2. Myth and Ritual Practices

Performance of rituals, representation and enactment of myths. If we now want to understand the significance of this sacred complex for those involved, and not just to explain it in functional terms from the observer perspective of the social scientist, we must draw on observations of modern tribal societies by cultural anthropologists that permit inferences about Neolithic forms of life dating back to the twelfth millennium BCE.

There is very little evidence that could have been preserved, and what evidence there is will hardly be clear and conclusive to make broad sweeping claims about ways of life over thousands of years. Thus, we are left with a less scientific method of "inferring" based on archaeological, linguistic, and cultural evidence. Our methods of inference are based on speculations using whatever we have to understand how humans operate. That is, we can take what evidence we have and, the better our speculative theories are about human beings, the more we will unlock about the past.

There is no real way around this. This is why there are two important aspects to Girard's project that Habermas seems to be following in his own way. One, we must understand the similarities that contributed to the rise of the axial age religions around the world. There is difference, but within the difference is considerable philosophical, religious, and cultural overlap. A nuanced yet general view of myth and archaic religions is a must. The second aspect is the key, or, a theory of human nature that is more or less stable across vastly different time periods, at least the last 12,000 to 100,000 years. After all, humans are biologically the same species for that time period, but it was not until the 12th millennium BCE that enough evidence of a cultural explosion that was left in artifacts is able to confirm that "something happened". This something that happened was the sacred and the "creation of the world".

For Girard, his key is mimetic desire. The banal and obvious, and unoriginal, yet important idea that humans imitate each other and this is the key to understanding the sacred. Girard found his way here from literature. For Girard, mimesis plays a central role in modern literature such as Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. I have yet to see what Habermas's "key" is. Girard uses his key to explain the hidden elements of myth and how the sacred was engendered, even if creation of the sacred was largely in the past and human sacrifice was already an ancient myth by the time of the Axial Age.

Lastly, I would like to note the term "significance" here. This is a minor point, but it is the reason that Pippin became so interested in the work of Heidegger. Heidegger himself wanted to break free from the metaphysical tradition and understand the structures of significance and meaning from a philosophical perspective. For Heidegger, we are always already in a world, there is no "view from nowhere", just as Habermas discusses many times in his work. This is also why Heidegger was so interested in the early Greek philosophers and poetry, which for Heidegger, exhibit the pre-metaphysical ways of thinking. However, we can see that Habermas is more interested in continuing moving forward and accepting the irreversible idea that we cannot go back and there are reasons that we progressed from pre-metaphysics, to metaphysics, and now post-metaphysics, and from the sacred to the secular.

On the other hand, the meaning of rites cannot be specified exhaustively in discursive terms, any more than can the meaning of works of art.

To Heidegger, and Pippin's point, the intelligibility of being is not primary, rather, it is secondary to the meaning or significance of being. This is direct contrast to the so called discursivity thesis of Kant, as popularized by Kant scholar Henry Allison in his Kant's Transcendental Idealism. It took Pippin almost his entire career, but Pippin's sustained engagement with art in its various modern forms I believe led him to accept the poverty of philosophy in the form of the so called discursivity thesis.

Habermas goes on to quote Maurice Bloch, who writes:

By combining a minimal propositional content with an overwhelming illocutionary power, the standardization of the behavioural patterns compels the participants to become absorbed in a situation that they collectively create without being able to express its propositional content in narrative terms. In a similar sense, the members of a choir cannot comment on the score of a song while singing it: 'You cannot argue with a song'.

This is similar to the work of Girard on the role of ritual in re-enacting the original murder. The absorption and creation of an act that they "collectively create" is for Girard the re-enactment of the lynching. Furthermore, the inability to express the content of the act fits as well with Girard's interpretation of the Bible that "they do not know what they do". There is a type of ideology critique at work in the Bible.

Habermas adds further support to his interpretation, namely, the "Scottish Orientalist" William Robertson Smith, who argues that "rite" is more original than myth. Smith's observations are based on contemporary ethnic groups, since one cannot observe the past ethnic groups. So again, the theory is only as good as the mechanisms of inference.

The antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices. No doubt men will not habitually follow certain practices without attaching a meaning to them; but as a rule we find that while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same rite was explained by different people in different ways, without any question of orthodoxy or heterodoxy arising in consequence.

