einem Applikationsschicksal von Genesis 3,” 53–71.
56. For a long preliminary discussion, see Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum: Zum historischen Hintergrund der Wahl der besten aller Welten,” Studia Leibnitiana 23 (1991): 3–24.
57. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1708), in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1: 3–55; Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1950); Susie I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge, 1972); John Passmore, “Enthusiasm, Fanatism and David Hume,” in The “Science of Man” in the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume, Reid and Their Contemporaries, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh, 1989), 85–107; and Robert Spaemann, “‘Fanatisch’ und ‘Fanatismus,’” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 15 (1970): 256–274.
58. “Non-trivial machines” is meant in the sense of Heinz von Foerster, Wissen und Gewissen: Versuch einer Brücke (Frankfurt, 1993), 244ff.
59. See Niklas Luhmann, “Soziologie der Moral,” in Theorientechnik und Moral, ed. Niklas Luhmann and Stephan Pfürtner (Frankfurt, 1978), 8–116. Also see Niklas Luhmann, “The Code of the Moral,” Cardozo Law Review 14 (1993): 995–1009; and id., “The Sociology of the Moral and Ethics,” International Sociology 11 (1996): 27–36.
60. Only since the second half of the eighteenth century have there been proposals for religion-free solutions to this problem. These have not been very convincing—whether calling for endowing the subject with “practical reason” (Kant), or whether applying a discursive ethics that bets on future results of communication set up according to rational criteria (Habermas). Both proposals are based on a comprehensible rearrangement of external to internal reference—self-reference of consciousness or of the societal system.
61. This literature of justification is endless. On the early history, see, e.g., Johann Jakob Stamm, Das Leiden des Unschuldigen in Babylon und Israel (Zurich, 1946); William Green, Moira: Fate, Good and Evil in Greek Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1944). For a comparison with a balancing of welfare from the standpoint of resymmetrization, see Georg Katkov, Untersuchungen zur Werttheorie und Theodizee (Brünn, 1937).
62. This notion stems from Tertullian and later St. Anselm of Canterbury. See Victor Naumann, “Das Problem des Bösen in Tertullians zweitem Buch gegen Marcion: Ein Beitrag zur Theodizee Tertullians,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 58 (1934): 311–363, 533–551.
63. In a kind of refinement of outdoing others, it can then become the devil’s goal to prevent humans from sinning because the ensuing repentance is the greater accomplishment. This is in any event the case with Islam with respect to violations of ritual.
64. See Jean Pierre de Crousaz, Traité de l’éducation des enfants (The Hague, 1772), 2: 192ff.
65. The attempt even precedes the eighteenth century. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 56ff., contends that hell is in the person feeling contrition. It is not necessary for faith itself. God does not punish (and yet Browne is plagued by concern for the state of the pagan philosophers, who had to die without faith in Christ!). Bishop Paley, over a hundred years later, dismisses talk of the torments of hell as “figurative speech,” but reasons that it actually serves to evoke the torments of the lost soul (!) before they have begun. See William Paley, “Sermon XXXI: The Terrors of the Lord,” in The Works (London, 1897), 700–702. The Jesuits also accepted that transcendence comes into play only after death but can no longer be corrected after that; they thus specialize in the practice of calculation and warning. See, e.g., Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, La balance du temps et de l’eternité (French trans., Le Mans, 1676). See, in particular, “Le temps est l’occasion de l’Eternité” (100ff.), which means that a lifetime is the opportunity to decide for eternity, specifically at every moment in life since one may always die at any time.
66. On the term “polemogenous,” see Julien Freund, “Le droit comme motif et solution des conflits,” in Die Funktionen des Rechts: Vorträge des Weltkongresses für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie (Wiesbaden, 1974), 47–62; id., Sociologie du conflit (Paris, 1983), 22, 327ff.
67. The best known example of a society that was integrated religiously chiefly by differentiating purity from impurity is the Indian caste system; see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (London, 1970). In Europe, one finds a clearly moral definition of nobility that, besides serving to emphasize the criteria of birth, also distinguishes itself from what is below. At this same time, this order is extended with other catalogues of duty [Pflichtkatalogen] down to the bottom, to the point of demarcating “dishonest” professions and people (with explicit associations of “impurity”).
68. In the area of theory, this becomes paradigmatically clear in the thought of Adam Smith between The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776). The result, with regard to shoes, is that Smith trusts his ability to pay more than the morals of the shoemaker.
69. For an example, see Niklas Luhmann, “Die Ehrlichkeit der Politik und die höhere Amoralität der Politik,” in Opfer der Macht: Müssen Politiker ehrlich sein? ed. Peter Kemper (Frankfurt, 1993), 27–41. See also id., “Politik, Demokratie, Moral,” in Normen, Ethik und Gesellschaft, ed. Konferenz der deutschen Akademic der Wissenschaften (Mainz, 1997), 17–39.
70. See here Niklas Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen, 1992).
71. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris, 1972; English trans., Chicago, 1981), 64 (82?). I am citing the English translation because of the special rigorousness of the English term “must.”
72. The art theory of the Renaissance refers to this distinction when understanding the principle of imitation not as merely copying what exists but as making visible ideal forms as these exist in the minds of angels. See Federico Zuccaro, L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti (Turin, 1607), in Scritti d’arte di Federico Zuccaro, ed. Detlef Heikamp (Florence, 1961), 159.
CHAPTER 5: THE DIFFERENTIATION OF RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATION
1. On the transition and the establishment of a field of ritualistically limited communication, see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London, 1970).
2. On quasi-objects as functional equivalents for social contracts, see Michel Serres, Genèse (Paris, 1982), 146ff.
3. On the “body as social medium,” see Douglas, Natural Symbols, 65ff. See also Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Richmond, CA, 1979), 126, 173ff.
4. See Friederike Hassauer, “Santiago”—Schrift, Körper, Raum, Reise: Eine medientheoretische Rekonstruktion (Munich, 1993).
