Potential Frameworks for a Rhetorical Approach to Practiced Religion
I. The Study of Religion in the 1800s
A. "religion is a false science"
B. Cultural Evolution
1. physical evolution
2. more complex forms
C. study of religion in rhetoric as "instrumental"
1. possibility of keeping own faith out of scholarship
2. possibility of focusing scholarship on issues that are most important to others of the same faith
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Discussion Point
How (and/or who) do we imagine our scholarship addressing as its audience?
What do we hope those who live the faith we study might get from our work?
What do we hope those who are atheist or from another faith might get from our work?
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II. Durkheim's "Ideal" Approach to Religion
A. human phenomenon that contains:
1. the division of sacred and profane
.B. Division of Sacred/Profane as First Category
1. "At the roots of our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life." (21)
a. "They are like the framework of our intelligence." (22)
b. "The general conclusion of this book which the reader has before him is that religion is something eminently social." (22)
c. social interaction
i. the first category
ii. creates the possibility of all categories
.III. The Ideal as the Sacred
1. to be shared, must be general
A. reality is experienced as individuals
a. general model unites
B. individual idiosyncrasies
a. rites function to reset the ideal
b. create time and space for adapting
C. same with space, humanity, personality, justice,
a. divine or Ideal
i. society imagines what it should be
D. always held separate from the mundane
a. what it should be
i. the sacred is that what is separate
E. "external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having an intrinsic value" (463)
a. through actions which "place ourselves within their [the sacred] sphere of action" (464)
F. ritual actions
G. "experimental proofs of his beliefs" (464)
a. taught and reinforced
i. supersedes individual perceptions
ii. a corrective
b. abstract concept of Time
c."All religions are true."
i. "Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory." (464)
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IV. The Necessity of the Sacred
1. "This reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious experience is made, is society." (465)
A. the collection of attitudes instilled by society
a. beliefs are created and maintained
i. a particular human psyche
ii. experience is organized
iii. society creates humans in its own image
B. Religion is the institutionalization of that creative process through which society generates its people.
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2. through actions
A. groups of individuals doing things
a. "It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before all else an active cooperation. The collective idea and sentiments are even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established. Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source." (465-6)
i. society is the sacred
B. religion and science are doing the same thing
A. "Religion sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language which does not differ in nature from that employed by science; the attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize them. We have seen that the essential ideas of the scientific are of religious origin."
B. speculation
C. "We have said that there is something eternal in religious: it is the cult and the faith." (476)
A. both reason to do rites and must do rites to understand and explain reasons for faith
B. society creates its own understanding
C. science can never fully replace this complete understanding
3. "Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life cannot wait. The theories of which are destined to make men live and act are therefore obliged to pass science and complete it prematurely." (479)
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Discussion Point
What advantages to this analytic view of the sacred do you see?
What disadvantages?
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William James, 1842 - 1910
V. James' Pragmatic Approach to Religion
1. doctor and teacher
A. human cognition
a. "psychiatrist"
VI. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
1. interviews
2. part of the human experience
A. is not "fake."
B. refers to something with is very real but impossible to place into a single linguistic framework
3. The Varieties
A. focused on individual experience and belief
a. doesn't deal with
i. group aspects of religion
ii theology
iii religious institutions
B. counter point to Durkheim.
4. the value of a phenomenon is separate from its existential nature
A. George Fox experienced visions
i. schizophrenic
ii. reject his experiences as encounters with the divine
ii. theological claims
iii. "medical materialism"
iv. Without regard to it being possibly a medically classifiable phenomenon, it may still carry real value as religious experience.
VII. "The Reality of the Unseen"
1. "Such is the ontological imagination, and such is the convincingness of what it brings to birth. Unpicturable beings are realized, and realized with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination" (71).
A. convincingly real things
2. "They are as convincing to those who have them as any direct sensible experiences can be, and they are, as a rule, much more convincing than results established by mere logic ever are" (72).
A. beyond any abstract logic
a. authority for belief
3. "The truth is that in the metaphysical and religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favor of the same conclusion. Then indeed, our intuitions and our reason work together, and great world-ruling systems, like of the Buddhist or of the Catholic philosophy, may grow up" (73).
A. religious systems
a. created after or adjusted to our "impression" or experiences
b. not the other way around
4. "Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is better that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact" (73).
Discussion Point
What role does the "irrational" play in public discourse?
What role should it (or should it not) play?
Contextuallizing Discursive Fragments
I. . . . any representation of a real person “is intrinsically incomplete. And worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is” (Geertz s . . .29).
A. mystery
B. sublime
Clifford Geertz, 1926 - 2006 (pictured in 1999)
I. Religion as World View
1. "Whether it be formulated as manna, as Brahma, or as the Holy Trinity, that which is set apart as more than mundane is inevitably considered to have far-reaching implications for the direction of conduct" (421).
A. extends Durkheim
B. religion is the sacred
C. sacred is the non-profane
D. upon the conduct
2. "The powerfully coercive 'ought' is felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual 'is,' and in such a way religion grounds the most specific requirements of human action in the most general contexts of human existence" (421).
A. Durkheim .
B. Geertz emphasizes: "coercive" force
3.organization of cognitive categories, forces behaviors
4. rituals transmit and reinforce
a. "ethos" (values) and "worldview" (perceived existential reality)
b. "The ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life implied by the actual state of affairs which the world-view describes, and the world-view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic expression" (422).
B. religion "conserves the fund of general meanings in terms of which each individual interprets his experience and organizes his conduct" (422)
II. Religious System
1. composed of a cluster of sacred symbols woven into some sort of ordered whole
A. "Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetics and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive normative import" (422).
B. religion supports proper
a. common sense
C. acting outside such conduct is not so much evil as insane or stupid because it is so clearly wrong;
D. the reality of things as envisioned by the religious system supports clearly defined actions
E. or the world-view designates the ethos of a group which share beliefs
III. The Persistence of Mystery
1. "By fusing ethos and world-view, [religion] gives to a set of social values what they perhaps most need to be coercive: an appearance of objectivity" (427).
2. "The view of man as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal which has become increasingly popular both in the social sciences and in philosophy over the past several years, opens up a whole new approach not only to the analysis of religion as such but to the understanding of the relations between religion and values. The drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs" (436).
A. "attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand."
1. How does Geertz idea of humans as "symbolizing" suggest rhetorical theory?
2. If, as K. Burke famously suggests, symbols are "strategies for encompassing situations," what do sacred symbols do? In what different ways might rhetorical analysis seek to account for this power of the sacred?