This further fits with the approaches of Girard and Heidegger. For Girard, rites preceded myth, actions were based on repeating the rites. Girard finds that myths contain a certain interpretation and literary flourish that obscures not only the connection to the rite, but the connection to the murder. This is part of the reason that a naive positivism of the scientists and interpreters of myths who take the myths at face value do not see any murder. However, as Smith notes, if you look towards the rites and practices, the connection is more clear and the rites are a linking between the myth and the original murder.

For Heidegger, this fits in with his whole idea that the "knowledge-how" is more primary than the "knowledge-what". This is in the famous example of the hammer, how we are more engaged as being-in-the-world than with the propositional knowledge of the hammer. That is, we are more absorbed with the use of the hammer and the equipment and tools of the world in our everyday lives than with the propositional knowledge of the hammer. The scientific view of the world was always secondary and philosophy at some point made it the primary epistemological orientation. When we are thinking of the ability to correctly infer about the archaic religions and societies, we err even more if we take this scientific approach, anachronistic on the scale of 10s of thousands of years as the way we try and understand the past. Of course through the scientific approach, the myths and rites and societies look childish, superstitious, and naive.

The section ends with the "representational function" of the worldviews. Specifically, this centers the prominent French theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's "structuralist" view tries to explain how "wild thought" operates and creates meaning. Wild thought uses pairs of opposite concepts to create frameworks of intelligibility. However, this means it does not use conceptual depth, such as Plato, to create different layers of meaning. This means that all "things" operate on the same "ontological" level. The way complexity is generated is through the use of

intuitively comprehensible relations, such as similarity and contrast, spatial distance and contiguity, simultaneity and temporal succession, horizontal and vertical directions, and so forth.

One can remember from various myths east and west, the use of mountains and seas, lineages and age, etc.

This ontological monism is what explains the "magical thinking" form of representation. Habermas writes:

This gives rise to the network of correspondences between nature and culture. The fact that the mythical world is reflected on the same level of interaction explains two striking features—on the one hand, the prominence of the narrative organization of all occurrences in categories of action and, on the other, the monism that levels down the distinctions between things and persons, between semantic and factual connections, and between instrumental and communicative action by projecting them all onto the same plane. No less blurred than the distinctions between these object areas and attitudes towards manipulable objects, on the one hand, and communicative partners, on the other, are those in mythical narratives between internal semantic and external factual connections: causality and guilt are interconnected, physical failure is connected with moral failure, harm and evil are blurred.

This section gives an adequate difference in the ontology of the era, and we can see how it changes from Heraclitus/Plato and the Axial Age philosophers, to the early Church Fathers, the Medieval philosophers, early modern, modern, and contemporary philosophers. Thus, without any specific philosophers to point to or texts to refer to, Habermas thinks that we can at least reconstruct a plausible view of the ontology of the Neolithic era, although it remains to be seen how the meaning or origin of it is theorized.

This ontological monism of the wild thought is how one can "make intelligible" the meaning of myths such as the New Year myth. If the ontology of all things are on the same plane, and the web of sense-making that structures intelligibility is explained through myth, we can see how a ritual is understood as a return to the "beginning of the world". That is, pre-metaphysics, pre-science, the ontology of the Neolithic era made it such that re-enacting of the myth through ritual allows one to re-actualize the myth and partake in the sacred. This "framing of the world" and "re-enactment" took on its own semi-autonomous form in Greek myth through theatre.

But it is clear that magical thinking presupposes a mythically articulated and narratively available world of higher powers. This is why magic does not provide the key for unlocking the ritual core of the sacred. The same holds for explanations of ritual in terms of sacrifice. For the — equally widespread — practice of offering sacrifices is also supposed to influence the favour of superior powers, which must have taken shape long before in mythical tales.

Habermas goes on to summarize in a long paragraph some of the work of Girard and how to explain human sacrifice as an extreme form of managing social expulsion during social crises, and how this is related to the work of calming rivalries seen in Durkheim and his students, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. Habermas also highlights how this practice of scapegoating is further justified by modern pogroms, the origins of "big game hunting", and the "collective arousal that is a striking feature of some sacrificial rites", as mentioned above.

However, sacrifice cannot provide the key to the origin of ritual for the simple reason that dealings with higher powers presuppose that mythical tales about these figures are already in circulation.

