Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Dewey in Art as Experience develops further his understanding of the relation of play and work. He emphasizes that the play of children at first has no more purpose than the play of a kitten, but that as play becomes more complex, it takes on an intention and a goal. He gives the example of a child playing with blocks, building a house or a tower. Here play involves the fulfillment of a preconceived idea. “Play as an event is still immediate. But its content consists of the mediation of present materials by ideas drawn from past experiences … This transition effects a transformation of play into work, provided work is not identical with toil or labor. For any activity becomes work when it is directed by accomplishment of a definite material result, and it is labor only as the activities are onerous, undergone as mere means by which to secure a result. The product of artistic activity is significantly called the work of art.“46 He then goes on to say, “Play remains as an attitude of freedom from subordination to an end imposed by external necessity, as opposed, that is, to labor; but it is transformed into work in that activity is subordinated to production of an objective result.“47 Perhaps Dewey in a good American way pushes too quickly beyond play or work as an end in itself into the realm of production, but surely he is raising the question of what in other theoretical traditions is called alienated labor or alienated work, and offering the possibility that all work could be unalienated, perhaps another utopian idea that puts pressure on the world of daily life.

  It is worth noting that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his study of what he calls flow-which he defines as a kind of optimal experience of full engagement with the world and full realization of one’s own potentialities, as we noted in Chapter 1-has found that, contrary to expectations, and to a degree contrary sometimes to the subjects’ beliefs, many American do experience flow at work.48 The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has even worried that some of the people she studied get more satisfaction at work than they do at home, though she focuses more on time pressure than on the intrinsic satisfaction of work.49 Perhaps this possible increase in the intrinsic satisfaction of work has to do with the changes in a modern economy where fewer jobs involve heavy manual labor, although desk jobs are widely viewed as often meaningless. We can be reasonably sure that we have a way to go before everyone’s job has the same quality as play, art, or flow.

  Theoria and Types of Consciousness

  Flow goes all the way back, because it is found in animal play, in ritual, in art, and in work that is intrinsically meaningful, but there is another related but different kind of experience that is at least equally ancient. The psychologist Alison Gopnik has interestingly contrasted flow, which she equates with what she calls “spotlight consciousness,” which we have “when our attention is completely focused on a single object or activity, and we lose ourselves in that activity,” with what she calls “lantern consciousness.” Flow involves concentration in a single direction, thus the spotlight metaphor: “In flow we enjoy a peculiarly pleasurable kind of unconsciousness. When we’re completely absorbed in a task we lose sight of the outside world and even lose consciousness of each particular action we must take. The plan just seems to execute itself.“50

  Lantern consciousness, which Gopnik sees as common in infants and attainable by adults usually only with certain forms of meditation, is not oriented to one particular direction but is open to the whole undifferentiated “Lantern consciousness leads to a very different kind of happiness [than does flow]. There is a similar feeling that we have lost our sense of self, but we lose ourselves by becoming part of the world.“52 Both spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness would seem to be part of what Maslow called B-cognition, as described in Chapter 1, because neither is oriented to deficiency, Maslow’s D-cognition. Yet there is a significant difference: flow is active, lantern consciousness is receptive. With these modern psychological categories in mind, let us return to the question of theoria and theory in the axial age.

  Theoria is accurately translated as “contemplation,” a state that is not active but is not passive either, for it is open to the whole of reality and receptive of what is given in that experience of openness. This seems to be similar to what Gopnik is describing with her idea of lantern consciousness, where everything is illuminated, and her notion that in that state we “become part of the world.” Lantern consciousness is similar to the unitive event that was the first of our stages of religious experience as described in Chapter 1. Both the vision of the idea of the Good in Plato’s Republic and the Buddha’s experience of release under the Bodhi tree seem to have this quality. Parallels in ancient China are easy to find in Daoism, but less obvious in Confucianism, though the idea of the original state of Bull Mountain in Mencius’s parable of that name contains such a vision. There are more than a few visions in the Hebrew scriptures. The great vision of Isaiah, chapter 6, in which the temple in Jerusalem is seen as identical with the whole cosmos, is a good example, but so is the vision of the end time in Isaiah 65 quoted above.

  Experiences of theoria, if we can use Plato’s word for them-they are usually visual, and theoria is a kind of seeing, though they can involve hearing, as was often the case in ancient Israel-provide an insight into reality so deep that the whole empirical world is called into question. Such experiences can remain private, but when they are taken as the focus for subsequent reflection they can lead to a radical questioning of the way things are, that is, the world is relativized in the light of an all-encompassing truth.

