Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Whither the Western Sacred?

    Polytheistic Prologue

    Xenophanes’ famous claim that “if cattle, horses, and lions had hands, they would draw and sculpt gods who looked like themselves,” can equally well be understood as a revelation that the appearances we lend to gods to make them like ourselves are a tacit recognition that what we call [a] god cannot be attributed a form at all, that it is not that we are ignorant of God’s appearance, but that [a] God, as an/the embodiment of the sacred, has no physical appearance—or existence. God’s essential presence to us is through language, above all, imperatives, and his commands are dominantly negative, thou shalt not… Xenophanes’ aphorisms make clear that he understood that the fact that we may imagine God as a man with a beard is wholly independent of His fundamental reality, which is very simply, as Hillel might have said, to make us remember the Golden Rule.

    Thus the Greeks had seen through the false meaningfulness of the gods’ imaginary incarnation, but by giving the gods a “superhuman” form had made them rivals of ourselves, as demonstrated in Iliad 24:525-6, where Achilles laments to Priam:

    Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.

    In a word, the Gods are our (happy) doubles, a notion not without relevance, but whose anthropological significance is much more sharply expressed by the “absurdity” of the Crucifixion: the sacred cannot be our victorious rival; on the contrary, it would take on human form only in order to share our mortality.

    After all, in the originary hypothesis, the sacred embodies the transcendent will of the human community to preserve it from mimetic rivalry, and the idea of transferring this rivalry to that between gods and men, however useful it may be in allowing Achilles to transcend the enmity of the Trojan War in returning Hector’s body to Priam, scarcely provides a solid foundation for the human social order. It is a short distance from Achilles’ lament to Gloucester’s in King Lear:

    As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods:
    They kill us for their sport. (IV, 1)

    where the gods are not merely blamed for being immortal when we are not, but for sadistically reminding us of our mortality.

    Xenophanes’ revelation allows us to understand the self-consciousness of Greek polytheism as grasping its mimetic nature, yet not seeing this as problematic—although, as we know, the sacred exists precisely to defer mimetic rivalry. No doubt deflecting this rivalry onto that between humans and gods is conducive, as in the Iliad example, to human solidarity; it is of course significant that Achilles’ sympathy for Priam has as its object his son’s mortality. But to define the gods as our rivals is to deny their role as agents of the sacred, in which their status as models must be devoid of resentment. This is in effect an autocritique of polytheism that heralds its decline, and its replacement in the Axial Age by monotheism focused on the unique divinity’s role as lawgiver, that is, regulator of interhuman moral relations.

    Abrahamic Religion

    The paradox that is at the root of the attempts to think the sacred that we call “religion” is that deferral has no subject. It is a suspension of the subject as the doer of actions, and our invention of god(s) as the subject enforcing this suspension cannot be effected without paradox, whether we fall into it or deliberately foreground it—as Christianity itself, in its rejection of the quasi-Tertullianian credo quia absurdum, refuses to admit openly. We worship the divinity by affirming its necessity, which we know we cannot demonstrate as other than a need. And with the first inklings of the universe’s infinities, Pascal understood this as an earthly wager, whose potentially infinite payoff is as close as we can come to understanding its value.

    If I were now at the beginning of my career, I would have had time to study this question in depth, and no doubt to write a book such as the 1981 The Origin of Language, which had the effect of discouraging anyone who might have found my never-refuted hypothetical syntactic progression from ostensive through imperative to declarative sufficiently credible to warrant further investigation. But at present, the best service I can provide my ideas is to offer them via these Chronicles, in the context of what is now known as generative anthropology—about which I should remind the reader that I was forced to accept the Chomskian generative in the place of what I had intended to call “genetic,” translating the French génétique that, unfortunately unlike the English equivalent, is not necessarily connected to the biological gene.

    The little I have learned about Buddhism has been—as it clearly was for Sartre a century ago—a liberating experience for a Westerner whose culture has taught him to judge all experiences with respect to the instrumentalities of the ego: what can I do with this? Thus in my talk in Nagoya in 2016, where I compared Zeno’s paradoxes with those of the Buddhist Nagarjuna, I noted that for Zeno, the paradoxes of motion are really paradoxes of notation; Achilles never meets the tortoise because the infinite series never ends, except that of course it does if one understands how to sum an infinite series—which was not at all Nagarjuna’s point.

    But the case of Sartre is more telling: we need only compare his terminology with that of Hegel, whose analysis of the subject he was following. For Hegel the difference between the animal consciousness that grasps its content “in itself” (an sich, en-soi) and the human whose content is “for itself” (für sich, pour-soi) has no extra-mental counterpart, the reflexive element implicit in the für remains, as it were, in the brain of the subject. Whereas Sartre’s notion of the pour-soi, influenced as it was by his conversations in 1923 with Japanese philosopher Kuki Shuzo (see Chronicle 806), unambiguously conceives this contrast as opposing constraint to freedom, which Sartre metaphorizes as an “empty space” (néant) between the subject and his object—the internalization of the real spatial distance that permits deferral and that establishes the scenic space of human cultural communication.

    Returning to Western civilization, it is along similar lines that I would seek to explain the difference between Judaism and Christianity. Hebrew monotheism is unlike the kind of abstract one-ness that one finds in Plato and Aristotle, where the Homeric Gods are no longer taken seriously as representing the sacred, only to be replaced with an abstraction to which, significantly, no prayers can be said and on which no collective ceremonies are centered. It is the cultural specificity of the Hebrew God, whose name cannot be pronounced (ostensively) but only read (intensively), that has made the Hebrews and their descendants the object of history’s most long-lasting, and as we have recently witnessed, still-virulent resentment. To accuse the Jews of being “the chosen people” illustrates the blindest form of mimetic rivalry, for if the non-Jews wish to reject the Jewish God, the Jews will have no objections. But the fact is that the other great religious movements of the West, Christianity and Islam, are both dependent on the original Hebrew intuition of the sacred—the former, openly and avowedly, and the latter ambivalently at best with a great proneness to denial, as the pronouncements of Mahmoud Abbas concerning Jerusalem and the Hebrew Temples so perfectly illustrate.

    Leaving Islam aside, it seems to me that now that Roman Catholics, along with many Protestants, are willing to see the Jews as “the elder brothers” of Christianity, Jews can likewise regard their younger brothers and sisters with not just affectionate tolerance but admiration—that of the elders for the creativity of the “younger generation” in their daring introduction two millennia ago of the incarnate sacred—the divine—into the world of what was then today. Whence my fondness for credo quia absurdum, however Tertullian really worded it.

    Not that we need say that the Christian understanding of the sacred is superior to the Hebrew, but in Hegelian terms, it is clearly a posterior development, a historical/dialectical transcendence of a kind. Whether it represents an advance or a deformation cannot be determined through conceptual analysis; whether it is ultimately more faithful to humanity’s needs can only be determined “at the end of history.” The millennial survival of the “tribal” community of Jews along with the “global” one of Christians indeed suggests that both models are necessary. On the one hand, Christianity might not have emerged had Judaism been willing or able to transcend the boundaries of “tribal” peoplehood; on the other, the enduring phenomenon of antisemitism demonstrates that rather than the Jews denying the legitimacy of Christianity, the hostility has always been fundamentally in the other direction, such that it has always been the Jews who are felt to pose a danger, even a mortal one, to Christianity, rather than the reverse.

    Indeed, now that the Jews have a real army at their disposal, the present identification of the victimary Left with the Palestinians is both an extension and a validation of this judgment. In sum, the worldly triumph of Christianity has always been haunted by the fear that Jesus’ mediation is less powerful than God’s original covenant with the Jews, given that the Jewish people has survived for two millennia in the face of Christian dominance.

    The current renewal of Islamic antisemitism can be traced to Mufti Al-Husseini’s wartime assimilation of Hitler’s exterminationist policy. The Mufti’s virulent antisemitism replaced traditional Islam’s relatively tolerant dhimmi system at the birth of Israel, in response to which the Jews were expelled from the countries of the Muslim Middle East. For Islam to have followed the modernizing of Atatürk would have been effectively to abandon its own sacred for a secularized version of Western Judeo-Christianity, thereby reducing Islam itself to a new form of dhimmitude, whereas by reviving Hitler’s policy, the Muslim Brotherhood and other partisans of jihad have renewed the Muslim dream of ultimately reigning over the entire world.

    In contrast, the West’s current indulgence of Islamic Jew-hatred is a prolongation of victimary thinking, the product of the Left’s epistemology of resentment, in the light of which Islamists are happy to identify with the Palestinian victims of “genocide” in the context of their desire for conquest. In thus fostering the “red-green alliance,” the post-liberal West shows itself a more useful ally to Islamism than Hitler, who ultimately failed to eliminate the Jews. The strength of Islamic resentment is such that it is happy to accept (in the persons of the Palestinians) the victimary role in which their European supporters place it, provided they hamper and eventually destroy the Jewish state.

    Epilogue: The Failure of the Sacred?

    A significant nuance has been added to this equation by the post-cold war transformation of the West’s military doctrine in the wake of the emergence of nuclear weapons. In the January 2025 issue of Mosaic, Ran Baratz’s “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military?” (https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2025/01/whats-wrong-with-the-postmodern-military/ [available only to subscribers]) explains with admirable clarity not only why Israel, after defeating several Arab armies in 6 days in 1967, has not been able to defeat Hamas in a year and a half—but as well the US’s failures to achieve real victory in any of the wars it has waged since WWII. As the aim of war has been deviated from victory to deterrence, raids have replaced the occupation of territory, allowing in the present case Hamas to return to areas from which it had been cleared and by recruiting fresh troops renew the conflict. It is indeed amazing that the obvious conclusions Baratz draws in this article have still not been accepted by Western armies despite the series of embarrassing failures of their military expeditions even when their adversaries did not possess nuclear weaponry.

    What Baratz does not do is draw a connection between this postmodern substitution of dissuasion for victory and, not simply the obsession with avoiding nuclear war, but what can only be called the fear of victory. Some of the quotes he cites from, for example, Benny Gantz, reflect a clear need to distance himself from the “war is hell” attitude that had always dominated the battlefield. Thus Gantz describes what follows a raid: “And when you come back you bring the guys to sing with singers at night.” It is hard to accept that these courageous and patriotic Israeli soldiers are led by men whose minds have been so softened by postmodern liberalism.

    No doubt the ultimate source of this softening is the fear that, whether or not relevant to each specific case, the existence of “ultimate weapons” risks provoking the extinction of our species—a fear that we should hope will not be given its ultimate test by allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb.

    Which leads me to a final reflection: the Hegelian, if not the Marxist, dialectic of history, functions on the tacit premise that it will continue indefinitely, at least in terms of the human life-span. The solar system will eventually disintegrate, but in a time-frame virtually infinite in relation to human history, so that we can take for granted that our descendants will have had enough time to devise a solution. But the idea that a decision made minimally by a single human being might set off a conflict that could lead to our species’ extinction is a problem that exceeds the capacity of the sacred as we know it. We have by now forgotten the drills in which my generation practiced crouching under our school desks in response to sirens presumably announcing the onset of nuclear war.

    In this context, the fact that even the Israeli army, so brave and competent, has lost its confidence in the power of genuine military victory to break the will of the enemy and permit the wounds of war to heal, is a most ominous sign, one that I fervently hope does not signal the beginning of the end of our species and of the sense of the sacred that has maintained it.

