The Disenchantment of the World

A Political History of Religion

Marcel Gauchet, Oscar Burge

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691238364
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy of Religion

Marcel Gauchet has launched one of the most ambitious and controversial works of speculative history recently to appear, based on the contention that Christianity is "the religion of the end of religion." In The Disenchantment of the World, Gauchet reinterprets the development of the modern west, with all its political and psychological complexities, in terms of mankind's changing relation to religion. He views Western history as a movement away from religious society, beginning with prophetic Judaism, gaining tremendous momentum in Christianity, and eventually leading to the rise of the political state. Gauchet's view that monotheistic religion itself was a form of social revolution is rich with implications for readers in fields across the humanities and social sciences.Life in religious society, Gauchet reminds us, involves a very different way of being than we know in our secular age: we must imagine prehistoric times where ever-present gods controlled every aspect of daily reality, and where ancestor worship grounded life's meaning in a far-off past. As prophecy-oriented religions shaped the concept of a single omnipotent God, one removed from the world and yet potentially knowable through prayer and reflection, human beings became increasingly free. Gauchet's paradoxical argument is that the development of human political and psychological autonomy must be understood against the backdrop of this double movement in religious consciousness--the growth of divine power and its increasing distance from human activity.In a fitting tribute to this passionate and brilliantly argued book, Charles Taylor offers an equally provocative foreword. Offering interpretations of key concepts proposed by Gauchet, Taylor also explores an important question: Does religion have a place in the future of Western society? The book does not close the door on religion but rather invites us to explore its socially constructive powers, which continue to shape Western politics and conceptions of the state.

PART ONE

The Metamorphoses of the Divine

THE ORIGIN, MEANING, AND DEVELOPMENT
OF THE RELIGIOUS

The Historicity of the Religious

Is there such a thing as a religious function, a subdivision of the symbolic function, which, along with speech and tools, organizes our relation to reality, and makes humanity’s detour through the invisible the pivot of its activity? Is there a broad common bond between the religious sphere and social reality, whereby sacral otherness allows the group to found itself or expresses and institutes the essential superiority of collective-being over that of its individual members? The question of the relation between religion and society can essentially be stated in those terms.

Surely even raising these questions implies an affirmative answer. It is commonly admitted that the religious factor in history has a constant, if not invariable, quality making it a necessary precondition for the existence of a human society, whatever role we assign it in the primordial structuring of the collective sphere. It is a primordial phenomenon insofar as it can be found as far back as we go in human history; it is universal in that we do not know of any society which has escaped it; and it is recurrent, as can be seen by its influence in recent times in movements with thoroughly antireligious motives, such as the various totalitarian enterprises. All of which would indicate that we are faced here with one of those ultimate constraints inherent in collective-being, which will always remain and whose singular necessity we should try to discern behind its increasingly diverse manifestations.

I have adopted an interrogative approach because I believe the time has come to question widely accepted theories and to reinterpret the irrefutable data behind them. Without doubt the religious has been a constant factor in human societies up to now. I believe, however, that it must still be regarded as a historical phenomenon, that is, one with a definite beginning and end, falling within a specified period followed by another. As far as we know, religion has without exception existed at all times and in all places: yet I will attempt to show that religion is organized not as a constraint but as an instituting action, not as an obligation but a choice. Finally, if we can detect signs of basic religious schemas in social processes where we would least expect them, this is because religion is the millennia-old veil of a deeper anthropological structure, which continues to operate in another guise after the veil has disappeared.

Religion substantially means the translation and embodiment of social man’s negative relation to himself into social forms. Its relative disintegration over the last two centuries allows us to glimpse the general pat­tern behind the particular expression to which it has so long given substance. To say that religion is a way of institutionalizing humans against themselves simply states what is most specific to the organization of human beings: a confrontational posture toward things as they are, making it structurally impossible for humans to entrench themselves and settle down, and steadfastly condemning them to a transformative nonacceptance of things—whether dealing with nature, which they cannot leave alone; with their fellow beings, who they perceive as potential objects for annihilation; with their culture, which they can only relate to by changing it; or, finally, with their own inner reality, which they must similarly deny or modify. The central noteworthy feature of the religious is precisely that this constitutive power of negation has been given the task of disguising itself, has been assigned and has accepted the function of denying itself—especially in its relation to the instituted social order, which is my main concern. The underlying force defining humans is one of refusal, which they express by rejecting their own ability to transform the organization of their world.

