dialogue

I have been thinking lately about the nature of dialogue. I have in mind principally religious dialogue, but this extends to any and all groups or individuals who undertake to express themselves and to understand others. The only bottom line is that participants show respect for the other. As you can see, I have a very wide definition of 'dialogue'. 'Dialogue' for me includes talking with, being with, working for, listening to, and a number of other verbs followed by a preposition that reaches out to another individual. The key element is the reaching out to another to bring that 'other' into some type of relationship with yourself. This is what I take to be the essence of dialogue. From what follows below, it is clear that I want to combat a narrow sense of dialogue that sees it only consisting in 'negotiating' differences in propositional belief in order to try to eliminate those differences and find the 'truth'. This is very far from what I consider to be the purpose or spirit of dialogue. True, 'unity' is the key to my definition of dialogue, but it is not one that consists of doctrinal unity, but rather a unity of spirit and love that is strongest when it emerges out of diversity. I feel strongly about this because dialogue simply signifies the desire to have a relationship with someone or something. And, at least, on an ideal or institutional level, we should be constantly seeking relationships with others. The significance of the act of speaking, listening. or the act of being together, to me, lies more in the act itself than in anything exchanged or said.

I am a bit pre-occupied with this topic at the moment because I recently read some statements by an evangelical who decried the attempt at dialogue by a Utah pastor at a recent event at which Mormons and Evangelicals spoke about Christianity together. This particular evangelical felt that, above all, interaction with 'cults' like Mormons had to be centered on proclaiming their error and pointing out the difference between the 'truth' and Mormonism. He writes:

"I [intend] to address the way we approach others of different faiths with the gospel. What happened at this event is not about becoming friends and learning about other faiths or even understanding their worldviews; God is concerned that we could and ultimately will be influenced by another's religious beliefs if we get too close, even becoming completely deceived to the point of compromising the gospel of Christ."

We'll come back to this in a second.

So as not to appear unbalanced, I will relate a similar attitude displayed recently by a mormon towards another group. I recently attended an Anglican service with a few mormon friends. During the pastor's short sermon, one of my friends got my attention, gestured at the text of the sermon, and mouthed the word 'blasphemy!' very intensely. When I asked him why he felt it was important to see another's belief system in such evaluative terms, he explained that he is doing his own belief system and the Anglican system a service: he is taking them seriously and not trying to water down our differences. Whenever he is in a foreign worship service, he scans the service and only participates in that with which he could agree.

These two attitudes towards belief are admirable on one level: both of them have a healthy respect for difference that sees compromise on that difference as a false value. But I fear that, in the first case, this attitude can never lead to true 'togetherness', i.e. the understanding and love that comes from seeing theological difference as only one aspect of a much larger relationship. I feel his view egotistically focuses on getting across his pet project, beliefs, and concerns to the detriment of communication. I do not see how any relationship could be healthy on that basis. Both sides need to speak. Not even a relationship with God, in my view, can be one-sided. God does not force-feed us truth, but lets us grow independently and speak for ourselves. In other words, God and man should be constantly in 'dialogue' for the relationship to be healthy. As for the second attitude, it is an improvement, but, once again, I think it focuses too narrowly on what we think we 'know' as being the deciding factor in who we identify and commune with. I have a strong aversion to sharply dichotomous ways of viewing the world. In effect, I think it is dangerous to base one's actions and one's interaction with others on the basis of it only being this one way because, simply put, the world is rarely only that 'one' way. If we stake everything on it being that way, we may end up having a painful, conflict-ridden existence.

To both of these individuals, 'dialogue' in the sense of seeking some type of common ground in order to have a conversation and be together, threatens the integrity of theological differences between them. I don't think it has to be seen that way. I, of all people would hate to be caught defending a notion of dialogue that simply erased individuality or difference. To be honest, I see only one thing being lost in dialogue: pride. I think what we implicitly express by seeking to find commonality as opposed to trumpeting difference is that we are more interested in being together than in putting ourselves and our own beliefs above another. I doubt that anyone would claim that Christ was expressing moral relativity by associating with marginalized and traditionally unclean groups. Rather, what Christ expressed with all of his striving to enter into dialogue with diverse peoples, was that, even above belief and manner of life, love and respect should unite us. Recently, a friend of mine made the point that Christ left us, essentially, only two things: a community and a meal. I love this because these two things express 'togetherness' more than 'right thinking'.