5. See here Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York, 1966), 233ff.
6. See Myth, Ritual, and Kingship, ed. Samuel H. Hooke (Oxford, 1958). See also Wallace, Religion, 106ff.
7. This is the claim of Victor W. Turner, “Myth and Symbol,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1968), 10: 576–582.
8. No longer aoidos [bard] but poiētēs [maker].
9. That also changed in the case of the Greek tragedies, specifically as a result of writing. A binding performance version of the text was preserved in the city offices and used as a criterion of correct portrayals.
10. In African religions, there is pervasive use of the dead for this function, in which those who have passed away can reach their ancestors and they in turn can reach God. See John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London, 1970), esp. 230ff., 267ff.
11. Here as well, the spectrum of transitional forms is very broad. There is, e.g., the state of being possessed by spirits (trance) and the well-known disposition (which might be inherited) of certain people to such states. And, related to that, there is the interpretive need that results from confused statements or physical appearances and that calls for special experts all the way to the difficult questions of authentic or inauthentic stigmata, which can only be resolved in the Vatican.
12. On this term, see Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems (Seaside, CA, 1981), 304ff.
13. Here I am following a suggestion by Talcott Parsons that evolution be described in terms of the variables of adaptive upgrading, differentiation, inclusion, and value generalization. See, e.g., Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 11, 26ff.
14. See Alois Hahn, “Unendliches Ende: Höllenvorstellung in soziologischer Perspektive,” in Das Ende: Figuren einer Denkform, ed. Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning (Munich, 1996), 155–182.
15. It should clearly not be overlooked that the notion of a synallagmatic [reciprocally binding] contract, which also determines how mistakes and impossibilities are dealt with, is a legal invention of Roman civil law that emerges much later.
16. For more detail, see Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1984).
17. See Niklas Luhmann, “Anfang und Ende: Probleme einer Unterscheidung,” in Zwischen Anfang und Ende: Fragen an die Pädagogik, ed. Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr (Frankfurt, 1990), 11–23.
18. See Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1981).
19. See Elena Esposito, “Interaktion, Interaktivität und Personalisierung der Massenmedien,” Soziale Systeme 1 (1995): 225–260.
20. On the mutual effects at the start of both these innovations in the form of Greek tyranny, see Peter N. Ure, The Origin of Tyranny (Cambridge, 1922).
21. See G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge, 1979) on this, and on the long symbiosis of science and magic going back to the seventeenth century.
22. See the short overview in Niklas Luhmann, “Einführende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie symbolisch generalisierter Kommunikationsmedien,” Soziologische Aufklärung 2 (Opladen, 1975): 170–192; on individual media, see id., Die Politik der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 2000), 18ff.; id., Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt, 1982); id., Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1988), 230ff.; id., Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), 167ff.
23. See on this Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT, 1967); id., “Communications Media and the State of Theology,” Cross Currents 19 (1969): 462–480.
24. I am borrowing this formulation from Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), 55.
25. To some extent, this problem is found in the popular belief in “heavenly letters” and in the numerous visionary manifestations in the Middle Ages, the authenticity of which had to be settled by Church policy.
26. For details, see the references to the literature provided in n. 22 above.
27. For more detail, see Niklas Luhmann, “Das Medium der Religion: Eine soziologische Betrachtung über Gott und die Seelen” (MS, 1994).
28. See again Hahn, “Unendliches Ende.”
29. On this point, see Niklas Luhmann, “The Paradox of System Differentiation and the Evolution of Society,” in Differentiation Theory and Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Paul Colomy (New York, 1990), 409–440.
30. Such a before/after depiction simplifies a great deal, of course. In the history of society, a kind of dual system is very often found with religious and political-military notables—an early case of the structural coupling of subsystems and simultaneously a form in which stratificatory or center/periphery differentiation of the societal system can be strengthened.
31. The social sciences, which are always interested in history, have in particular been misled by this misunderstanding and have never really worked with an evolutionary theory, despite all the oscillating between structuralism, functionalism, and evolutionism. This is a point made by Marion Blute, “Sociocultural Evolutionism: An Untried Theory,” Behavioral Science 24 (1979): 46–59.
32. See the formulation “selective retention” in one of the most impressive attempts to convey Darwinistic theoretical designs to the social sciences, in Donald T. Campbell, “Variation and Selective Retention in Socio-Cultural Evolution,” General Systems 14 (1969): 69–85.
33. See Roy A. Rappaport, “Maladaptation in Social Systems,” in The Evolution of Social Systems, ed. J. Friedman and M. J. Rowlands (Pittsburgh, 1978), 49–71.
34. On changes under a communist regime that merely copy the old clan structures into work organizations, without achieving individual behavior susceptible to direct intervention by changes in the legal, economic, and the political systems, see, however, Li Hanlin, Die Grundstrukturen der chinesischen Gesellschaft: Vom traditionellen Clansystem zur modernen Danwei-Organisation (Opladen, 1991).
35. For comparative study in the modern period, it is useful to look at African religions, since in traditional Africa we find both the development of kingdoms and a continuation of “stateless” tribal cultures.
36. See the overview of the research in Robert Wuthnow, “Science and the Sacred,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 187–203. Beyond that, it may be that the contrast is more distinct in the United States, with its relatively high average religiosity (whatever these statistical values are saying).
37. Wuthnow, ibid., also draws this conclusion from the fact that social scientists’ distance from religion is greater than that of natural scientists, who have at their disposal a guaranteed paradigm and a highly consensual knowledge of research and who more than the social scientists can afford to be religious. And precisely sociologists like Max Weber who have conducted research on religion been careful to make it clear that they are not interested in the subject for religious reasons.
38. See, e.g., the results of a conference on evolutionary theory inspired and introduced by Cardinal Franz König, published in Evolution und Menschenbild, ed. Rupert J. Riedl and Franz Kreuzer (Hamburg, 1983), or along these lines, the activities of the Forum St. Stephanus in Vienna.
