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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical.
1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (Intro., trans, and notes) Crouter, Richard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 163.Google Scholar
2 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’, Standard Edition, vol. IX, p. 118; quotations will henceforth appear in the text.Google Scholar
3 I mention here only those conditions that we ordinarily take to license teleological explanation. A full analysis of the concept – if one is possible – would have to include further conditions. For example, to cover instances in which a desire and belief combine accidentally to cause an action for which they form a reason, we must require the pair to cause the action qua belief and desire. For discussion, see, Davidson, Donald, ‘Agency’, Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 43–61,Google Scholar and, Elster, Jon, ‘The Nature and Scope of Rational-Choice Explanation’, in (eds.) LePore, Ernest and McLaughlin, Brian, Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 60ff.Google Scholar
4 For example, Keith Lehrer identifies as the key addition ‘metamental activity’ —our ability to resolve, through deliberation (‘metamental ascent’), conflicts between ‘first–order beliefs and desires. Says Lehrer, ‘conflict is resolved by the articulation of alternatives and the exercise of autonomy’ (‘Metamental Ascent: Beyond Belief and Desire’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association LXIII/3 (11 1989), 25.Google Scholar
5 In particular, I pass over the claim that autonomy is inconsistent with causal determination.Google Scholar
6 ‘The Biology of Obsessions and Compulsions’, Scientific American, CCLX/3 (03 1989), 83–9.Google Scholar In closing, Rapoport glances in our direction (and Freud's): ‘It is my feeling that in the [long] run this work could lead to a fundamental shift in the understanding of evolution, the mind and human rituals.’
7 Wilson, E. O., On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 174, 180.Google ScholarPubMed
8 This of course leaves open many questions, prime among them whether the elements of mentality in such causal relations are brain states that are token-identical to the relevant beliefs and desires — the view urged by Davidson in a series of influential papers (cf. ‘Mental Events’, repr., Essays on Actions and Events). I note three issues that arise on this view: first, given Davidson's denial of psychophysical laws, there is the question how to establish the connection between the psychological attitude and the brain state that it tokens (cf. Frederick Stoutland, ‘Davidson on Intentional Behavior’, in [eds.] LePore and McLaughlin, Actions and Events, pp. 29–43). Second, given the ‘causal impotence’ of the psychological attitudes considered as such, Jaegwon Kim concludes that ‘it is doubtful that they have any useful role at all’ (‘The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association LXIII/3 [11 1989], 35). Finally, some have questioned the legitimacy of teleological explanations on the grounds that one cannot make an explanatory appeal to the cause of an event unless one grasps the causal law that it exemplifies (cf. Dagfinn Follesdal, ‘Causation and Explanation: A Problem in Davidson's View of Action and Mind’, in [eds.] LePore and McLaughlin, Actions and Events, pp. 311–23).Google Scholar
9 Quoted terms are from Ernest LePore and Brian McLaughlin, ‘Actions, Reasons, Causes, and Intentions’, in (eds.) LePore and McLaughlin, Actions and Events, p. 10.Google Scholar
10 Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 113. Tambiah is assessing Wilson's handling of the institutions of kinship and marriage.Google Scholar
11 Thus, Paul Ricoeur wonders whether Freud sees his refusal as ‘due to the underlying intention of religion, or is it the result of its degradation and regression when it begins to lose the meaning of its own symbolism? And how does the forgetfulness of meaning in religious observances pertain to the essence of religion? These questions necessarily remain in the background, even though Freud does not raise them himself (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970]). 232–3. In this section I sketch answers to these questions.Google Scholar
12 ‘Desires to ’ requires that our causal discoveries further expressly teleological explanation. Of course we may notice revealing (‘meaningful’ in a wider sense) causal relationships of which the agent is unaware; on such relationships depend, for example, the symbolist and structuralist social scientific traditions. For them, religious behaviour is meaningful, but not teleologically so, and so the question of autonomy cannot arise.
