Philosophical method refers to the philosophical and meta-philosophical investigation of how philosophy is done. In particular, method can be distinguished from the study of history of philosophy: the latter is, in general, more concerned with the development of trends in philosophical thought, whereas the former seeks to understand the assumptions, mechanisms, and trends underlying philosophical practice (Buchler 1961). The study of philosophical method has tended to concentrate on the classification of philosophers’ approaches to problems based upon the methods used to address and answer philosophical questions (Burnyeat 1983). For instance, a methodological classification of Hegelian epistemology could at least partially concentrate on its rationalism, dialecticism, and teleology – but that would not be a fully methodological investigation, since it does not directly concern the manner and mode in which Hegel engages with epistemological topics (Buchler 1961). Rather, a methodological investigation could begin with the analysis of Hegelian texts’ reliance upon systematization – the architectonic framework-philosophy that seeks to understand and classify all aspects of human life through the use of detailed arguments often employing modus-ponens and modus-tollens (arguments of self-contradiction) from classical Aristotelian method.
Another homologous approach is to determine philosophical methods is through a paradigmatic (e.g. Kuhnian) understanding of the major frameworks by which philosophers have historically approached questions. In the Western tradition, several major sub-traditions can be seen at work. Such paradigmatic understandings also tend to contextualize the questions that contemporary philosophers found meaningful, as well as the modes of argument employed to reach conclusions and develop counterarguments. For instance, the “ontological paradigm,” attributed to Plato and Aristotle (among other contemporaries), deconstructs Platonic philosophy as a systematized (argumentative) paradigm that aims ultimately at wisdom and is objective (e.g. concerned with objects and their properties). Other common methodological mechanisms include dialectic (discursive method seen extensively in Platonic dialogue); and methodological doubt (self-skepticism regarding beliefs and attempts to arrive at completely justifiable core premises; as in Descartes).
Philosophical method has been advanced by numerous theorists, both contemporary and ancient; like most meta-theoretic enterprises, it has often poses questions of itself. Plato’s Meno and Republic are particularly illustrative of ontological-paradigmatic argumentation, and have served as a resource for scholars investigating anti-sophistic trends in ancient philosophy. Additionally, similar methodologies have been warranted in discussions regarding “restricted platonisms” that have arisen, for instance, in mathematics (via Putnam) and physics (via Quine-Putnam and others). Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics has also served as a key resource in the deconstruction of the philosophical methods of Scholasticism and early Renaissance philosophy. In the 20th century, Buchler (1961) composed a comprehensive re-interpretation of philosophical methods based upon general theories of human and natural judgment, in which certain philosophical contexts (“polemical contexts”) are used to describe the nature and form of philosophical argument. Matthews (1973) undertook an influential investigation of platonic epistemology as presented in the Republic, Meno, and related works, with an emphasis upon the argumentative form of platonic dialectic. Burnyeat (1983) discussed the ontological structures of dialectical skeptical argument with an emphasis upon understanding the sustainability of the method.
Many other authors have written on the topic of philosophical paradigm and philosophical methodology, but few have considered the role of method in the development of arguments in the “gray zones” between philosophy and the social sciences, where both analytic and observational approaches overlap (Tweed, 2006). Perhaps no philosophe in the history of Religious Studies has at once commanded such approbation and engendered such fierce scholarly renitence as the Romanian master Mircea Eliade. Eliade, an enigmatic figure whose voluminous works span the mythology, metaphysics, hermeneutics, phenomenology (and even the aesthetics) of religion has, perhaps more efficaciously than any other scholar in humanities-at-large, forced to a crisis the dominant modernist (Kantian) assumptions underlying the construction(s) of space, place, and motion in religious communities (Dudley 120-121; 128-129; 141).
As Dudley has persuasively argued, the basis of this ‘crisis of methodology’ is manifest more broadly in the contention of phenomenologists and scholars of hermeneutics, in which both camps, with varying degrees of cogency, conceive Eliade as the rexis defensor (29; 33; 39; 46; 65; 83). A discussion of the philosophical method employed in Eliade’s work has been neglected in the philosophical literature, largely because theorists of religion have classified his work as primarily anthropological and sociological as opposed to philosophical. More recently, however, scholars have sought a methodological understanding of Eliade and have re-interpreted his work along epistemological and metaphysical, as opposed to strictly anthropological, lines. This modern debate regarding the philosophical method employed by Eliade has crucial import for scholars of religion (like Tweed and Smith) whose rebellion against Kantian architectonics of space and the attendant hegemonizing precepts of modernist discourse has demanded detailed revisitations of Eliadean cosmogony. For instance, Bryan Rennie’s influential responsum to the postmodernists, Reconstructing Eliade situates the debates referenced by Dudley within the context of geo-spatial and temporal definition and contestation referenced to Tweed in Crossing and Dwelling and Smith in Map is not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, and ultimately interpret them in light of Kant’s methodology of systematic ontology. It can be argued that Eliade’s primary texts betray an ontological methodological paradigm. The method by which this investigation unfolds is ontological in its taxonomy of rituals; Eliade’s primary methodology is a reduction of philosophical knowledge to objective knowledge about the state of ritual economies.
