Dylan Lorio-MacNamara: Intro Reading Excerpts, 1/21/20


  • Rollo May's "The Significance of Symbols" 
    • "Using symbols opens humans to transcending their immediate concrete situation through abstraction and living toward a possible situation" (20).
      • writing is such a use of symbols, so we see from last class how writing systems are crucial to the elaboration of religion from primal towards the ancient 

    • "...symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible'..." (33).
      • Is "the possible" here more along the lines of Sartre's nothingness--meaning there are no essential limits on what my life can be--or Nietzsche's slave morality--meaning a projection of one's hopes onto an afterlife?

  • Paul Ricouer's The Symbolism of Evil
    • "Anyone who wished to escape this contingency of historical encounters and stand apart from the game in the name of a non-situated 'objectivity' would at the most know everything, but would understand nothing" (24).
    • "...the meaning resides in the power of the myth to evoke speculation" (236).
      • These seem to speak to the sedimentation of religions Kip talked about last week (see the rainbowy model from notes); religious traditions evolve via elaboration of previous ones, not replacement or destruction
      • so, we should conceive of primal religions as the base layer in the historical process of elaboration/sedimentation
      • myth serves as a symbolic gazing into the past, meant to inspire speculation about the future (points to elaboration)
      • But where/how exactly does one religion morph into another? How does this process of elaboration really work? 

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