    For Baratz may not put it in these terms, but the terrible blindness of the Israeli military to the determination of their enemy that was revealed on October 7, 2023 cannot help but put in doubt the capability of the Western sacred—that of the three Abrahamic religions and the Western and Middle-Eastern societies they created—to control and protect humanity’s destiny.

  • Lucien Goldmann’s “The Hidden God” and its significance for GA

    As mentioned in the previous Chronicle, my interest in paradox and in what Goldmann called the “tragic” worldview (vision du monde) goes back to my years at Johns Hopkins and to writings situated within the corpus of what was called at the time “French Theory.” Although Goldmann was not present at the famous Hopkins conference in 1966 that was its original catalyst, he was a significant presence in the US as well as in France. Goldmann was present at my doctoral oral at Hopkins, and when I taught at Indiana University from 1967-69, he served there for a semester as Visiting Professor. Sadly, he passed away prematurely in 1970 at the age of 57.

    Rereading Le Dieu caché, which I had not opened since the 1970s, was an enlightening experience. It is a brilliant book, of remarkable rigor and thoroughness. Yet the fact that for Goldmann the “tragic” mode of thought that he attributes to Pascal and Racine—and subsequently to Kant and Goethe—is viewed in relation to an overall neo-Marxist perspective very much in the spirit of the later work of Hungarian Georg Lukács, that is, a perspective in which the “end of history” envisioned by Marx and his disciples (which many thought, ironically enough, had rather been realized with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991), provided an overall perspective that can clearly no longer be sustained.

    This does not prevent Goldmann’s analysis of these works and of the worldview they embody from being rigorous and enlightening, but it does require us to reconceive it in a historical context where we can no longer imagine Communism, nor indeed any other mode of social organization, as defining the “end of history.” Above all, this notion of a worldview implies that social groups in early modern and modern society evolved more or less coherent understandings not simply of their expected career paths, but of their lives’ fulfillment of the requirements of the sacred—in Christian societies, the degree to which they could feel assured of salvation as opposed to damnation. Goldmann’s interest in the “tragic” reflects a problematic moment in the socio-economic functions of a social group, the noblesse de robe, which was opposed to the traditional higher nobility, the noblesse d’épée, descended from the military leaders of the past. These nobles of middle-class origins, engaged in legal and governmental functions, were with the progression of Louis XIV’s “absolute” monarchy in the process of losing their privileges and being replaced by functionaries wholly dependent on the king.

    The tragic worldview of the Jansenists, among whom were Pascal and Racine, reflected this sense of déclassement, leading the more extreme members of the group to abandon “the world” altogether, and Pascal in particular to conceive Christian life in paradoxical terms, as (in contrast to Judaism) requiring belief in what could never be demonstrated but which our only hope was to “bet on” as our chance for salvation. Goldmann sees this tragic worldview as a major step in the direction of the “dialectical” thinking inaugurated by Hegel and given its “materialist” concreteness by Marx and his followers. And indeed, despite the breakup of the USSR, nations following versions of the Soviet formula, China in particular, remain in contention for world leadership today, in a curious “red-green” semi-alliance with Islamism to overturn the Judeo-Christian West’s longstanding hegemony.

    How then should we understand the tragic worldview in the context of GA? By viewing the tragic, the worship of the “hidden God,” as an ancestor of Marxism, Goldmann might be thought to be suggesting that the same paradoxicality that was central to Pascal’s thought is, or should be, at the center of Marxism, which would certainly require a good deal of dialectics to explain its connection to the dogmatic, tyrannical politics that has characterized every society Marxism has inspired. But on the contrary, for Goldmann and all Marxists, dialectical materialism presumably resolves the paradox of the tragic by defining a praxis guaranteed to lead to the classless utopia of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”…

    As I understand it, the paradox discovered by Pascal as implicit in Christianity is rather the source of the Western maximalization of personal/economic freedom that has maintained the socio-economic leadership of the world since the Renaissance. But there is no guarantee that the level of disorder that the individual freedoms of Western-style nations tend to inspire, although a stimulus to individual creativity, can maintain itself in the postmodern context of increasingly “intelligent” machines in competition with the more disciplined autocracies that surround it. As a result, we still remain in the paradoxical world of Pascal, betting on what might be called our postmodern version of Judeo-Christianity against the more highly concentrated efforts driven by strict top-down control, in the hope that the future development of AI will never be able to abolish the advantage of the fallible but “dialectical” human psyche.

    Given Goldmann’s recognition of the open-ended nature of Pascal’s paradoxical view of our place in the world, I have no real quarrel with his reading of the Pensées and Pascal’s other writings, save that he views them in a “dialectical” perspective of which Marxism represents the fulfillment. For me, this sense of a predefined historical trajectory is ultimately incompatible with what I consider an appropriate reading of literary/artistic works in general, and tragedy in particular. Goldmann’s quasi-sacralization of the “tragic” character—implying the identification of this role with a future synthesis that transcends the paradox in which the character was caught and destroyed—is an artifact of his “dialectical” philosophy of history.

    And in particular, concerning Phèdre, as discussed in Chronicle 843, although Goldmann admires this masterpiece as much as I do, his analysis of the play significantly avoids discussing the passage that seems to me without question the high point of the tragedy: the monologue in which the heroine, after noting Hippolyte’s resemblance to his father, proceeds to substitute him for Thésée in his descent into the Labyrinth, then Phèdre herself for Ariane as the bearer of the thread that will allow him to return from its depths, then imagines herself as accompanying him into the Labyrinth, and finally, forgetting their assigned task, converting what had been the monster’s lair into a trysting place in which she both finds and loses herself in her love for Hippolyte.

    Goldmann quotes only a few lines from the beginning of this speech and deliberately omits any mention of the Labyrinth’s imaginary transformation. And as if to justify this omission, Goldmann insists throughout that the tragic heroine embodies an authenticity in attempting to realize her paradoxical desire that puts her on a higher ontological level than the merely “worldly” characters, whose inconsistent lives make them so to speak figures of situation comedy.

    Clearly Goldmann’s notion of tragic paradox is at odds with the spectator’s experience. No doubt Phèdre is of a different intensity and significance from the other characters, and in this sense, closer to the sacred, but, in contrast to Pascal’s infinitely deferred bet, the tragic hero’s quest for immediate satisfaction must always fail. Goldmann is aware that Phèdre isn’t what we would consider a “good person,” but he takes her literary superiority as the equivalent of an ontological superiority to the non-tragic characters, who lack the special charm of tragic paradox. What fascinates us in Phèdre, nowhere more than in her labyrinth speech, is the passion that transforms a hiding place for evil into its opposite, the extremes of both destruction and redemption both needing to be kept hidden from the everyday world. But when in Act 5: 3, Aricie says to Thésée that, although he has killed many monsters, he is still leaving one alive, the spectator cannot miss—nor reject—this clear reference to Phèdre, whose banishment of Hippolyte through the agency of her servant Oenone, as we will soon discover, has brought about his violent death.

    No doubt the Jansenists disdained “the world” of everyday life, but I cannot accept Goldmann’s judgment that when in the final scene Thésée reestablishes order, pledges to bury his son and to adopt Aricie, Hippolyte’s beloved, to take on the role of his daughter, we experience this as “an abrupt passage from tragedy to what, in itself, would be a drama, but being so close to the tragic universe, is on the border of comedy and farce” (p. 440). On the contrary, the sacrifice of the tragic hero, here, Phèdre’s suicide that ends the play, allows real life to go on; those who seek to embody, to live out paradox are false idols, for the audience as well as their fellow characters—if not for the critics! I am sure that Racine would have found Goldmann’s reading the height of perversity, as though the esthetic value of Phèdre (and not just that of Phèdre) were the equivalent of a moral value. We may pity Phèdre and wish that her paradox could somehow have found a worldly resolution—a wish whose impossibility of fulfillment is the very substance of tragedy—but in the Jansenist worldview as described by Pascal our only chance is to wager on the infinitesimal chance of redemption.

    And it is in this perspective that, once more, the minimal starting point of GA allows us to avoid turning the paradoxical nature of the sacred’s relationship to the “objective” world into an ethic. The greatness of Christianity is no doubt defined by its insistence on the paradoxical affirmation of its spiritual truth as objective reality, but the temptation for us mere mortals to see paradox as transcending reality itself must always be resisted. To aspire to bring together good and evil so as to abolish the latter’s presence in the world can only be done one step at a time; the tragic figure, in seeking to precipitate their synthesis, can only destroy the good along with the evil.

    If we merely recall humanity’s point of departure in deferral, we will never lose sight of why such deferral—of desire that seeks immediate satisfaction in its object independently of the needs of the community, so powerfully illustrated in Phèdre’s labyrinth fantasy—remains always necessary if the act of fulfilling one’s desire is to be moral, fulfilling the need of the community as well as of the desiring individual. The imaginary beauty of the reconciliation of evil with good can exist only on the scene of culture, where reality is deferred by its representation; that is the substance of Aristotle’s Poetics.

    In the most simple terms, the sacred is the human community’s sense of what prevents conflict among its members from endangering its coherence and consequently its survival. It is experienced variously by each individual, but it motivates the creation of religions, which insist that the scenic element of the human be reinforced and shown to lead to communal unity.

    The scenic portrayal of fictions: the arts, and most particularly, literature, offer imaginary utopias of various kinds that lead, in the broadest sense, from disorder to order, whether or not to the satisfaction of the characters. The originary model of this “narrative” process is the originary scene itself, as the first example of the establishment of a human order, and even if the tragic protagonist must suffer death or expulsion, the end result is a reestablishment of order.

    I would trace GA back to Pascal because his conception of the bet as the ultimate “proof” of the existence of God, or in other terms, the meaningfulness and presumed eternality of human life, is in effect the concretization in each human life of the meaningfulness of the survival of the human community. As he said, il faut parier: we must make the bet, since our continued existence as a species, in which the différance enforced by our common sense of the sacred has permitted/obliged us to create a scene of representation on which we use the signs of language to refer to potential objects of desire and hopefully to organize their distribution and eventually their production in the interests of our community, depends on the perpetuation and flourishing of this scenic structure for the good of the human community. Pascal sees this as a bet on the existence of God; but the way in which a human-like mind can be considered to preside over the universe is ultimately a model for our action, a way of judging in what ways our acts can be seen as conducive to the success of our species.

    Western civilization as a transcultural phenomenon began with the adoption, which I see as the discovery, of monotheism—the unity of the sacred, with the One God as a guarantee of the unity of human morality. Christianity adds to its Jewish basis the anthropological revelation that the sacred is not other than, but merely the extreme limit of the human, yet one we all bear within ourselves.

    This is why I will never forget (see Chronicles 530 and 834) Girard’s saying to me nous sommes tous fils de Dieu—we are all sons of God. As Pascal saw clearly, we are all embarqués, our very lives embody the pari, whether we like it or not. However differently we envision the embodiment of the sacred, its existence, as holding us together in the face of our rivalries, is what we must count on to assure at least the possibility of our survival.

    Whether this will serve to protect us against the violence of the cosmos is a different matter, although as I suggested in Chronicle 841, we will at least have the consolation of anticipating with some confidence the evolution of increasingly complex beings with increasing abilities to manipulate their environment, thus making it likely that whatever happens to humanity, it will have worthy successors who will some day discover and honor the memory of its greatness.

  • The Sacred and “Esthetic Paradox”

    The preceding “Pascalian” Chronicles (840, 841 and 842) exemplify paradoxical analogies of the sacred in the real world, something that Pascal himself did not state explicitly, yet illustrated by implication, as in the pari (bet) or in his separation of the esprit de finesse from the esprit de géométrie.

