A. N. Whitehead has said that the history of western philosophy is no more than a series of footnotes to Plato. It is doubtful whether western thought can maintain itself any longer in this “splendid isolation.”
(Eliade 1965, 95)
David M. Rasmussen
There seems to be a growing feeling that the symbolism of archaic and oriental cultures can and ought to be taken seriously. The question is how? It is one thing to empathize with man in other and past cultures; it is another thing to understand him. In the past, archaic and oriental symbolism was thought to be important as a datum in the development of modern consciousness. Although this interpretation is still given credence by some, historical-evolutionary hypotheses are being replaced by interpretations which want to understand this symbolism as an authentic dimension of human consciousness regardless of its historical origin. If archaic symbolism can be regarded as representative of a dimension of consciousness, the question of interpretation is primary.
I wish to debate this question by reference to a hermeneutic developed by the historian of religions and phenomenologist, Mircea Eliade. Although Eliade has neither claimed nor been granted the status of a philosopher, he regards his work as a preliminary stage for philosophical reflection. The chief interpretive problem is one of the procedure from the appearance of a sacred phenomenon—a symbol, myth, hierophany, etc.—to the understanding of that phenomenon. Once the hermeneutic procedure has been clarified, it will be possible to suggest it as a possible method for philosophic reflection.
There is a polemic in Eliade’s thought which provides the negative foundation for his hermeneutic, namely, the polemic against reductionism. The difficulty that reductionism presents in any form is its tendency to explain away the phenomenon being studied. The argument is this: if a sacred modality can be reduced to psychological, sociological, or historical statements about it, its original intention is lost. This simply means that a religious form ought to be interpreted as a religious form, that is, with hermeneutic tools appropriate to its structure. A psychological interpretation of a religious modality may be useful and indeed, enlightening, but it will not be exhaustive. To claim that a psychological interpretation is exhaustive must result, necessarily, in reductionism. Other types of interpretation will yield similar conclusions. Eliade has made his position clear by specific references to reductionistic positions. In sociological terms, Durkheim attempted to make religion an aspect of sociological theory. For Durkheim religion was a projection of social experience … He concluded that sacredness (or “God”) and the social group are one and the same thing (Eliade 1963, 99).
The psychological mode of explanation is equally unsatisfactory. “For Freud, religion as well as human society and culture in general started with a primordial murder” (Eliade 1963, 101). Totemism, with its underlying psychic explanation, informed Freud’s reductionism. His method assumed that a sacred phenomenon is understood properly when it is reduced to a psychic phenomenon. Eliade agrees with the Freudian claim that the manifestation of the sacred has psychological significance; he does not agree that this is its only significance. An equal claim can be made about historical reductionism. Historical explanations of a religious phenomenon tend to explain that phenomenon by reference to the historical circumstances that gave rise to its appearance and not to the intrinsic character of the phenomenon itself (Eliade 1963, 105 ff).
This kind of criticism, however, places one on the horns of a hermeneutic dilemma. Does not investment in theory, any theory, impose restrictions on the object of interpretation? If interpreter and object interpreted are in some intersubjective relationship, can one avoid the problem of reductionism that will follow almost inevitably? I, for one, do not believe it possible to escape the basic “intersubjective” relationship that any hermeneutical position must presuppose. To this extent, psychological, sociological, and historical theories of interpretation are on a par with philosophical and religious modes of interpretation. But I do believe the manner in which this intersubjective relationship is stated is crucial. To the extent that a theory is imposed upon the object of interpretation, it may be said to be reductionistic. To the extent that a theory may be said to be the result of investigation, it may be said to be consequential, or derived from the object. It is important to note here, that in contradistinction to theories which result in reductionism, Eliade attempts to establish a hermeneutic which arises as a consequence of one’s encounter with the sacred.
In any case, in Eliade’s hermeneutic, this original polemical position has its consequence in a positive correlate: the notion of the irreducibility of the sacred.
A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred.
(Eliade 1958, xiii)
Philosophically, this means that the sacred must be granted an original ontological status. Reasons may be cited. The sacred as manifest to the believer may be said to have such an original status. If an authentic interpretation may be derived, that is, an interpretation which does not abort the sacred by imposing external norms foreign to the object interpreted, this initial claim must be taken seriously. The task of the interpreter will be to grasp somehow and recreate imaginatively the conditions for the sacred appearance.
