As a religious studies grad student, I used to joke that if you wanted to say someone was a bastard, you called him a Protestant. If you wanted to say he was a filthy bastard, you called him a liberal Protestant. And if you wanted to say he was a dirty rotten filthy stinking bastard, you called him a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant.
I said this because the trendy scholars in religious studies (especially performance theory) tended to view “nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism” as the root of all evils in the field. Religious studies, I heard over and over, had been too dominated by the study of texts and scriptures and ideas, all the pernicious influence of nineteenth-century liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher. We needed to be exploring “lived” religion (with the implication, it was admitted in more candid moments, that the study of texts amounted to “dead” religion). For most people in history, they said, religion is not about texts but about ritual, performance, history, society, supernatural beings. Colleagues cited Vasudha Narayanan‘s JAAR article entitled “Liberation and lentils,” in which she recounted how Indian traditions like her family’s, involving rituals like picking the most auspicious lentils to eat at particular holidays, had been marginalized in favour of philosophical claims about liberation, or the myths in the Vedas. Religious studies, it was said, needed to focus more on lentils and less on liberation, more on ritual and less on philosophy.
I didn’t and don’t buy a word of this argument. To begin with, it relies almost entirely on the obscuring and pernicious concept of “religion,” a highly unfortunate term that leads us to emphasize the wrong differences, to give some beliefs a legal privilege they don’t deserve, to underplay similarities between “religious” and “secular” phenomena. The assumption is that what we had in common in religious studies was that we intended to study “religion.” Which, in my case, was completely false. I had no interest in “religion”; I was there to study Asian philosophy, which is marginalized if present at all in the vast majority of philosophy departments. But because the departments where one could study Asian thought were called “religious studies,” we were told that the concept of “religion” should have a normative value in deciding what we consider worthy of study.
Beyond the word, there’s an unspoken populist criterion of value underlying the anti-textual argument: the fact that more people do ritual than texts is taken as implying that ritual is therefore more worthy of study than texts. Such a view, I think, is one of the factors behind the current tendency to study other people’s ethics and act as if one is doing ethics oneself. But why, again, should this be so? More Americans, at least, believe in creationism than in evolution. By the populist criterion, it would seem that the sociology of creationism is more worthy of study than is evolutionary biology.
Excellent post, Amod. It had me laughing at the beginning, laughing at the end, and thoughtfully agreeing in between.
I think your use of creationism/evolution is a telling example. Corresponding with the rise of non-textual studies in the West has been a withering of the belief in Truth, a pernicious sort of relativism where liberation itself is nothing more than a culturally mediated phenomenon to be looked at. And to see it in this lens means looking at power relations and other cultural factors. Once you start looking at it like that, yes, lentils do suddenly look just as intriguing and worthy of our attention.
Many creationists, and likely some who understand evolution, use the ‘logic’ of relativism to buttress their claims, making them virtually impenetrable to the truth of evolution.
Yes, exactly – as well they should. I’m kind of surprised they don’t do more of that, actually. If there’s no truth, then evolution really isn’t any better than creationism. Some postmodern types are willing to bite the bullet and accept that implication, but most relativists just haven’t thought the point through.
The dispute between text and ritual actually has its 19th-century antecedents, particularly in the dispute over the priority between ritual and myth. In any case, while I think that the “19th-c. liberals” still have much to teach us (Schleiermacher’s critique of the cultured despisers of religion is as relevant as ever), I’m not sure I want to go as far as you here. Yes, “contextualizing” everything muddies the waters and makes it hard to see useful distinctions. And I’d even agree w/ Justin that there’s an interesting and possibly pertinent correlation between the rise of relativism and the de-emphasis upon texts (wouldn’t McLuhan have said the same?) I think I see what you mean about populism, too. But, as you know, I am more of a fan of Wittgenstein than you, and there’s a place for the attention to the vague edges of “worldviews” and the messy way these things inform our whole lives. Moreover, “more [study] on ritual and less on philosophy” does not have to mean an abdication of rigor or ignoring what Newman called the “grammar of assent.” My argument that some doctrine is meant to be understood in the context of liturgy doesn’t intend to throw over doctrine; it just says that doctrine is more than the sentences: it’s the posture, the rhythm, the body-memory.