    It is a fundamental human intuition that a moral distance is incommensurable with a physical distance; if an object is sacred and cannot be touched, it is effectively at an infinite distance from us even if it is standing right in this room.

    And beginning with the originary event, human events of significance have in principle had as their goal a similar passage from the original state of blocked individual desire to that of communal sharing, whether in a truly collective activity such as a communal feast, or in an individual event that can be understood as a harmonious element in the construction of the human community, such as a wedding—where the groom and the bride form a single couple but one that sets an example for others and that is in principle expected to help produce the next generation of this community.

    In principle, individual desire should only seek fulfillment in such terms. Most of our daily acts do not oblige us to choose between our own satisfaction and that of our community, but a sufficient number do that we are constantly aware of the dictates of our conscience, as well as of the communal laws that spell out our duties and the society’s means of enforcing them.

    Culture and the sacred

    The cultural sphere is only understandable in terms of the sacred. The miraculous disappearance of an infinite distance is impossible in the real world, but in the world of culture, it is constantly replayed on the scenes of art, whether as an image to contemplate or as a story to follow to the end.

    Every work of art, even the most vulgar, celebrates a (sometimes perverse) version of the same closure that we experience at the end of a religious ritual, and that repeats the closure of the originary event, with the abolition of conflict in communal celebration. We take all this for granted to the point where we no longer bother to distinguish in kind between human culture and the learned behavior of animals: speaking, for example of animal “languages” rather than signal systems. Animals can learn to perform worldly tasks; all life consists in the performance of tasks, whatever the level of consciousness of the performer. But animals cannot follow, let alone tell, stories because they have no conception of the sacred, of the closure of the sacred drama that began with the gesture of appropriation that could not be completed without being deferred through the signs of language, of representation.

    That we spend a good portion of our lives following (and telling) stories that reach conclusions, not to speak of listening to (and performing) music that ends with resolution, or looking at (and drawing/painting) images whose closure, however imperfect, makes them momentarily for the spectator sacred objects, is an exclusive sign of our humanity, however much the physiological qualities of these acts have analogies in the animal world. Our trendily victimary mentality has made it difficult for us not merely to judge some civilizations as more advanced than others, but even to so judge our own species—to speak of human language as qualitatively different from animal communication systems seems to many to smack of a speciesism not far from racism.

    If generative anthropology can accomplish one thing, it is to oblige humanity to accept its différance—both for good and ill, for human crimes are desecrations, evil as no animal act can be.

    Culture and Paradox

    In my early essays on literary esthetics I sought to define the esthetic as paradoxical, and in 1977 published a volume of essays in French entitled Essais d’esthétique paradoxale. But on returning to these reflections many years later, I realized that the paradoxes I was seeking were analogous to those of Pascal, those that separate géométrie from finesse, and above all, the sacred from the profane.

    What is, after all, esthetic judgment? Beauty, like significance, is in the first place a quasi-synonym of sacredness, a category embodying a value judgment analogous to “the good,” which expresses the valuation of one’s conscience. The same can be said of the “true” when placed in parallel with “the good and the beautiful.”

    But truth has a (more common) logical sense; a “true” theorem is not sacred, it merely follows from the premises that define the field in which it operates. To put truth in parallel with the others is to refer to a value judgment rather than a logical category, as in the phrase “to thine own self be true.” The bottom line of all these qualities is that they are worthy of affirmation, of “worship” if one likes. Once this is recognized, there can be no possible controversy; but in our post-religious world, it has become difficult to assert these parallels, as if they were specifically dependent on religious belief.

    What makes the realm of the esthetic paradoxical is what makes paradoxical the contrast between the physical distance and the moral distance of a sacred object: the contrast between a measurable finite quantity and one wholly qualitative—a contrast which, as I have become aware in recent years, is more easily assimilated by Eastern than Western religions and cultures.

    No doubt human beauty has its physiological indices, according to which a beautiful human being can be considered objectively more “harmonious” than an average one. But these categories measure the mode of spectators’ reactions to this beauty, something very different from measuring someone’s height and weight. The workings of human desire are certainly worldly realities, but they cannot be understood independently of what we can, and perhaps should, call the soul of the humans who experience these desires.

    For even if a computer program were written to test our judgments of beauty whose results corresponded every time with what we consider the best human judgment, the two sides of the equation would have nothing in common; to say that some combination of the ratios of the length of a woman’s nose to the thickness of her lips and that between the distance between her eyes and the height of her cheekbones corresponds 100% of the time to expert judgments of her beauty would not permit us to define beauty any more precisely than it is today. Nor is it even appropriate to define it by the satisfaction it gives the spectator, not even if this satisfaction were inevitably accompanied by, e.g., the secretion of a certain hormone. Esthetic “pleasure” is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be separated entirely from its sacred source; at root, it is a moral pleasure, a sense that the harmony between the human world and that of the order of the universe has been satisfied. And “the true, the good, and the beautiful” are linked by the connection between all three and our vision of the human community’s survival and perpetuation—best summed up by the word sacred.

    None of this is new or mysterious, but it needs to be repeated in today’s intellectual environment in which quality is constantly reduced to quantity. The physical parameters of a phenomenon cannot be made to express its meaning, its significance—in a word, its sacrality, which exists only in the context of human culture.

    In consequence of what I now conceive as the necessary foregrounding of the category of the sacred, what I had earlier called “esthetic paradox” should really be seen as an effect of the tension between physical and moral distance, between objective worldly measures and those mediated by the sacred—ultimately, by moral value, value with respect to the survival of the human species and its transcendental world, in contrast to the wholly worldly nature of life before the coming of humanity.

    Let me illustrate this point by an analysis of a key passage in Phèdre, Jean Racine’s most famous play, the high point of 17th-century French classical theater. Phèdre is an adaptation of Euripides’ Phaedra, a play that the Roman Seneca had previously adapted in Latin.

    What I had called in my essay on Le Paradoxe de Phèdre (Nizet, 1975) to “differ differently,” différer différamment, referring to Phèdre’s culpable love for her stepson Hyppolite (which leads to the deaths of both) referred to Racine’s attempt to show, going beyond Euripides’ Phaedra and even Seneca’s, that Phèdre’s love for her stepson led her to transfigure in her mind the status of the Labyrinth as a prison for the Minotaur into an inverted paradise in which alone this forbidden love could be realized.

    Whence these verses in which Phèdre expresses the ultimate consequence of her love:

    Et Phèdre au Labyrinthe avec vous descendue
    Se serait avec vous retrouvée, ou perdue.

    And Phèdre having descended with you into the Labyrinth
    Would with you have found—or lost—herself.

    This are lines that Euripides could never have written, that reflect a Christian understanding of the human soul, where instead of an impersonal curse, Phèdre’s forbidden love for her stepson is both a sin and at the same time, a transgressive expression of erotic love as, in Nietzsche’s terms, Jenseits von Gut und Böse—beyond good and evil.

    Thus Theseus’s quest to eliminate the monstrous Minotaur as a threat to human civilization is transformed into its opposite. Phèdre’s speech does this line by line, first replacing Theseus by Hippolyte, then her sister Ariadne (who gave Theseus the thread that would allow him to enter and leave the Labyrinth) by herself, and finally herself taking the place of the hero, but not to kill the monster, but so to speak to become it, realizing in Phèdre’s imagination her quest to lose herself in what becomes for her a sacred space where her adulterous love for her stepson can be reconceived as innocent.

    Speaking in my professional capacity as a professor of French, I can only say that nothing in Western literature, not even in Shakespeare, expresses so sharply the paradoxicality of the sacred as the ultimate moral value that corresponds to the preservation of the human community, yet at the same time embodies the tragic aspiration of the individual human soul to transcend the limits of the community as it exists toward an ideal community that could accommodate even this desire—even the desire to commit adultery with her stepson, as pushing back yet farther the limits of the human.

    Which is, after all, what tragedy has always been about. The tragic hero/heroine’s “fatal flaw”-hamartia is that he or she is led by desire to seek to transcend the limits of human reality by defining this desire as sacred precisely because it is experienced as an—effectively diabolical—imperative. To my knowledge, Phèdre’s speech, which culminates in the passage I have described, is literature’s sharpest example of the moral inversion that results: the conversion of the labyrinth that shelters the diabolical Minotaur into a trysting place. What I had previously described as paradoxical is the result of the necessarily judgmental nature, not of the sacred itself, but of our individual access to it—there is nothing in the sacred as the expression of the good of the human species that can persuade one thus dominated by his or her sinful desire.

    And witnessing this makes us both recognize Phèdre’s sinfulness and at the same time pity her, the explicit and shocking contrast between her desire and the purpose of Theseus’ quest lending her a pathos beyond that of her Greek model that only the Christianization of Renaissance tragedy could realize. To call this “paradox” was not an error, but to abstract it from its sacred/moral context risked assimilating this tragedy of human desire into a mathematical exercise.

    Afterword: Readers interested in delving into the “Jansenist” background of both Pascal and Racine should read Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God: a study of tragic vision in the Pensees of Pascal and the tragedies of Racine. Trans. Philip Thody. London: Routledge, 1964; also available in paperback, Verso, 2016.

  • Pascal III: Géométrie and Finesse

    I have long had a special admiration for the French mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who understood better than any of the other pioneers of modern science and mathematics that the closure of knowledge was neither to be desired or feared, and who foresaw that the exploration of nature and the ever-more-subtle tools required to understand it would not, as Enlightenment rationalists and their progeny have continued to think, lead to a “theory of everything” that would exhaust the realm of knowledge of the natural world. Whence this third in a series of Chronicles paying homage to this classical master of paradox as the first true precursor—in spirit if not in detail—of Generative Anthropology.

    In this light, the evolution of my own thinking from The Origin of Language until today can be seen as an effort to reconcile the two domains of what Pascal called géométrie and finesse; the first, easily enough translated; the second, the home of the un-geometrical, what we might call the “intuitive,” but I think best understood as the intrinsically paradoxical realm of the sacred, which was most certainly, beyond the realm of geometry and its fellow sciences, this pious Jansenist’s principal preoccupation.

    On March 31, 2025, the conservative French daily Le Figaro published what we would call an op-ed by Laurent Alexandre, Olivier Babeau, and Alexandre Tsicopoulos entitled “La grande démission de l’intellect face à l’IA”: “The Great Abdication of the Intellect in the Face of AI.”

    After citing a study showing that 88% (!) of today’s British upper-school students write their papers with the help of ChatGPT, the authors point to the steady decline of European Pisa test scores. Thus “one already observes in certain professions a phenomenon of de-qualification: the intensive use of AI leads to the loss of certain skills that are no longer activated. Imagine what will be the case in the future when these skills will not even have been acquired.” And in conclusion, “the future that is emerging is closer to the plot of the 2006 film Idiocracy than to the flourishing of an advanced society.” (Idiocracy was a wonderful comedy in which two 21st-century humans were placed in suspended animation in a time capsule and woke up a few centuries later to discover themselves in a world where the machines did all the thinking, while the humans had become… what the film’s title suggests.)

    There is no doubt that the Figaro authors are posing a serious problem that will have to be faced up to by a carefully programmed modification of the tools of instruction. Having had the good fortune to retire before this latest disastrous innovation—following the already-disturbing move to online teaching occasioned by the pandemic of 2020—I can only commiserate with those now obliged to assign papers to be written in class (without cell phones or laptops), and shortly perhaps to pass their students through a detector on entering the classroom to prevent them from exchanging clandestine electronic signals.

