Dr. Robert Anton Wilson is a bit of an intellectual prankster who has asserted on more than one occasion, "what the thinker thinks the prover proves." While such a statement may serve to agitate some, or perhaps simply confound others, we can see that there is certainly some sort of insight embedded within its coding-perhaps even some hint of mad genius. Of course, simply because Wilson spends much time, as he freely admits, "spinning yarns" does not give good reason to neglect the content of such a statement. Indeed, over the course of this essay we will come to see that once we "unpack" such a statement, or perhaps better, once we unfold the meaning of this into a form that not merely appears as a pinnacle, but also as its structure and support, then we hope to see that indeed it is not only a sensible statement, but that it is also a reasonable and perhaps most sound way to understand the function of method in theory creation and data analysis.1
"Einstein once said," Wilson quotes Korzyski from his Science and Sanity, who was quoting Einstein from who knows where, "'[i]nsofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain'" (Wilson 9). What this intends to mean, and coming from an individual aquatinted with mathematics and its application to reality, is that there is a stark difference between the idealization from which a theory works in an abstract sense and its application to our world. It also seems to say, as Wilson goes on to discuss, that the world of our experiences is compiled by us through sense data, and it is perfectly acceptable that sense data is far from infallible; thus, our theories are derived from an imperfect data set, and then this is analyzed in terms of our reason at which point a theory is developed about an idealized data set, and then from this we want to apply the theory back to the world, where our observations of the theory's application must be filtered through sense data in order to assess the theory's success or failure. Spelt out like this it is no wonder there has been a history of skeptics who deny that we humans know anything at all! Of course, we are far from not knowing anything, and the mere fact that we can communicate to one another shows that we at least have some knowledge about language in its semantic and syntactic aspects-we shall return to the importance of language shortly.
In a sense, we can see that each human being lives as the nexus and boundaries of two primary circles. The first is the circle of our experiencing, and the second is the circle of our interpreting.2 Our circle of experiencing extends spatially along three axes-left/right, forward/back, and up/down-coupled with a time axis of which we appear to experience only in points with the recollection of a history and an anticipation of a future. In other words, our circle of experiencing is really a four dimensional sphere of which we experience only a three dimensional slice at any given time. Within this sphere are located all sorts of manifested physical objects, including each human being's body. The circle of interpreting is intimately linked to this 4D sphere of experiencing and while it might be illustrated in terms of axes as well, it is best to give a less scientific sounding analysis of its composition.
The circle of our interpreting is built upon a two-way interaction between what can be called the subjective and objective realms of our experiencing. We appropriate a language (or languages) from the objective world outside of us and then we internalize this language in such a manner that it comes to create the sensible subjective realm of our thoughts, ideas, and etc., which creates the mode(s) of our interpreting. This is to say that each individual's circle of experiencing becomes a sensible world qua language acquisition via the cultural milieu he or she finds him or her self in. As Gadamer asserts, "Each [person] is at first a kind of linguistic circle , and these linguistic circles come into contact with each other..." (Klemm 189). However, a language is not a static entity, which means that the meanings which are assigned to words upon our learning their use and function are not set in stone and we are free to expand or contract the meaning and use of any word of which we are familiar. Such flexibility in individual language appropriation and use creates a plethora of possible interpretations, and interpreting religious phenomena is no exception.
William Paden writes, "[r]eligious action can signify different things all at once, just as any act can be said to have multiple meanings or multiple causes" (114). What this comes to in regards to the model we have set up within this paper is that each individual acts within his or her circle of experiencing based upon his or her interpretation of the events and phenomena that occur in that circle. Thus, there is intimate interaction between the circle of experiencing and the circle of interpreting: any willful act or direction of intent stems from the interpretation that is created in virtue of our experiencing. The two circles are involved in a interactive feedback/forward loop that generates our momentum in the world; that is, we move along the time axis of our spatial experiencing in such a way that experiencing can cause interpreting and interpreting can lead to certain modes of experiencing. A simple example of this is: we can have two individuals who's circles of experiencing overlap-they are each present during the occurrence of some "religious" event. Now the first person, who's circle of interpreting is based upon what might be labeled as "skepticism" will interpret the event along the lines of his or her habitual mode of understanding-the religiosity of the event is lost to their skeptical standards. On the other hand, the other person's modes of interpretation are not skeptical but agnostic, and so for this person the religious event can signify some kind of religious phenomena, but he or she will remain neutral towards the impact of that phenomena on his or her being. So the first person does not even perceive the religiosity of the event (other than perhaps to scoff at it, dismiss it, or reduce it to something non-religious), and the second person can perceive it, but remains unmoved by it.