I blogged about Wilber lately, and my reaction to your post is making me re-think my presentation; the pre-rational (e.g. lentils) and the trans-rational (e.g. liberation) are perhaps more closely linked than Wilber would say. (Or then again, maybe he’d say that the doctrine of liberation is every bit as “pre-” as lentils are.) All this notwithstanding, I agree with much of your post, especially in that it seems to me you’re pointing out a significant sort of orientalism in western academe, which collapses “Asian philosophy” with “religious studies.”
I think it’s fair to argue that traditions are more than just the content of the words, even when one is trying to learn from them and not just about them. Especially there’s a necessity for practice: wisdom needs to be applied. (Thus my recent thoughts on prayer as well.)
So I think we probably agree more than we disagree. My defence of textual study is shaped in the context of academic religious studies – especially the study of Asian religions – where the populist criterion is the norm, where what’s most worthy of study is what the most people do. Constructive studies of ritual or practice, though they do exist, are even rarer than constructive studies of texts – understandably, because academic work, by its own nature, is the production of texts and not of practice. (At least, not spiritually beneficial practice.)
Pardon my late response, Amod. I suspect we do agree substantially. The question at issue (which you get at in your follow-up post) is what the truth is in a tradition. This can be entered into via practice; but if one is just studying about the practice (what Vasudha Narayanan’s colleague characterized as ‘anthropological stuff’), it risks being just a kind of nostalgia. It is far easier to study texts, and one could even argue that the written text is designedly an attempt to provide a portable ‘entry way’ into the tradition that could give access to the truth even in the absence of the rest of the ‘apparatus’ of practices. Of course, it is also easier to study about texts, but that is because it is easier to “study about” in general.
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Vasudha was likely being mischievious. Hinduism is a broad church moving from the lentil-counters to mantra-counters and on to satyam, jnanam, anantam Brahma. ( There are only 3 temples to Brahma in India I think. ) Was she mocking the fact that Westerners take up the most esoteric form generally? It is also convenient to teach that which you best understand yourself.
Well, this is part of why I don’t like using the term “Hinduism” except for a relatively narrowly defined modern movement. I don’t think it is a broad church, so much as no church at all – just as (say) the various traditions of the Roman Empire, including Christianity and Manicheanism as well as Stoicism and Epicureanism, did not together constitute any sort of church.
Forgot the scare quotes. Maybe there ought to be a special mark for ‘to be taken under advisment
it seems to me that your beef should be with the field of philosophy, not religious studies. in Buddhist studies, at least, I certainly don’t see any danger of “anthropological stuff” taking over, and you can rest assured that one’s personal experience with religious practice basically still has no place in the field. I find it problematic to argue for text as a doorway to the truth on par with the “apparatus” as a whole, expecially for students in a field that generally demands a closely delimited mode of engagement with text. And an “apparatus” of some kind most likely created that text, and a whole lot of lives have been devoted to developing and refining many many apparati–surely some of them belonged to people as intelligent and moral as we, and their devotion to such undertakings can be assumed to have been done with good reason. Just the term “apparatus” kind of pisses me off, actually. But I agree with you about “Studying about,” or “learning about” instead of “learning from.” But I happen to think that the apparatus is something we have a lot to learn from, especially given the seeming total lack of apparati in the western philosophy of recent history.