There is not a dialogical element to Eliade’s work (especially in central works like the Myth of the Eternal Return) – rather, ontological arguments are advanced in the following fashion: (1). Through a detailed examination of the sociological and anthropological literature, find a cultural practice that can be called religious; (2). Formulate an ontological precedent for the practice, wherein the practice is situated in the episteme of the society in question; (3). Conduct a review of related practices, establishing an Aristotelian taxonomy of rituals that fulfill certain ontological purposes. A preliminary analysis of the Eliadean spatio-temporal paradigm manifestly illustrates the ideological tradition to which Tweed and Smith, despite their stentorous protestations, are nonetheless (in the view of an influential Eliadean,Rennie) undeniably beholden. Despite the anthropological nature of Rennie’s many cosmogonies, he must be brought to recognize that Eliade’s method is ultimately about the nature of knowledge, and revolves around a dialectical stance. In Reconstructing, Rennie correctly and succinctly presents Eliadean sacred spaces as domains that: (1) revolve about culturally postulated sacred centers; (2) infuse irruptions (hierophanies) of the Divine into pre-existing physical space; and (3) valorize and are valorized by symbolic quantifiers which induce a coincidentia oppositorum (reconciliation of existential contradictions); in addition, he recognizes the essentially dialectical nature of Eliade’s argumentation – arising from anthropological facts and forming conclusions based upon a detailed investigation of cultural factors.
Eliade can also be classified as ontological in methodology as regards his method of arguing that societies create and maintain symbolic economies through cartographies (conceptual mappings of the universe) to sustain conceptual and ontological renditions of reality. Careful readings of Eliade’s texts reveal that his method of argument is a Kantian and Levi-Straussian deconstruction of space that is frequently interpreted as a reified domain free of the “thick cartographies” that pervade Smith’s and Tweed’s accounts; but this construction of sacred space has, profoundly imbricated within it, a fundamental motion of cosmogonic repetition. For Eliade, this repetition is the basis of “primal ontology,” which he credits as a Kantian construction. Eliade argues that philosophical knowledge is possessed by all societies and sustains this argument by method of contradiction: any civilization not possessing such knowledge would never be able to create and sustain the elaborate rituals that comprise such vast elements of the symbolic economy.
This method of argument (modus tollens) is not assumed by parallel philosophers of space; in fact, neither Rennie nor Dudley assumes this line of defense, possibly because Smith seems to tacitly accept it in several recent prolegomena to The
Myth of the Eternal Return and assume (in my opinion falsely) that Rennie had already recognized its potential utility in the construction of an integrated (hermeneutic and phenomenological) neo-Eliadean theory of religious experience acknowledging the ‘spatial (Tweedian)‘ turn referenced by Kim Knott (see, for instance, Smith X; XI). Eliade argues that communities inhabit space in culturally situated ways, and his approach in doing so is Platonic, placing him in an ontological methodological camp. Indeed, for Eliade all philosophy is ultimately concerned with a dialectic process: the interplay between ritual and ontological understanding (grasping) of the proximal universe. Eliade’s method sustaining this thesis is classical Platonic argument: if societies possess cultural knowledge and all culturally situated knowledge has ontological premises, then all societies must possess ontological knowledge. Furthermore, Eliade addresses the protestation that ritual knowledge is not isomorphic to mental (Baconian) knowledge by means of contradiction: if there were to exist any ritual that did not involve mental knowledge, then ritual would be useless for sustaining objective views about the world, and as a consequence, would be entirely destructive of objectivity. Consequently, the rituals would be ineffective in situating individuals within the ritual economy. More precisely, his manner of argument is as follows: It is initially difficult to isolate the nature of sacred spaces from Eliade’s panoramic review of the composition of “archaic ontology.” This presupposedly ubiquitous existent is, of course, a-priori reified by the systematic, trans-cultural, trans-temporal reduction of consciousness to a seriatim evocation of responses to “the terror of history” (156; 159; 160).
