The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science - Hardcover

Torrance, Robert M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520081323 ISBN 13: 9780520081321

Verlag: University of California Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

Robert Torrance's wide-ranging, innovative study argues that the spiritual quest is rooted in our biological, psychological, linguistic, and social nature. The quest is not, as most have believed, a rare mystical experience, but a frequent expression of our most basic human impulses. Shaman and scientist, medium and poet, prophet and philosopher, all venture forth in quest of visionary truths to transform and renew the world.

Yet Torrance is not trying to reduce the quest to an "archetype" or "monomyth." Instead, he presents the full diversity of the quest in the myths and religious practices of tribal peoples throughout the world, from Oceania to India, Africa, Siberia, and especially the Americas. In theorizing about the quest, Torrance draws on thinkers as diverse as Bergson and Piaget, van Gennep and Turner, Pierce and Popper, Freud, Darwin, and Chomsky. This is a book that will expand our knowledge—and awareness—of a fundamental human activity in all its fascinating complexity.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert M. Torrance is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Davis.

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"Robert Torrance posits a dynamic questing impulse as intrinsic to both human nature and the wild process of nature. Torrance sets out an impressive array of examples as to what 'spiritual quest' has meant in human experience, highlighting cases from societies that are not dominated by organized religious ideologies. The background of ethnographic cases serves to underpin the challenging assertion that we must forever base our seeking on a wholehearted engagement with uncertainty and impermanence. The spiritual quest is creative, and always made new in light of Torrance's book—a marvelous view."—Gary Snyder, author of Turtle Island

"This is a magnificent effort to approach the question of our most expansive psychic activity, the quest for transcending our limited universe. This is a brilliant work, which opens the gates to much new research."—Ake Hultkrantz, author of Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama

"This is an important book for the history of religions, for it redeems the universalist hypothesis from the caves of the Jungians (supplying a critical corrective to Joseph Campbell and, more significantly, to Mircea Eliade), nimbly sidesteps the vortex of the structuralists, and beats back the dragons of deconstruction. His sophisticated use of contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and the anthropology of shamanic cultures makes this Platonic approach to the narrative of human experience, this old faith in human universals, newly compelling."—Wendy Doniger, author of Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts

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"Robert Torrance posits a dynamic questing impulse as intrinsic to both human nature and the wild process of nature. Torrance sets out an impressive array of examples as to what 'spiritual quest' has meant in human experience, highlighting cases from societies that are not dominated by organized religious ideologies. The background of ethnographic cases serves to underpin the challenging assertion that we must forever base our seeking on a wholehearted engagement with uncertainty and impermanence. The spiritual quest is creative, and always made new in light of Torrance's booka marvelous view."Gary Snyder, author ofTurtle Island

"This is a magnificent effort to approach the question of our most expansive psychic activity, the quest for transcending our limited universe. This is a brilliant work, which opens the gates to much new research."Ake Hultkrantz, author ofShamanic Healing and Ritual Drama

"This is an important book for the history of religions, for it redeems the universalist hypothesis from the caves of the Jungians (supplying a critical corrective to Joseph Campbell and, more significantly, to Mircea Eliade), nimbly sidesteps the vortex of the structuralists, and beats back the dragons of deconstruction. His sophisticated use of contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and the anthropology of shamanic cultures makes this Platonic approach to the narrative of human experience, this old faith in human universals, newly compelling."Wendy Doniger, author of Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts

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The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science

By Robert M. Torrance

University of California Press

Copyright 1994 Robert M. Torrance
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520081323
Chapter One
Religion and the Spiritual Quest:
From Closure to Openness

We shall not look far in search of the quest; it will meet us at every turn of the way. For this business of seeking, of setting off in determined pursuit of what we are lacking and may never attain, is no incidental theme of our literature and thought, no bypath of history, but a fundamental activity that contributes in no small measure toward defining existence as human. All life is continually going beyond its given condition, and the primal origin of the quest may very well lie in the biochemical composition that links the proud members of our sapient species with everything else that grows before decomposing.

But the quest is pre-eminently a conscious transcendence, a deliberate reaching toward a positedif by no means an unalterablegoal; and in this purposeful overreaching of our given status we are perhaps entitled to regard humankind, among the inhabitants of our planet, as being alone. We distinguish ourselves from lowlier beasts as kindlers of fire, makers of tools, users of language, but whatever innate dispositions may have evolved to render these activities possible, each of them was and remains, like everything specifically human, not an instinctive inheritance but a cultural acquisition, a capacity that must be attained. As the animal most imperfectly programmed by nature for the period between birth and death, the animal that must seek to acquire what it characteristically lacks to begin with, and to actualize by directed effort what is potential in its being but never knowable in advance, the human species may be designated animal quaerens with at least as much right as animal rationale .