  Josef Pieper in his Leisure, the Basis of Culture provides Latin contrast terms from medieval scholasticism that seem to be getting at a relevant contrast: intellectus is receptive contemplation; ratio is active reason.53 The Greek terms that lie behind this much later distinction are not easy to specify: nous in some uses could be behind intellectus, and logos could be behind ratio, but both nous and logos have many meanings. In any case, when Donald and I, following him, use “theory” as a way of characterizing a new cultural capacity in the axial age, it is theory or reason in the active sense, not theoria as contemplation that we are primarily thinking of. However, I want to argue that there is a relation between these two senses of the term. If Gopnik is right that what she calls lantern consciousness is characteristic of all young children (and probably many animals as well), we can hardly argue that it is something new in the axial age. 14 It is, however, something that doesn’t come readily to adults, who may have to “work” to attain it. And in the cultural context of the axial age it can, for intellectually and spiritually attuned adults, take on a significance not given to such experiences earlier. What I want to argue is that theoria as contemplation may open up the possibility of theory in the active sense, related to Gopnik’s spotlight consciousness, but not quite identical.

  Gopnik emphasizes the relation of spotlight consciousness and flow: the task takes over and pulls us along, sometimes without our even being conscious that it is happening, but in talking about active reason I want to emphasize the conscious side of spotlight consciousness. Those engaged in demanding intellectual work, scientists and scholars, often have the experience of flow when all is going well in their work. But there are occasions when all does not go well, when facts turn up that don’t fit one’s expectations, contradictions appear in arguments that had seemed coherent. Then one must stop the flow and think about what is going on. It is then, I would argue, that we engage in “second-order thinking,” thinking about thinking, to try to clarify our problems and find a way to deal with them. It is here that “theory,” which is related in origin to both lantern consciousness and flow, comes into its own as active reason, as involving a higher level of abstraction and methods of investigation that may be required to solve problems. Here we find the beginnings of science, cognitive speculation, and the universalization of ethics, all of which were beginning to appear in the axial age, though still in relation to embodied practice and story, mimetic and mythic culture.

  When the experience of radical truth-which is given, not a
chieved, which is the original meaning of philosophical theoria-is reflected on after the experience itself has passed, the door may be opened to this new kind of thinking about the world and particularly society, which is now “demystified,” in that the shadows in the cave are revealed as fake, as not reality but a manipulated simulacrum of reality. This new kind of theory in axial religion led to two major consequences that worked themselves out in various ways in the four axial cases. One is that the person who experienced theoria as “seeing truth” was driven to imagine the kind of society in which that truth could transform the world of daily life. The second consequence of thinking through the vision of the Good coming from a true experience of theoria was-because changing the whole society proved impossibly utopian-to consider limited kinds of utopia within the world, forms of group organization that would protect the vision and provide a relaxed field, at least for its devotees. Both kinds of response to the experience of theoria would continue to work themselves out over the subsequent millennia right up to the present, though a consideration of those later developments is not our present concern. Both projects are utopian, but the first is a big, almost fantastic, utopia, whereas the second is a more modest, even practical, one.

  Two Kinds of Theory in Two Kinds of Utopia

  Plato’s big utopia took its model, as noted above, from the polis, though a very new kind of polis. After the vision of the Good in the Parable of the Cave, which is theoria in the classic sense, Plato turns to theory in the active sense, a way of thinking about the world to determine how it could be different. Active theory or active reason requires Plato to think about the practical realities of the world of daily life, the world of the struggle for existence. In order to show citizens who had not shared his transcendent experience that the city he is proposing is good, he invented the “noble lie” to convince the various orders in the city to accept their stations as “natural.” And in the Laws Plato justifies punishments, even including the death penalty, for those whose souls have not been improved by the enlightened “musical” education laid out for them, though in time such punishments would no longer be necessary. Confucians would come to a similar position when they admitted that the city of virtue under a moral king could not abandon harsh punishments at once, even though that was the goal. The renouncer, then, sees the world with new eyes: as Plato says of the ones who have returned to the cave, they see the shadows for what they are, not naively as do those who have never left. One could say that the ideological illusion is gone. One gazes at a distance, objectively, so to speak.

  Once disengaged vision, what I am calling active theory, becomes possible, then theory can take another turn: it can abandon any moral stance at all and look simply at what will be useful, what can make the powerful and exploitative even more so. One thinks of the Legalists in China, and of Kautilya’s Arthashastra in India. Although the Hebrew prophets saw and condemned the self-serving manipulations of the rich and powerful, we can find in the Bible no example of someone arguing for such behavior in principle. Except possibly for some of the Sophists, whose surviving writings are fragmentary, we have nothing quite like Han Fei or Kautilya in Greece. Or do we?