“Die Wahrheit ist also einem Saamenkorn gleich, dem der Mensch einen Leib giebt wie er will; und dieser Leib bekommt wiederum durch den Ausdruck ein Kleid nach eines jeden Geschmack, oder nach den Gesetzen der Mode.”

(The truth is like a grain to which man gives a form after his own preference; and this body receives again through that expression a dress after each one's tastes, or according to the laws of fashion.) (ZH I 335) Johann Georg Hamann

From Goethe's Faust:

GRETCHEN: ... Do you believe in God?
FAUST: My darling, who can (really) say:
I believe in God!
You may ask priests or wise men,
And their answer seems but a mockery
Of the questioner to be.
GRETCHEN: So you do not believe?
FAUST: Don't misunderstand me, you lovely sight!
Who may name Him,
And who declare:
I believe in Him.
Who can feel
And dare
To say: I do not believe in Him!
The all-embracing one,
The all-preserving one,
Does He not embrace and preserve
You, me, (and) Himself?
Does the sky not arch above us up there?
Does the earth not lie firm down here?
And do not with kind glance
The eternal stars rise?
Do I not look at you eye to eye,
And does not everything press
Upon your head and heart
And weave in eternal mystery
Invisible and visible around you?
Fill your heart, as big as it is, from that
And when you are completely blissful in the feeling,
Then call it what you like:
Call it happiness! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name
For it! Feeling is everything;
(The) name is sound and smoke,
Enshrouding heaven's glow.
GRETCHEN: That is all quite fine and good;
Much the same thing says the pastor, too
Only with slightly different words.
FAUST: It is said everywhere (by)
All hearts under the heavenly day,
Each in its own language:
Why not I in mine?


So here are two of my favorite quotes on the nature of transcendence. As with almost everything, I stop just short of saying that I take these ideas to be the "truth". I am more interested in the searching and in the striving to express what we understand and feel than in actually saying "I am certain". And maybe that is exactly what I like about these approaches to transcendence. They express the idea that the form in which we express our feelings will never perfectly approximate the nature of ultimate reality; or rather, that whatever form those expressions do take is ultimate reality. The truth can simply appear under an infinite number of names (God, spirit, love, heart) or a variety of images. So the question I want to ask is one that I've gone over with a lot of friends: how consistent is this approach? Does it do too much violence to the individual's experience? Or can we accept the individual's experience as valid, but simply recognize that the infinite is not limited to one form? But is this still inconsistent when we consider those whose experience "tells" them that there is only one form? One expression to truth? Am I really just being paradoxical in saying that I am sure that truth cannot be contained in only one word or image and then saying that I am sure of this? (You'll notice that I stopped short of being 'certain' though). Thoughts welcome

Transcendental Humanity

Here is an real anecdote taken from my real life here at Oxford. I had an interesting lunch a few weeks ago and I wrote this down right after the lunch. I figured I'd make it a blog post since I am trying (and failing) to use my blog to keep people up to date on my life (not that I am necessarily important enough for people to keep tabs on me). So, here it is and apologies for the unedited/stream-of-consciousness style:

Oh my heck!!!! Transcendental humanity!!!!! So I'm still trying to find friends here, but today was really nice. Yesterday was particularly rough because I was sick and confined to my room. Today I felt a lot better and went to the library and one of the German girls in my program came up to me around lunch time and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. I of course jumped at the opportunity to have human contact. Well, we sat down and started chatting about life and career and then it got really interesting. She said that she used to get all worried about her future, but she now does not worry so much about it now because of "Gottvertrauen" (which is German for "trusting in God", i.e. faith). I kind of had to do a double take because this is not normal--or at least being here at Oxford makes you think that bringing up faith in a conversation is not normal. Plus, we had spoken before and there was not necessarily any inkling that she was religious. You have to understand my surprise. It is just not selbstverständlich, (understood/expected/natural) that a German--especially at Oxford--would be religious. So I kind of stammered, "wait, are you religious?" And she said yes and I asked what religion. She said that she was "catholic/protestant". She was raised catholic, but she recently realized that she thinks more like a protestant (wait for this), but she still identifies herself as catholic because she realizes that growing up catholic has made it such that catholicism is her identity and she can't escape it. It makes no sense to her to "convert" to another religion. And besides, if she just jumps ship, how could she ever effect change in her tradition? I got really excited when she said this and stammered "me too!!!!" but it did not end there. She then said, "yeah, the main thing is the claim about being the only true church." I almost lost it at about this point. But then she started talking again without letting me catch my breath: "But I've been thinking a lot about pluralism lately." And then she started explaining an analogy that tries to capture a pluralistic worldview. We all are blind and are feeling different parts of an elephant and describing what we feel from our vantage point. What we say ends up being different even though the ultimate reality is the same. hahahaha. I thought I was watching myself in a mirror. I had been using that analogy for a while as well. We both have realized that we don't like the analogy though and that the arguments for pluralism are just as unsatisfactory and contradictory as are one tradition's claims to absolute truth. We both kind of just left it at the thought of having an epistemological ceiling when it comes to certain matters. Tradition is not rational and there may not be any easy way to harmonize them all into one meta-system. I thought the conversation was such a crazy coincidence though and kind of made my heart jump about the possibility of connecting with people and finding commonalities. You know those moments when someone says something that really speaks to your experiences and suddenly you feel like we are not all just trapped in some hermetically sealed jar not really able to communicate with one another? This lunch was one of those experiences. We then wandered back to the topic of Gottvertrauen and how we both have derived a lot of strength from the religious mindset and have noticed that religious people are often characterized by a calm approach to life.

Just the other night I had the same conversation with a Jewish girl who is trying to figure out her place in her tradition. She came to a similar conclusion as the one above. It is interesting to me how many young people at this place come from religious backgrounds and are having similar experiences relating to their traditions as me. I suppose it is one of the effects of being in an in-between world with faith on the one side and secular academia on the other. Anyways, it is interesting how so many people deal with the same issues and questions. I think being at a place like this is kind of deceptive. You get the idea that with so many people from different places and backgrounds and religions that there is little you have in common. It seems to me that you just have to scratch a little below the surface to find surprising commonalities in human experience.

