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I. Philosophy and the Conflict of Beliefs
- Southern Illinois University Press
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3 I. Philosophy and the Conflict of Beliefs M an is a teller of tales, a spreader of reports. He tells his story in every medium; by the spoken work, by pantomime and drama, in carvings in wood and stone, in rite and cult, in memorial and monument . His beliefs are social beliefs; they are of import because of this fact. Moreover, beliefs are serially as well as contemporaneously told and shared. They become traditions, and there are no traces of any form of mankind so primitive as not to reveal him possessed of traditions. Of other animals we find bones; associated with the remains of the human body are always objects that are symbols of common beliefs. When groups having different traditional beliefs come into close intercourse with one another, there is a shock which makes belief an object of attentive observation. Philosophies have always flourished in such periods. Consider, for example, the time of the sophists; the conflux of different Mediterranean civilizations when Rome was mistress; the definition of Christian dogmas against threatening heresies; the period called the renascence . There is another type of conflict and of beliefs, and one even more important in recent centuries. Science has given us new ways of reaching beliefs about nature, and these newer and not as yet acclimatized beliefs do not harmonize with the older beliefs transmitted from Roman-Hellenistic civilization and from the Middle Ages. The story of these conflicts of special traditions with one another, and of novel beliefs in conflict with those of tradition, forms the theme of this series of addresses. This chapter is given to discussion of the background of beliefs out of which philosophy arose. A philosopher deals with the beliefs which are characteristic of the culture of the society in which he lives. Philosophy as it proceeds piles up its own special traditions and, in consequence, a philosopher, especially for the last century and a half, is distracted. He has to keep one eye on living contemporary beliefs and the other on beliefs embodied in the tradition of prior great systems. The outcome is rarely a solid stereoscopic vision. The confusion of thought which reflects the actual state of the social world to-day is increased by this special source of confusion. The fact that Greek thought 4 | Philosophy and the Conflict of Beliefs was not so troubled, that it reflected a native culture developing on its own heath, and growing so rapidly and spontaneously that men thought in terms of living problems rather than in those of results reached in prior reflection, is perhaps the chief reason for the perennial attractiveness of Greek thought. It presents a freshness, naïveté and directness which we in vain would emulate. Before Greek reflection on beliefs arose there were, however, bodies of beliefs already in existence, and these formed its material. The story of early Greek thought is already being rewritten in the light of its gradual emergence from this body of beliefs. I am no specialist in this field and shall not detain you with any account of the special background of Greek philosophy as that is being imaginatively reconstructed by the efforts of anthropologist, archeologist, historian, and philologist. What concerns us is rather certain traits of all pre-philosophic beliefs, traits which form the common matrix out of which emerged all the world’s philosophies, Asiatic as well as European. In turning to this cultural background of belief, I shall of necessity repeat things which are more or less commonplaces. But if philosophy is a study of society with respect to its fundamental and transmitted beliefs, and if there is a time when these beliefs had not yet been complicated and sophisticated by the result of prior intellectual criticism and organization, the conclusions of the anthropologist provides priceless data for the study of the origin and course of philosophy itself. One universal trait of the untried beliefs of mankind is the distinction drawn in them between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Mankind is conspicuously sensitive to the difference between the prosaic expected run of events and that which by contrast is weird, uncanny, mysterious, beyond expectation, and beyond control by means of the appliances and procedures by which the ordinary run of events is administered. The two realms may be said to mark out by way of anticipation what are later called the natural and the supernatural. But we should miss the point of the difference in primitive beliefs if we read into them...