    But the real point of this Chronicle remains nonetheless Pascalian. AI can surely defeat human intelligence in any algorithmic task, and its latest developments extend this ability into areas far broader than mathematical calculations or even the game of Go. But Pascal’s esprit de finesse, like his gambler’s decision to bet on God’s existence, is a product of a transcendence that cannot be reproduced in a machine, unless machines could be made to reproduce the very history embodied quite literally in our human flesh.

    The esprit de finesse depends on what we call insight, the discovery of a connection not previously made, and of which the esprit de géométrie is in principle incapable, because insight cannot be derived from the axiomatic system on which the latter depends for its “intelligence.”

    And this is true as much for the linguistic “intelligence” displayed by ChatGPT and its competitors as for the strictly mathematical calculations of traditional computers. The “wisdom” of interactive Large Language Model programs of this kind derives from recombining presumably reliable assertions from online reference material. The only connections they can make between statements must already be implicit in the vocabularies of the statements themselves; they have no capacity to discover new connections not already at least hinted at in their data bases. Whereas the insights of the esprit de finesse make use of human beings’ experiences not yet formulated as factual statements. Observing reality can lead me to discover new facts about reality in a way that observing previous statements about reality cannot.

    Given that what we have already learned about the material world suggests the truth of Pascal’s intuition of the two infinities: that we have not reached—and will quite likely never reach—the limit of smallness or largeness, either in time or in space, so that no algorithmic system can replace our continually improved observation of the natural world, which itself can never be definitively summed up by a set of equations. And whether or not there are elsewhere creatures other than ourselves capable of constructing scenes on which to model the real world through representations, this process is not reproducible within the cybernetic realm in its current state.

    So that for the moment at least—and this “moment” may well be either longer or briefer than we imagine—the esprit de finesse that is the home not merely of “intuition” but of what we humans call the sacred must still be cultivated. All the more so given the danger pointed to by the Figaro article: that in losing our abilities to perform algorithmic acts—and many/most? people today can no longer multiply, much less divide, two multi-digit numbers with pencil and paper—we will dull our mental acuity and our sensitivity to the insights of finesse as well.

    The sacred and the infinities

    Reading Melanie Phillips’ critique of postmodern thinking in The World Turned Upside Down (Encounter, 2010), I certainly sympathize with her rejection of the dogmatic atheism of such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Thinkers who dismiss religion as nonsense turn their backs on a foundational element of the human itself, as though it belonged to the same category as empirical misapprehensions. On the contrary, Roy Rappaport’s great intuition that language and religion were coeval at the birth of what we can truly call the human obliges us to treat the phenomenon of the sacred as an inseparable component of it, independently of whatever specific beliefs in sacred beings the different creeds attach to it. What is indeed paradoxical is that a religion that seeks to embody the sacred independently of all such beliefs is effectively inconceivable. To understand the sacred “in itself” within our minimal hypothesis, we can only posit its behavioral origin in the originary scene of language; its historical developments in the form of collective religions then belong to the history of human culture. The question of evaluating religious beliefs as historical facts is a very different matter from evaluating the functioning of these beliefs within the human societies that have adopted them.

    No doubt to take this position forces us to reject the usual apologies for religion in its own terms, which in effect oblige us to accept as true without proof assertions about reality that we can only know as those of our fellow humans. But the task of anthropology is to grasp in what way religion, as the institutional organization of the sacred, operates in specific cases to maintain the human communities that have adopted them.

    In the scenario of the originary hypothesis, the sacred originates as our internal sense of the interdiction, whose locus comes to be called our conscience, of potentially conflict-producing “instinctual” appetitive acts in the interest of maintaining order in the human community. I have given as a minimal (but not originary) expression of this interdiction the example of Hillel’s “golden rule”: do not do to another what you would not have him do to you.

    GA situates the originary experience of the sacred in the hesitation that, ex hypothesi for the first time, obliges the individuals surrounding an object of appetitive desire, such as the body of a prey animal, to defer seeking to appropriate this object for themselves until such time as all can agree to share it. It is at this point that the “conditioned-reflex” inhibitions that prevent conflict among animals may be presumed to have become incapable of regulating living creatures once they have attained a certain level of (mimetic) desire, and must therefore be reinforced by the conscious rejection of the appropriative act.

    This deferral of appropriative action then presumably leads the community to share a pointing or ostensive gesture that constitutes the first sign of language: the first shared signifier by which the members of the group designate the object of their common desire, and in that act, qualify it as sacred, a term to which we can give the minimal meaning of belonging in the first place to the community rather than being available for possession by any given individual.

    In the absence of archaeological evidence, the only demonstration of this hypothetical scenario can come from Occam’s razor. But the Derridean term différance, which its creator unfortunately demurred to understand in anthropological terms, nevertheless admirably demonstrates the link intuited by Rappaport between the births of language and religion: the sacred is in the first place what can only be referred to, pointed to by what will become in that very act a sign. And this minimal ostensive sign must be understood not simply as designating a worldly thing, let along this sort of thing, like the word “cat,” but rather as designating what can only be designated, that is, pointed out so that we attend to it—attend as Sartre’s pour-soi attends to its object separated from it by a néant—as an object of contemplation, that is, as an exclusively mental object whose physical being for the moment is sacred and cannot be violated.

    Which is, simply put, to say that the sign sets its object on a scene. But we should be guided by the Buddhist intuition that sees Sartre’s néant, the (mental) space of freedom that separates the mind from its object, as “infinite,” since the deferral of action makes my distance from the object effectively beyond my powers to traverse it. It is this equation of a limited physical distance with an infinite moral distance that offers the simplest worldly illustration of the sacred.

    And in contrast, once this sacred distance has been accepted and shared by the community as a whole, its members can then come together to share the object in a collective feast, through which the prior infinity of separation is transformed into the abolition of all distance, so to speak in an infinite communal closeness. In physical terms, the change can be described as a series of physical movements; but in terms of the sacred that unites the human community, the abolition of this infinite separation is miraculous, infinitely meaningful, and effectively the source of all meaning.

    In this way, Pascal’s two infinities, even more than his famous pari (bet), can be shown to embody for us with admirable concreteness his pioneering anthropological intuition of the sacred.

  • Survival of the Fittest

    In Chronicle 840 concerning 17th-century French mathematician/religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, I referred to his conception of the bet (le pari), in which he applied his pioneering analysis of probability to the problem of convincing skeptics to believe in God—in a 17th century context where such belief meant not an abstract yes-no but effective acceptance of the strict Catholic doctrine of Jansenism. Pascal’s idea was simply that denial of God is the acceptance of extinction at death, whereas betting on his existence offers a chance at eternal life. Given this infinite difference, the gambler has no reason to hesitate; the slightest chance of God’s existence makes it worthwhile to bet on it, since if the bet is lost, it is no worse than if you bet against it—you perish in any case—whereas on the least chance of winning the bet, one is assured of the Paradise of the faithful, as opposed to the other place where are sent the unbelievers.

    Pascal (who also created the first practical calculating machine) lived at the dawn of the modern age, when science was beginning to acquire its modern toolkit of microscopes and telescopes, calculus and analytic geometry, a century before the steam engine gave birth to the industrial era. At that time, to return to a passage I quoted in Chronicle 815, the poet Alexander Pope exemplified the public reaction to Newton’s laws as the ultimate scientific accomplishment: what we would call today the theory of everything:

    Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night:
    God said: “Let Newton be!” and all was light.

    And even up to Einstein’s discovery of relativity more or less contemporaneously with the atomic theory of Niels Bohr, the general public had the impression that we were indeed very close to having achieved a general knowledge of the components of the universe and their laws of interaction. Certainly this was the atmosphere in the high schools and universities in my youth: the theory of everything had not yet been attained, but it was ever closer to achievement.

    Today, and already for many years previously, most strikingly since the emergence of the apparent necessity of explaining the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy, which are theorized to make up something like 95% of the matter/energy in the universe, it has become ever more clear that, rather than closing the perfect circle that Pope imagined had been traced by Newton, we are instead discovering ever-new complications, and however successful future generations may be in resolving these, it seems painfully naïve to imagine that we will ever reach the utopian end of the process.

    And indeed, one wonders what would then be left for scientists to accomplish afterward, beyond working out ever more secondary and tertiary details within this unchangeable scheme. Intellectual work, most particularly empirical science, implicitly depends on an infinite future; like Alexander of Macedon, scientists dread facing a universe in which there are no more worlds to conquer.

    Yet the very possibility of such meditations as this has been dependent on millions of man-hours of intellectual labor, including that involved in building the ever more powerful machines that have allowed us to probe the various domains of reality. I need not feel ashamed of my minuscule knowledge in this area, since what I am suggesting is that, like Pascal’s gambler, to assume that the amount of information required to explain everything is infinite, in the sense that some ultimate limit will never be attained, means that however useful it is to learn about reality, it is in principle an infinite rather than a finite task, one that only God, in whatever sense we give to this term, can encompass it. And indeed, this acceptance allows us a (relatively) objective definition of God, as the Being in whom all is complete—a conception which, I would point out, is dependent on the existence of a system of signs in which knowledge can be recorded.

    II

    These prefatory remarks were meant to provide a taste of what might be called the bad infinity of such speculations about empirical science, and to suggest that they would best be set aside—that our efforts to understand reality should be pursued independently of any ultimate goal, in the interest and usefulness of acquiring ever more knowledge and consequently ever more power over reality.

    And in that spirit, I would like to suggest a purely speculative model of the universe. It is simply this: given a universe sufficiently complex to permit the emergence of forms or structures of any kind, that is, of configurations of its minimal components that have their own properties not identical with those of these components taken separately, that such a system will continue to generate indefinitely more complex structures, and that the history of these structures will, regardless of setbacks, be a steady improvement, in the sense that they will become more elaborate and more capable of various manipulations of their surrounding reality so as to evolve, precisely in the Darwinian sense, into increasingly successful and durable forms.

    And all this may be summarized by Darwin’s simple, and ultimately tautological, device: the survival of the fittest.

    The fittest what? The struggle for life implied by this expression should not blind us to the simple fact that competition of the sort described is in no way limited to self-conscious creatures, or to living ones, or even to complex ones: in a universe where different objects encounter each other to be modified (or not) in various ways, we can say with certainty that within a given (more or less) isolated/independent sector of this universe, to the extent that its parts can interact, interdependent structures will form, and those fittest to survive the random effects of time will indeed survive better than the others, so that to the extent that there is any possibility of smaller and simpler units combining into larger and more complex ones, the latter will tend to increase in size and complexity to the extent that the results are more durable. It may be that only the smallest units can survive in a certain milieu, that no combinations are durable; in that case, these small units are the fittest. But if complexity can provide advantages, even rarely, then a sufficiently long period will tend to generate increasingly survivable and more complex beings.

    Seen in this light, the universe we inhabit is certainly capable of producing beings of for all intents and purposes unlimited complexity. No doubt not all beings can be treated as integrated units; a planet, for example, is a collection of materials whose degree of organization is far lower than that of what we on Earth consider living creatures.

    Do such creatures exist elsewhere? It seems strange that if they do, we have not yet encountered traces of them; yet given the number of planets in the universe, it is hard to defend the position that life in the sense of self-reproducing organisms has not appeared elsewhere, perhaps even of a comparable or superior level of complexity to our own. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the persistent lack of evidence in the face of the constantly increasing power of our tools of observation.