39. The (now) standard monograph on this is Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich, 1990).
40. See August Buck, “Aus der Vorgeschichte der Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in Mittelalter und Renaissance,” in Bibliothèque de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance 20 (1958): 527–541; id., Die “Querelle des anciens et des moderne” im italienischen Selbstverständnis der Renaissance und des Barocks (Wiesbaden, 1973); Elisabeth Goessmann, Antiqui und Moderni im Mittelalter: Eine geschichtliche Standortbestimmung (Munich, 1974).
41. For greater detail on this, see Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York, 1968).
42. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706; Milan, 1971), 1: 104. And when one poet has this skill more than others, it is no longer understood as a divine gift (1: 217f.).
43. On this, see Stéphane Ngo Mai and Alain Raybaut, “Microdiversity and Macro-order: Toward a Self-Organization Approach,” Revue internationale de systémique 10 (1996): 223–239.
CHAPTER 6: RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS
1. See Englard, “Majority Decision vs. Individual Truth” (cited in chapter 2, n. 51, above) on the story of the Oven of Achnai in the Talmud.
2. See Niklas Luhmann, “Organisation,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6 (Basel, 1984), cols. 1326–1328.
3. See Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1955); Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ, 1957); Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: Expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen âge latin (Paris, 1970); Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983), trans. as Recht und Revolution: Die Bildung der westlichen Rechtstradition (Frankfurt, 1991), esp. 356ff.
4. On the growth of this problem and the increase in problems of Church organization (which for sociologists suggests a comparison with other organizations), there is now a great deal of literature available. See James A. Beckford, “Religious Organizations: A Trend Report and Bibliography,” Current Sociology 21, no. 2 (1975): 1–170, and id., “Religious Organizations,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 125–139.
5. This according to Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, MA, 1938; 9th printing, 1951), 167ff.
6. The term “organization” is defined here based on suggestions by Herbert Simon, who originally spoke of “behavior premises,” then later of “decision premises.” See Herbert A. Simon, Donald W. Smithburg, and Victor A. Thompson, Public Administration (New York, 1950), 57ff.; Herbert A. Simon, Models of Man—Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting (New York, 1957), 201.
7. Here see also Niklas Luhmann, “Organisation,” in Mikropolitik: Rationalität, Macht und Spiele in Organisationen, ed. Willi Küpper and Günther Ortmann (Opladen, 1988): 165–185; id., Die Gesellschaft und ihre Organisationen, Festschrift für Renate Mayntz (Baden-Baden, 1964), 189–201; id., Organisation und Entscheidung (Opladen, 1990).
8. See, e.g., Talcott Parsons, “A Sociological Approach to the Theory of Organizations,” in id., Structure and Process in Modern Sciences (New York, 1960), 16–58.
9. For more detail, see Niklas Luhmann, “Inklusion und Exklusion,” Soziologische Aufklärung 6 (Opladen, 1995), 237–264.
10. Rather than signifying the organic and psychological processes that continually occur in societal environments, the term “individuals” [Personen] is used here (in connection with the traditional concept) as a kind of identity marker that can be used in communication to indicate a (particularly) opaque environmental complexity. See also Niklas Luhmann, “Die Form ‘Person,’” in Soziale Welt 42 (1991): 166–175; id. “Die operative Geschlossenheit psychischer und sozialer Systeme,” in Das Ende der großen Entwürfe, ed. Hans Rudi Fischer et al. (Frankfurt, 1992), 117–132; both articles can also be found in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 6.
11. Moreover, Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory comes down fully on the side of traditional liberal variants here, and not on that of ideological criticism. In a moral discourse that includes everyone, free and equal access is presumed to be a procedural condition. Tragically, it is not taken into account that under actual conditions, even this has an exclusionary aspect (even if this comes down to self-exclusion by many people). This applies all the more should such discourse, however improbably, lead to a reasonable consensus, when everyone who did not consent would be excluded as irrational.
12. This [i.e., absorbing uncertainty] is also a term proposed by Simon. See James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York, 1958), 164ff.
13. The upshot of this, nonetheless, is that using internal structure is problematic for the treatment of uncertainty. On the issue, see Brian L. Loasby, Choice, Complexity and Ignorance: An Enquiry into Economic Theory and the Practice of Decision-making (Cambridge, 1976), esp. 151f.
14. In the sense of Francis Heylighten, “Causality as Distinction Conversation: A Theory of Predictability, Reversibility, and Time Order,” Cybernetics and Systems 20 (1989): 361–384.
15. For examples, see Dschalaluddin Rumi, Die Flucht nach Hindustan und andere Geschichten aus dem Matnawi, ed. Gisela Wendt (Amsterdam, 1989). A more comprehensive version is The Matnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmi, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1925–1940), containing an English translation and commentaries.
16. For example, there is the doctrine of a revelation that is revealing itself as revelation. See also the specifically Judaic doctrine that the Torah is revealed as a text for written and for oral transmission, even though this latter teaching, not explicitly contained in the Torah, inserts itself into it.
17. See Niklas Luhmann, Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation (Berlin, 1964), 307–308, with further references.
18. See N. J. Demerath III and V. Thiessen, “On Spitting Against the Wind: Organizational Precariousness and American Irreligion,” American Journal of Sociology 71 (1966): 674–687.
19. Here see chiefly Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (London, 1967).
20. That is precisely why control [Steuerung], a specially directed activity, becomes problematic in broader sociological and political-scientific discussions. See Helmut Willke, Ironie des Staates: Grundlinien einer Staatstheorie polyzentrischer Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1992).
21. In the research literature, this is often designated by concepts such as oppression, repression, exploitation. But such terminology is much too weak and inappropriate in light of the circumstances involved. Put differently, it gives too much hope that things could be done differently.
22. On “double closure” with reference to neurophysiological systems, see Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems (Seaside, CA, 1981), 304ff.