In both cases of the two abstract individuals above, we see how their preconceptions about what is allowed into their experience by their interpretation has a direct effect on their respective experiences of the same event. And each interpretation is built upon the linguistic resources that each individual possess. Or, as Wilson puts it, "language does indeed have hypnotic effects, and that one who has said 'This is Sacred' will treat the non-verbal event as if it really is Sacred, and those who say 'This is Crap' will act as if the event really is crap" (Wilson 12). Thus, "[t]he plurality of interpretation therefore corresponds at least partly to the plurality of modes of language, which are in turn appropriate to shifting questions, settings, and audiences" (Paden 114).
E.E. Rehmus, in his role as an etymologist, tells us that "[t]he word 'religion' derives from the Latin prefix, re (an intensive) + ligio, 'to tie, to bind,' hence, 'a practice designed to tie down tightly, as though by a spell-binding force" (219). So, with respect to a circle of interpreting, we can see that a religious mode of interpreting becomes a binding force on not only the way we will understand the events that we experience in this world, but it will also create limits on how we will respond to the events we experience. However, it is easy to see that there is no singular religious interpretation to turn to; rather, there is a panorama of possibility in religious interpreting and experiencing. Moreover, taking the metaphor of "spell-binding" and reading it literally, we see that it is the "spelling out" of a religious position, to which a given individual can affirm, deny, or ignore, which creates the binding force of affirmation, denial, or neglect. Put differently, it is the employment of language to illustrate a position which represents a mode of interpretation which then acts, qua language, to produce the "hypnotic" effect that Wilson mentions where we are put in a position where we believe that our interpretations really do reflect some unchanging reality. And as Wilson says, "if we believe in a model in all cases we have become Idolators of the model" (24).
Thus, if there is a variety not only of religious experience, but also a plethora of modes of interpreting that experience-none of which can infallibly portray the reality-then how much more variety and fallibility must there be in our methods of interpreting and analyzing religious phenomena? This is to say, and in a non-rhetorical non-question asking way, there can be no method of studying religion which can hope to capture all religious phenomena and the interpretations of such phenomena.
Hans-Georg Gadamer is a hermeneutical theorist who has much to say about method and its relationship to truth. Like we have been building a case for so far, Gadamer also believes that language acquisition and use comes to build a world out of "a surging sea of stimuli" such that an articulation of that perceived world becomes possible in virtue of language use (Klemm 187). As Gadamer states, "the...building up of our world in language...persists whenever we want to say something to one and other" (Klemm 189). However, even if there is a group of assenting individuals with regard to the framing of a world through their overlapping linguistic circles (or circles of interpretation), the methods that are used to generate the shared assent are not reliable markers of fixed truth, but merely markers of truth with respect to a given method.
As Richard Palmer says of Gadamer's position, "[t]ruth is not reached methodically," and any given method can "...only render...explicit the kind of truth already implicit in the method" (165). It appears that Gadamer feels that a purely methodological approach misses out on a significant part of the relation between subject and object, or perhaps more accurately, Gadamer feels that the use of a method creates the pitfall of seeing one's self as the subject relative to the object, but not the reciprocal situation which actually exists in the relationship of overlapping experiencing. This latter would be one's self in the position of object to our object's role as subject qua itself. Put differently, Gadamer asserts that a method is largely a device used to interrogate and analyze an object at the expense of the reciprocal interrogation of the subject by the object. "In method," says Palmer, "the inquiring subject leads and controls and manipulates" (ibid.). Thus, if this is the case, then it becomes easy to see that a fixed interpretation of some object or event leaves the person experiencing the object or event closed to a deeper impact of the object or event upon his or her being. Put differently, a method is a closed system which, when clung to, yields only what the person employing the method desires to perceive and neglects other aspects of an object or event which do not "fit" into the standards of the method. Or as Wilson puts it, "[e]very...neurosemantic system3 encourages us to 'see' (give importance to) some information-to pay close attention to certain kinds of signals," while at the same time each system "...also tends to discourage attention and alertness to some other classes of signals" (27). In other words, like Gadamer appears to argue, "[i]t is possible that 'truth' only exists when one has specified the context or field within which one is speaking" (Wilson 35).