I will obviously sound like a Girard fanboy here, but I think it is important to at least note that this misses out on the core idea of Girard's project. Habermas lumps together Girard's idea of sacrifice and scapegoating with the magic. The core of this is that, to explain the origin and meaning of ritual, you cannot explain it using a practice that presupposes the myth and ritual setting already for its explanation. For example, sacrificing virgins to a god cannot be the origin of the ritual themselves because it presupposes the mythical structure already for the sacrifice to make sense, i.e. a virgin sacrifice to some specific god of the myth.

But Girard does not say anything close to this. Girard goes to great lengths to highlight how rituals and myth are created, related, and evolve over time. Girard also distinguishes between the "founding murder" and how that generates ritual and taboo as such as opposed to the individual practices of a specific type of sacrifice. To me, this is like saying the act of taking the body of Christ cannot explain the origin of the Eucharist. But that is highlighting a bad circle when in fact there is a good circle to be drawn. There is a much larger act that took place, part of a narrative, that generated the rituals in Christian liturgy. The ritual is informed by the "myth" that was developed after the ritual, and the ritual is based on the re-enactment of actual founding events of Christianity as depicted in the Gospels.

To repeat, Girard thinks that it happened slowly over time, but the repetition of the founding murder formed rituals and taboos, that generated the contrasting yet ambivalent aspects of the sacred from the founding murder, myth developed, myth became whitewashed and repackaged so much that, like Habermas agrees, something like Greek tragic theatre could take on its own semi-autonomous life outside of ritual.

This shallow reading of Girard is more confusing when it comes to the line he says not long after, that Durkheim is the most important for understanding the interpretation of ritual from the perspective of the participants, he says

He understood rites as self-referential practices that stabilize the cohesion of social groups.

Unless I am the one that is misinterpreting Girard, this is exactly Girard's point. It is also the point of many critics of Girard is that he is too similar to Durkheim and therefore unoriginal. Girard's response is that, in some ways on the origin of the sacred he differs, and also he claims to not have read Durkheim when he was writing his earlier works on mimetic desire and the Violence and the Sacred, that he had this idea before he encountered Durkheim if I recall. To reiterate, Girard thinks that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of ritual and the purpose of scapegoating was an early way of solving problems of social cohesion, ritual and taboo developed out of that founding murder as ways to put stopgaps on violence and rivalry, and that in times of great crisis resorting to human sacrifice might have occurred but was not necessary.

So, in a sense, Habermas is right that Durkheim was the first, but Girard is not necessarily original but his work on myths, interpreting the violence behind them, on Christianity and modernity, and Habermas's own project are all of interest, even if Durkheim from a sociological perspective was the father of this approach.

Supplementing Durkheim is Arnold van Gennep's studies of initiation rites. Habermas thinks these further his theory of society and the origin of society through ritual. Not only do initiation rituals self-thematize society and the transition from child to adult, etc., they also show the dependence of the individual on the social. Initiation rituals have two main steps, a throwing out of the individual from society and a reintegration. This mirrors the logic of the founding murder as well, the death and rebirth of the scapegoat into a god (my Girardian input here, not Habermas). One can read this further that, it is a way of stabilizing society pre-emptively, these are the norms and we live or die as a society if we follow them. This is a literal and real example of the state of nature and the social contract.

Habermas thinks similarly.

But this is a reflection of the dynamics of an ongoing process of destructuring and restructuring through which every society must ensure its continuity from one generation to the next.

This fits in line with the theory of society that it evolves over time, and to counter any sort of conservative critiques who think the evolution of society is regressive. It is inherent to society to break itself down and rebuild itself.

Further on this metaphor of founding murder.

During the phase of banishment into nowhere, the novice in a sense falls out of society, so that the social totality can confront him as such.

This is where Girard again feels more ambitious at least in trying to offer a compelling origin of the sacred. Habermas thinks that, correctly, things like social totality are 10s of thousands of years away from self-consciousness and use in philosophy, but he still seems to stick to an analysis of these societies that is too abstract and anachronistic. Girard would rather say, no, this social totality is the literal social world, the people around you, the mob, your tribe. Just a mob crowds around a person, as the Biblical stories tell, so too does the scapegoat or the initiate get surrounded by the "social totality". But it is not an abstract social totality that lynches people or forces you into the woods to survive until you kill a bear. Girard says these exact words when he reads into the many myths the "celestial armies" as the mob. Who are doing these killings? The gods? Where do they come from? Habermas so far seems to be mixing up contemporary explanations and tools with the self-conscious thinking of the Neolithic societies.