23. See here Nils Brunsson and Johan P. Olsen, The Reforming Organization (London, 1993).
24. On this, see esp. ibid., 176ff.
25. See Helmut Schlesky, “Ist die Dauerreflexion institutionalisierbar?” Zeitschrift für evangelische Ethik 1 (1957): 153–174.
CHAPTER 7: THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
1. See Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1997), 413ff.
2. See also Niklas Luhmann, “Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion,” in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt, 1989), 259–357.
3. See Peter N. Ure, The Origin of Tyranny (Cambridge, 1922); Martin Warnke, Hofkünstler: Zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Künstlers (Cologne, 1985); Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995).
4. For treatment of this topic that is detailed, instructive, and pays particular attention to the significance of “improbability,” see Hartmann Tyrell, “Worum geht es in der ‘Protestantischen Ethik’? Ein Versuch zum besseren Verständnis Max Webers,” Saeculum 41 (1990): 130–177, and id., “Potenz und Depotenzierung der Religion—Religion und Rationalisierung bei Max Weber,” Saeculum 44 (1993): 300–347.
5. This circumstance is easy to understand if we realize that in Weber’s time there were no theories of social evolution available other than a Social Darwinism based on a few buzzwords.
6. See chapter 5, § IV, in this volume.
7. This example is from Fredrik Barth, Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea (Oslo, 1975). Barth also shows how strongly the semantic worlds between the initiated and the remaining members of the tribe (women, children, adolescents) differ. This can be classified as a schema that enables differentiation as well as co-existence of stereotyping and adaptive pragmatism.
8. See Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinean People (New Haven, CT, 1967). See also id., “The Sacred in Human Evolution,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 2 (1971): 23–44.
9. This can be studied particularly well in Japan, where in many places we encounter a continuation of divinatory and magic practices, and apparently primarily where the group does not offer adequate security, but the individual knows that he has to depend on himself. People wash their money in wire baskets at a certain spring in order to assure continued business success. (And judging by the cars arriving and the content of the baskets, it is not the poorest of the poor who are using this technique.) Prior to examinations, people go to the temple in order to receive a prophecy. And all this is done apparently without experiencing any inconsistency in relation to the rest of one’s knowledge of the world. As a result, the question of whether one believes in it or not is hardly understood and is not clearly answered.
10. “Quasi-objects” is meant in the sense of Michel Serres, Genèse (Paris, 1982), 146ff. It is obvious that the quasi- of such objects is not communicated religiously. Yet here also, from the perspective of a second-order observer, an opening for discovery and fantasy—and thus for variation—can be recognized. This is very effective, e.g., in the interpretation of trance states and especially in the invention of the quasi-object of the “soul,” which still serves to orient religion.
11. A modern equivalent would be the way technology works. There may be doubts and different opinions about whether the lights should be turned on at dusk, but there is no need for consensus as to whether they will turn on once the switch has been flipped. By means of objectification, the requirements of consensus can be reduced and conserved but also expanded. For the objectifications built into functional contexts—whether of rituals or of technologies—make things possible that would otherwise not be possible and only in that way configure what is required for understanding.
12. The literature on the issue of religion’s transformation through writing has grown immensely, but it is generally not theoretically informed. For an introductory overview, see, e.g., Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (New York, 1986), trans. as Die Logik der Schrift und die Organisation von Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), 25ff. See also Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven, CT, 1967).
13. See Harald Haarmann, Universalgeschichte der Schrift (Frankfurt, 1990), 70ff. See also Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation (London, 1972). The evolutionary preconditions for the development of writing that represents speech (however incomplete at first) seem to have arisen in Mesopotamia, where the inherited technology for making identity and deviation visible [in the shape of pictographic cuneiform script] made it possible for this to occur relatively quickly. On this, see Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “An Archaic Recording System and the Origin of Writing,” Syro-Mesopotamian Studies 1–2 (1977): 1–32; Jean Bottéro, “De l’aidemémoire à l’écriture,” Mésopotamie: L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris, 1987): 89–112.
14. See Niklas Luhmann, “The Form of Writing,” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1992): 25–42.
15. Although the details are highly disputed, it has been speculated that incised symbols discovered in the Balkans that are independent of and predate Mesopotamian writing might be a type of occult script intended for direct communication with gods; see Haarmann, Universalgeschichte der Schrift, 70ff.
16. This according to Jean Pierre Camus, Les Diversitez, vol. 1 (2nd ed., Paris, 1612), 375ff. This work contains a detailed defense for writing in comparison with the (merely) spoken word.
17. See Elena Esposito, “Interaktion, Interaktivität und Personalisierung der Massenmedien,” Soziale System 1 (1995): 225–260.
18. Rosalind Thomas speaks of “telescoping” in Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 95ff., 155ff.
19. See Jean Bottéro, “Symptômes, signes, écritures en Mésopotamie ancienne,” in Divination et rationalité, ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant et al. (Paris, 1974), 70–197 (here 157–158).
20. See here the rich material in Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur altchristlichen Bildersprache (Bonn, 1952).
21. On this difference and its evolutionary force, see Cristiano Grotanelli, “Profezia e scrittura nel Vicino Oriente,” La Ricerca folkloria. La scrittura: Funzioni ed ideologie 5 (1982): 57–62.
22. In more recent research in the history of ideas, Quentin Skinner has primarily emphasized this situative, political-polemical factor in semantic evolution, which helps semantic innovations overcome the persuasive thresholds of tradition. For a summary, see Skinner, “Language and Political Change,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989), 6–23. See also Henk de Berg, “Kontext und Kontingenz: Kommunikationstheoretische Überlegungen zur Literaturhistoriographie. Mit einer Fallstudie zur Goethe-Rezeption des Jungen Deutschland” (diss., Leiden, 1994).