    There is no use speculating about these questions, save as a background to maintaining the curiosity that drives our continuing quest for more powerful systems of detection along with theories to explain our observations. But from a Pascalian point of view, bracketing all ultimate questions about why there is something rather than nothing, which even without discussing God tacitly presuppose a God-like intelligence as the source of being—who alone could answer the question—what seems demonstrated is that, whatever catastrophes may occur in individual sectors, the universe that has (at least) generated us is almost certain to continue generating creatures of equal or greater complexity, whether or not we ourselves are fated to participate in their generation. If the history of the universe as beginning with the big bang is indeed a reasonably accurate account of how we got to where we are, then whether or not our species and its successors survive is secondary to the obvious and presumably unstoppable trend to greater complexity, greater concentrations of negentropy, no doubt not in an uninterrupted continuum, but clearly with an upward trend.

    I suppose that in the current historical context, with the never quite absent threat of another yet more destructive World War to follow those of the 20th century, we are not inclined to content ourselves with resigned acceptance of the near-certainty that, even if the human species is fated to kill itself off—or, at best, to fail to survive the demise of our solar system (giving us a few billion more years to work with)—other and better-adapted species will continue to arise—always assuming that the whole shebang is not fated to return to its originary big-bang state and start over, in what one might call the Buddhist version of modern cosmology.

    But, as I said at the conclusion of the meditation in Chronicle 840, if indeed the universe has only been around for a few billion years, simply given the tautological principle with which we began—how unimaginably wonderful things should become after trillions, quadrillions, GOOGOLS of years of evolution! Unless, of course, all this has already occurred, and we are now, once more, just starting over.

  • Pascal’s Infinities — A Meditation

    A couple of Chronicles ago I mentioned Blaise Pascal’s idea of the “two infinities,” a conception that can be said to inaugurate the era of modernity. For despite the limited nature of microscopes and telescopes in the 17th century, Pascal intuited that now that we had become able to see microbes on the one hand and Jupiter’s moons on the other, there would be ultimately no limit in either direction. This simple intuition has held up surprisingly well, to the extent that recent discoveries seem increasingly to suggest that physicists looking for a definitive “theory of everything” are barking up the wrong tree.

    Pascal was a serious Christian, a Jansenist, who made use of his investigations into the science of probability to redefine religious faith in a way that strikes me as equally unshakeable: Since the validation of this faith would provide benefits incommensurable with those of the everyday world, we should be willing to bet on God’s benevolent existence even were there only an infinitesimal chance that the bet would be successful.

    Perhaps an easier way to envisage this wager would make use of the “St. Petersburg Paradox,” where one flips a coin until tails turns up and receives 2 to the power of the number of consecutive heads. It is easy to see that the “expectation” of this action is infinite: ½ the time one gets $1, ¼ the time, $4, 1/8 the time, $8… thus $1 + 1 + 1… ad infinitum. But we all know that the gambler cannot afford to pay the infinite expectation for one or any number of chances. What this “expectation” really means is that if you keep playing the game long enough, no matter what fixed payment you give each time, the payoff will eventually come out in your favor—the catch being that the number of games you’ll need before you come out ahead also approaches infinity.

    On this analogy, our bet on God is the equivalent of the coin never turning up tails: although its chances of happening are infinitesimal, the payoff is infinite.

    In any case, we must remember that Pascal was both a brilliant mathematician and a sincere believer, and that he saw this kind of reasoning as demonstrating less the “truth” of his belief in God than the advantage to the gambler of making the bet, which he therefore considered a way of demonstrating to the religious skeptic, given the infinite difference between death and eternal life, the necessity of making it.

    I think that in our age, when so many of us are at best agnostic, Pascal’s logic offers the closest we can come to a “demonstration” of the validity of religious belief—which, translated into strictly anthropological terms, can simply be understood as betting that, in terms of the human species to which we belong, “life is worthwhile.”

    And put in these terms, the necessity of making a deliberate act of affirming such belief becomes unnecessary. Whether we do so or not, the idea that a benevolent God protects the human race from destruction and chaos has only one real argument in its favor—the fact of our survival itself.

    After all, “something”—call it Providence—has kept our species alive through the generations, and the mechanism through which this force is actuated, whether through a conscious divine will analogous to our own, or by a set of conditions determined by chance, is unknown to us. And to assume that humanity will continue to endure does not imply that we should sit back and do nothing, but that we should continue making our usual efforts at more than mere survival, and keep hoping that they will succeed—and this is true regardless of the nature of the reassurance we receive from the external conditions of our existence.

    Pascal’s point is valid whether we “believe” in anything at all beyond the worldly realities we have experienced and the deductions we have been able to draw from them. What I must insist on is that 400 years ago, when science had just begun to suspect the “two infinities” of possible experience—a phenomenon that can be imagined along other dimensions than space and time that we may eventually learn of—the situation of faith was already fully defined. Pascal’s reasoning is independent of how many dimensions of ignorance we suffer from. His point is simply that we cannot know for certain what the future has in store for humanity, but we can only bet on the chance that in place of some indifferent Fate, there is a benevolent force—even if a purely statistical one—that will keep humanity going—or failing that, a universe that will continue to generate self-conscious, creative beings like ourselves.

    For at the very least, the reason we are here at all is that, given enough billions of years, the Darwinian survival of the fittest forms of matter/energy evolved from even the most undifferentiated original state will produce beings as complex as ourselves. And given trillions and quadrillions of years, who can imagine what marvels might arise?

  • Generative Anthropology and Human Science

    As a subscriber to Scientific American since 1954, “Thinking without Words” on pp. 86-88 of the March 2025 issue struck me as a useful illustration of what GA’s perspective can add to the standard discourse of the human sciences among anthropologists and linguists, by allowing them to rethink their foundations.

    No one can contest the value of the scientific method for empirical research, nor is it useful to replay the sterile controversies between Darwinists and believers in Creationism. But the problem the latter are attempting to solve by positing a Creator, however inappropriately in a scientific context, is not thereby proved spurious in itself. Whether or not we need to take seriously a view of the evolution of life as determined by a transcendental will, the great error of positive anthropology is to take for granted that the techniques of empirical natural science in themselves suffice to explain what makes humanity unique. The study of the human is not a simple extension of physics and chemistry, nor even of biology. And the proof is that empirical anthropology can teach us many things about the human, but it has no effective theory to explain its emergence from the non-human, because it lacks the means to define just wherein the difference lies.

    In this regard, I have long appreciated Roy Rappoport’s dictum in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999) that language and religion were “coeval,” emerged at the same moment. But Rappoport poses this primary truth as a given, and never goes into detail in hypothesizing a path from the non-human to the human. In contrast, GA offers an originary hypothesis of the human’s emergence. I hope to show in this Chronicle how it helps clarify the apparent paradoxes of this S.A. article.

    The article is, after a brief introduction, a conversation-interview between Gary Stix, a senior editor of the journal, and Evelina Fedorenko, “a neuroscientist who studies language at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research” at MIT. The point of her research, as the author’s first question brings out, is to discover “whether language and thought are separate entities,” a question that she answers in the affirmative, while pointing out that animals too make use of “thinking,” along with people with aphasia who are unable to speak. For indeed the parts of the brain which deal with language on the one hand and thinking on the other are not the same.

    There are surely no false statements in Dr Fedorenko’s remarks, including her critique in passing of the Chomskian tradition, “where the dogma has always been that we use language for thinking: to think is why language evolved in our species.” Yet as a way of understanding human language and why it is different from animal modes of communication, Stix’ point that “No words are needed for animals to perform all kinds of problem-solving challenges that demonstrate high-level cognition. Chimpanzees can outplay humans in a strategy game, and New Caledonian Crows make their own tools that enable them to capture prey,” even if arguably true, obscures the very point of what a useful critique of Chomsky’s position would be.

    Yes, animals think, but it is useful only from the perspective of a physiologist to concern oneself with the “mechanisms” of thought without considering the very principles by which language operates as being in the first place those of a medium of communication. Since Stix concedes in the following paragraph that “humans perform tasks at a level of sophistication not seen in chimps”—as though this difference of level were somehow comparable to that between a child and an adult rather than involving a wholly different degree of richness and subtlety—he then wonders if “we require words and syntax as scaffolding to construct the things we think about? Or do the brain’s cognitive regions devise fully baked thoughts that we then convey using words as a medium of communication?”

    The notion of a “fully baked thought” as expressible without a system of signs begs the question of how this thought could be formulated otherwise even inside the brain. What Stix calls the “high-level cognition” of animals is arguably many degrees less complex than what we would consider ordinary human thought, such as the defense of a thesis in a typical newspaper article; what we know of as animal thinking can typically be presented in the form of a simple diagram.

    It is surely useful to point out that animals can indeed think, in the sense of drawing inferences from experience: that the latter is not wholly dependent on language as a shared sign-system. But talking about language and thought in this way distracts us from the real task of anthropology, which is to explain what is particular to humans, who are after all the only animals who have the means to express, and share, such concern about themselves.

    It is not useless to know that the brain carries out operations of reasoning in a separate place from its store of vocabulary—just as a computer’s store of data is separate from the modules that process that data. But talking about language without relating it to the fundamental activities of the human beings that it does so much to define implicitly effaces the fundamental difference between humans and other living creatures that, as we should always remember, is the core of anthropology.

    In answer to Stix’s question: “So, what is the role of language, if not for thinking?” his interlocutor replies:

    I’m . . . sharing some knowledge that I have that you may have only had a partial version of—and once I transmit it to you through language, you can update your knowledge and have that in your mind as well. It’s basically like a shortcut for telepathy. . . . [W]e can use this tool called language, which is a flexible way to communicate our inner states, to transmit information to each other.

    Now I don’t want to pretend that Dr. Fedorenko considers this description as an explanation of how language emerged, let alone of why it emerged only among humans. But the comparison with telepathy reveals an indifference to the collective nature of language, let alone to its possible origin. How indeed could we have begun to “telepathize” the words of language to each other? And how, and why, has spoken language given rise to writing and electronic communication that allow humans, also unlike all other creatures, to preserve information in transmissible forms?

    What strikes me is not that Dr. Fedorenko does not attempt to answer these questions, but that, at least in the context of this dialogue, she sees them as irrelevant to the matter of how language is connected to thinking. What indeed is it that makes human thinking so much more powerful than that of the chimpanzees and Caledonian Crows that Stix alleges as examples of “thinking without words?” Could it be that a thought, as opposed to “thinking,” can only be conceived as expressed in a system of signs? Ask a logician to give an example of an elementary thought, and it will be in the form of a simple declarative sentence, “all a is b,” or “elephants are bigger than mice.” Our chimpanzee can certainly observe, and presumably “think,” the latter idea; we can say that he “knows” that elephants are larger than mice. What he lacks is a simple means of communicating it to another chimpanzee. But what do we mean by thinking in this case?

    Stix’ example of strategy games is a good place to start. When two chess players are playing each other, they are clearly thinking, but it is also clear that expressing their reasoning in language is irrelevant to their action, unless, for example, one is teaching the other and consequently explaining his moves. It is easy enough to see in such cases that language, so useful in communicating our thoughts “telepathically,” is not necessarily required to think them; and this is generally true in the practical matters of daily life. If I decide to put on a raincoat because it looks like rain, I certainly don’t arrive at this conclusion by explaining my decision in words to myself; I draw the inference without expressing it, and this is true for just about all the practical decisions one makes throughout the day. The only time you need to use language to figure something out is, as I am doing now, developing a line of reasoning meant to convince an interlocutor, whether or not actualized in a real Other, of a certain conclusion. Whence the connection between mathematics and logic in the simple and unambiguous architecture of the statements they allow, so that the statement to be demonstrated becomes a theorem to be proved on the basis of a clear set of premises.