Habermas finally says his thesis.

According to this hypothesis, initiation rites provide a suitable basis for deciphering the meaning of rites as such. The psychodynamics of every successful status passage may even recapitulate an episode of collective human memory— the recollection of how the initial evolutionary transition from pre-linguistic to sociocultural forms of life was mastered. Accordingly, the experience of the sacred would be a 'working through' and ritualized recapitulation of the fateful result of the process of hominization.

The process of hominization is a fascinating question, but Habermas seems to largely gesture towards a proto-social contract method. The view of humans here seems too neat and orderly, proto-agents proto-communicating through a proto-public reason of rituals and initiation rites with a proto-ideology and proto-philosophy.

Girard's work is still fantastic, but at least ambitious in the details and the narrative, while also admitting that things were much more complex for 10s of thousands of years before we have things like Oedipus the King or the Bhagavad Gita. For Girard, humans are the cooperation animals, but that cooperation is made possible by imitation. Imitation leads to cooperation and competition. Without guardrails on competition, the "social organism" as a whole is not just "shaken", but to the early Homo sapiens, quite possibly the end of the "world" for their tribes. Habermas admits that initiation rites provide an interpretive key, but this is not an origin, it is a matter of finding the particular that most speaks to the general principle. The initiation rite, I would argue, follows the logic of the sacred, but it follows it just as other rites follow it in their own ways in their own spheres of social life. But because it is the "most sacred" sacral rite, does not mean that it is the origin. But it is also the closest to Girard's origin, i.e., real founding murders.

Habermas thus, in this chapter so far, is extremely close to my intuitions and Girard, but seems to commit two slight errors. One, our more advanced language of categorization and understanding is helpful for us but cannot be projected onto these. Not that I think Habermas does this in his mind, but the writing seems to be too messy and quick. Second, He could have used an example or two for the different aspects he is outlining and how that would arise from the perspective of the participants. That is, why would an initiation rite arise in the first place? Where would they get the idea for an artificial practice such as initiation rites? There is no Habermasian answer here that I could speculate, it is gestured towards, but not explained. I find Girard and the Girardian inspired more raw, more real, and more human, and I think a lot of what Habermas is doing is greatly important, but the chapter is light on the "origin" of the sacred and more on the meaning and intelligibility of the sacred. That is, I think Habermas is correct in his propositions but light on the details and origin, which I was hoping for in a genealogy.

Habermas thus defines the meaning of the sacred as:

... the crossing of the risk threshold of a loss of identity and the fortunate outcome of a struggle to recover one's identity; these two elements are experienced by the socialized individuals as a violent process of creative destruction and renewal. The salvation striven for is defined in negative terms as the avoidance of a misfortune that is experienced in the depths of the mode of socialization, that is, in the reproduction of one's own form of life.

This is a good definition, and fits with his philosophy and especially his left-Hegelian / Marxist inspired approach. Specifically, the Hegelian idea of the struggle and overcoming of the struggle and new identity that emerges. Seen in Hegel's logic, the oscillation of Being and Nothing in their indeterminacy becomes the new category of Becoming, which is mirrored in ever more complex ways in his philosophy. Furthermore, Marx takes this idea into the realm of society in the production and especially reproduction of a form of life.

I would argue that this is still too sophisticated. My simple, potentially reductive, and probably naive definition of the meaning of the sacred is that which prevents violence. The sacred is ambivalent on violence, not all violence is bad, violence can be seen retroactively as divine and therefore good. But the sacred is that which prevents violence. The founding murder was the ultimate and original prevention, rituals and taboos provide practical opportunities for brakes on violence, while myth provided an ideological apparatus and self-thematization of how this all fits together. It is also no wonder around the Axial age, give or take, that the larger kingdoms that emerged would also rewrite the myths based on who was in power or what city-state was in power, which deity they worshipped, etc. Bruce Lincoln's work on myth and ideology is interesting here.