23. See, e.g., Ishak Englard, “Majority Decision vs. Individual Truth: The Interpretation of the Oven of Achnai Aggadah,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 15 (1975): 137–151, with many further references.
24. Early medieval Europe and Mexico (e.g., Mitla) both offer examples of this.
25. This according to Jean-Fréderic Bernard, Eloge d’Enfer: Ouvrage critique, historique et moral, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1759).
26. See Jan Assmann, Ägypten: Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur (Stuttgart, 1984); id., Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992), 248ff.
27. See also chapter 5, § III, in this volume.
28. See Karl Heim, Das Gewißheitsproblem in der systematischen Theologie bis zu Schleiermacher (Leipzig, 1911), 220ff., esp. 249, and Paul Althaus, Die Prinzipien der deutschen reformierten Dogmatik im Zeitalter der aristotelischen Scholastik (Leipzig, 1914; repr. Darmstadt, 1967), 183ff.
29. See, e.g., Johann Gottlob Benjamin Pfeil, L’homme sauvage, trans. Louis Sébastien Mercier (Paris, 1767). Yet the author still has hope for the future, saying: “One day, we shall know it” (119). That remains, however, a hope that is not further substantiated.
30. Jean Paul, Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana, quoted in id., Werke, vol. 3 (Munich, 1961), 1011–1056 (here 1053).
31. The reference here is to Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York, 1979).
32. This is conveyed by the title of an article in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on April 23, 1994: “In Toscana ci sono più maghi che preti: L’allarme di diciotto vescovi.”
CHAPTER 8: SECULARIZATION
1. See Bryan Wilson, “Secularization: The Inherited Model,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 9–20.
2. See Thomas Luckmann, “The New and the Old Religion,” in Social Theory for a Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (Boulder, CO, and New York, 1991): 167–182 (here 168).
3. Overviews with references are provided by the following articles on secularization: Hermann Zabel et al., in Wörterbuch Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, 1984): 789–829; Giacomo Marramao, “Säkularisierung,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 8 (Basel, 1992), cols. 1133–1161; id., Cielo e terra: Genealogia della secolarizzazione (Rome, 1994), German trans. as Die Säkularisierung der westlichen Welt (Frankfurt, 1996). For a treatment that sees the relevance of this topic more positively, see Hartmann Tyrell, “Religionssoziologie,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 428–457 (444ff.).
4. And this is in accordance with even the most recent research results. See only W. Jagodzinki and Karel Dobbelaere, “Der Wandel kirchlicher Religiosität in Westeuropa,” in Religion und Kultur, ed. J. Bergmann, Alois Hahn, and Thomas Luckmann, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, special issue 33 (Opladen, 1993): 68–91; Studien- und Planungsgruppe der EKD, Fremde Heimat Kirche: Ansichten ihrer Mitglieder (Hannover, 1993).
5. Luc Ferry speaks more cautiously of a “fin du théologico-culturel” in L’homme-Dieu ou le Sens de la vie: essai (Paris, 1996), 207.
6. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, quoted in id., Werke, vol. 5 (Munich, 1963), 384.
7. See, e.g., Luca Ricolfi, “Il processo di secularizzazione nell’Italia del dopoguerra: Un profilo empirico,” Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 29 (1988): 37–87. For a report on older research, see Karel Dobbelaere, “Secularization: A MultiDimensional Concept,” Current Sociology 29, no. 2 (1981). See also id., “Secularization Theories and Sociological Paradigms: Convergences and Divergences,” Social Compass 31 (1984): 199–219.
8. For a worldwide comparison, see John W. Meyer, David H. Kamens, and Aaron Benavot, School Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC, 1992), esp. 139ff.
9. For sociology, one can in particular assume that the thesis of a secularized society is a desperate attempt to retain the centrality of the religion question for the problem of societal order—but only in a negative version. See Roland Robertson, “Sociologists and Secularization,” Sociology 5 (1971): 297–312. For a similar argument regarding the theological interest in the topic, see Trutz Rendtorff, “Zur Säkularisierungsproblematik: Über die Weiterentwicklung der Kirchensoziologie zur Religionssoziologie,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Religionssoziologie 2 (1966): 51–72.
10. This is emphasized repeatedly, so one is not misled by the term. See, e.g., Donald E. Miller, “Religion, Social Change, and the Expansive Life Style,” Internationales Jahrbuch für Wissens- und Religionssoziologie 9 (1975): 149–159. His thesis: not the “whether” but the “how” of religious experience is the problem.
11. This is noted, e.g., by Ludwig Tieck, Frühe Erzählungen und Romane (Munich, 1963), 177–178: “Der Geist der Intoleranz ist in die Politik übergegangen.”
12. See Friedrich von Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst. Vorlesung 1802/03 (1859; repr. Darmstadt, 1960).
13. On “displacement,” see Dominick LaCapra, “The Temporality of Rhetoric,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA, 1991), 115–147; Peter Fuchs, Moderne Kommunikation: Zur Theorie des operativen Displacements (Frankfurt, 1993). Luc Ferry, L’homme-Dieu, trans. David Pellauer as Man Made God: The Meaning of Life (Chicago, 2002), 7, speaks of “the secular reworking of religion” and cites communism as an example.
14. Meaning, in other words, that religion and secularization only represent an opposition in religious contexts. One therefore does not get any closer to the issue with empirical sociological studies attempting to establish objective facts. See James E. Dittes, “Secular Religion: Dilemma of Churches and Researchers,” Review of Religious Research 10 (1969): 65–81, and Peter G. Forster, “Secularization in the English Context: Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems,” Sociological Review 20 (1972), 153–168.
15. See Robert M. Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term. Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 57 (1983): 4–68 (here 8), which attempts to make the Talmudic tradition productive within a secular society in interpreting the American Constitution.
16. On this, with regard to Gotthard Günther, see Elena Esposito, L’operazione di osservazione: Costruttivismo e teoria dei sistemi sociali (Milan, 1992).