    And it is precisely when this reasoning process is most rigorous, when “thought” is not just making statements, but deriving true statements from prior ones, that we are farthest from the normal use of language, and that we tend to invent systems of notation to simplify the elements of reasoning by avoiding the use of words. To express a mathematical formula in “language” in the normal sense would have no valid purpose, unless one were dictating the formula to another who would be expected to translate the words back into the symbols that the first party would presumably have been “translating” into everyday speech. But to mention such examples is to demonstrate the weakness of the “telepathy” analogy; the mathematical formula is only conceivable in technical notation, that is, on paper or a blackboard, real or imagined, not as an “idea” in someone’s brain.

    And given that Fedorenko no longer accepts Chomsky’s dictum that the purpose of language is thinking, she must assume that its purpose is communication, the “telepathy” that lets us share the contents of our minds—that lets us formulate these contents in communicable signs. But how does this explain why such a system evolved, or how humans, unlike other creatures, came to create it? One would not expect to find in this brief interview a theory of language emergence and evolution, but one might have hoped nonetheless for some acknowledgement that language emerged as a new mode of communication because, as GA insists, it had become necessary.

    GA hypothesizes that we needed the “telepathic” mediation of language to separate us from each other’s rivalrous desires. As our hominid ancestors became more intelligent, they found it increasingly difficult to “follow their instincts” in dividing up large food items such as the bodies of animals scavenged or hunted, as had previously been accomplished by a serial distribution system, where the Alpha animal took the first piece and passed the rest of the carcass to the Beta, etc. Challenges in this system took place only one-on-one; if a lower-ranked hominid was unhappy with his rank, he could challenge its holder. Chimps and other apes still use this system on occasion; but it is easy enough to understand that such a system would break down with the growth among the hominids of the sense of rivalry brought about by what René Girard called mimetic desire—something we all know well from our experience when a classmate or colleague gains a thing of value that we feel that we equally or more deserved.

    Language, which allows us to share the idea of the desired object by sharing the word designating that idea—the signifier—was the peaceful human solution to the far more difficult problem of sharing the referent of the signifier, which, being a worldly object, could not be multiplied. In the Gospels, one of which (John) begins by telling us “In the beginning was the Word [logos],” Jesus demonstrates his role of Savior by multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed a crowd—the only miracle (aside from the Resurrection) mentioned in all four Gospels. This figure of divine providence renders real what had already been made possible through the suspension of conflict by means of language—as the course of human history has so plentifully realized.

    Language began as a solution to the problem of sharing desirable objects among a group of creatures, who thereupon became a human community. The solution was of necessity a compromise. Jesus was not usually around to multiply the loaves and fishes. But the message conveyed by this miracle is that if the humans truly form a community that puts the welfare of all before that of its individual members, they will devise better ways to increase production of loaves and fishes than if they fought among themselves for the ones they already had.

    This understanding of the originary anthropological function of language, of its emergence as a necessary mediation between humanity and its desires, allows us to understand the sense of freedom that Sartre in particular saw as the defining quality of the human mind as opposed to all other objects in the cosmos. The possibility of sharing words/signs when we cannot share things is what allows us to think about them, and subsequently to communicate our thoughts, whether or not the operation of thinking itself is wholly congruent with the sentences we use to communicate its results.

    To sum up, we don’t need language to think the simple thoughts of everyday, but it is the thoughts created and preserved in language that have allowed us to accumulate the knowledge of the world by means of which our species, so much more than any other, has been able to shape it to our ends. Speech, and then writing, have permitted the vast accumulation of 44×1021 bytes of information that Google estimates as the current contents of the Internet.

    Language, in a word, is in the first place not a means for thinking but for sharing the signs of our desires. It could only have arisen in the context of the need for such sharing, so that the sharing of the sign could subsequently allow us the freedom to conceive, and to bring about, the sharing of the thing itself. For what is most problematic about the human is not our ability to think, which the existence of language and communication so greatly facilitates—since words, signs, are so to speak designed to be easily reproducible, and the history of human communication has been marked by the constant invention of more efficient and effective means of their transmission—but the fact that each improvement in communication adds to the intensification of potential rivalries, not for the signs that are transmitted, but for the objects they designate.

    And this brings me back to Rappoport’s dictum about the coevality of language and religion. The gesture that in GA’s originary hypothesis becomes the first sign is simply one of pointing, but the hypothesized origin of the pointing gesture, which is not practiced even by chimps, is an aborted act of appropriation, the result of reaching for the object but aborting one’s attempt in order to avoid conflict with the others reaching for it at the same time—like, in my favorite example, two party guests both reaching for the last canapé. And what we call the sacred, the basis of religion, is in its origin nothing more than this recognition of the priority of the community to the individual—the basis of most of the Ten Commandments and of Hillel’s Golden Rule, and the core of what we call our conscience.

    To sum up, thought has existed in some sense from the first living creatures, in the sense of permitting choices necessary to their existence, at first, by purely mechanical means, and with the evolution of nervous systems, through specialized mechanisms by which their environment could be evaluated. But it is only with language and the communication of thought from one human to another that we began to understand ourselves as a community, enduring through the generations and accumulating the “thoughts,” the knowledge that has made us, for better and worse, and however imperfectly, masters of our world.

  • Screenicity

    In reaction to the worldwide triumph of the smartphone, a few years ago I created the term screenic to designate the dominance of the screen in today’s culture. (“The Screenic.” Mimetic Theory and Film. Ed. Paolo Bubbio and Chris Fleming. New York, BloomsburyAcademic, 2019: 109-21). Any TikTok influencers reading this Chronicle are welcome to help it achieve meme status. Indeed, screenicity, as I pointed out, had been building up for some time, from its public debut with the Lumière Brothers’ first movie showing in Paris in 1895.

    From the movie screen—to which sound was soon added—the screenic moved into homes with TV, and then to personal computers, followed by “personal data assistants” and iPads. But the most impactful breakthrough was the emergence of the cellphone as a privileged and soon indispensable means of communication—communication in the broadest sense, accessing the whole world of information available on the Internet while connecting one with colleagues and friends by email and message as well as by telephone.

    Why didn’t screenic catch on? Well I’m not exactly an influencer, but I think the more useful answer is that the idea of the screenic is a deformation of the term scenic, which in GA, but not in standard anthropological discourse, designates the cultural space within which humans, unlike other creatures, communicate through signs—whether passive ones like clothes and grooming, or more significantly, through the signs of language. To be sure animal collectivities have ways of communicating between their members, as we see in flocks of birds or “armies” of ants, but these are essentially hard-wired, open only at the extreme limit to such things as apes teaching each other how to crack a nut with a rock. In a word, animals lack the free space of mutual communication that we call a scene.

    Although the idea of the scenic, if not the word, may be said to have been introduced into Western thought with Sartre’s originally Eastern concept of the néant, nothingness, as designating in abstract terms the free, peaceful, sacred space indispensable to the scenic element of the pour-soi. This translation of Hegel’s für-sich, designates the self-conscious mind (which Hegel did not describe in scenic terms). And as I explained in Chronicles 802 and 806, Sartre never saw the connection of the néant to language and the sacred; for him, their scenic element remained confined to an intuition of the abstract emptiness/freedom of the subject’s mind. As a consequence, the notion of scenicity is absent from discussions of human culture, this fundamental element being taken for granted to the point of invisibility, and accordingly, screenicity has no preexisting hook to hang on.

    Yet generative anthropology tells us that the origin of the “free space” in our minds is the free space that human conscience/consciousness opens up in the human world, where a sacred force of interdiction keeps people apart as they designate their desire-objects by signs—language—rather than come to blows over them.

    The idea of reproducing—sacralizing—the human scene is central to art in its various forms, whether in the imagination of Homer’s audience as he and his successors sang the Iliad, or in the hunting scenes portrayed on the walls of prehistoric caves, not to speak of festivals, dances, and later, for individual consumption, texts that allow the reader to conjure up in solitude the scenes of a novel. This scenic element may be taken for granted, but it is at the bottom of them all, as the ur-medium of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Yes, the scene is the underlying medium of all the arts and beyond them, of all modes of human culture, beginning with the first exchanges of language.

    Yet in its drive to reproduce the entire cultural world in a form accessible privately to the individual, the screenic is something new. No doubt this goal of the private screen as a double of the human mental space was not obvious at the Lumière brothers’ film showings, but the appetite of film creators and later for those of television for bringing the whole world to the spectator whether in a theater or at home gave what can already be called information technology the ambition of becoming a universal medium, in which the screen could contain not only the narratives of cinema, but the texts of the world’s libraries, and finally every element of visualizable and/or auditory information, all at the disposal of each singular individual.

    Thus with the universalization of the cell phone comes the potential 24/7 accessibility to everyone of the entire world of human knowledge. So that whereas in the not-so-distant past (that of my childhood), parents were able to keep their children relatively protected from knowledge considered inappropriate for the young, such as “dirty words” and pornography, today this has become almost impossible, with the result that pre-pubertal children are demanding to implement sex changes—and the so-called liberal left has been ready to defend them, even when parents are deliberately kept uninformed of developments in this domain that occur during school hours.

    Nor is there any obvious solution for such problems. In an era where the world’s knowledge of sexuality and everything else is available to the general public with few (often easily-breached) restrictions, it is very difficult to prevent such leakage. Indeed, the need to protect children from the dangers of the adult world has seemingly grown with each generation in proportion to the accessibility of sources of potentially dangerous information. Simply to judge from my own case growing up in the Bronx, it is striking how much freer city children were in the outside world during the 40s and 50s than today—when, for example, one virtually never sees a child under 16, or even 18, out by himself performing tasks such as shopping for groceries—whereas my mother sent me to the store to pick up items like bakery goods from the age of 8 or so; and I recall that at 12 I was allowed to take the subway by myself from the Bronx down to Manhattan to make a purchase at a department store. (I need not insist that rapid transit was incomparably more civilized in those days.)

    These considerations aside, the screenic age is in potential an age of universal enlightenment. Virtually any fact of common knowledge is immediately available through Google or Wikipedia or any of a number of similar sources, and much more specialized information is available, often at no cost. The totality of information available through electronic media is an ever-expanding “encyclopedia” currently approximated (according to Google) at 44×1021 bytes. A less positive concomitant feature of the screenic era’s vast accumulation of data is the overall impoverishment of the minds of even educated people, habituated to neglect their personal “memory bank” in favor of the ubiquitous Internet.

    Ideally, the screenic age makes all humanity able to communicate near-instantaneously, if necessary via online translation programs. But whether this tends to bring people together or facilitates their enmity cannot be answered in terms of bytes of information. Certainly, as we have recently seen, a phenomenon like antisemitism can spread far more easily and rapidly in such a world. Both the positive and negative features of human mimeticism are enhanced by the screenic, and above all, as with children’s exposure to sexual information, it has become much more difficult to impose what were not long ago enforceable limitations dictated by ethical-moral considerations. I have mentioned the difficulty of restraining access to pornography—but it’s also easy to find out on the Internet how to build bombs or fraudulent websites, or to organize riots. And I wonder if the Woke-era trend of decriminalizing “minor” criminal activity—fortunately just voted out in California—was not influenced by a growing reluctance to interfere in others’ real-world activities, now that one’s “scene” is increasingly confined to the solipsism of one’s personal screen.