I'm on the train into London. 18:01. The indian man across from me eating tic-tacs for dinner. One after the other every minute or so. Can't blame him. I do the same sometimes. The well-dressed men all over the train give me new ideas on what accessories I'm lacking at the moment. Chatter in different languages. The 15 different conversations hitting my ears simultaneously, all at different pitches, different tempos, intensities and volumes. It's like putting ten different tapes on at once and the whole confusing buzz forms its own synthetic melody; like grasshoppers or birds all chirping forms a cacophony that is pleasant in its own right. But I notice more the silence of people not talking to each other. There are a lot of us on this train. Not enought seats for everyone. Some young boys sit on the luggage racks. Some passengers read, some sleep, some sit, blankly staring ahead or out the window. Some are in conversation. They all look different. We're all different but all together in the same hurtling tube going to one of the world's great metropolises. I'm thinking a lot about difference lately. All these people have different backgrounds, stories, values, hopes, beliefs, etc. I guess we all have a lot in common as well. We all must value practicality, efficiency, and order--getting along in order to make sure we can follow our different paths to the good life. But beyond that, we don't seem to want much to do with each other. We keep to ourselves. Train conversations with strangers are by no means rare, but they aren't exactly common either. I think this is because difference is uncomfortable and when forced to face it, we sit quietly or do our own thing until the train arrives. My brother calls me to tell me which restaurant I need to go to when I arrive in London...It's really rather just a coincidence that there are other people on the train with us. We tend to think of traveling as more about just getting to a destination than what the actual journey involves. Fair enough, but aren't we always kind of traveling from one place ot the next? Wouldn't it make sense to see the journey--and our fellow passengers as having more meaning than the buildings that wizz by the train?
I guess I'm people watching. It's rather fun. Well, I'm not doing a very good job of shaking this preoccupation with difference. I was thinking earlier today how silly my idealism upon coming to Oxford was. I was going to be friends with everyone. everyone. We were all going to be best friends and have very deep relationships. Ha! I've met a lot of nice people and had some very good conversations and with two people I felt a connection. We even set up lunch or dinner appointments to initiate our friendships. I was very excited. Then neither of them showed up! But it is just orientation week and that is understandable. I still felt really down though. I think I am really needing friendship at the moment. It's tough.
Another thing is tough. I noticed that without even dong anything I had become a curiosity for some people. "Are you really a mormon?" Their interest belied the fact that with the admission I had automatically become more of a joke--someone who believed in "gold plates" and "angels"--than someone to connect with or take seriously. The conversation was frustrating. They kept on asking "where did the gold plates go?" and "what about these magic underpants" in a very patronizing manner. That hurt. I think it hurt because I usually think of myself as a thinking, feeling, aware individual with a very thought-out relationship to his faith. Dismissal and being looked at askance is the worst. It is even worse because I know I do that sometime to others as well. Well, what I'm thinking now is that I may just have to accept that difference and other people's attitudes and even my own shortcomings (not to mention the constraints of space and time) may mean that I won't become friends with everyone. The train is coming into London. People are starting to get off at the stops. But now more people are getting on. It's gotten dark on the way in.
Come to think of it, I could very well comment on the uniformity of the people I see. All the guys basically wear the same thing: Jeans. Button-up shirt with a collar. And some type of jacket or blazer. Most have watches and there are about three types of cell-phones. I've been thinking about commonalities--and uniformity-- a lot lately as well. I feel an irresistible urge to look like everyone else in Oxford. I'm slowly being assimilated. I now just need a blazer, a scarf, and these boot-like shoes with fur around the top I keep seeing. Heaven forbid. What was Hayek saying again about the inability of central planning to figure out disparate tastes in a society...? I suppose uniformity is a also a necessary component of social life. I suppose as well that uniformity fits well with the idea of being uncomfortable with difference. As much as we can, we try to eliminate it. That's not really true. We try to be different as well. Why should difference be so scary or unbearable? I'm sure there are lots of reasons--our own way of being could feel threatened or because we depend so much on other people we need to be able to understand them. Would some of these barriers dissolve if I started talking to these people or would they become even more incomprehensible? Maybe it would work if we found some common interests and experiences. But there is a great chance that we would end up talking in generalities and things common to all humans--like the weather. Oh goodness no. The ultimate indicator of an impasse. Talking about the weather. But I've noticed old couples who know everything about each other also talk about the weather.
Arrived at Paddington. We all get off together. In a few minutes I'll be with some friends and feel at home for a little while.

oh, and I've posted some pictures of my new home and college.

My Thumb Hurts

I was listening to a rather worthless song today (okay, I admit it, I like the song even though it is pop) and I was struck by one pathetic line in which the singer describes her thought process about her emotions upon being heartbroken. She states that "It's not as if New York City/Burnt to the Ground/the moment you drove away/". She appeared to me to be engaging in what many of us do whenever we experience strong (usually negative) feelings related to some personal occurrence. She is trying to understand why such a small event (so she thinks) should have such a great impact on her. She compares the cause of her emotional devastation to another event and intimates that her event should not be so powerful. After all, no one died in her case, no great losses of wealth or property were incurred, and finally, she is only one person. Why should she feel so bad? This mental process seems unhealthy and disingenuous to me. Her "rational" side is playing the role of the prompter who tells the audience when to laugh and when to cry during a show. The only thing that the prompter ends up doing, however, is turning the show into a stiff, heartless production that no one watches. The audience is not allowed to find its own meaning and enjoyment in the show. The fact is that it is as if New York City burnt to the ground when "he drove away".