Thus, to disengage from the abstraction of the story so far, we can take an example from the method and theory of one thinker and theorist with regards to the study of religion. We shall now have a quick look at a portion of Freud's thought.
Freud's method and theory revolves around the idea that we are largely unconscious of our real motivations and tend to project these onto the world that we find outside ourselves. With respect to religion, Freud is quite adamant that those of us practicing religion are caught up in an illusion of projecting an idealized self upon some shared image of a divinity (typically what gets called "the Big Daddy in the Sky").4 While his theory is armed with a fistful of technical terms to relate the various mechanisms of our projections, we are not so concerned with that here. What we can note is that there seems to be something to this; namely, we do appear often to make idealized images of what we ought to aspire to, and then externalize these outside of our own being in order that we can model our own behaviour on such a pattern. However, this does not seem to entail that religion is the belief in an illusion, and indeed, we can even point to a religion such as Buddhism and note that Freud's theory breaks down because the ultimate goal of Buddhism is not the worship of some externalized entity, but the dissolution of attachment with respect to the concerns of the individual ego. Thus, we see a clear example of how Freud's theory pays selective attention to particular elements of the total data set of experience-in this case the standard formulation of what might be called "Western" religious tradition(s)-and does this at the expense of other points of data and experience within the overall human circle of experiencing. Moreover, that Freud begins with the presupposition that we are unconscious of our real feelings and thoughts and hide these under a mask of "defense mechanisms" appears to lead us more or less directly to the idea that religion must be an illusion because it is something that we consciously place belief in. This is to say, since various religious systems are adhered to by people in ways that they can consciously articulate, and if what we can consciously articulate is not what really motivates us, then it is no surprise that Freud's method reveals that our conscious participation in any given religious system must not reflect the actuality of our experiences, but rather, perpetuates the ignorance of our own true motivations. In other words, we see how Freud's method renders a "truth"5 about religion that is already implicit in its starting assumptions.
So we have seen that it is possible that what the thinker thinks, the prover proves. Our methods are not only derived from fallible data to which we pay selective attention, but also, it does appear that any method we employ will contain bias and presupposition that might largely go unnoticed if we do not take pains to be critical in a self-reflexive manner. It seems to be the case that there is no difference between religion and theories about religion in the sense that both build sensible but finitely limited worlds out of a potentially infinite data set derived from human experiencing. Thus, each theory about religion, like each religion itself, is an avenue to provide insight and meaning to our world while also having the potential to lull us into sleepy submission if we should come to think that the world built from a specific interpretation really does capture and infallibly relate the whole of our existence. Therefore, when we apply a method to study the occurrence of religious phenomena in the world we need to hold the truths the method reveals with an open hand, which means that we recognize our method has uncovered something for us, but it cannot be something permanent or final, nor even perhaps something for everyone. Any method will shine a light on some portion of our human experiences while at the same time placing other aspects into the dark.
1. It seems important to note that this is a general thesis, which, as we develop it, will become more focused on religion and religious phenomena; however, this general thesis still seems to hold regarding other categories of human experiences, those in the realm of politics, say, or science. The limit of application of this thesis might only be in our imaginations or our lack of willingness to apply it.
2. The numbering is entirely arbitrary and not meant to denote any sort of ordering or primacy.
3. Where "neurosemantic system" is taken to be the equivalent, but perhaps more complex or technical version, of our "circle of interpretation."
4. The paraphrased content of this sentence, including quote in brackets, taken from field notes.
5. And here we place truth in quotations to denote the idea that this truth is a truth of Freud's method and theory, but not necessarily a truth outside of that theory.
Works Cited
Klemm, David E., Hermeneutical Inquiry Volume 1 The Interpretation of Texts, The American Academy of Religion, 1986.
Paden, William E., Interpreting the Sacred, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992.
Palmer, Richard E., Hermeneutics, Northwestern University Press, USA, 1969.
Rehmus, E.E., The Magician's Dictionary, Feral House, USA, 1990.
Wilson, Robert Anton, The New Inquisition, New Falcon Publications, USA, 1995.