    One notable result of the screenic age, greatly accelerated by the Covid pandemic of 2020-21, has been the possibility of substituting screens for physical presence in human interactions, thereby saving time and money at the expense of physical proximity. I had fortunately retired from teaching before 2020, but I know several professors who after a few semesters of online teaching made the decision to retire.

    At least until Trump took office, large numbers of government and other office workers often worked several days a week from home, saving money on child-care costs but surely at the expense both of efficiency and of fostering teamwork, not to speak of in-office services.

    Similarly, recent sessions of conferences and annual meetings such as those of the GASC have included a number of “Zoom” participants, speakers as well as spectators. The human scene was in its origin a face-to-face yet distanced contact mediated by signs, inaugurated in order to avoid mimetic conflicts. But online, where physical contact is impossible, it is impossible to reproduce the sense of fraternity that is created in a human group by the simple pleasure of being together in the absence of physical conflict.

    Instead, today this sense of fraternity is inversely challenged from within, where among groups of people in physical proximity with each other, some or all are usually interacting with their phones rather than with their neighbors.

    As with all such effects of technology, it is impossible to predict the future consequences of the screenic. Such extreme examples as virtual reality that cuts off the real world altogether to the benefit of a personalized universe seem to me unlikely to find uses beyond personal meditation. Yet it would be foolish to attempt to conceive the limitations of future means of creating simulations in which groups can work together, for example in conceiving communities on other planets. Indeed, one can imagine as a future utopia/dystopia a social universe where the entire population would interact mainly through such screenic mediations, reserving natural human communication for the rare intimate moments, and even then…

    Whatever the future of human scenicity/screenicity, we should not forget their origin and foundation in the free, empty space between the pointing finger and the designated object, the sign and the referent—the néant that Sartre imported into Western philosophy from the East without realizing that he was describing the central openness to the world and to each other, pregnant with all human possibility, discovered at humanity’s birth in language and the sacred.

  • Religion, God, and the Sacred

    The theologies of established religions enshrine and interpret specific historical experiences that cannot simply be deduced from first principles, whether those of GA or an alternative theory of origin. But it is essential that we be able to establish a scene on which the practitioners of religion and those of anthropological theory (who need not be seen as mutually exclusive) can find sufficient common ground to share their insights to the end of improving our human self-understanding.

    Generative anthropology (GA)’s minimal hypothesis follows the principle of Ockham’s razor by minimizing the worldly presuppositions of human emergence. To this end, it is essential to provide a strictly anthropological-empirical definition of the sacred, as the core of the beliefs in sacred beings that are the substance of religious ontologies.

    I have often cited Roy Rappoport’s dictum in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999) that language and religion were coeval, born in the same moment. GA provides Rappoport’s revelation with a Girardian basis: proto-humanity needed language and the sacred because at a certain point in the evolution of protohuman intelligence, conditioned reflexes could no longer resolve the problem of (mimetic) desire.

    What became necessary was conscience in the human sense: the emergence in each individual of a “soul” consisting of a mental scene of representation on which objects of potential desire could be designated by signs communicable to his fellows, and thereby mutually understood in terms of the human community’s needs and judgments. In this way, rather than following our appetites limited only by reflexive inhibitions, we became able to contemplate the objects of these appetites in the context of the community as a whole while deferring our appetitive drives toward them, thus limiting the danger inherent in the mimetic multiplication of these appetites by their presence in our fellows.

    In this context, the signs of language are hypothesized to originate in a collective context from “aborted gestures of appropriation” originally directed toward possessing an appetitive object but suspended for fear of the conflict they might arouse with other members of the group. These interrupted gestures would thereby become understood as acts of pointing designating their object, gestures that could be reproduced by the entire group without their coming into conflict, thereby creating a stasis that would permit the participants to share the object in a way satisfactory to all.

    We thus define the sacred as the intuited agent of this deferral, an emerging common sense within the group that it cannot, as in the ape serial distribution system, pass the object from the Alpha to the Beta and the Gamma, but must divide it in more or less equal portions, in a common space we call a scene because it constitutes for the first time a terrain on which all members of the emerging human group are aware of the sacred constraint on individual behavior, and obliged to communicate about the object of their common desire through signs. With the focus of attention of the entire group on a common object, it comes to constitute a community.

    “Religion” is then what we call the collective celebration of the sacred in order to reinforce the lesson of the originary scene. Such reaffirmations of communal solidarity reduce intragroup tensions overall, as is the case at church services or indeed in any public celebration, from concerts to sports events to political rallies. What the originary humans understand as preventing them from fighting over the common object of the group’s desires is the sense of interdiction that surrounds it, rooted in the fear of violent conflict that individual attempts to appropriate the object might arouse, but understood not simply as a reaction of fear, but as a moral obligation, a matter of conscience.

    Thus fear of mimetic conflict comes to be shared by the entire group, the participants’ gestures of appropriation are aborted, become gestures of pointing, of representation. This is the origin of language, and at the same time, of the sacred—the concrete realization of Rappoport’s intuition in the context of Girard’s discovery of the transformative effect of mimetic desire in making us, in forcing us to become, human.

    Thus far we have not needed to speak of the embodiment of the sacred in gods or idols. It is essential to understand that the priority of the sacred is a simple truth of anthropology; before the first humans could begin to conceive the source of this sacred deferral of appropriation as emanating from one or more specific beings, they must have felt the interdictive force generated from the group dynamic surrounding an object of common desire, presumably a source of alimentary nourishment, no doubt recalling memories of conflicts that had erupted before the common sense of sacred interdiction had come to replace the Alpha-Beta distribution system. The central animal/victim itself would be felt as embodying a force preventing the completion of their individual acts of appropriation—and to the extent that cave art provides a clue, the animals of the hunt were clearly objects of reverence, as were the clay “Venuses” found nearby, presumably as agents and protectresses of childbirth, hence likewise objects of common desire. And from all we know of elementary societies, the originary division of the desire-object would have been egalitarian, symmetrical.

    What do these introductory remarks imply concerning how we can speak about the singular God of our own Western religions in terms of generative anthropology? Indeed, it is characteristic of such discussions to begin from a Biblical perspective in which God is a unique “meta-person” whose model is the Creator of Genesis.

    That monotheism—realization of the uniqueness of the sacred throughout humanity—is more faithful to anthropological truth than polytheism is generally accepted, and one wonders to what extent even practitioners of polytheistic religions still fully believe in the personhood of their plural gods. In any case, the overall dominance of monotheism can hardly be ignored.

    And it is no accident that it was in the Axial age, when the early middle-Eastern empires came to communicate among themselves, that the Hebrews, taking advantage of the newfound technique of writing, were able to set down on parchment their sacred history, which subsequently expanded into the “Abrahamic” trio of monotheistic religions that still dominate the West and Middle East. Hence in this part of the world, to be religious is to “believe in God” as a singular “meta-person,” enriched but not contradicted in Christianity by the addition of two “persons” to that of the Father-Creator.

    Thus to speak of “God” is in effect to celebrate the Hebrew “victory” of monotheism over polytheism: the triumph of the One God, whose anthropological superiority would lead to the West’s triumph over the rest of the world—and at the same time, to the unique hatred of antisemitism, the resentment of those who cannot deny the Hebrews’ “firstness” in affirming the One God. Its return in force after 10/7/23 surprised many who had naively thought it to have gone into permanent decline after the defeat of Nazism

    Sacred and Significant

    For something to be significant is, in its minimal sense, for it to “be worthy” to become a signified, that is, to have a word (signifier) that signifies it. The sharpest distinction between religious and anthropological ontology is that the former makes a fundamental distinction between what is sacred and what is not, the sacred and the “profane,” whereas if we take significance as the secular equivalent of sacrality, everything we use signs for thinking/speaking about is somewhat significant. Or in other terms, all signs/words may be said to possess a certain degree of sacrality, the fact of using a sign implying that its object in conceived on a scene of representation, and that we defer for the moment seeking to appropriate its physical being. In particular, the Jewish refusal to name the divinity, to “signify” him, is a way of distinguishing the One God absolutely from the universe of his nameable creations.

    A closer look at our attitudes toward language complicates the categorical distinction between the sacred and the significant. Certain words, for example, constitute “profanity,” which is a negative form of sacrality, and despite the recent blurring of this distinction that has led to the inclusion of such language even in the margins of public discourse, it certainly remains recognizable. (And we cannot fail to note that “swear words” or “oaths” borrow these categories directly from the sacred, as does the French sacrer, which means “to swear” in the sense of using profanity.)

    Mistakes in grammar and usage also bear a stigma—relative of course to the expected “level” of language in a given context, where a term or turn of phrase “higher” than expected may seem as inappropriate as a more vulgar one. This too reflects a certain kind of sacrality, as is indeed associated with any behavioral “sign” that we transmit to others—through our dress, for example, or the way we wear our hair. All of these behaviors signify, and in so doing, they confront certain norms—and the respect for norms cannot be separated from the respect for the rules of human interaction that were enunciated in the Ten Commandments, or in Hillel’s Golden Rule, as the essence of the sacred.

    Which is after all only to say that all human life is in principle lived on a scene where we are in principle observed by our fellows, and where every detail accessible to the senses may accordingly be judged according to the norms of that scene. Human life, in a word, is never “insignificant,” and by the same token, never wholly neutral with regard to sacrality. Animal behavior too follows “rules,” but these are the result of conditioned reflexes; animals cannot discuss them or agree to change them.

    Thus the difference between sacrality and significance in the Western/Abrahamic context is that the former is understood as the product of a singular universal will that governs its manifestations in rites, holy objects, etc., whereas the latter—a category rarely encountered in serious theoretical discourse—is applied only a posteriori to words or ideas whose importance strikes us. On the rare occasions in which individuals or groups may be said to discover a revelation of the sacred, we naturally attribute it to an “act of God,” an intervention that differs from God’s normal omnipresence by the fact that He conveys to us a “message.”

    But we should not forget that at the origin, significance in the representational relation between sign and thing was itself a revelation, and always retains the trace of one: the mark of the deferral or différance that separates the human mind—in the liberating space of Sartre’s néant—from its potential objects of discourse.

    A final word on God and humanity’s place in the universe

    We are so used to defining an individual’s position on the sacred/religious issue by whether or not he believes in God, that we have trouble thinking about the sacred in more general terms—one more thing for which we can blame the Jews. Readers of Chronicles 802 and 806 will recall the importance of broadening our Western perspective in this respect: Sartre would surely never have written his L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) had he not spent months discussing philosophy with a Buddhist philosopher. Researching this subject made me realize that “nothingness,” which means little to Westerners, is in contrast a central concept in Hinduism/Buddhism, where it is understood in scenic terms as a space of freedom. Whence Sartre’s association of the néant with the freedom of the pour-soi, of human scenicity, in contrast with his vision of the non-human en-soi as a world without free space, in which everything is jammed up against everything else.

    This space of freedom is precisely what humans brought themselves with language. And in this respect, it is ironically curious that nowhere in L’être et le néant does Sartre make this connection between the freedom of the human pour-soi and human language, as though the latter were a mere artifact of this freedom rather than its primary manifestation. Nor to my knowledge do the oriental religions that focus on the emptiness of Nirvana as the ultimate goal of liberation ever associate it with language.

    But this only shows that, however language may appear a far better-defined characteristic of humanity than the sacred, it is the sacred that has been the primary focus of anthropological concern, while our possession of language is taken for granted.