13 Wisdom, John, ‘Gods’, in his Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).Google Scholar
14 That is, we seemed justified in taking Wisdom's man to intend us to take him to be intending to use ‘gardener’ in a standard way (we got standard replies to our questions about what a gardener does, what kinds of tools a gardener typically uses, etc.).Google Scholar
15 For an extended discussion of the distinction between theoretical and observational discourse, see my Religion, Interpretation and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chs. 3 and 4.Google Scholar
16 Here I bend an example of Dagfinn Follesdal's, who attributes it to Suppes, Patrick (‘Intentionality and Rationality’, in [eds.] Margolis, J., Krausz, M. and Burian, R. M., Rationality, Relativism and the Human Sciences [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986], p. 117).Google Scholar
17 Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), pp. IIff.Google Scholar
18 If so, then Eliade cannot be right that the only approach ‘that even deserves consideration’ is that on which the interpreter comes to understand the belief or practice at hand by appreciating the ‘reality’ which ‘justifies’ it (Myth and Reality [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], pp. 3–6). Since Eliade means justification through the agent's eyes, he is urging the teleological strategy; we understand when we appreciate that aspect of the world that the agent takes to warrant his or her behaviour. Indeed, my discussion of the adolescent theologian suggests that teleological interpretation cannot even be taken as a regulative ideal, as a guide to our interpretive conduct. Rather, I am arguing that built-in features of religion tend to block our attempts to appreciate what the agent takes to justify his or her behaviour. We may view Eliade as exaggerating the legitimate methodological requirement that, if we are to see the other as having beliefs and desires at all, we must place him or her in fundamental agreement with us. I return to this point in the next section.Google Scholar
19 Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, (ed.) Rhees, Rush, (trans.) Miles, A. C., (rev.) Rhees, (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, Inc., 1979), p. 4.Google ScholarBritish copyright, Retford, Nottinghamshire: Brynmill Press Ltd. For the German: ‘Bemerkungen über Frazers The Golden Bough’, Synthese XVII (1967), 233–53Google Scholar Recent discussions of this work include Needham, Rodney, Exemplars (Berkeley: University of California Press), ch. 7,Google ScholarTambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, Magic Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 54–64,Google Scholar and Proudfoot, Wayne, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 209–10, 214.Google Scholar
20 Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 12.Google Scholar
21 ‘But it's only an egregious error from our point of view.’ Rather, we have already interpreted the other as sharing enough of ‘our’ point of view to make the error obvious as error to both of us. It is our initial act of interpretive assimilation that makes for our subsequent discomfort. Wittgenstein's point is that we feel that it is we, as interpreters, who have made the error.Google Scholar
22 Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, pp. 1–2.Google Scholar
23 Davidson, , ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in (ed.) LePore, Ernest, Truth and Interpretation: Essays on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 316–18.Google Scholar
24 See, for example, ‘Comment on Donald Davidson’, Synthese xxvii (1974), 328. Davidson's response follows.Google Scholar
25 Lewis, David, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Synthese xxvii (1974), 331–44; Follesdal, ‘Intentionality and Rationality’, 120ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 For a recent discussion, see Davidson, , ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, The Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII/6 (06 1990), 318ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Religion, Interpretation and Diversity of Belief, ch. 4.Google Scholar
28 Davidson, , ‘Structure and Content of Truth’, 321.Google Scholar
29 I ignore several well-known problems here. Two of these — the vagueness of such terms as ‘most’, ‘widespread’, ‘general’, and ‘bulk’, and how to accommodate our evident errors and irrationalities — I have discussed in Religion, Interpretation and Diversity of Belief, chs. 3 and 4. In addition, I exaggerate here the extent to which the content of beliefs, sentences and desires can be assigned independent of one another.Google Scholar
30 And so, we could add, from his or her reflection on these beliefs and desires (see, above, note 4).
31 For example, I take this to be the thrust of Davidson's view. See, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, in his Essays on Truth and Interpretation(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 154,Google Scholar ‘Mental Events’, Essays on Actions and Events, pp. 221–3, and ‘Comments and Replies’ to ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, Ibid. p. 241; see also, Jaegwon Kim, K‘Psychophysical Laws’, in (eds.) LePore and McLaughlin, Actions and Events, pp. 369–87.
32 Prozesky, Martin, ‘Explanations of Religion as a Part of and Problem for Religious Studies’ Religious Studies xxiv/3 (09 1988), 306–7.Google Scholar
33 Types of Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 41.Google Scholar
34 I wish to thank David Banach, Bruce Barton, Warren Frisina, Robert Holland, Tom Lawson, Leon Pearl, Hans Penner, Sally Sedgwick and an audience at Columbia University for comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper.