On the basis of what has been established, from this perspective, one does not recreate imaginatively the sociological conditions for the manifestations of a sacred form. Nor would it be sufficient to do the same from the perspective of psychology. The model I find most appealing for this crucial hermeneutic step is one taken from the domain of phenomenology proper. The attempt to understand the sacred as an irreducible form is accompanied by the technical attempt to capture its intentional mode. A sacred form, for example, a stone carved in the shape of a phallus or a pearl venerated as a modality of sexuality, presents vivid examples of the problem at hand. The obvious temptation for the Western sophisticate, who has never admitted such objects into his spiritual pantheon, is to understand them in an ordinary mode of manifestation, or as natural objects. But to do this is to miss their meaning, in Husserlian terms, to fail to discover their true intentionality.
Eliade’s second hermeneutic principle, the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, is introduced precisely to capture this intentional characteristic of the sacred modality.
The sacred is qualitatively different from the profane; yet it may manifest itself no matter how nor where within the profane world because of its power of turning a natural object into a paradox by means of a hierophany; (it ceases to be itself as a natural object, though in appearance it remains unchanged).
(Eliade 1958, 30)
It follows that ordinary modes of understanding will not give us the meaning of the sacred because the sacred does not manifest itself in an ordinary way. But cosmic symbolism does reveal itself in ordinary forms. The sacred reveals itself in stones, earth, sky, persons, and almost any form imaginable. Thus, the modality of manifestation is complex. It is precisely this complexity which the dialectical principles wish to capture. The sacred appears in and through the profane. “Among countless stones, one stone becomes sacred—and hence becomes instantly saturated with being” (Eliade 1959). The sacred is perceived thus in the context of ordinary profane things which are separated, that is, stand apart, from their ordinary role because the sacred is revealed through them. It would seem, therefore, that Eliade’s doctrine of the irreducibility of the sacred leads to an attempt to recreate by means of imagination the conditions for the sacred appearance. It may be concluded that this can be done by granting the complexity of the sacred appearance as dialectical. Having acknowledged that complexity, it is necessary to discover the intentional mode peculiar to the manifestation of the sacred phenomenon.
This hermeneutic approach may be sustained and clarified by acknowledging the position against which it is directed.
In the time of Max Müller and Tylor, the scholars used to speak of naturalistic cults and of fetishism, meaning that primitive man adored natural objects. But the veneration of cosmic objects is not “fetishism.” It is not the tree, the spring, or the stone that is venerated, but the sacred which is manifested through these objects
(Eliade 1964).
It is one thing to construct an apparatus wherein the sacred may be perceived adequately; it is another to move from levels of perception to those of understanding. I regard Eliade’s chief hermeneutic achievement as the movement from an initial acknowledgment of the sacred in its dialectical complexity and distinctive intentional modality to an understanding of its meaning. The problem is epistemological; its solution is structural.
The notion of the irreducibility of the sacred and the dialectic of the sacred and the profane establish the conditions for the appearance of the sacred. They in no way provide the meaning of a particular sacred phenomenon. It is quite possible that the meaning of a particular phenomenon is not at all apparent to either the researcher or to the believer. For example: When a sorceress burns a wax doll containing a lock of her victim’s hair, she does not have in mind the entire theory underlying that bit of magic (Eliade 1958, 9).
The question is, how does one get to the theory which will explain the phenomenon? To answer this more difficult hermeneutic problem, Eliade makes two claims which enable him to move from the manifestation of a sacred object to its meaning. First, he suggests that phenomena of sacred manifestation will tend toward archetype. There is no religious form that does not try to get as close as possible to the true archetype, in other words, to rid itself of “historical” accretions and deposits (Eliade 1958, 462).
For Eliade, archetype may be regarded as the initial structure of the sacred. This is to be distinguished from the Jungian definition of archetype as the collective unconscious. Second, he suggests that phenomena of a given type or structure will tend toward system. Speaking of vegetation hierophanies he said:
What must be emphasized at once is that all these hierophanies point to a system of coherent statements, to a theory of the sacred significance of vegetation, the more cryptic hierophanies as much as any others.