The essence of religion lies in this process of establishing a dispossessive relationship between the world of visible living beings and its foundation. Moreover, it is important to recognize that man’s religious rejection of himself and reliance on the past, which might be called the “indebtedness of meaning” (dette du sens). are only secondary formations, socially effective transcriptions of a powerful underlying movement which is neutralized and diverted by this peculiar instituting process. The religious is the principle of mobility placed in the service of inertia, it is the principle of transformation mobilized to protect the inviolability of things, it is the power of negation wholly redirected toward accepting and renewing the established law. The entire mystery of our history lies in the fact that in his conflictual relationship with himself, man began by denying precisely this unsettling truth about himself, this uncertainty about his place in the world, and the productive instability of his being in motion. In this sense, religion represents the enigma of our backwards entrance into history.

CHAPTER 1

Primeval Religion or the Reign of the Absolute Past

THE MOST noteworthy feature of this backward entrance is that it began by being radical, was relativized, opened up, and then to a certain extent overthrown. The idea of religious development has a long and venerable tradition. It is generally governed by the notion that our conception of the divine developed (monotheism being its highest stage of development) while religious activity was correlatively differentiated within the totality of collective activities, as part of an increasingly complex social structure. As soon as we make the relation to the social foundation the center of gravity of the religious, we are led to radically invert our perspective. We now see religion’s most complete and systematic form is its initial one; later transformations, which we thought corresponded to more advanced stages, progressively call the religious into question. Its origins lay in radical dispossession, where the foundation was considered to be wholly other. Later formulations of the divine image, which reinforced its power and, one would think, human dependence on it, actually corresponded to a reduction of the religious other as the world’s ultimate organizing principle, in favor of agents here-below. The path from primitive religions to modern Christianity was largely an attempt to reappropriate the source of meaning and law initially transferred beyond the grasp of human actors.

I admit there is difficulty involved in reconciling the idea of choosing the instituting principle with the absolute radical uniformity of its adoption. We can best observe the same twofold affirmation, as varied in expressions as it is unvaried in content, in the remnants of societies existing prior to the State. We can see in all of them both a radical dispossession of humans in relation to what determines their existence and an inviolable permanence in the order bringing them together. The underlying belief is that we owe everything we have, our way of living, our rules, our customs, and what we know, to beings of a different nature—to Ancestors, Heroes, or Gods. All we can do is follow, imitate, and repeat what they have taught us. In other words, everything governing our “works and days” was handed down to us. Major obligations and petty exploits, the whole framework encompassing the practices of the living, had their origins in a founding past that ritual both revitalizes as an inexhaustible source and reaffirms in its sacred otherness. Such a regularly recurring, thoroughly consistent device, obviously countenances a primordial, universal and above all relentless determinism. One is strongly tempted to believe that more than just a powerful motive or a strong obligation must be involved for such a consistent set of attitudes to have won out, for thousands of years, among the infinitely fragmented groups and cultures throughout the world. This is no doubt one of those areas that strongly confirms the unity of the human race and its history—and consequently one where we can most readily identify the relevant determining factors.

