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Category Archives: Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

Logic, Poetry, and the Myth of Disenchantment

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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Critical Religion, Disenchantment, Indian Logic, Poetry

In this posting I will discuss some issues surrounding the use of formalized repetitions and the “disenchantment” of language in modern times.

Robert Yelle has shown in his book The Language of Disenchantment (2013) that the attempts of the British civilizing mission to roll back mantras and other apparently non-rational forms of language in India had a precursor in the polemics against Catholic “vain repetitions” back home:

Protestant iconoclasm at a deep level informed many criticisms of Hindu culture, beginning with its worship of multiple gods or images (murti) of these in stone metal, or wood. […] These polemics were in many instances simply transferred from Catholics to Hindus as their target, with little if any modification. Such was the case not only with the worship of images, but also with attacks on the various forms of chants that Hindus used – matras, Vedic recitation (svadhyaya), and the like – which, to many British, resembled the chanting of the Ave Maria by Catholics. (Yelle, 2013: 9)

According Yelle, “disenchantment” was an ideology, not an historical process that did happen or could have happened. The interesting question is therefore not how language got disenchanted but how disenchantment is employed as a rhetorical tool in narratives of approaching the other.

An example from Indian logic can show how fluid the boundaries between aesthetics, religious belief and rational argumentation can be. When Western scholars learned about the traditional five step inference model of the Indian Nyaya school, they considered it as inferior to the three step Aristotelian model because of the apparently redundant repetitions of the form. Ganeri (1924: 75) in his “A Note on the Indian Syllogism” called the Indian model “an untidy organism […] with vestigial structures and rudimentary organs”, especially when compared to the “more perfect work of art, the Aristotelian syllogism”.

It is true that in the Nyaya inference model requires apparently superfluous examples and repetitive steps:

Proposition: This mountain is fire-possessing.

Reason: Because it is smoke-possessing.

Example: Like the kitchen, unlike the lake.

Application: This mountain, since it possesses smoke, possesses fire.

Conclusion: This mountain is fire-possessing.

Both the examples and the repetitions can be explained if the background of Indian logic is taken into account. Logic in India was fundamentally rooted in rhetoric, and the goal was to guide the audience or the other party of the debate along every step of the argument so that they could follow and, if in amicable mood, agree with every single point. Repetitions were not seen as a flaw. On the contrary, Jainas considered the elaborate ten-step syllogism as found in the writings of Bhadrabahu the highest form of making an argument, superior to the five step model. A three step argument was also known to Nyaya logic, but was considered only suitable for drawing conclusions for oneself, not for convincing others.

While oral culture relies on formalized repetitions for both effect and style, for the British, logic had to conform to their preference for plain style and classicist aesthetics. For Randle, the Aristotelean syllogism was after all not only “perfect” but also a “work of art”.

Poetry, maybe the most obvious “word-art”, is today also dominated by the preference for non-repetitive forms. The argument is that poetry has been freed from the straight jacket of rhyme, form and metre. Rhyme, the regular correspondence of sounds, seems to be for modern ears a particularly vain, if not ridiculous, repetition. The first rule of Frank L. Visco’s famous list of “How to Write Good” reads “Avoid Alliteration. Always”.

Like the difference between Protestant plain style and the repetitiveness of Indian mantras or the Catholic rosary, this is not just an aesthetic preference. By using rhyme, poetry can recreate, reaffirm and conform to a given order. The fact that form and rhyme are out of favour on the poetry market reflects therefore a more general individualization and the rejection of traditional pattern in many areas of life.

It is not a coincidence then that the revival of poetical formalism was called for in particular by Catholics. In 1987 the Catholic poet and critic Dana Gioia (1987: 408) criticized modern mainstream poetry for the “debasement of poetic language; […] the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem.” He called for a renewed interest in the aural aspects of poetry that had been replaced by the more visual and text-centred focus of contemporary free verse. Metre, which Gioia (1987: 396) understood as dating back to times “when there was little, if any, distinction between poetry, religion, history, music and magic”, was taken by new formalism as part of the solution.

