SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
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i68<br />
I Social Theory and Social Action<br />
Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I 169<br />
ate with the distinction between effective action and discursive reasoning. In<br />
other words, the field of religion seems to have pragmatics in the field of ritual<br />
and reason in the realm of doctrine or philosophical argumentation, thus leaving<br />
little room for a unified notion of practical reason. Furthermore, what is practical,<br />
namely, ritual action, is not particularly subject to efficient articulation or<br />
philosophical scrutiny. Also, both ritual, with its tendency toward decontextualized<br />
semiotic form (see Chapter 6) and religious discourse, with its attention to<br />
transcendent realities, often place religion at the opposite pole from the utilitarian<br />
or functional concerns of everyday life, which can be taken to be the locus<br />
of practical rationality (Maurice Bloch 1974:78).<br />
On closer inspection, however, practical reason does play a critical role in<br />
religious traditions. Cross-culturally, religious phenomena that could be listed under<br />
the rubric of practical reason include: the embodiments of divinity in material<br />
tokens such as sacraments, amulets, icons, and masks; religious practices of socialization,<br />
indoctrination, initiation, and discipline; ritual acts with effective or<br />
even performative force, such as blessing, anathematization, and healing; rhetorical<br />
devices in religious communication, preaching, and conversion; the normative,<br />
ethical dimension of religious life and religious thinking; and the explicit<br />
philosophical expression of the religious validity of practical reason as an alternative<br />
to theoretical reason in notions such as mystical participation, coincidentia<br />
oppositorum, and the absurdity of belief. 8<br />
To this rather obvious list of dimensions of practical reason in religion needs<br />
to be added comparison, seen both as the historical interface of religious traditions<br />
and as a topic for philosophical and theological discourse about religion. In<br />
fact, if there is a tendency for the discipline of the comparative philosophy of<br />
religion to fission between the study of the cultural-historical dimension of religious<br />
traditions and the study of philosophical discourses about religion, careful<br />
attention to the importance of comparison can be a useful experiment in selfcritical<br />
dialogue, since there appears to be a complex dialectic or reciprocal feedback<br />
between historical circumstances and philosophical reflections: on the one<br />
hand, the historical encounter between religious traditions can compel philosophical<br />
and theological theorizing about comparison; on the other hand, philosophical<br />
positions and theological doctrines can play powerful roles in prestructuring<br />
the experience of religious interface.<br />
In commenting on her ethnographic fieldwork in New Guinea, where smallscaled<br />
societies live in close proximity with interlocking exchange relationships,<br />
Mead (1964:281) generalized:<br />
It can, I believe, be demonstrated that contiguity and close interrelationship<br />
between groups with differing communicational styles increase awareness that<br />
various aspects of the communicational system are learned, can be taught, and<br />
are transmissible to others who are not born with them.<br />
This heightened sensibility to the conventionality of cultural systems as a result<br />
of historical encounter presents certain difficulties for religious and philosophical<br />
traditions, both of which, in many cases at least, try to make a claim of uniqueness<br />
and absoluteness. Thus, when religious traditions come into historical contact<br />
the encounter often becomes part of broader political and economic power<br />
relations put into play, though it is a mistake to analyze these situations solely<br />
from the point of view of the agency of the dominant force in the interface. The<br />
range of historical stances runs from fanatical exclusivism's dictating the rejection<br />
and condemnation of the Other so that no communication is deemed possible<br />
(Tillich 1963:31); to the zealous proselytizing of missions to convert the<br />
Other; to respectful juxtaposition facilitated by a thoroughgoing allegorizing of<br />
the Other's texts and doctrines in an effort to make the foreign seem "the same"<br />
(J. Z. Smith 1987:101); to creative forms of syncretism, blending, and hierachical<br />
layering; to efforts at multicultural dialogue predicated either on the relativist<br />
assumption of the formal equivalence of deities, cosmologies, or ritual practices<br />
or on the inclusivist assumption of the constructive benefit of modifying the<br />
"reading" of the local tradition through the perspective of an alien tradition<br />
(Clooney 1989:547; 1990).<br />
Walker's (1994) analysis of al-Farabi, a tenth-century Islamic philosopher,<br />
illustrates a particularly clear case of comparison by hierarchical synthesis. 9 In<br />
the confrontation—real or hypothetical—between Greek philosophy, personified<br />
by Aristotle, and Islamic religion, epitomized by its founder Muhammad, al-Farabi<br />
maintains the formal identity of the great philosopher and the great religious<br />
founder, but only on the condition that each of the two roles operates according<br />
to the guidelines of "theoretical" reason, the principles of which were discovered<br />
by Aristotle. Theoretical reason leads to universal, logically demonstrated knowledge,<br />
while practical reason depends on the linguistic expressions, representational<br />
forms, and rhetorical techniques of particular cultures. AI-Farabi writes:<br />
There are two ways of making a thing comprehensible: first, by causing its<br />
essence to be perceived by the intellect, and second, by causing it to be imagined<br />
through the similitude that imitates it. . . . Now when one acquires knowledge<br />
of the beings or receives instruction in them, if he perceives their ideas<br />
themselves with his intellect, and his assent to them is by means of certain<br />
demonstration, then the science that comprises these cognitions is philosophy.<br />
But if they are known by imagining them through similitudes that imitate<br />
them, and assent to what is imagined of them is caused by persuasive methods,<br />
then the ancients call what comprises these cognitions religion. ... In everything<br />
demonstrated by philosophy, religion employs persuasion. (al-Farabi<br />
1962:44-45)<br />
Thus, the philosopher and the religious leader are brought into a hierarchical<br />
relationship, since Aristotle and Muhammad can only enter into a nonlinguistic