Said another way, New York City burning to the ground might not mean a thing to us unless there is some connection to ourselves. I have often wondered at this same process in myself of trying to rationalize my feelings away by comparing them to some objective factors like life (in the abstract) and money. I suppose that this can be healthy on one level--trying to "get perspective" on things--but it also seems destructive and self-denying to me. We attach meaning and importance ourselves to things in life and without emotion in the first place, a lost life would not matter to us at all. What "reason" ends up doing in the end is robbing us of our precious subjectivity and continually reintroducing us into the "herd" by pointing us in the direction of "objective" values that dictate to us what has meaning and what does not have meaning. I admit it would be dangerous to let go of "reason" all together--and let the world go up in flames--but when reason is introduced to suffocate individuality and to inhibit coming to terms with our own emotions (however inconsequential they may seem), then we need to let go of what reason may say is unimportant.

I suppose I agree with Hume (with a modern pragmatic twist) that we are not merely rational creatures. It is more satisfying and important to us to scratch an itch on our thumb then to stop Rome burning to the ground. Grimly put, and even though I think that we are just as much rational creatures as emotional, I think Hume has a point. In an extreme case, what happens when we let society, church, or other people dictate our values and what we can feel good or bad about? We end up with a whole lot of discontent housewives and guilt-ridden young men.

Tuned-In

What kind of change does being constantly connected through email, facebook, cell-phones, etc. cause in my daily life? Being face to face with other people--to me--involves several responses. The other is an attraction to be looked upon and spoken to as well as something that imposes duties on me; the duty to respond to them and pay attention to them. These interactions are necessary, exhilarating, addicting, but also taxing emotionally and time consuming. For all these reasons, we generally try to find a balance between time alone for ourselves and time in society.

Before, this balance was more or less easy to find as retiring to one's home meant moving beyond the reach of other people--at least to an extent. In order to connect with one another more energy needed to be expended such as writing a letter, visiting another house, or making a live phone call. These barriers to communication (and privacy and alone time) have now all been broken down. I find myself being bombarded with demands (each email, text-message, facebook post is a form of demand and attraction) from the other to which I feel a duty to respond. The computer is not a passive device for information or simply connecting with others; it is literally a gateway that allows people to shout at me 24/7 to which I must respond. I find this great on one level (as I am able to keep contact with loved ones), but for my particularly OCD personality, I find that a computer makes me less effective as my alone time is slowly whittled away. And I of course have not even mentioned the problem with the type of relationships that one forms in cyberspace, etc.

Fight The Methodology

One of my friends mentioned one time that philosophy has only taught him that you cannot be sure of anything. I was reading something today that gave me somewhat of an insight into this. I have thought a bit about how different methodologies (history, hard sciences, philosophy) seem to condition a certain worldview for those who employ them. Could it be that "philosophy" is prone to teach that you cannot be sure of anything because of a methodological bias that one learns in philosophy? I am thinking of critical thinking here. You are "taught" to question assumptions, and to try to come up with arguments against those assumptions. It is even taught that one should do this as a pure intellectual exercise even if you agree with the premises in order to detect errors, i.e. make your position stronger.

It seems to me that there are several problems with this. The first problem brings to light a fundamental problem for the methodology of philosophy. Before we even get started in asking about assumptions and beginning the project of criticism, we have the problem of defining what philosophy is--i.e. are we going to critique things that make no rational sense, that do not seem to fit into our experience, or are we just going to be absurdists and play with language all day? It seems to me that the nature of modern philosophy and academia predisposes the "methodology" of philosophy to take on purely a form that is conducive to discursive, abstract, presentation. I heard a philosophy professor--Dr. Jensen--describe philosophy in these terms as he ridiculed those who believed that philosophy really was "the love of wisdom" and said that philosophy is a certain way of going about answering a question, i.e., questioning assumptions, etc. I believe it is structural problem. In other words, the academy is incapable of accommodating an endless variety of definitions of what philosophy is and must naturally lean to one way of doing things. It is therefore doomed to cause people like Alex to only learn to "doubt everything" because that is the natural outcome of the particular methodology of abstract, discursive reasoning.

So the first problem of defining what philosophy is leads to the next problem I see in that "philosophy" (as we've defined it) could lead to sidestepping the question of practical reason and living. If one is focused on whether something is consistent in a logical, discursive format, one neglects empirical realities or subjective positions. This means that philosophy could overemphasize the ethereal, abstract, nature of things as opposed to other approaches such as intuition, emotion, empirical models. In other words, I've noticed that philosophers do not necessarily base their arguments of what is true on empirical studies and surveys of what people think. Just because most people believe in God does not make it true for the philosopher or even an interesting question. I am kind of rambling here, but I feel that there is an important gap here between a practical reality and the philosopher's reality.