Unsurprisingly, new formalism has been called “patriarchal” and a “dangerous nostalgia”. But while alliteration may not always be awesome, free verse is just as dangerous in the sense of promoting a particular blend of “political” or “religious” preferences. In either direction, shifts in how language is supposed to be used can tell a lot about power relations but they do not in themselves constitute a form of “progress”. Like other judgements that are called aesthetic, political, religious or rational they are mingled with the myths we have come to hold true.

Words don’t come easy: an example from Jaina Studies

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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categories, Critical Religion, India, Jaina, Jainism, philosophy, world religions

Jainism is increasingly included among the “world religions” with a growing number of books available for both academic and general readers. Typically, Jainism is introduced as an Indian religion with around 4 million members and with a strong focus on personal development through non-violence and asceticism. The BBC website, for example, states that “Jainism is an ancient religion from India that teaches that the way to liberation and bliss is to live lives of harmlessness and renunciation.”

However, when I spoke to Jainas as part of my doctoral research in Karnataka, I found that many Jainas object to the idea that Jainism is their religion. For example, a lecturer at a Jainology department told me that he considered there to be only one true religion, and that would not be Jainism but non-violence. A bhattaraka, a highly venerated Digambara functionary, said that every religion claims to have the ultimate solution, but when new problems arise, subgroups will just form new religions, and that to him race, caste or religion did not matter for defining a person. Another bhattaraka told me that Jaina dharma, Christ dharma and Muslim dharma were all limited but that the universe was unlimited. All these people shared an aversion against having their Jaina beliefs and practices categorised as religion not because they believed in the superiority of secular labels but because to them fencing off a part of reality as “religion” or “Jain-ism” carried connotations of a narrow-minded ideology and arbitrary boundaries.

This highlighted a problem I experienced again and again when trying to write about Jaina teachings: what concepts and phrases do I use for talking about what Jainas believe and do?

Jaina Studies at the University of Mysore

Jaina Studies at the University of Mysore

My doctoral research is about anekantavada, the Jaina teaching that every object in the world has infinitely many aspects even though only a limited amount of information can at any single point in time be grasped by human perception or expressed by human language. In that respect anekantavada is a philosophical teaching that involves questions of ontology and epistemology. But anekantavada is also one of the most important teachings of Indian rhetoric or, as the study of argumentation in India is commonly called, Indian logic. If objects have infinitely many aspects, this impacts on the way we should speak about reality, especially in arguments about ultimate meaning. The claim is that ideally the expression “from a certain perspective” should be added to every statement, to show that it reflects only one of many equally justified possibilities. This has strong ethical implications which have become predominant in contemporary discussions about anekantavada as “tolerance”. However, anekantavada also has to be seen in the light of the ultimate goal of the Jaina, becoming an omniscient, a liberated being who can grasp at will all aspects of past, present and future simultaneously. According to Jainism these omniscients, who have cleansed their souls through right conduct and knowledge of karmic particles, already exist in higher spheres. Anekantavada tries to show the limitations of human perception while bringing us as closely as possible to the reality of the omiscients. So is anekantavada a religious teaching?

I found that anekantavada cannot be properly understood if it is labelled either philosophy or religion, so throughout my dissertation I kept somewhat unhappily repeating the expression “Jaina philosophy and religion”. Trying to avoid controversial terminology I also spoke of the “Jaina worldview” though I was not happy at all with this term because it lacked the emphasis on praxis. Just using Indian terms did not seem a solution to me either because an important part of my dissertation was explaining an element of one culture for the readership of another. Of course concepts overlap and there are ways of explaining how they are connected but every concrete text passage calls for a concrete choice. It does, after all, make a big difference if I write that anekantavada is part of “Indian logic” or “Jaina rhetoric”.