(Eliade 1958, 9)
Structure then functions on two levels. On the first level, one discerns an initial archetype manifest through the sacred phenomenon. On the second level, this initial structure tends toward a larger context of structural associations. Hence, the argument is that a particular archetype is understood not in terms of itself, that is, in terms of its particular concrete historical manifestation. Rather, understanding occurs when the total system of associations is uncovered, or better, reconstructed.
The initial problem presented by the discernment of structure is morphological. It is necessary to separate those phenomena which have structural similarities from those which do not. The task is one of morphological classification. In his study of cosmic symbolism, Eliade is able to distinguish a number of morphological types: the sky and sky god symbolism, the sun and sun worship, the moon, water, stones, earth, woman, vegetation, agriculture and fertility, and the symbolism of space and time.
To make this morphological classification, a departure is made from what might be called a historical method. The transition from one element in a morphological type to another is not historical. This claim is not intended to depreciate the historical significance of any given phenomenon; but it does suggest that the relationship of hierophanies is non-historical because they do not follow a particular historical order. Morphological analysis and classification does not have its consequence in the construction of a history of religious consciousness.
A treatise on religious phenomena starting with the simplest and working up to the most complex does not seem to me to be called for, … I mean the sort of treatise that begins with the most elementary hypothesis (mana, the unusual, etc.), going on to totemism, fetishism, the worship of nature and spirits, thence to gods and demons, and coming finally to the monotheistic idea of God. Such an arrangement would be quite arbitrary; it presupposes an evolution in the religious phenomenon, from the simple to the complex, which is a mere hypothesis and cannot be proved; we have yet to meet anywhere a simple religion, consisting only of the most elementary hierophanies.
(Eliade 1958, xiv)
Indeed, ordering religious phenomena on the basis of an historical-evolutionary hypothesis about the development of religious consciousness is a distortion of what seems to be the facts of sacred appearance. Here, Eliade is of the same mind as Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wants to dismiss any qualitative distinction whatsoever between primitive and modern thought. In Eliade’s case, morphology is designed as a hermeneutic method to replace the historical-evolutionary hypothesis.
Hence, the significance of the morphological approach is that it offers an alternative solution to the problems of intelligibility presented by sacred phenomena.
It was suggested a moment ago that the most significant problem for Eliade’s hermeneutic method was the movement from the initial appearance of the sacred phenomena to an understanding of its meaning. It can now be seen that the solution to that problem is basically structural and not historical. Fidelity to the special character of the sacred manifestation, that is, fidelity to its special intentional mode, does not allow us to place phenomena within an historical-evolutionary scheme. The hermeneutic alternative of morphological analysis has suggested that meaning will be understood in terms of the association of sacred modalities. For Eliade, understanding is basically a task of imaginative reconstruction, but reconstruction on the basis of principles given by structuralism.
The analogy which best clarifies a hermeneutic grounded in structuralism is given by structural linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Saussure 1959) developed the notion of dividing the study of language into historical dynamic modes and structural internally related modes. To these separate spheres of study, de Saussure gave the term diachronic and synchronic linguistics. Language could be studied either in terms of its internal structural relations or its historic dynamic development. Diachronic linguistics focused on historical change and development within language, while synchronic understood language as a total system of interrelations. Eliade has found the structural (synchronic) model most appealing. Rather than understanding a symbol or myth as representative of a stage in the evolution of human consciousness, Eliade has asked the structural question regarding the place of a religious phenomenon within a total synchronic system. This leads to the basic judgment that religious phenomena tend toward system. This tendency is the intentional mode of every particular sacred manifestation. On this assumption, morphological analysis is held to be necessary; its consequence is the transition from appearance to understanding.
Only one thing matters in the history of religion; and that is the fact that the immersion of man or a continent together with the cosmic and eschatological meaning of such immersions, are present in myth and ritual; the fact that all these myths and. all these rituals fit together, or, in other words, make up a symbolic system which in a sense pre-existed them all.