17. See also my remarks on religion’s “loss of function,” in chapter 3 in this volume.
18. On European developments since the Middle Ages, see Katherine and Charles H. George, “Roman Catholic Sainthood and Social Status: A Statistical and Analytical Study,” Journal of Religion 35 (1955): 85–98; Pierre Delooz, Sociologie et canonizations (The Hague, 1969).
19. To exactly what extent this also applies to people who do not belong to one’s own religion can be evaluated by different criteria, e.g., according to the stipulation presented by a distinction between center and periphery. While the Christian major religions worried about the souls of the ancient philosophers who could not be saved, I know a southern Italian who is considered a “Turk” and sees himself as one, since he was not baptized and “consequently” has no soul. Yet he has a heart, as he takes pains to assure me. On this subject, from the perspective of another religious context, see also Gananath Obeyesekere, “The Great Tradition and the Little in the Perspective of Sinhalese Buddhism,” Journal of Asian Studies 22 (1963): 139–153.
20. See here, e.g., Gibson Winter, The Suburban Captivity of the Churches (New York, 1962); Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York, 1963).
21. This according to Ferry, L’homme-Dieu, 33n.
22. For more detail, see Niklas Luhmann, “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus,” in id., Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 3 (Frankfurt 1989), 149–258.
23. On this distinction, see Stéphane Ngo Mai and Alain Raybaut, “Microdiversity and Macro-order: Toward a Self-Organization Approach,” Revue internationale de systémique 10 (1996): 223–239.
24. For more detail here, see Niklas Luhmann, “Frühneuzeitliche Anthropologie: Theorietechnische Lösungen für ein Evolutionsproblem der Gesellschaft,” in id., Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt 1980), 162–234.
25. § VII of the present chapter looks at this issue from the standpoint of “culture.”
26. See, e.g., Alexandre Vinet, “Sur l’individualité et l’individualisme,” in id., Philosophie morale et sociale, vol. 1 (Lausanne, 1913), 319–335; first published in Semeur, April 13, 1836.
27. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry concerning virtue or merit” (1709), in id., Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2nd ed. (1714, repr. Farnborough, Hants, UK, 1968), 2: 120.
28. Jean Paul, Levana oder Erziehungslehre I, in id., Sämmtliche Werke (Berlin, 1827), 36: 51.
29. On African religious beliefs, see John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (London, 1970), 218: “The individual ‘believes’ what other members of the corporate society ‘believe’, and he ‘believes’ because others ‘believe.’”
30. Baltasar Gracián y Morales, El Criticón (Zaragoza, 1651–53), trans. as Criticón oder: Über die allgemeinen Laster des Menschen (Hamburg, 1957), 49.
31. Ibid., 51, 67, and passim.
32. On this, see Loredana Sciolla, “La natura delle credenze religiose nelle società complesse,” Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 36 (1995): 479–511.
33. Ibid., 507.
34. Viewed historically, this was a Romantic idea.
35. See Bryan A. Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society: A Sociological Comment (London, 1966), 160ff.
36. For a comparison of Islamic and American (Protestant) fundamentalism with a focus on this point, see Dieter Goetze, “Fundamentalismus, Chilianismus, Revitalisierungsbewegungen: Neue Handlungsmuster im Weltsystem?” in Transkulturelle Kommunikation und Weltgesellschaft: Theorie und Pragmatik globaler Interaktion, ed. Horst Reiman (Opladen, 1992), 44–59.
37. For an overview of American research, which is especially instructive, see James T. Richardson, “Studies of Conversion: Secularization or Re-enchantment,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Philip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 104–121.
38. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA, 1970).
39. See Mundus in Imagine: Bildersprache und Lebenswelten im Mittelalter: Festgabe für Klaus Schreiner (Munich, 1996).
40. For a special case, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).
41. See esp. Talcott Parsons, “Belief, Unbelief, and Disbelief,” and “Religion in Postindustrial America: The Problem of Secularization,” in id., Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York, 1978), 233–263, 300–322.
42. There is much evidence for this effect. One of the claims of the eighteenth century could be put thus: forget all the stipulations and intricacies—and simplify! See J. J. (Dom Louis), Le Ciel ouvert à tout l’univers (n.p., 1782), 163: “The art of simplifying everything is that of perfecting everything.”
43. See Peter Berger, “A Sociological View of the Secularization of Theology” (1967), in id., Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion (New York, 1977), 162–182.
44. Parsons is not following Rousseau but Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York, 1970). Here Rousseau is seen more as precursor of the “secular religion” of Marxism. Overall, the diagnosis is directed toward a nontheistic religion of love in this world, apparently influenced by social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
45. On this, see also Niklas Luhmann, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” in Soziologische Aufklärung 6 (Opladen, 1995), 237–264.
46. According to Anonymous [Jacques Pernetti], Les conseils de l’amitié, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt, 1748), 5. In what follows, it is emphasized that this temporal fractioning of attention is not as bad as the frontal attacks by atheists.
47. An important exception is sports, especially ice hockey.
48. See chapter 6, § V, in this volume.
49. This may be the case in the context of a particular function system in society, one that is interested in remedies; see Dirk Baecker, “Soziale Hilfe als Funktionssystem der Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 23 (1994): 93–110.
50. See La función de la teologia en el futuro de America Latina: Memorias (Mexico City, 1991), proceedings of an international symposium at the Universidad Iberoamericana, September 24–27, 1991, especially the discussion.
51. This has been an issue at least since publication of Alexandre Koyré’s La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1929; 2nd ed. 1968); see also Berger, Facing Up to Modernity.
52. See Kees W. Bolle, “Secularization as a Problem of History of Religions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (1970): 242–259.
53. See, e.g., Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (London, 1967), which reveals an intention to hold onto certain structural commonalities of all religious phenomena—commonalities that can be described in post-transcendental/post-phenomenological perspectives). Or see Parsons, Action Theory and the Human Condition, in the context of explaining the necessity of semantic generalizations in evolutionary theoretical terms.