I cannot say that I have found a solution to this problem of categories and terminology but I try to make the tensions visible in the text. A first point was to reflect the different conceptualisations in the structure of my text. Anekantavada is about the many perspectives one can have on the world, and I therefore discuss in one chapter anekantavada as part of ontology, in another as part of epistemology, in another as soteriology. Then I try to bring them together in an overarching, more organic section, hoping that every time I present anekantavada in one way the other presentations will have some presence in the reader’s mind. The other point was that I decided to provide a substantial amount of background information on terms that should not appear natural but contested. When I speak of anekantavada as being part of Indian logic I devote a whole section to discussing the field of Indian logic in comparison to Western logic, and that it is based on rhetoric and grammar, not mathematics. I thereby hope to draw mental landscapes that present a realistic impression even if the embedded terminology remains deficient.

I am not sure if the Jainas I spoke to in India would agree with how I present their tradition but I hope they would acknowledge that at least I have learned a lesson from anekantavada about the complexity of the world and the limitations of language.

Marian apparitions – a challenge to established categories

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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Christian, Critical Religion, market, modernity, pilgrimage, religion, strong religion

Emile Zola noted in 1892 about the newly built Lourdes basilica that its effect was “very shimmering but not especially religious”. The aesthetics of the Lourdes complex, with its mix of architectural styles and generous use of electric lights, was only one of many elements of the Marian apparitions that did not sit well with critics. Interestingly it was not only the reactionary politics behind the Marian cult but particularly the modern aspects like the consumerism or use of mass media at Marian apparition sites that were criticized by many liberal and progressive observers as unworthy of a true religious spirit.

But it would be misguided to simply continue the 19th century tradition and label these aspects as aberrations of an otherwise pure religiosity. As Suzanne K. Kaufman has shown, republicans used the controversy around Lourdes to construct a dichotomy between an acceptable private, nostalgic religiosity and its debased modern public forms in order to “relegate its practices to the margins of modern political and economic life”. (80)

The background for this was that the developments at Lourdes and other Marian apparition sites challenged the monopoly of the secular world view for presenting viable visions for modernity and progress. Marian apparitions showed that reactionary values could go very well with modern technology, mass media and the market. The apparitions themselves were also highly political, not only in the sense that they brought existing tensions to the fore as in the case of violent clashes between Catholics and state troops following claims of Marian apparitions during the German Kulturkampf, but innately through the messages conveyed by the seers to the people.

Academia is increasingly taking “strong religion” (Almond et al. 2003) into account, yet the preconceptions about what the term is supposed to designate are strongly influenced by militant Islamism and its scripture based forms of fundamentalism that dominate the news since 9/11. Marian apparitions, however, are not primarily rooted in scripture but distinctively modern. Mary, the mother of God, appears in the here and now with a message tailored to the circumstances of the time, often choosing places undergoing drastic transformation: Fatima called for a bulwark against communism, La Salette summoned to a disciplined Christian life on the brink of the 1848 revolution. The still on-going messages at Medjugorje that started a decade before the Balkan war spread the message of peace as did the apparition of Mary in Kibeho, where one of the major genocides of the Rwandan war took place.

At Lourdes, the Assumptionists realized the political potential of the Marian apparition site when they chose the National Pilgrimage as their key instrument for driving forth their mission of re-Christianizing French society from individual to government. Also, what is overlooked when speaking in derogatory terms about the devotional kitsch associated with Marian apparition shrines is that these mass produced items could powerfully forge and express identity as they served as “a rival set of emblems” (Blackbourn, 1993: 27) to the omnipresent national symbols of allegiance like the Tricolour.

Of course, the status of Marian apparitions is highly contested. Catholics are not obliged to believe in any of the accepted apparitions, and not only rationalists may find it difficult to believe that God sends Mary today to speak on day-to-day politics. Yet one should keep in mind that those who write off Marian apparitions as degenerated forms of religion and hence as imagined have an agenda, too. Religion, politics, modernity and the market do not come in neat boxes, and we should be wary of anyone trying to package these terms according to their needs. Marian apparitions are an underestimated phenomenon of modernity that can shed new light on the contested conceptualisation and construction of religion from the 19th century onwards.

—

Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World, by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan. University of Chicago Press, 2003

Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by David Blackbourn. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, by Suzanne K. Kaufman. Cornell University Press, 2005

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