Sometimes a Man Just Needs to Write About What's on His Mind

Religious theorists like to answer questions surrounding the origins of religion. More often than not, it's in an non-falsifiable way. Freud makes the rather bold move of positing a pre-historical narrative. A group of sons killed their father, and, due to a sense of unconscious remorse, displaced that guilt of murder onto a Totem animal of some kind. The role of the father--protection-- thus became the occupation of the Totem. Sate the needs of the totem and the totem will sate the needs of the people. Later on within the evolution of this religious attitude, animism found the old Totem guilt re-displaced onto some kind of ghostly chimera. Mythological gods followed--slightly more abstract in nature--,and eventually the Immanent highly rationalized Yahweh (originally Jehovah) appears in the Semitic mythos. Add Christianity, Islam, and a tinge of Scholasticism, and what you have is a theologized, rationalization of a Deity figure, abstracted even beyond the capabilities of semantics (the negative differentia of Divine Simplicity). God is something so other He is not really something about which we can speak.

Nevertheless, for Freud, God still functions as a thing which cares for and protects, satisfies needs, and helps repress the original guilt, somehow sociologically (or physiologically?--Freud is never clear) latent within the collective mind. But even though religion or, later on, theodicy is therapeutic, they are incomplete therapy. In the way that a neurotic patient may hold some of his symptoms in abeyance via medicine, religions act as ephemeral cures. (Freud has a tendency to argue from the ontogenetic to phylogenetic analogy.) The disease remains, and only the only therapy is a recognition of, a naming of, a return and remembrance of the original event: the killing of the father. Once the causal event has meaning to the patient, healing follows via a proper ordering of the Id, Ego, and Superego. Once we, societies, know why and what we are repressing, we can begin to repress through the right modes viz. the scientific attitude. It's blatantly, and perhaps embarrassingly, akin to Plato's proper ordering of the desiderative, sentimental, and rational classifications of the soul found in The Republic. Health and happiness are caused through a rationalization of the internal man.

I could offer similar accounts from Weber, James, Jung, Eliade, Otto, Burkertt, Levi-Strauss etc. But my point for explicating Freud's account for the origin of religion is merely to demonstrate what sort of hoola-hoops thinkers are willing to go through to make sense of religious experience (at the personal level) and religious institutions (at the public level).

I find this need to construct a Weltanschauung a fascinating one. It fits, i think, into an impulsive category. It manifests itself as a need, a desire to be sated with "the thing which is the case." When we put the impulse into words, it comes out in conceptual form: but the event itself is not a concept. The phenomenon appears, furthermore, to be universal. I have never met nor heard of someone who does not desire to know--not necessarily even "the truth of truths", but any truth. If a disinterest in "what is the case" ever manifested itself in someone, i think i would be highly skeptical concerning the claim.

This impulse fits within the psychology of religion, or maybe more accurately, the psychology of Weltanschauung. We find ourselves with a need. From whence comes it? Christianity, of course, supplies a narrative to account for the impulse--not to mention that both Eliade and Otto (and even James) add their own religious models.

I don't know. Something about exploring these models feels--for me-- akin to the pleasure deriving from reading a poem or listening to a song. I wade in them like a man in an ocean, satisfied simply to explore the realms the current may take me. I realized upon reflection that this is the mode through which i construct my Weltanschauung. My methodology may appear a bit haphazard, and, i suspect, it is. Our current analytic tradition leaves us with the impression that schemas alone, logical validity, following premises to sound conclusions provide truths we may fearlessly adopt. Though in a sense i think this is right, i do not think it necessary to come vis-a-vis with truth. Too many people, normal people who don't blog about the Freudian fixations, construct worldviews on propositions they were told are true. Most people exist in a world argued from authority. To the degree that they adhere to truths, they do so because someone told them it was true. They arrive at truth by accident.

In the same sort of way, i have the impression that my methodological approach will place me in the position to acquire truth by accident. Coherency aside [or bracketed] and charity given, i think that to dabble is to know. More importantly it is to know a certain sort of thing. A long lost friend of mine once accused me of what he called "Tensionism." He was right then, and he is right now. The tendency to synthesize, to willingly suspend belief, the wish to eat a little bit of everything off of the buffet is really, in another sort of way, a construction of a Weltanschuanng. One object is to be full, the other object is to know "what is the case." I shall taste from the cornucopia of knowledge and be filled. The psychological dangers of such an approach take the form of dissonance and terror. The psychological advantages take the form of knowing a piece of truth in a way concurrent with the way someone else, fully engrossed in it, knows it completely. It is somehow, though not yet clear to me, related to Murdoch's definition of love--the extremely difficult realization that someone, other than oneself, is real. Additionally, it is related to James' account of hope standing in opposition to fear in "The Will To Believe." It is all a muddle, as one might expect from someone like myself. But i did not choose to see the world the way that i do; it feels, rather, like it chose me.