Ok. I am going to sum up. Because I do not believe that "truth" necessarily forces itself upon us when it is seen, I feel that the methodology of philosophy may not be necessarily conducive to finding truth, but rather conducive to finding error and only error. So it is similar to the agnostics dilemma in which he is sure that God cannot be proven, but he is also sure that God cannot be disproven. If the agnostic is speaking of what human reason can tell us, then it seems that philosophy only pronounces upon the limits of its own methodology. For those who believe in God, this may point to the fact that philosophy must be combined with other approaches with different premises for what can count as "truth".

Please discuss.

I am currently reading a masterful biography on Johann Wolfgang Goethe. I am continuously shocked at the level of insight into the human condition of many of Goethe's statements, poems, and novels. After sampling even a small portion of his works, readers often grasp much better this statement of one of Goethe's contemporaries: "Most people have only one soul. Goethe has a hundred." Recently, one episode from Goethe's life and his biographer's paraphrase of its philosophical import struck my own experience regarding the nature of emotion. I quote a section from the biography:

"With his sudden insight into what he had done to Friederike, and the hideous caricature of its moral implications being daily impressed on him, there began for Goethe what his autobiography calls a period of 'sombre remorse'; 'here for the first time I was guilty'. With the admission of a guilt that could not be remedied, or even alleviated, Goethe entered territory hitherto unknown to the moral sensibility of the rationalist enlightenment, for which sensual desires were but an obscure form of rational desires, disappointment an obscure form of fulfilment, and the only ultimate evil temporary misunderstanding. This was not how love affairs ended for the Swedish Countess or MIss Sara Sampson. On the other hand, Goethe had now consciously detached himself from the Christian Savior who atoned for irremediable guilt of helpless men. Goethe was now alone, and in the darkness he had to find his own way." (Boyle 106)

To put simply the thought I have had recently, which the above quote puts so well, is that emotion defies reason and rational explanation. By 'reason' I mean that which is understandable, demonstrable, balanced, and proportionate to the goal or end we have in mind. In context, this passage is referring to Goethe's realization that the emotion aroused by his negligent comportment towards a woman caused pain that could not be explained away. More generally, the desires he also felt in this period for women who could never be his, did not lend themselves to being understood or being soothed by rational thought. Emotion suddenly presented itself as maniacal and irrational to Goethe. In The Sorrows of the Young Werther--the book that transformed him into a literary superstar almost overnight and which is loosely autobiographical in nature--Goethe tells the tale of a young man whose overly sentimental nature leads him to kill himself when his desires for a woman cannot be fulfilled as she is betrothed to another man. Irrational seems to be the perfect word to describe an overpowering impulse that disregards one's own life, others, and the means to achieve the end.


On one hand, when we use the word emotion, we imply exactly that side of us which is not rational. My entry may thus seem a bit banal in that I simply point this fact out. But, as Enlightenment philosophy demonstrates, people often conceptualize emotion in exactly rational terms. Our notion of morality often rests on this idea. It is very common since the Enlightenment to think of emotion as something God or nature endows us with in order to achieve its ends. Our sex drive, hunger, thirst, sociability, drive to compete. We may tend to think that our emotions work in harmony with very rational ends. If this were true, we would find that our desires tailor themselves to our needs: when we have satisfied ourselves or come up against a situation that is impossible or against "nature" then it should follow that our desires let up a bit. This is often true, but often not. First, the intensity and amount of emotion is often not commensurate with what any rational standard of what might be need to satisfy the desire. I just read a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses where a young boy, Cyparissus, accidentally kills his beloved fawn, and then desires to die as his grief is so great. The God Phoebus counsels him that "his grief should be moderate, in proportion to its cause". I am sure that others can identify with this, but I often find that my emotions/desires seem to go far beyond what is seemingly justified.

