Ernst Cassirer on 'Myth and Religion'

 The question I ask as I attempt to plumb some philosopher is ‘what is his doctrine, what is the mainspring, the assumption, the very clearly indisputable central fact for his thought.  It might be something like evidence: how do I know what I know:  It might be: what am I immediately aware of?  This ‘pole star’ as it were, can be so powerful a true north that other ways of thinking languish, shunned as unpresentable.  Ernst Cassirer whose ‘Essay on Man’ I have been reading does not consider some very important thinkers in his section on ‘Myth and Religion’.  Who and why? Leaving the former aside for a later post (James, Otto, Bergson only to controvert him) the principle behind his exclusion, what Coleridge would have called ‘the understanding of his ignorance’ is to be discovered in his neo-Kantianism.  Writing in the first book of his trilogy on ‘Symbolic Form’:

“Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition: it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force.  It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification”, a distinctive ideational content.  This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion.  They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect an empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle.” (pg.7)

Religion escapes from Captivity

When you read this written by an unquestionably clever person you wonder what narrow definition of ‘religion’ is at work:

It is against the horizon of these principles that I listened to my students with great interest today as we began discussion of Lucretius’s atomistic metaphysics as outlined in De Rerum Natura.  In order to achieve ataraxia or tranquility and freedom from anxiety, we must overcome our two primary sources of anxiety:  fear produced as a result of religion (I think this is a bad translation, as the concept of religion as a distinct domain of human behavior and practice doesn’t really arise until the 17th century), and fear of death.

(from: larval on religion - Levi Bryant post)

Narrowly enough defined, almost anything, however paradoxical, will have some truth in it. The more you examine it the more exiguous that truth will appear till a climax of evanescence is achieved and in the light of common day it is seen as no more than a commonplace trope or a wikism.

The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,[31][32] despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written

(from Wikipedia on Religion:
Wikipedia on Religion)

That is wispy like the chocolate bar that is mostly air. Listen up babes, (I had to say that) what were the prophets on about, to what end were the great councils called? Are you in or are you out? Are you a people of God or are you a rabble? Everything does not have to have a ‘meta’ entry to exist. Conditions exceed their boundaries and enable poetry in their escape from captivity.

The Bell by Iris Murdoch (1958)

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

(The Circus Animals Desertion by W.B.Yeats)

Was he wrong? Can character become fixed by a significant incident at a sensitive moment? Iris Murdoch proposes in her novel that the tentative grooming by Michael of Nick, a teacher and his pupil, had a disastrous effect on both their lives. He the priest manqué, and the other a ‘beautiful boy’ of 15. Of course Michael does not see that, it was all so aesthetic, so pure, almost holy. Now 15 years later He is running a Brotherhood attached to a convent of Anglican Benedictines. Nick’s sister Catherine is due to join the nuns and Nick is lurking at the lodge but not a serious member of the group quartered at the big house of Imber. Yes it’s that familiar one pot stew of Murdoch’s that you must stir, stir, stir and don’t let it stick to the bottom. She is a great fabulist and the story continues to hubble bubble.


James the second in command at Imber (it’s Michael’’s house and lodge) has a view which is a rough sketch of the course of the novel:

In so far as Michael had had serious hopes that any individual other than Catherine might be of any genuine help to Nick at Imber he had thought that James Tayper Pace was the man. He was disappointed in James's reaction. James showed himself, where Nick was concerned, stiffly conventional. 'He looks to me like a pansy,' he said to Michael, soon after Nick's arrival. 'I didn't like to say so before, but I had heard it about him in London. They're always troublemakers, believe me. I've seen plenty of that type. There's something destructive in them, a sort of grudge against society. Give a dog a bad name, and all that, but we may as well be prepared! Who'd believe that thing was twin to dear Catherine?'

James has no inkling of course of how Nick was ‘turned out’ by his interlocutor and how something of the same sort is to to be visited on the innocent Toby who is helping out at Imber before going up to Oxford in the Autumn. As I wrote in my previous post Toby is quartered with Nick at the Lodge to keep an eye on him. Is he being traded? Well you decide, Iris does not tell you everything.

Another interesting character is Dora, the errant wife of a resident at Imber Paul, who is studying the historical documents of the nunnery. She is a true Dora (Copperfield nee Spenlow) scatterbrained with a good heart but a ninny. Iris reduces many pc mansions to rubble in this novel. That was the 50’s for you, an era of great repression. On a day flight from Imber and her overbearing husband Dora visits the National Gallery and has a Murdoch moment:

Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect. Who had said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless. Even Paul, she thought, only existed now as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed to be subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all.

The chief characters are developed through their own voice and consciousness which change as the novel develops. The craft is to make that credible and she does along with very fine nature word painting as well. A classic.

Trivia: Glenn Ford stars in a made for tv movie The Brotherhood of the Bell which is quite good and out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ICl0KMm5yw

Natural Religion

What is beyond expression finds expression.

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion by Henri Bergson

I tend towards Bergsonism which is an alert attention to his thought whether it seems inscrutable, as it often does, or not. Bergsonianism I take to be a willingness to co-opt a slice or two into one’s own loaf. I’m not sure that any of the modern Bergsonianisms have much use for his last major work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. A citation will hint why which is odd because there is no major conflict with evolutionary ethics/ethology at present fashionable.

We have been searching for pure obligation. To find it we have had to reduce morality to its simplest expression. The advantage of this has been to indicate in what obligation consisted; the disadvantage, to narrow down morality enormously. Not indeed because that part of it which we have left on one side is not obligatory: is there such a thing as a duty which is not compulsory? But it is conceivable that, starting from a primitive basis of obligation pure and simple, such as we have just defined, this obligation should radiate, expand, and even come to be absorbed into something that transfigures it. Let us now see what complete morality would be like. We shall use the same method and once more proceed, not downwards as up to now but upwards, to the extreme limit.
In all times there have arisen exceptional men, incarnating this morality. Before the saints of Christianity, mankind had known the sages of Greece, the prophets of Israel, the Arhats of Buddhism, and others besides. It is to them that men have always turned for that complete morality which we had best call absolute morality. And this very fact is at once characteristic and instructive; this very fact suggests to us the existence of a difference of kind and not merely one of degree between the morality with which we have been dealing up to now and that we are about to study, between the maximum and the minimum, between the two extremes. Whereas the former is all the more unalloyed and perfect precisely in proportion as it is the more readily reduced to impersonal formulae, the second, in order to be fully itself, must be incarnate in a privileged person who becomes an example. The generality of the one consists in the universal acceptance of a law, that of the other in a common imitation of a model.
Why is it, then, that saints have their imitators, and why do the great moral leaders draw the masses after them? They ask nothing, and yet they receive. They have no need to exhort; their mere existence suffices. For such is precisely the nature of this other morality. Whereas natural obligation is a pressure or a propulsive force, complete and perfect morality has the effect of an appeal.
Only those who have come into touch with a great moral personality have fully realized the  nature of this appeal.

The primitive morality of which he speaks is the in group tribal morality of the closed society. This is a fundamental virtually instinctual promptness to align oneself with the good of the group. Bergson’s delineates the impossibility of moving to the open religious moral schema without the powerful spiritual magnetism of the avatar.