54. On this, see Detlef Pollack, “Was ist Religion: Probleme der Definition,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 3 (1995): 163–190.
55. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA, 1981), sees in this a “philosophical” problem with which art is identifying itself.
56. For greater detail, see Niklas Luhmann, “Kultur als historischer Begriff,” in id., Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik, vol. 4 (Frankfurt, 1993), 31–45; id., “Religion als Kultur,” in Das Europa der Religionen, ed. Otto Kallscheuer (Frankfurt 1996), 291–315.
57. I leave to one side Schiller’s designation of this approach as naïve (as opposed to sentimental) in his treatise on “naïve” and “sentimental” writing [Dichtung]. The approach was naïve, not in its own mode of observation but only in the eyes of a present-day “sentimental writer.”
58. Matei Călinescu, “From the One to the Many: Pluralism in Today’s Thought,” in Zeitgeist in Babylon: The Postmodernist Controversy, ed. Ingeborg Hoesterey (Bloomington, IN, 1991): 156–174 (here 157).
59. Systematic attention to this question can be found primarily in context of Talcott Parsons’s theory of the universal action system. See his later essays on religion in Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York, 1978), 167ff. However, the analyses only develop partial aspects of systems and remain formal in the way they assign them.
60. On methodology, see Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik (Hamburg, 1948).
61. Cf., e.g., Roland Robertson, “The Sacred and the World System,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward a Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Philipp E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 347–358; id., Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London, 1992).
62. On this formulation for a specific form of dealing with paradoxes, see Andrew H. Van de Ven and Marshall Scott Poole, “Paradoxical Requirements for a Theory of Organizational Change,” in Paradox and Transformation: Toward a Theory of Change in Organization and Management, ed. Robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 19–63 (esp. 30–31).
63. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 149.
64. “Could it be that the deeper significance of the famous ‘comparative method’ that became a powerful and unifying paradigm in the life sciences and social sciences has been a kind of secularization of conceptions of religious and transcendental ‘otherness’?” Johannes Fabian asks in “Of Dogs Alive, Birds Dead, and Time to Tell a Story,” in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA, 1991), 185–204 (190).
CHAPTER 9: SELF-DESCRIPTION
1. Max Weber exemplifies this—despite or precisely because of the significance of religion in his sociology, as Hartmann Tyrell details in “Max Webers Religionssoziologie,” Saeculum 43 (1992): 172–230. See also Detlef Pollack, “Was ist Religion: Probleme der Definition,” Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 3 (1995): 163–190.
2. The preceding chapters have avoided this problem—and thus self-description as religious—because their premise is distinction, specifically, function and coding.
3. Jean Paul asks us to consider these arguments in his “Religion als politischer Hebel,” in Jean Pauls Werke: Auswahl in zwei Bänden, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1924), 56.
4. Using Gotthard Günther’s terminology, one could also say that religion has at its disposal “transjunctional operations” and “rejection values” that not only emphasize the otherness of its specific commitments but also reject positive/negative distinctions of a different origin as distinctions; see Gotthard Günther, Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1976), esp. 286ff.
5. For a resolute attempt of this kind (which nonetheless fails very quickly), see Kai T. Erikson, Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (New York, 1966). The system’s boundaries, which simultaneously define its identity, are defined by early Puritans in New England in such a way that all deviance is described as the system’s environment and in the system, the elect (who watch one another closely) are among themselves.
6. On the paradox of communicating an abstention from communication and on the silent communicating of avoiding communication, see Peter Fuchs, “Die Weltflucht der Mönche: Anmerkungen zur Funktion des monastisch-aszetischen Schweigens,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 15 (1986): 393–405; revised and reprinted in Niklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs, Reden und Schweigen (Frankfurt, 1989), 21–45.
7. That, in any event, is the standpoint from which Benton Johnson attempts to specify this (now diffuse) distinction; “On Church and Sect,” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 539–549.
8. A renowned depiction of this thesis is that what matters to God is difference, antithesis, contrast (and not merely the simple repetition of His own self-sufficient unity), because in this way human beings are granted freedom (= sin?) and the capacity to make distinctions; St. Augustine, “De ordine libri duo,” in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 63 (1922; repr., New York, 1962).
9. This tendency to wait can in fact be observed, and not only in the case of those who defend forms of faith that have been handed down but also in the case of sociologists of religion. See, e.g., Gregory Baum, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism (New York, 1970), and Bryan Wilson, The Contemporary Transformation of Religion (New York, 1976), both of these influenced by the youth movements of the 1960s. But see also Michael Welker, Gottes Geist: Theologie des Heiligen Geists (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1992), trans. John F. Hoffmeyer as God the Spirit (Minneapolis, 1994), which attempts to find a connection with present-day charismatic movements within spiritism.
10. See chapter 8, § III, in this volume.
11. “Redescription” in the sense of Mary Hesse’s theory of metaphors; see Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, IN, 1966), 157ff.
12. [Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Berlin, 1799), trans. as On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (New York, 1955).] On this problem (without reference to “deconstruction”), see also Thomas Lehnerer, “Kunst und Bildung: zu Schliermachers Reden über die Religion,” in Früher Idealismus und Frühromantik: Der Streit um die Grundlagen der Ästhetik (1795–1805), ed. Walter Jaeschke and Helmut Holzhey (Hamburg 1990), 190–200, esp. 199–200.
13. See here Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY, 1982).
14. See here the case study by Georg Elwert, “Changing Certainties and the Move to a Global Religion: Medical Knowledge and Islamization Among the Anii (Baseda) in the Republic of Bénin,” in The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Foundations, ed. Wendy James (London, 1995), 215–233.
15. The same argument could be repeated for other religions, with respect to religious meditation (as opposed to helpful, everyday meditative practice) in the Buddhist context or with respect to the stereotyped formalism of prayer in Islam that exposes itself to observation.