Second, I feel that emotion deserves the title of "irrational" as it often seems to not follow the course that nature has set out for it. One of the major themes in classical literature such as Euripides and Ovid is the notion of "pathological love" i.e., love for someone you should not love (siblings, parents, same-sex attraction) or love that seems to be overpowering where no will is involved. We often try to come up with words such as "aberration", "defect", etc. to explain those desires that go against nature, but we would do well to simply accept the notion that "aberration" and boundless emotion are just as "natural" (if we mean what spontaneously occurs) as those desires that have clear, beneficial ends.

I have a lot more thoughts on this topic such as the role of rationality, the attitude we should take toward emotion, and some thoughts on what ultimately determines action, but I believe I will save that for another post as this one is getting long.

The Word and History

No matter how much I try, I tend to see life through the lenses of an historian. I am always drawn to the question of how context --whether that is geographical location, personal family history, or gender--conditions the beliefs I hold, the way I vote, or the food I eat. I am, as it happens, also very interested in languages. Far from being a rigorous linguist, I often find myself thinking about the relationship between language, society, and history. I have, as of late, been thinking about how words and their meaning arise from a historical context--a new invention ('google it'), an event (September 11), or a neologism to describe a new trend in society (globalisation). Languages seem to be built word by word as individuals and societies amass new experiences. Each national tradition and language has a distinctive flavor and way of understanding the world through their language because their experiences have been distinct from everyone other traditions', set apart as they are by geography, climate, wars, and events.

For the individual today, standing at the end of this long build-up of language, an interesting relationship exists between himself and his language. The words he uses have the interesting characteristic of having the potentiality to express almost an infinitely wide range of collective memories, individual experiences, but at the same time the word must be precise enough to function as a definite signifier for daily communication. As a historian, I am mostly interested in how the individual is more often than not completely oblivious to the cultural and historical meaning that the word and language contains. Apart from the historian who is able to methodically unpack the history of a word, we mostly concentrate on a standard (albeit subjective) understanding. But even as we use words to communicate something definite, the possibility of manifold meaning arising from the collective basis of the word is ever-present as Emile Durkheim points out:

"Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or lesser extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?" (482-3)

Durkheim's quote about how words contain meanings that go beyond the individual evokes a thought I had recently. It has to do with the way our culture collectively understands (or misunderstands) the meaning of the words "Barack Obama". This "event" stands arguably as one of the most momentous events in American society in the previous decade. I must admit that I had a hard time grasping the full rationale behind the excitement in media broadcasts that used such a word as "historic" to describe the significance of a black president being elected to the White House. It struck me last week why I was experiencing this disconnect with the excitement surrounding the election of the first African-American to the presidency. I can best explain it in terms of a generation gap which highlights the underlying historical side of language. Being born in 1985, what I associate with the word "African-American" is radically different from what my parents or grandparents associate with the word. I only have second-hand knowledge of the civil rights movement, I have not felt the full range of emotions over lynchings, fire hoses, church-burnings, etc. that my parents (to speak nothing of middle-aged Africans-Americans) did growing up in the sixties. Partly as a result of growing up in Utah as well, the word "African-American" has been to a great degree discharged of any divisive, controversial content. I may understand it intellectually, but the chances were slim that Barack Obama's election would bring a tear to my eye conditioned as it is to see the world through the language of post-1985 culture. The advancing years and changing conditions shifted the meaning of a word. For the older generation, those memories of hate and race riots and an American seemingly eternally biased and broke still clung to the word "Barack Obama" and thus their experience of the event was powerful as it was symbolic of the exact cultural change that left me tearless.

I hope, however, that this post communicates one aspect of the value of studying history. Its value lies in understanding the historical context for the language we use and thus expanding our ability to sympathize with others as we expand our understanding of the meaning contained in the language we use.

collective effervescence

I've just finished reading Emile Durkheim's "The Elementary Forms of the Religious". Durkheim--a pioneer in the field of sociology and anthropology--sets as his task in this book nothing less than the identification of the most basic (i.e. earliest, most fundamental) activity among civilizations that we can call "religious". His overall goal in this investigation is to identify how religious thinking and institutions arise in the first place and what aspects of religion are universal to all world religions. In what follows, I will try to explain the most striking evidence of Durkheim's thesis that "religion is inherently a social phenomenon" and its implications. That main piece of evidence is Durkheim's assertion that religion arises as a way to understand "collective effervescence", a phenomenon that occurs when individuals come together.

