Thinking Through Rituals: Philosophical Perspectives
Kevin Schilbrack
Language: English
Pages: 298
ISBN: B000P0JNLC
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Many philosophical approaches today seek to overcome the division between mind and body. If such projects succeed, then thinking is not restricted to the disembodied mind, but is in some sense done through the body. From a post-Cartesian perspective, then, ritual activities that discipline the body are not just thoughtless motions, but crucial parts of the way people think.
Thinking Through Rituals explores religious ritual acts and their connection to meaning and truth, belief, memory, inquiry, worldview and ethics. Drawing on philosophers such as Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, and sources from cognitive science, pragmatism and feminist theory, it provides philosophical resources for understanding religious ritual practices like the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, Hatha Yoga, sacred meditation or liturgical speech.
Its essays consider a wide variety of rituals in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism - including political protest rituals and gay commitment ceremonies, traditional Vedic and Yogic rites, Christian and Buddhist meditation and the Jewish Shabbat. They challenge the traditional disjunction between thought and action, showing how philosophy can help to illuminate the relationship between doing and meaning which ritual practices imply.
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Consciously reflected upon will vary between cases, as indeed will the flexibility with which they can be used, RITUAL, BODY TECHNIQUE, AND (INTER)SUBJECTIVITY 47 Nevertheless, the effectiveness of ritual depends in large part upon our capacity to “suspend disbelief” and abandon ourselves pre-reflectively to it, and this assumedly puts limits upon the extent to which it can be reflectively and cynically manipulated. Indeed, reflective and deliberative rationality is, to some extent, the enemy.
Emotions.Furthermore, they ensure a solidaristic expression of the emotions in question. Even individuals who agree upon the nature of certain events as, forexample, unjust, and who agree that protest is necessary, might react witha different emotion or express their emotion differently; but the public expression of feeling, in the form of protest, demands relative homogeneity and,again, the protest ritual serves this end. It generates a (largely) intersubjectively shared state. Protest rituals.
Need to take a brief look at Frazer’s description and explanation of rites involving the transference of evil. Frazer explains first of all the principle on which rituals centered on the transference of evil rest: The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial. Because it is possible to shift a.
Behavior generate a whole pattern of expectations. These expectations have a complex function with respect to the religious objectives of ritual participants or of the sponsoring community. In part, such behavior is designed to be confirmatory, that is, to confirm by embodying in practice (gestures, utterances, etc.) those religious beliefs that are shared by members of the community. These may range from quite general perspectives on the nature of reality to beliefs that are of particular.
To the account of ritual articulated here even in the absence of arguments for its exclusive truth or adequacy. Such an account would seem, at best, to offer a highly distorted picture of what religious ritual is all about. The force of such an objection is compelling only to the extent that one ignores or repudiates the theory of inquiry defended by Peirce and other pragmatists. That is to say, understanding ritual as inquiry already presupposes a dramatic transformation of commonplace.