Some might include among these factors the limited development of technical resources and means of controlling nature in general—making religious dependence an expression of the inferiority experienced by humans in the face of overwhelmingly nonhuman forces. This viewpoint can be countered by pointing out the relatively strong autonomy of this conceptual and attitudinal system in relation to its material substratum, and its systematic organization of factual experience. Let us take an established historical fact, namely, that a change as fundamental to the means of production and subsistence as the “neolithic revolution,” one of two major transformations in societies’ material basis, was able to occur without bringing about any systematic cultural and religious change. The majority of primitive or savage societies known to us are neolithic and their adoption of agriculture in particular did not lead to any substantial modification in the belief system. Rather, this adoption was translated into the language of dispossession and indebtedness, and this momentous human achievement of agriculture became a gift from the gods, introduced in ancient times through a hero whose example was thereafter dutifully followed. The independence of this structure, which can lay down laws capable of denying the most obvious facts, is confirmed elsewhere by the analysis of economic behavior, itself dictated by global norms of sufficiency and stability diametrically opposed to any intention to produce a surplus—an example being where a gain in productivity brought about by a superior set of implements is offset by a reduction in working hours. So even if we were to accept that this symbolic organization of indebtedness toward a founding past reflected humanity’s greatly reduced status in the face of natural forces, we would still have to account for its systematic bias toward immobility, which, instead of provoking attempts to overcome it, has tended on the contrary to prevent any such attempts and to perpetuate the existing weakness. Moreover, not only were major events absorbed, obliterated, and denied by a conceptual system that recognizes only the primal and the immutable. This system also denies the obviousness of daily change, of the alteration of things, of the transforming activity that individuals continually and unintentionally bring to bear on their social relations and the surrounding culture, not to mention the adaptations caused by external factors. Of course, societies must be historical since pure repetition is absolutely impossible for humans. Yet human societies have continually spent most of their time methodically and successfully repressing this indisputable fact. For if this system has not prevented them from continuously changing, often against their agents’ wishes, it has nonetheless condemned them to a cycle of slow change. The essence of the religious act lies wholly in this antihistorical frame of mind. Religion in its pure state is drawn into a temporal division that puts the present in a position of absolute dependence on the mythical past, and guarantees the irrevocable allegiance of all human activities to their inaugural truth. At the same time it ratifies the non-appealable dispossession of human actors from what gives substance and meaning to their actions and gestures. The key to the inter-relationship between religion and society, as well as the secret of the nature of the religious, lies in its radical conservatism which structurally combines co-presence to the origin with disjunction from the originary moment, combining unstinting conformity to what has been definitively founded with a separated foundation.

We are therefore dealing with an a priori organization of the conceptual framework, which cannot be related to any external determinism. If we want to understand why it exists we must conduct an internal analysis. Only when we consider this organization as the central component of a broader mechanism can we clearly see its contents in terms of its results. For this systematic denial, and the accompanying preservation of what exists, proves to be loaded with crucial implications. For example, political ones: the rigid separation of existing individuals from the instaurating age controlling them is an ironclad guarantee that no one can claim to speak in the name of the sacred norm, can claim special relations with the divine foundation in order to enact its law or appropriate the principle of collective order. Radical dispossession is thus a means toward ultimate political equality which, although it does not prevent differences in social status or prestige, does prohibit the secession of unified power. There can be no privileged status among the living in an inviolable received order. Everyone is placed on the same level, the role of the leader being restricted to extolling the wisdom of ancestors and recalling the unalterable and necessary permanence of things. The notion introduced by Pierre Clastres of society against the State thus derives its entire significance from the political viewpoint inherent in primitive religion.

By the expression “society against the State,” I mean a society where the religious removal of the founding principle prohibits a separate legitimating and coercive authority. On the other hand, it also means that such societies contain the structural potential for a similar political division—and this potential is at the root of the impersonal reflexivity at work in the religious choice which first neutralizes and then conceals it. I make this point to counter the charge that could be laid if the phrase “choice against” were interpreted as a kind of finalism. How, one might ask, can there be a negative view of something that has not yet occurred? The problem cannot be resolved from an external or hypothetical perspective, but must be related to an internal factor mistakenly regarded as one of the conditions for social existence. If we wish to understand the sociological action that wards off political domination through religious dispossession, we must remain within the framework of a fundamental anthropology and return to the primary structures which cause society to be. Society’s implementation is a meaningful choice only insofar as its social space is originally organized and identified by an internal opposition establishing the universal potentiality for power to separate itself. This choice does not negate the polarization of power and society, as seen in the analysis of functions attached to leadership confined to the bounds of speech and reputation. Rather it neutralizes this polarization by partitioning off the heroic past. The remarkable enigma is the stubborn human bias toward self-negation, the unconscious and systematic refusal to assume the constituting dimensions of human-social reality. It is as if whatever caused man to be what he is was so unbearable that he had no choice but to repress it immediately.