In order to understand what Durkheim means by this, we must summarize a portion of Durkheim's investigative process and findings. Durkheim spends most of his book exploring what he considers the most fundamental cult of the most primitive human civilization: the practice of totemism among the Australian aborigines. Durkheim describes totemism as the practice of a clan identifying itself with some object from the natural world (usually a plant or animal). In other words, a totem is a clan's flag. All societies seem to do this. We find symbols--often taken from the natural world--as stand ins for our community, nation, or group. Germany takes an eagle, the mormons take the beehive, and Japan takes the rising sun. Durkheim makes clear that what is important is not the real object itself, but the representation of the object. It is not the rabbit that is sacred, but the image of the rabbit. This is significant because what Durkheim argues is that the clan is in fact representing itself by means of the totem. When the clan reverences, worships, or in any way sets apart the totem as a sacred object, they are, in effect, simply reverencing the visual representation of their collective existence. The practices that spring up around the representation of the totem then become what we recognize as a "religion". Durkheim sees this process of taking outside objects as representative of oneself as a necessary means by which a community expresses and understands itself: "...collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects..." (466)

Why do societies seek to represent and then revere themselves in this manner? This is where we approach Durkheim's fascinating notion of a "collective effervescence". People have wondered what it is exactly that gives rise to religion and the idea of an all-powerful being named God. Durkheim rejects the idea that the notion of "God" comes from feelings of fear, or weakness in the face of powerful natural forces. Rather, Durkheim sees the beginnings of the practice of totemism, which then develops into the notion of a spiritual being, as beginning with the experience of community. Durkheim states that "...collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity..." (469) This "religious thought" begins with the feeling of "reverence" for something outside of ourselves that seems to be all-powerful.

On some level, we all reverence society and recognize its claims upon us. Durkheim theorizes that this sense of respect for society comes from the physical power we feel when participating in any communal event. We seem to be lifted out of ourselves in the presence of large groups participating in some important communal act. Durkheim puts it so:

"There are occasions when this strengthening and vivifying action of society is especially apparent. In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves" (240)

This physical force emanating from community is what Durkheim terms "collective effervescence". We can perhaps best understand it by reflecting on the excitement we feel as we sing together in a church assembly, or experience the sensation of 30,000 individuals cheering for a school basketball team. There seems to be a force that exists in community.

The Aborigines--experiencing this phenomenon as they came together to celebrate a successful hunt or something of that sort--began the process of seeking to understand this force that seemed to alight upon their community. It eventually led to the totem. In a more general sense, it is not very hard to see the connection between God and society. God is to us--in basic form--"a being whom men think of as superior to themselves, and upon whom they feel that they depend" (237). Durkheim argues that God is (I've simplified this a little bit) the expression we use for the individual's relationship to society. Society appears to us as an invisible, yet all-powerful entity. Its can demand everything from us simply by being what it is: society. We all seem to perceive that the greatest end that exists is the good of society. Durkheim feels that this attitude seemingly innate in us arises from an immaterial power that comes with communal existence:

"We say that an object, whether individual or collective, inspires respect when the representation expressing it in the mind is gifted with such a force that it automatically causes or inhibits actions, without regard for any consideration relative to their useful or injurious effects" (237).

Thus, Durkheim's main thrust can be summed up in three words: "Society is God". By way of conclusion, what I find most applicative in this theory is what Durkheim concludes about the ultimate nature of religious claims about a spiritual realm and the ethical teachings attached to the religion. To be perfectly blunt, Durkheim saves religion from being simply interpreted as an illusion, but ultimately concludes that while arising from very real physical forces, the literal notions of a corporeal God and heaven cannot be accepted. In his words, "...the reality which religious thought expresses is society..." (480) Further, the ethical claims that religion makes on individuals can be understood as how a community expresses the "collective ideal" (470).