That being said, I think if the sacred was the core of social cohesion, this definition is in fact too narrow. It misses out on areas that are not necessarily about crossing the threshold, such as gift giving or taboos around marriage. Girard's notion is more expansive and covers this. This might be a better definition of sacred rituals, but not the sacred itself. I believe Habermas narrows in on the ritual because of his own project of communicative action and post-metaphysical thinking. Ritual fits more in line with the core of his project, so he is emphasizing the place of ritual, which I thought started out fine, but it seems to come at the expense of the other aspects of the sacred.

Habermas then, in line with the above, goes onto discuss the relation between language and ritual. Habermas says that the symbolic is a nonlinguistic form of communication and thus areas of life such as art cannot be explained through words alone and this is seen in areas of attempting to translate works of poetry from language to language, not all cases make sense. What is distinct from the way of everyday communication here in ritual is that "out-of-the-ordinary" Habermas says. He writes:

'Out-of-the-ordinary' first has the trivial meaning that sacral processes and objects are disengaged from the transparent functional contexts of social interactions. Sacral objects and practices are elevated above dealing with the world, whose meaning is disclosed by the interests and intentions of the actors involved, or at least by the social functions of their customary everyday practices.

To note here is the similarity again with two other figures, Girard and Heidegger. For Heidegger, he traces the logic of the sacred with his writings on ek-stasis, and Girard traces an anthropological origin in the founding murder. The founding murder is the original situation that "creates the world", as represented in many myths around the world. The original experience of the participants here was one of literally ecstasis, out-of-the-ordinary, in that this existential event that became divinized, the crisis dissipates, and for the first time humans are no longer animals and instead social animals, the intra-group aggression resolved through murder that became the basis for social cohesion.

See here the introduction to How We Became Human.

In the scheme of understanding human origins phenomenologically, deities, spirits, gods are nothing more nor less than the transfiguration of the "metaphysical" power that emanated from sacrificial victims in their killing, producing the sudden abatement of collective rage and a new conciliation of the community. In this moment, there is, in Girard's words, a collective "divinizing transference" that credits that god or gods, i.e. the victim as transfigured and sacralized by the potent and obscurely "transcendent" effects experienced. The victim/culprit must be a god—for who else could effect the saving reversal of transcending life-energies from a negative to a positive valency? The transcendental element in this scenario is the totalizing, unanimous experience that acted as the "pull" that allowed the genus Homo to go beyond its biological limitations. It is the ex-static (literally, "going out-side oneself", as Fornari argues in "A Mediatory Theory of Hominization") moment, that "forced" the first anatomically capable humans to leap outside their biological niche to become the modern Homo sapiens, and to be literally "created" by the sacred and by religion. Girard summarizes it in a very straightforward way: "The formula 'self-domestication" has been used quite often in reference to the human being: man is a 'self-domesticated' animal." No—Girard says— he is not a self-domesticated animal in any unmediated or automatic sense: "it is religion, it is sacrifice that domesticated him" (Girard, Antonello, and de Castro Rocha 2007, italics in the text). This is the genetic moment (the coming-to-be, as in Genesis) in which religion or God(s) literally created the human.

This then leads us towards the end of the chapter, which drifts away from philosophy and religion, but is nonetheless important for the project here. The use of symbols and the illocutionary leads Habermas to the conclusion that the sacred was only made possible through the ability to use symbols in the first place. This takes Habermas on a journey through the origins of language and contemporary linguistic research. Skinner and Chomsky, mostly Chomsky, but the main figure is Michael Tomasello's research on children and chimpanzees. Tomasello's research about the origins of language fits neatly into Habermas's project of communicative action and post-metaphysical thinking, in that, language developed uniquely in humans through many evolutionary events and is the reason for humans to further evolve, biologically and culturally. Even simple symbolic use is something that chimpanzees cannot do but children can, chimpanzees do not have the same type of intersubjective understanding that humans do.

This picture is again, philosophically, Brandomian. Brandom shows how even basic gestures and indexicals presuppose a quite robust and complex background set of concepts and relations of intersubjectivity that make possible communication. Communication and cooperation is the bootstrapping of the Homo sapiens for Habermas. Habermas's picture here then is one in which the human was hominized through language and is finally, in the post-metaphysical age, coming back into language. With Brandom, Habermas advocates for a social-pragmatism, a de-transcendentalized philosophy, where the only "transcendental" structures are those necessary background concepts of intersubjectivity and language.