This transferal of foundations and causes to the other (i.e., to others, to the origins) responds not just to the problem of political division, but to structural questions raised by the bond between humans or their stance toward nature. It is not possible here to examine each of these articulations, which would require me to show how they help constitute human-social space, and to describe their arrangement in detail. Let me just say that in every case there is a similar neutralization of a structurally antagonistic relation. Thus the temporal disposition, which makes the present completely dependent on the primordial, cannot be separated from a spatial one that makes the world of the living a continuous part of the natural order. Taken to extremes, religious dispossession means becoming part of the living universe, being physically integrated into the heavenly cycles and into the supposedly permanent organization of the elements and the species. The potential antagonism embedded in humans’ relation to nature is neutralized by substituting a symbolic attitude of belonging for one of confrontation. Something in their organization—something inherent to tools and language—removes humans from nature. Religion, in its original pure state, is the desire to merge with nature. This also involves deploying the extraordinary structuring activity of the savage mind, so well highlighted by Claude Lévi-Strauss, where we can recognize the vestiges of this confrontation with the domesticated world—just as we can recognize the primordial necessity of power in the savage chief’s role.

Shifting the causes of the instauration elsewhere neutralizes the radical antagonism of beings that is inscribed in the bond holding them together. This disposition is closely related to previous ones: if the customary modes of human coexistence are accepted as wholly predefined, then no conflict arises between social actors about the content and forms of collective relations. All possible conflict between individuals and groups is given precise predetermined limits as to its prospects and possible outcomes.

This highlights what is undoubtedly the most general characteristic of the religious in its relation to the social: when we talk about religion we are ultimately talking about a well-defined type of society based on the priority of the principle of collective organization over the will of the individuals it brings together. The reader will recognize here the model of society that Louis Dumont calls “holistic,” due to the primacy of the whole over the part organizing it, as opposed to our own individualist model, which assumes first the dispersion of independent atoms, then the creation of structure through the citizen’s free expression. The holistic model coincides historically with the age of what might be called religious societies, not in terms of their members’ beliefs but in the way these beliefs are actually articulated around a religious hegemony, that is, around the absolute predominance of a founding past, of a sovereign tradition, which predates personal preferences. On the other hand, entering the age of individualism means leaving the age of the religious, where both dependency on the whole and indebtedness to the other are simultaneously relinquished.

In its most highly developed form, the received order’s logic can anticipate and halt the development of any intrasocial conflict: it is tacitly assumed that you cannot disagree on fundamentals, on what binds you to your fellow humans. You can certainly risk your life, but you cannot question the very principle of coexistence. If there is a place for war, there is none for destroying meaning. If we are to explain how effective forms of collective-being are arranged to neutralize the structural antagonism linking humans together, we must revise the rule of reciprocity. This rule tells us nothing about logical necessity in savage societies or about the social bond reduced to its most elementary expression of reciprocity, i.e., the established fact that there are others. On the contrary, this rule is wholly instituted and is an active participant in the general structure of religious refusal. It expresses the priority of the relationship between individuals over those involved in it, and thus the priority of the established norm, and it begins with the radical direct encounter of mutual recognition. This presents the permanent possibility of starting from the bottom, of systematically redefining and reestablishing human relations by rethinking their foundations. In other words, it is the instauration of a social relation that excludes questioning its own terms and conditions. At the heart of what attaches humans to their fellow beings lies the turmoil of unresolved conflict. In both peacefully negotiated exchange and the restitutive chain of vengeance, the law of reciprocity is the nonquestionable religious aspect of the foundation which shapes social relations. It is the uncontested predominance of ultimate causes, a predominance insured against what brings people into contact, whether it be free choice or mortal opposition.

Everything is thus related back to the core elements of customary permanence and sacral dependence, which is the primordial essence of the religious. What gives meaning to our existence, what drives our actions, what sustains our customs comes not from us but from those before us, not from humans like us, but totally different beings, whose difference and sacrality lies in the fact that they were creators, while everyone since is an epigone. There is nothing currently existing whose place and destination were not set down in earlier times and followed by our age of repetition; and hence everything established is to be traced back through successive generations. In short, historically speaking, the real kernel of religious attitudes and thought lies in accepting the external as the originating source and the unchangeable as law. This is not just a body of representations an...