    Thus we can teach language to machines, but (as I suggested a few years ago in a talk at COV&R) getting machines to conceive the sacred “for themselves,” as opposed to merely repeating what humans have said about it, would be a truly momentous undertaking, one for the moment inconceivable. Without a sense of the sacred, not as a word but as an intuition, a pour-soi, a superego, we would never have invented language—and machines wouldn’t have either.

    Thus I cannot help thinking, on the basis of my amateur understanding via Scientific American and similar journals of the evolution of physical science, that Pascal’s intuition of the endlessness of the “two infinities”—the ever-expanding vastness of the universe and the ever-diminishing tininess of its minimal components of matter/energy—is constantly being borne out as our means of detection become more powerful.

    What reason then do we have to assume that there is some endpoint either to the vastness or the tininess? All we can know for certain is how to make things work in the human-accessible intermediate zones that we have been able to explore up to the present, and which we can be assured that we can continue to expand so long as we are able to survive without destroying ourselves. But the goal of a “theory of everything” that could presumably be explained to the layperson never ceases to recoil, and it is hard to believe that any such theory is truly conceivable.

    It was in the spectacle of these limitless infinities that Pascal defined the basis of religious faith: we must place a wager on God, however infinitesimal our chance that he will respond to us, else we have no reason to affirm the truth of our intuition of the sacred. But in simple, anthropological terms, what we are really betting on is not the existence of a benign power ruling the universe for our benefit, but merely the ability of the sacred, as it emerged with human language and religion, to continue to protect us sufficiently so that our species can prolong itself indefinitely in time, hopefully (however unlikely the possibility) even after the demise of our solar system.

    We should still have some time to prepare for that eventuality. In the meantime, my Pascalian wager is that language and the sacred as minimally defined by generative anthropology offer the best point of departure for understanding humanity’s role in the universe.

  • What IS antisemitism?

    One of the most reliable websites for Jewish matters is the Jewish News Syndicate, jns.com, whose Editor-in-Chief, Jonathan Tobin, is a constant source of intelligent and well-informed commentary on world Jewish affairs. Since the start of the recent Gaza conflict with the Hamas pogrom on October 7, 2023, I turn constantly to the JNS for news and analysis of the latest developments.

    On February 11, 2025, Tobin published a critique of a Super Bowl ad run by Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, entitled “Super Bowl antisemitism ad is no way to tackle Jew-hatred.” Here is Tobin’s description of this 30-second piece:

    It featured two mega-celebrities—rapper and actor Snoop Dogg, and NFL great Tom Brady [. . .]. In it, they spout various reasons why people hate each other before concluding that “things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it,” before the two walk off together in a gesture of amity.

    After this introductory presentation, the body of Tobin’s article consists in a demonstration of why this kind of generalized critique of “prejudice” and “hate” is “no way to tackle Jew-hatred.”

    I have no quarrel with anything Tobin says in the article about the need to talk about antisemitism specifically as opposed to lumping it with the classic American example of racism of whites against blacks. But I could not help but note his inability to tell us just what is so special about antisemitism, as opposed to all other varieties of hostility among ethnic, sexual, religious, and other groups. There is lots of hatred between Muslims and Christians, for example, and there have surely been many times more Christians killed by Muslims in Africa and elsewhere than Jews—not to speak of Muslims and Hindus killing each other in India and Pakistan. Tobin wants to insist on the specificity of this hatred; yet he never puts his finger on what is really unique about it.

    Thus he continues:

    [T]he FCAS [Foundation to Combat Antisemitism] produced an ad that it supposed would appeal to the widest possible audience and therefore went all-in on universalizing the problem.

    This is the same premise of most Holocaust education programs that have been employed in the United States in the past few decades. They are rooted in the belief that the only way anyone can be deterred from hating Jews is to depict the Holocaust and antisemitism as essentially no different than any other form of prejudice. In this way, as the FCAS ad seemed to be telling us, Jew-hatred is no different from disliking any group or people other than the majority. The solution, then, is for everyone to play nicely with each other the way Snoop and Brady—a black celebrity and a white one—appear willing to do.

    But if history, as well as the present-day surge in Jew-hatred teaches, it is that antisemitism is not like other varieties of prejudice, be they major or minor. It is a specific virus of hate that targets Jews not merely as a function of bad behavior or a lack of awareness of our common humanity, but as a means of acquiring and holding onto political power.

    To antisemites of every variety—be they left-wing, right-wing, Islamists, and yes, blacks—Jews aren’t merely the “other.” They are in the crosshairs to be despised and subjected to singular prejudice and discrimination, no matter their age, background, what they do or where they reside. They are, instead, an almost superhuman force for evil that must be eradicated. They alone are to be denied rights that even other discriminated minorities are given. And in so doing, various groups can wield power and pretend to be forces for good.

    This description indeed distinguishes antisemitism from all other varieties of prejudice, but it gives no reason for this distinction, and what at first appears to serve as its specific explanation, that “It is a specific virus of hate that targets Jews . . . as a means of acquiring and holding onto political power,” can only combine a medical metaphor (“virus of hate”) with a political reference (“means of acquiring and holding onto political power”) in a way that is hardly specific to antisemitism, or indeed to group prejudice as such.

    And this is not just a matter of sloppy writing; the use of “virus” or similar terms to describe antisemitism is well-attested in the literature, both historical and fictional. One never describes other ethnic prejudices in such terms; whether it’s whites hating blacks, or Hindus hating Muslims, defining the hated group as the “other” seems to provide a sufficient explanation. Why then is antisemitism so different? Why indeed is there a specific word for this prejudice alone?

    And why is it so difficult for one who is deeply concerned with it and writes about it constantly to explain to the reader what is so special about Jew-hatred? For it is certainly not that it is a means to political power.

    Readers of these Chronicles know that this is far from the first time I have dealt with this issue, and perhaps even that Adam Katz and I published a book in 2015 entitled The First Shall Be The Last: Rethinking Antisemitism—a book sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), but which the Institute has subsequently sought to ignore, presumably as having broken the taboo on attempting to explain what it is that is so special about this prejudice.

    I bring this up now because, at the time when the book was published in the era before October 7, 2023, antisemitism was not the dominant issue in Jewish affairs that it has become since that day. At that time, it even seemed possible to treat it as it was addressed, or rather not addressed, in the Super Bowl ad: as just another example of intergroup hostility. But what was a greater shock to the Jewish community even than the barbarous Hamas-led massacre of 1200 innocent civilians—and even before the IDF began its retaliation—was that the world’s reaction was far less one of sympathy for the Jewish victims than of support for the cause of the torturers, rapists, and murderers who carried it out.

    It is this that is unique in antisemitism: it is, as Tobin points out, the hatred of the Jews as “an almost superhuman force for evil that must be eradicated.” But why the Jews have been singled out for this hatred is never explained—and after writing a book and a good number of Chronicles on the subject, I am very much aware that the term “explain” in the normal sense in which the word is used in the social sciences is inadequate to provide a cogent explanation. For our book, we chose as its title “the first shall be the last,” a quote from the Sermon on the Mount that indeed gives the basis of the explanation, but which can only be understood—as it has not been either by ISGAP or by the rest of what may be called the “antisemitism community” in the world of scholarship—in a context that accepts the primacy of the sacred as the basis of human culture.

    The Jews are the descendants of the creators, or better, the discoverers of monotheism, which is the basis of Western civilization. This is not to belittle the Classical or Greco-Roman element of this civilization, which is the source of the West’s scientific as well as esthetic and political traditions. But that the sacred is far more fundamental is reflected in the simple fact that the very idea of hating the Greeks or the Romans for their historical priority, let alone considering them “an almost superhuman force for evil,” is altogether inconceivable.

    In a word, the power—staying power and emotional power—of antisemitism lies in the impossibility of attempting to explain it clearly without further arousing it. This is indeed the effect of the reference to the Jews as “the chosen people”—chosen, that is, by God. And indeed, if a Jew makes a non-Jew aware that he, but not his interlocutor, is a member of the “chosen people,” he has already supplied the latter with a good reason for hating him.

    And yet if the non-Jew didn’t somehow himself believe in this chosenness, he would have no reason to treat the Jew’s belief, real or simply presumed, as anything but a pathetic delusion, like that of the inhabitant of an insane asylum who believes he is Napoleon or Genghis Khan. That is the paradoxical force behind antisemitism.

    Today, in most countries, Jews are indeed more successful than most—for, all other things being equal, the unusual pressures they have experienced over the centuries have no doubt provided them with a major evolutionary incentive to improve their intelligence. But it is not the fact that they may have higher IQs or make more money on the average than non-Jews that provokes their hatred; these advantages are consequences of the hatred that has over the centuries caused them countless tragedies—of which the Nazi Holocaust, as we have just been shown, was by no means the last.

    “The first shall be the last”; it is Jesus who says this. Almost certainly writing after the sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the text’s putative author would have been able to verify this prophecy’s application to the Jews who rejected Jesus. But although the Romans later drove the Jews out of Judaea and changed its name to “Palestina,” antisemitism as we know it began as a Christian phenomenon—while Islam was from the outset anything but Jew-friendly.

    And what is truly paradoxical is that even as the Jews thus ended up as “the last” in the Abrahamic world, this prophecy, and with it, the whole edifice of antisemitism, has continued to treat them as “the first” whose pride must be humiliated.

    For the Jews, or the Hebrews, were indeed the first true monotheists. And to put it in more anthropologically relevant terms, they were the discoverers of the unity of the sacred—of its fundamental identity across all the different religious observances and beliefs that had existed until that time—the first to realize that sanctity or “God-ness” is not an attribute to be distributed among different gods, but a single human-related phenomenon, one that is the basis of humanity itself.

    The sacred and the sign, language and religion, were, as Roy Rappaport had insisted in Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge 1999), coeval, had a common origin—a great insight that has never received the acceptance it deserves. For language and the sacred are indeed the twin marks of humanity that distinguish it—that make it first—among all living creatures.

    October 7, 2023 was a horrible tragedy for its victims, and on the part of its perpetrators, an unalloyed manifestation of human evil. But just as we may hope that its ultimate outcome will be the defeat of fanatical Islamism and the emergence of a Middle East in which Israel will thrive in peace with its neighbors, we must never forget that the Jews, as heirs to the Hebrews’ firstness in the discovery of the oneness of the sacred in the souls of all humanity, may never be able to fully redeem themselves to their fellow humans for this indelible mark of priority.

    The lessons of human history are the truths of anthropology, of the human logos, which combines the qualities of the sign and the sacred. The sign, we (think we) understand: it is a means of communication, more efficient than the signals of animals because it is mediated by a consciousness that the sign allows us to share among us in a new way. But what we need to know as well is that we would not be human without what the sacred provides: the protection provided by the aura of holy untouchability that we naturally associate with religious services, but which is present in a small but crucial way in all but the most animalistic human interactions, most of which are mediated by words or gestures, that is, by signs that protect both the speaker and his interlocutor by deferring conflict over the objects of their common desire.

    The sign and the sacred were coeval, born at the same moment; one could not exist without the other. And as the Bible shows us at Babel, signs are arbitrary; but the sacred is One. The Hebrews did not invent either language or religion, but they were the first to grasp that in sharing the sense of the sacred, all humanity is one—and worships the One God, whatever name we give him.

    Hence religious Jews just call him HaShem, “the name”—for which the closest Greek, or Christian, equivalent is the logos.