16. See Welker, Gottes Geist.
17. E.g., “Doch dieser Schein trügt” (ibid., 177).
18. See the treatment of “lying spirits” (ibid., 87ff.) and the distancing of religious judgment (God’s judgment) of good and bad from the socially circulating morality of respect and misrespect (social moralism) (ibid., 49ff., 119ff.).
19. E.g., conceiving of the resurrection of the flesh as something concomitant that occurs outside of time, salvation in the sense of the inescapability of the lived sense of life (ibid., 301).
20. See ibid., 118–119.
21. See ibid., 127–128.
22. See ibid., 82n6.
23. See, e.g., the analyses of Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York, 1947). A short version is: “The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion” (17). With the conceptuality of “speech act” theory, it could also be said to be the unity of its constative and performative components.
24. See chapter 4, § III, in this volume.
25. See the interpretation of Kant’s aesthetics from this very viewpoint in Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture (Paris, 1987).
26. A symptom of this fact is that now a corresponding negative term is needed: “insincerity” was added to the language in the sixteenth century.
27. On this, see esp. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 1986). On the futility of a polemic that resorts to the utility of poetry—either a this-worldly or other-worldly utility—see also Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton, NJ, 1970).
28. See Baltasar Gracián y Morales, El Criticón (Zaragoza, 1651–53), trans. as Criticón oder: Über die allgemeinen Laster des Menschen (Hamburg, 1957). Reflective of this situation of a generalized insecurity is the fact that the permission to publish organizationally required by his order was a problem for Gracián throughout his lifetime and had to be—but also could be—circumvented.
29. See Roland Robertson, “The Sacred and the World System,” in The Sacred in a Secular Age: Toward Revision in the Scientific Study of Religion, ed. Phillip E. Hammond (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 347–358 (esp. 352–353.). Robertson even presupposes that the “globalization” of human relationships is one of the essential factors in the revitalization of religion that can be observed at present in the spread of all kinds of fundamentalisms and in the religious thematization of the human situation in modern society. See also Robert Robertson and Jo Ann Chirico, “Humanity, Globalization and Worldwide Religious Resurgence: A Theoretical Exploration,” Sociological Analysis 46 (1985): 219–246. For a summary, see Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London, 1992).
30. On Islam, see esp. M. Abaza and Georg Stauth, “Occidental Reason, Orientalism, Islamic Fundamentalism: A Critique,” in Globalization, Knowledge and Society, ed. Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King (London, 1990), 209–233. See also Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London, 1994).
31. See, e.g., José Faur, Golden Doves and Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Bloomington, IN, 1986).
32. This can also be demonstrated inversely by how inconsequential local forms of exception were, as exemplified by the large number of schools of differing faith orientations (and the “ecumenical” efforts these motivated) to be found in the town of Otranto in the twelfth century, still apparent today in the famous mosaic of its cathedral.
33. The conclusion of an advantage for religion through functional differentiation is thus relativized if one considers that the political system has the autonomy to define which religious movements are politically dangerous. This can be shown in nationalistic and especially one-party regimes that leave it up to the party to define the only correct opinions, or concretely in the problems that Marxist-oriented regimes in Asia have with Buddhist monks. On these matters, see Donald E. Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton, NJ, 1965); Milton Sacks, “Some Religious Components in Vietnamese Politics,” in Religion and Change in Contemporary Asia, ed. Robert F. Spencer (Minneapolis, 1971), 44–66; Holmes Welch, Buddhism Under Mao (Cambridge, MA, 1972). See too Urmila Phadnis, Religion and Politics in Sri Lanka (Columbia, MO, 1976); S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background (Cambridge, 1976); Somboon Suksamran, Buddhism and Politics in Thailand: A Study of Socio-Political Change and Political Activism of the Thai Sangha (Singapore, 1982).
34. Integration here (as elsewhere) is not understood as a consensus but rather as a mutual restriction on the degree of freedom in the systems involved.
35. How little this applies to Buddhism—which (though an atheistic religion) can still accommodate gods and permits itself to be popularized in several regional versions—has been the subject of numerous treatments. See Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (Westport, CT, 1962); Michael M. Ames, “Magical Animism and Buddhism: A Structural Analysis of the Sinhalese Religious System,” in Religion in South Asia, ed. Edward B. Harper (Seattle, 1964), 21–52; S. J. Tambiah, Buddhism and Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand (Cambridge, 1970); Steven Piker, “The Problem of Consistency in Thai Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 211–229. That may be due to the fact that the system’s self-description in this case emphasizes how all distinctions are futile, seeking its unity therein and therefore being able to live with distinctions.
36. At a feast for the Virgin Mary observed primarily by the indigenous population in Andacollo, Chile, a high Catholic Church official sighed: “Whether they believe in God and whether they are Catholic, I don’t know; that they believe in Mary is certain.” His distinction, I recall, was both visible and (especially) audible: the Ave Maria played via loudspeaker from the church above the (supernaturally inspired) dance groups with their musical instruments in front of it (which distinguished themselves from one another, but not from the Church). In addition, the groups were let into the church to receive their blessing not as groups but only as individuals.
37. See only Michael Welker, Schöpfung und Wirklichkeit (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1995).
38. For related theses in literary studies, see Kommunikation und Differenz: Systemtheoretische Ansätze in der Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Henk de Berg and Matthias Prangel (Opladen, 1993), and Differenzen: Systemtheorie zwischen Dekonstruktion und Konstruktivismus, ed. Henk de Berg and Matthias Prangel (Tübingen, 1995).
39. See chapter 1 in this volume.
40. See merely Stephan H. Pfürtner, Kirche und Sexualität (Reinbek, 1972)—a publication that cost its author his professorship.
41. Here see Klaus Krippendorff, “A Second-Order Cybernetics of Otherness,” Systems Research 13 (1996): 311–328; this is a Festschrift in honor of Heinz von Foerster.