What human beings lack in genetically programmed endowments they normally make good, to be sure, by an acculturation process so routine as to seem automatic: to speak one's native language, or to

manufacture a basic artifact, requires no one to go questing afar. Here culture is very nearly a second nature, and the most ordinary effort is all but certain not to miscarry. But awareness of this process may set human beings self-consciously apart from a no longer "natural" world which they strive to regain or surpass; the concerted effort to overcome this apartness is a cardinal condition of the quest. The very term spiritual is an index of this separation; for distinction from the body places the unhoused spirit in a state of incompletion and need. Whether or not the process of self-transcendence has its inarticulate origin in the protoplasmic beginnings of life, so that evolution can be comprehended, as Bergson somewhat fancifully thought (213), "only if we view it as seeking for something beyond its reach," it achieves awareness, and hence can be fully a quest, first in man; and not until man posits a mobile dimension at least partly independent of biological need does the quest become spiritual and specifically human. It lies in the nature of spirit, which owes its existence to the separation that it continually strives to overcome, rather to seek than to find.

Two Aspects of Religious Ritual

We naturally associate the spiritual quest with religions; we emphatically cannot identify them. Like technology and language, religion is a frequently cited differentia of humanity; insofar as it too is an institution of acculturation, it appears to be a self-contained system that leaves the spirit little to ask for. In this light, religion is less a manifestation of the individual quest than an alternative to it; it says not "Seek!" but "Seek no further!" This aspect of religion has been repeatedly emphasized by those who view religious beliefs as a reflection, and religious practices as a reaffirmation, of dominant social values.

For Marx it was axiomatic that the religious sentiment "is itself a social product " and that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" (Marx and Engels, 71, 135), "real" being equivalent to "socio-economic." Nor is this perspective exclusively Marxist: "In societies such as our own," Bergson remarked (13), "the first effect of religion is to sustain and reinforce the claims of society." For Peter L. Berger (1967, 33), "religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference." Within this frame religious and social institutions (which repeatedly overlap) are viewed as immutable, and religion, by its claim to permanent status, acts as the hypostatized inertia (or "repository of sacred tradition") by which society collectively denies the potentially disruptive reality of change. It would be hard to imagine an institution more alien to the tentative in-betweenness and perpetual

movement of the spiritual quest than this stolid objectification of willed social rigidity.

The study of "primitive" religion has found this model of particular value. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life of 1912 (115), Durkheim pronounced the totemism of aboriginal Australia, as recorded by Spencer and Gillen, Strehlow, and Howitt, "the most primitive and simple religion which it is possible to find," and therefore the one in which the essential features of all religions could best be studied. Many of Durkheim's assumptions now seem preposterous. Australian religions are neither single nor simple; and the hypothesis of universal religious evolution from a vague "totemism" unattested in much of the world was flimsy then and is untenable now. But by his single-minded insistence on the interdependence of the religious and social orders Durkheim exerted immense influence on the sociology of religion. His belief that society is "the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation" (29) mounts to evangelical heights when he declares it "unquestionable" that to its members society "is what a god is to his worshippers" (23637). And in this worship of society "the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be illusory" (464): their adoration has the force of indefeasible truth.1 Durkheim's collectivism is thus totalitarian in the strictest sense. Society as the Absolute, unlike lesser deities, allows no exceptions and tempers the necessity of its order with no merely personal mercy. Such a monolithic religion clearly leaves no place at all for the restless spirit to quest in.

Anthropologists have by no means unanimously acquiesced in Durkheim's fervid credo"It was Durkheim and not the savage," Evans-Pritchard tartly observed (1956, 313), "who made society into a god"but the social perspective on religion has been central to many. Thus for Malinowski (6667), though society is neither the author nor the self-revealed subject of religious truth, religion "standardizes the right way of thinking and acting and society takes up the verdict and repeats it in unison." And for Radcliffe-Brown (1952, 157), the principal function of religious rites is to "regulate, maintain and transmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the constitution of the society depends." We need not subscribe to the unitary correlation...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520081323
• ISBN 13: 9780520081321
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 367
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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