  Aristotle was not an amoralist; he was one of the greatest moral theorists who ever lived. Yet in Aristotle we can see the possibility of a split between knowledge and ethics that will, when it is fully recognized, have enormous consequences in later history, a split that was already foreshadowed in Plato’s “noble lie,” as we have seen. Pierre Hadot argues that Plato’s school, for all its concern for mathematics and dialectic, had an essentially political aim: philosophers in principle should be rulers. Aristotle’s school, however, is specifically for philosophers, those who do not participate actively in the life of the city, in a way a school for renouncers.55 But in distinguishing the philosophical life from the political life so clearly, Aristotle threatens the link between wisdom (sophia) and moral judgment (phronesis), in which he still clearly believed. Most of his surviving texts were notes for lectures within the school and express aspects of the philosophical life, though the Ethics and the Politics were intended for a larger audience of active citizens. The link between the two realms is not direct but appears in the fact that both are oriented to good forms of life, one toward knowledge for its own sake, the other toward the creation of a good city.

  Although the highest form of theoria is contemplation of the divine, and through it the philosopher, however briefly and partially, actually participates in the divine, theoria includes the search for knowledge of all things, including the transient ones. Pierre Hadot, however, argues that Aristotle’s massive research project is not quite what it seems to modern minds: “It is thus indisputable that for Aristotle the life of the mind consists to a large degree, in observing, doing research, and reflecting on one’s observations. Yet this activity is carried out in a certain spirit, which we might go so far as to describe as an almost religious passion for reality in all its aspects, be they humble or sublime, for we find traces of the divine in all things.“56 And he goes on to quote a passage in which Aristotle says, “In all natural things there is something wonderful.“57 It is as though theoria in its highest form is close to what Gopnik calls “lantern consciousness,” the apprehension of reality as a whole, but in its lesser forms it becomes various kinds of “spotlight consciousness,” focusing on each aspect of reality, however humble, in an effort to understand it and what causes it.

  So one possible split apparent in Aristotle is between his metaphysics, where he describes the ultimate source of all knowledge, and the many particular fields of inquiry that he had so much to do with founding. But the second possible split is between theoria, contemplation, in all its various levels, as the best life for human beings, and the life of the city, of politics and ethics. Zheoria, in his words, is useless. It is a good internal to itself, but it has no consequences for the world.

  But perhaps we miss Aristotle’s point if we ask what the theoretical life is good for. Being the best kind of life, and good in itself, then the question is what kind of person and what kind of society could make this life possible. The Ethics and Politics describe the conditions under which the theoretical life could be pursued. But unlike Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics is no utopia, but an empirical and analytical description of actual Greek society, containing ethical judgments between better and worse, but objective, distant, as an analysis of the second-best kind of life, one that has its final value in making possible the first kind of life. Aristotle was the founder of sociology, which Durkheim recognized when he assigned the Politics as the basic textbook for his students when he first began to teach at the University of Bordeaux. All I am suggesting is that the distinctions between two kinds of theoria, pure contemplation and various fields of inquiry, and two kinds of ethical life, the intellectual and the practical, made possible, if the unity of Aristotle’s thought was broken, separate developments that could lead to autonomous sciences and utilitarian ethics in the long run.

  Aristotle was really a stranger in his own city, if Athens was his own city: he was not a citizen. He had to set up his school, the Lyceum, in a public building, because, as an alien, he could not own land in Athens and so could not buy land for his school. And when things turned grim, he, unlike Socrates, had no compunction about getting out in time, so that Athens would not commit the same crime a second time. He was a teacher, one of the greatest who ever lived, but one of his (not very apt) pupils was Alexander, the greatest conqueror of the ancient world. Aristotle on the whole used the word theoria in Plato’s sense, but he also used it from time to time for “investigation,” or “inquiry,” that is, for the study of all things in the world, natural and cultural, to see how they work and what they are for.

  The beginnings of science, of a critical view of the world, of knowledge for its own sake, can be found in all the axial cases, though in Israel, as in the case of Philo (20 BCE-50 CE) or Josephus (37-ca. 100 cE), for example, creative thinkers often wrot
e in Greek and were profoundly influenced by Greek thought, which dominated most of the Middle East for centuries. Talcott Parsons spoke of ancient Israel and Greece as “seedbed” societies because their heritages, even when they lost political independence, continued to germinate in subsequent history.58 In reality, all the axial societies were seedbed societies, and one of the things we would need to consider if we were to follow up this metaphor, is that they cross-pollinated in a variety of ways. Just as Jewish and Greek traditions interpenetrated, Buddhism had a powerful effect on China, and Indian mathematics on the West. The axial transitions themselves were probably not simply parallel, though the connections between them are hard to determine, but in subsequent history they all deeply influenced each other.