(Eliade 1958, 450)
At times, structuralism has been thought to be indifferent to consciousness and subjectivity. In Eliade’s case, however, structuralism is the handmaiden of phenomenology. It is by uncovering the intentionality of a sacred modality through an act of imaginative reconstruction within consciousness that understanding occurs. Eliade gives his own distinctive stamp to this phenomenological procedure. Understanding does not occur by the reconstruction of a particular phenomenon, but rather by the reintegration of that phenomenon within its system of associations. Such a hermeneutic approach could well be called eidetic reintegration. The discernment of the structure of a phenomenon would be analogous to an eidetic analysis. Once the intentional structure is uncovered, it is reintegrated into its proper system of associations through the use of morphology and structuralism. The consequence of that reintegration is understanding.
Grounded on an initial acknowledgment of the independent validity of the sacred understood as an irreducible form, Eliade’s hermeneutic attempts to capture the intentional mode of the sacred manifest through the profane by morphological analysis and eidetic reintegration. It is worth noting that the major task of the hermeneutic, reintegration, is precisely the opposite of the reductionism against which the hermeneutic was constructed.
The conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that hermeneutics so conceived assumes that the sacred is an element in the structure of consciousness, not a moment in the history of consciousness. Structuralism, as employed by Eliade, effects a rather radical revision when the hermeneutic is compared to previous attempts to understand the sacred. In a sense, the historical-evolutionary hypothesis tends to drive the philosopher away from any serious consideration of the sacred.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl illustrates this problem in the conclusion of Primitive Mentality when he attempts to draw a basic distinction between the archaic mind and the modern European mind:
In short, our (the modern European) mentality is above all “conceptual,” and theirs (the primitive mind) hardly at all so. It is, therefore, extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a European, even if he tries, and even if he knows the natives’ language, to think as they do, although he may speak as they do.
(Levy-Bruhl 1966, 433–434)
His point was the following:
Almost unconsciously, the European makes use of abstract thought, and his language has made simple logical processes so easy to him that they entail no effort. With primitives both thought and language are almost exclusively concrete by nature.
(Levy-Bruhl 1966, 433)
The philosophical consequence of this approach is that archaic experience is interesting as a datum in the history of consciousness, but only as a significant backdrop to modern theoretical consciousness. Philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer, who became interested in myth and symbolism, found a vast wealth of material to document their theses about the historic emergence of man into the modern age. To this extent, they took archaic experience seriously. But they did not take that experience seriously in the sense that they chose to evaluate it on a plane equal to that of their hypotheses about modern man.
The emerging question is, can that experience ever be taken seriously if one accepts the basic assumption of a historical-evolutionary hypothesis? There are reasons for suggesting that it cannot. If one has made a judgment already about the superiority of a hypothesized theoretical consciousness, then it will follow that the myths and symbols of archaic experience will always have the stigma of an inferior imagination.
As we have seen, a careful analysis of the basic characteristics of religious modalities will not allow for such a judgment. The case for the obliteration of this distinction has been stated well by Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between the so-called primitive mind and scientific thought have resorted to qualitative differences between the working processes of the mind in both cases, while assuming that the entities which they were studying remained very much the same. If our interpretation is correct we are led toward a completely different view—namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science and that the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of things to which it is applied.
(Lévi-Strauss 1963, 229–230)
Eliade’s hermeneutic makes a similar judgment. As one would not depreciate a work of art simply because it was a product of a previous age, so one would not depreciate the validity of myth and symbolism because it was a product of past history. Further, in terms of its aims, myth and symbolism in complexity and logic is as rigorous as the products of modern thought.
The structuralists seem to have discovered that there is no valid reason for depreciating archaic and oriental experiences of the sacred. Equally, there are reasons for considering the experience of the sacred as valid regardless of the historical epoch or cultural region in which it occurred. As Eliade has shown, a hermeneutic of the sacred cannot be justified on the basis of an emergent anthropology because the development of the sacred does not follow an historical order. It seems better to assume that the experience of the sacred is congruent with man’s attempt to construct a meaningful world. Hence, the burden of structural hermeneutics is the recovery of the intentional mode of the sacred modality. In this sense, a structural hermeneutic is concerned with matters of consciousness and meaning. It is possible to suggest then that structural hermeneutics opens up the possibility for a serious philosophical consideration of the sacred.
