The nice thing about religious discourse is that it puts everything in
human terms. Once God has finished his creation, the world has become a
human-friendly place, and fixing up the equations—the six days becoming
so many billion years—is of secondary importance. But when, in the
absence of religious humility or petitio principi, philosophy attempts
to “understand” the world, that is, to describe it in words, it cannot
escape the epistemological conundrum of connecting these words to a
non-divine, that is, a
human source of meaning.
(
Entre parenthèses, it is significant that there is no neutral term for
religious discourse. Either one
believes it, in which case it is God’s word, or one calls it
myth.
Girard’s use of the term “biblical” to distinguish Judeo-Christian
discourse from that of “pagan” myth is as far as one can go before
accepting the necessity of an
anthropological hypothesis of our
human/cultural/religious/linguistic origin.)
Philosophy as a self-conscious activity begins with Plato’s Socrates
asking not about “the world” but about the meanings of words, as we may
assume the real Socrates did in the Athenian agora. And although his
definitions of Courage, Beauty, the Good and the rest provide a model
that the entire history of philosophy will only refine, the ontology on
which it is purportedly based, the doctrine of Ideas, is founded on a
quasi-sacred myth. The idea that what are in fact the
words of
human languages should be understood as Ideas, independent of our
existence, casting shadows on the wall of our “cave,” is not a fanciful
sidebar but the very core of our philosophical/metaphysical tradition.
Well, you may ask, how can we do better than this? How can we have the
chutzpah to challenge the entire philosophical tradition, not on the
basis of a scientific discovery, but simply by a priori reasoning?
And yet, the answer is simple enough. Platonic metaphysics, the Western
philosophical tradition (addressing “Eastern” traditions is another
matter, although I think that my reflections on Buddhism (see in
particular
Chronicles 515 and
516) provide at least a point of departure) is founded on the need to deal with its subject matter
in medias res.
Whatever our image of the “armchair” philosopher, Socrates was, not
coincidentally, anything but. He saw as his task not to elaborate an
abstract ontology, but to find a basis for resolving the problems of the
polis. It is by no means coincidental that the
Republic
is Plato’s longest and most frequently cited dialogue: philosophy in
the service of creating the “good society.” As, in another sense, is GA.
But the past two millennia have taught us that we have to begin further
back than the declarative sentence.
Kant spoke of his “critical” mode of philosophical thinking as a
“Copernican revolution,” an introspective examination of our internal
scene of representation that would lead in two generations to
phenomenology, and thence to
Existenzphilosophie, which would
reintroduce the “metaphysical” concept of Being, no longer founded on
biblical and/or Platonic authority, but as the product of our, or
Heidegger’s, ontological intuition.
Aware of the quasi-mythical basis for what would come to be called “Continental” philosophy,
analytic
philosophy seeks to avoid any such appeal to “Ideas” and simply to
explore as rigorously as possible the truth-value of propositions. But
this attempt to liberate thought from metaphysics misunderstands the
real foundation of metaphysics—which is, precisely,
the proposition.
When analytic philosophy spares us from trying to understand what
Heidegger means in calling man “the shepherd of Being” by dismissing
such sentences as “meaningless,” it demonstrates only that its concept
of “meaning” is too narrowly constrained by propositional logic to
encompass the anthropological truth Heidegger’s statement attempts,
however “poetically,” to express.
Analytic philosophy misses the point, as pointed out by Hamlet to
Horatio in I, 5, that
it is this anthropological truth that philosophy and ultimately, all human thought aims to address,
be it even by attempting to describe the activities of the “natural”
world. Whatever the value of the results of analytic philosophy, one
thing it does not and cannot do is explain the foundation of the human
difference/
différance from the rest of nature, a difference that is both historically and
logically prior to the existence of the proposition or declarative sentence.
Now that we have come to the fortieth anniversary of my original
formulation of the originary hypothesis during my visit to Johns Hopkins
and René Girard in 1978, it is time to make the point that this simple
principle is and remains the unchallenged if not unchallengeable basis
for an originary anthropology. It provides an explanation of the human
that requires no Ideas to descend from heaven, let alone the whole of
the language in which we express ourselves.
For the entire history of philosophy presupposes, and cannot even put
seriously into question, that not merely arithmetic and all the rest of
mathematics, but
language itself are systems that have existed
in a virtual state from all eternity, awaiting “intelligent” creatures
like ourselves (and the scientific community appears certain, on
zero evidence, that other, possibly
more intelligent creatures exist elsewhere) to be downloaded into our brains like so many Apps.
Nor can the human or “social” sciences explain, or even formulate in their own terms, the
différance by which we pass from the
en-soi to the
pour-soi, a phenomenon that the philosophers at least can describe, even if their science cannot encompass its origin.
What I have called the “moral model,” the scenic configuration that
provides a plausible origin for morality along with language and
religion, in contrast to John Rawls’s “original position” that provides
the ingenious basis for his model of justice in a necessarily unequal
society, is not a thought-experiment, but
a genuine hypothesis. The originary hypothesis describes an event arguably similar in its basic pattern to one that
must have taken place.
Its connection with our profound sense of moral equality, “that all men
are created equal,” is not an a posteriori construction, but flows
plausibly from the configuration of the hypothetical originary event.
Similarly, whereas Sartre’s brilliant description of the
pour-soi in
L’être et le néant
is grounded only in the author’s “phenomenological” intuition, the
originary hypothesis offers an evenemential explanation for its
emergence.
Whatever the advance of Kant’s categorical imperative over religiously
guaranteed morality, it remains an external imposition, one that can be
“proved” only as one proves Euclid’s theorems, on the basis of prior
postulates. The moral model, as I have proposed it, does not derive from
a series of reasonings; it is realized
in actu in the originary event as I have described it.
Our conviction of moral equality and the symmetrical configuration of
the originary scene reinforce each other—just as our behavior in social
exchange confirms Mauss’s model of the “gift,” just as our food-sharing
festive behavior confirms the hypothesized originary
sparagmos.
The essential features of the human condition do not change. This is the principle behind what I have called
originary analysis:
to seek the source of a category of cultural behavior, conceive how it
would have emerged in the course of the originary event.
We should have more confidence in our history. If we do not, it is
because we remain the children of the Enlightenment, unable to discover
an
immanent basis for human uniqueness, but intolerant of the
transcendent element of the sacred that, like the baby in the bathwater,
had to be discarded in order to do away with our dependency on
religious tradition. But at the origin,
the sacred and the significant are the same. The referent that we designate to one another through the sign of language is the embodiment of a
signified
that exists in another dimension than the objects of our appetite. Call
it sacred, call it significant—its existence can be attested only by
human speakers of language. Language and the recognition of the sacred
that we call “religion,” as Vico, de Maistre, Max Müller, and Roy
Rappaport understood, are
coeval. And the originary hypothesis offers the first plausible model of their moment of birth within the proto-human world.
I am confident that if the human species survives, this way of thinking,
whether or not associated with my name or with the term “generative
anthropology,” will eventually triumph, and will lead to unpredictable
advances in every domain of human science.