Andrew~~
you wrote, “I find it problematic to argue for text as a doorway to the truth on par with the “apparatus” as a whole”
I find this quite problematic too! I certainly don’t think that the “text-as-door” is “on a par” with the tradition as a whole; only, as I wrote, that one might “argue that the written text is designedly an attempt to provide a portable ‘entry way’ into the tradition.” I don’t say that this attempt works very well, only that this might be one of the motives for entrusting a wisdom tradition (which after all is famously about an experience that cannot be got from books) to writing at all. My remark was meant to be speculative.
I wavered about the term “apparatus” and was not at all sure about it; the fact that it irked you validates my suspicion that it probably just won’t do. I’m on record as holding that rites, liturgy, and much less formal “practices” are essential to understanding what a tradition means and is (I hold that outside of the Christian liturgy, for instance, one can “interpret” the Bible but one is not inhabiting the story as the shapers of the tradition intended). I might even say— at the risk of sounding far more reactionary than I hope I am— that what you note as “the seeming total lack of apparati in the western philosophy of recent history” is a grave index of the cultural shallows of our times. (I just noted the death of Pierre Hadot, who points to the difference between ancient philosophical practice and modern philosophical discourse.) While I do not make a rigorous distinction between philosophy and religious studies in my own projects (and on some days consider the distinction to be “part of the problem”), perhaps you are right that my complaint is more about the “field” of philosophy– at least as currently configured in universities.
Hi Andrew, and welcome to the blog! I think philosophy as a discipline is pretty blameless on this particular score. (Or were you talking to Skholiast about that?) Buddhist studies, on the other hand, is even worse than most religious-studies fields on this question. True, anthropology as such is less of an emphasis; but to consider Buddhist ideas with an eye to truth is largely taken as anathema, as I mentioned in my followup post: the excitement is with people like Greg Schopen, who can barely imagine the idea that Buddhism might have something to teach us.
As for the role of personal experience: that’s a somewhat different question. As I see it, personal experience has a significantly greater role in the kind of philosophical study I’m advocating than it does in any of the kinds of study (historical, text-critical, anthropological, sociological) privileged in contemporary religious studies and especially Buddhist studies.
my apologies for such a conflated reply–I am having trouble now parsing it myself. The point (I think) i was trying to make about this being a problem with philosophy departments as much or more than religious studies departments was related to Asian philosophy not being taken seriously in the former, as noted by skholiast as “a significant sort of orientalism in western academe, which collapses “Asian philosophy” with “religious studies.”” But I know much less about the field of philosophy than than I do of Buddhist Studies (which I commonly abbreviate as “BS” for a reason), and I completely agree with your last comment, Amod, with regard to that field. But I wonder if there isn’t something lucky, in the long run, in that seemingly unfortunate collapsing–from my perspective as a meditation practitioner and a self-identifying Buddhist in a lineage of Tibetan derivation, I am very cautiously hopeful that BS can eventually grow to accommodate truth-seeking and even personal experience, and, because of its engagement with other kinds of study of religion, will actually be a more suitable home for Buddhist philosophy than a philosophy department, given my evaluation of western philosophy as experience and practice deficient. Of course, what I’d really prefer is to see practice become a part of western philosophy, but I’m not sure what that would look like. I think the unacknowledged other player in this is the field of psychology (and neuroscience, etc) and its current love affair with meditation, an engagement I trust about as far as I can throw an MRI machine, with regard to doing justice to philosophy. I think this all points to the complications of western thought encountering a very different way of generating and grounding knowledge and truth, one more embedded in personal experience and therefore systems of medicine or simply the body, thereby necessarily dragging all three disciplines into the fray. I certainly don’t mean to say that this is some unbridgeable cultural gap, but simply that we haven’t figured out how to work with it yet. And I’d like to think that the academy might have something to learn about this process from Yavanayana Buddhists, who are currently engaged in a great deal of trail and error testing on a personal level.
Wow, Andrew – you seem to have read my mind! As it turns out I took up several of the topics here (what practice would look like in Western philosophy, the connections of philosophy and religion with natural science) in my latest post, from yesterday. Perhaps we should continue this conversation there?