The correlate of the doctrine of the irreducibility of the sacred is the assumption that it represents a dimension of experience that can be regarded as unique. To depreciate the uniqueness of that experience must in some sense be to misunderstand it, while to understand it is to realize that it is part of man’s quest for meaning. So conceived, the experience of the sacred is analogous to what phenomenologists have called a mode of being-in-the-world. It can be understood as a mode of self-constitution. At the same time, a study of the sacred will expand the philosophical understanding of what that quest for meaning is. Eliade has stated this case rather dramatically:
A. N. Whitehead has said that the history of western philosophy is no more than a series of footnotes to Plato. It is doubtful whether western thought can maintain itself any longer in this “splendid isolation.”
(Eliade 1965, 95)
The point of this somewhat critical commentary is:
The effort spent on correctly understanding modes of thought foreign to the western rationalist tradition, that is to say, in the first place deciphering the meaning of myths and symbols, will be repaid by a considerable enrichment of consciousness.
(Eliade 1965, 13)
The basis for this possibility has been established through the creation of a hermeneutic which assumes the validity of sacred manifestation without negative valuation.
Serious philosophical consideration of the sacred requires not only a justifiable foundation but also an interpretive context. It was suggested earlier that the initial hermeneutic datum was hierophany, that is, a manifestation of the sacred. The modality for the occurrence of hierophany is symbol and myth. Symbol and myth establish the context for hermeneutics as the basic components of a primary religious language. Hence, the context for the interpretation of the sacred is the study of language, in this case the particular language of symbol and myth. Such a language exists as the foundation for philosophical analysis. So conceived, this primary language provides the pre-reflective basis for philosophical reflection.
A special language requires a special hermeneutic. To the extent that the language of symbol and myth constitutes a particular mode of discourse, a hermeneutic must be devised specially to understand that mode of discourse. As we have seen, the major difficulty interpretation presents is the attempt to construct a hermeneutic which avoids false reductions. It is probable that structural hermeneutics may be applied to philosophical interpretation if a similar commitment is made. However, if the basic claims of structural hermeneutics are introduced for philosophical interpretation, they must be understood as analogies for philosophical interpretation.
First, the contention that the sacred is irreducible suggests that the sacred modality, the symbol and the myth, provides the pre-reflective basis for philosophical reflection. Philosophical interpretation takes on its own particular character not by trying to get behind the sacred modality, but through reflection from this primary form. Second, commitment to this basic principle requires the hermeneutic or interpretive movement from appearance to meaning or sensibility to understanding on the basis of structural and morphological principles. Third, if one is to avoid the problems engendered by distinctions between logical and pre-logical mentalities, the task of imaginative reconstruction may follow the procedures of eidetic reintegration.
To these three movements, which are basically reduplications of Eliade’s, a fourth distinctively philosophical task needs to be added. Philosophical interpretation is concerned not only with understanding the language of symbol and myth, but also with its verifiability. With such language, verification occurs through specifying the referent of symbolic and mythic statements. This task may be defined in relationship to the program of structural hermeneutics. Given the polemical and constructive foundation of structural hermeneutics, the referent of symbolic and mythic statements is neither solely cultural nor solely historical because no one culture or any linear theory of history is capable of explaining their meaning. Since structural hermeneutics aims at understanding meaning as an aspect of the structure of consciousness, it follows that the final referent of religious language is anthropological, in the sense that the use of symbol and myth represents a unique dimension of consciousness. Hence, the final task of the philosopher is that of placing this language in the context of a philosophical anthropology.
We have outlined Eliade’s structural hermeneutic, and we have suggested its potential as a program for philosophical interpretation. For some, the legitimacy of this enterprise may be doubted still. We consider ourselves moderns, historical people who make a distinction between myth and history. I do not contest the validity of that distinction, but there is no reason to give to it a negative interpretation. It is precisely because the distinction between myth and history can be made that we are in a position to understand, perhaps for the first time, the positive function of myth and symbol as a distinctive dimension of consciousness. Thus, it seems possible to suggest that an investigation of that phenomenon may contribute in a positive way to contemporary self-understanding. Eliade has suggested that encounter with the myths and symbols of non-Western and archaic cultures may “lead to a renewal in the philosophic field, in the same way that the discovery of exotic and primitive arts half a century ago opened up new perspectives in European art” (Eliade 1965, 13). This possibility may be the final result of an enquiry into structural hermeneutics.