In Eliade’s philosophical method, spaces and rituals are treated as discrete archetypes, and the pursuit of these archetypes is, in an ontological (Platonic) sense, the pursuit of wisdom. The very physicality of the indigenous settlement, for instance, is sustained by the orientation of the omphalos, which is itself determined by a unique “celestial archetype,” a concept that Eliade develops based upon a Platonic style of contradiction of pre-existing philosophical views (33). However, the efficacious de-integration of the ontic domain and the realms of religiously negotiated physicality are facilitated by a corpus of relations between and among: (1) the omphalos and territoriality; (2) mythical actions performed ab-origine and the perforation of time/space by hierophany in illo tempore; (3) physical actions of a determinedly territorializing nature, as manifest in peripheralization rituals banishing the ‘chaos’ of uninhabited space from the domain of the sacred universe. A systematic investigation of these categories reveals the fundamental interdigitation of the “eidetic archetypes” of cosmicization rituals and a dialectic of eternal return present in the sacred spaces cosmicized by such rituals (10; 18; 21).
Another crucial concept in Eliade’s corpus is approached through Platonic means of argumentation. Consequent of Eliade’s “homologization of the center” with the construction of space is his assertion of the existence of’ periodic ritual ‘returns to existence ab-origine‘. The periodicity of the ritual regeneration of sacred spaces (habitations, temples, cities, or otherwise) is the erasure of temporality, which is the identification of ritualized time and space with the primordial context of the original generation. For Eliade, the “archaic mind” perceives regenerative ritualizations of space not only repeat, but actually assume ontic (Platonic knowledge) equality with, the cosmogonic construction; such ritualizations are not only paradigmatic of sacrality but eternally recurrent reinvestments of the tempus sacrum in contemporaneity. Thus, it is evident that sacred space facilitates the erasure of temporality (35-36) and actuates the mythicization of historicity in order to homologize mythical/ideal prototypes with sacred spaces, contexts, and orientations.
However, like Jonathan Z. Smith and (subsequently) Thomas Tweed, Eliade posits the functional centrality of orienting mechanisms and lenitive motions of crossing (i.e. return) in the construction of stable, territorialized identities. Perhaps the most precise illustration of this thesis is provided (conspicuously) in Myth of the Eternal Return, in which dramas of suffering and disemplacement affected by territorial crossings are postulated to be “capable of rectification by the eternal return” (101). It is because history, despite its privations, exiles, and constrained crossings (to use Tweed’s analytical palette) is a continuous manifestation of theophany (103) that the construction of inhabited space is repeated in annual festivals (58-59) and ritual journeys beyond the terra cognita.The argumentative nature of Eliade’s method should be noted, as well as his reliance on syllogisms from classical Aristotelian tradition.
The ontological nature of the argument is as follows: societies employing ritual economies do so in interest of preserving definite social structures; these social structures in turn perpetuate the existence of homologous institutions that possess ritual investment. Because all ritual investment is itself a form of cartography, it follows that the ultimate goal of ritual is the establishment of this cartography. And because cartography is a mental process, the means by which ritual produces social institutions can be conceived as a series of mental processes. These mental processes need not correspond to Western archetypes of knowledge, but nonetheless possess mental agency. Eliade can also be classified as classical and ontological in his methodology because of his heavy reliance upon syllogism in direct argumentation. Considering the following deductions together makes a stronger case for this assertion (1).
For Eliade, unlike the postmodern cartographers referenced above, the manifestation of “the sacred” into human life is an epiphenomenon punctuating the universal (pseudo-Kantian) ambient space of all action and dwelling (10; 18). (2). In light of (1), territoreality can be classified as a mental, not necessarily physical construct; categorical space is not, as some critics of Eliade have charged, neutral and pervasive; it is, rather, the un-cosmicized exterior of an inhabited domain a-priori oriented by an axis mundi. (3). In light of (2), territoreality can be seen as a mental reference to a culturally postulated center: this ‘central axis’ is then, as in Tweed’s discussion of Cuban-American myths of habitation, a platform for a dramatic re-narration of the originary or founding mythos (19; 22-23). (4). In light of (2) and (3), the role of the mental in life is ultimately a role of mapping and constructing of spaces; as in Tweedian discussions upon such mythos, it is ultimately the desire to live in a “real and efficacious” world that demands the orientation of space, and thus the construction of sacred space through mental processes (29).
In Sacred and Profane, however, thresholds between socially constructed sacred spaces and undifferentiated ambient spaces are conceptualized as interfaces for migration between the primordial (mythical) time and the present (24; 68; 75). This motion of eternal return tacitly recognizes crossing between undifferentiated spaces (through migration, conquest, or material necessity) and dwelling within sacred spaces, (as conceptualized in Crossing and Dwelling) as the fundamental instrumentalities of homo religiosus. As Eliade argues in Sacred and Profane and Myth of the Eternal Return, to settle in a territory and build a dwelling is an undertaking for the community and the individual; the habitation is an imago mundi (53), which relates the necessity for the animation of the dwelling through cosmogonic rituals (56). Similarly, religious architecture is a repositioning of the omphalos from “traditional religious modes” (58-59); the ritual crossing of boundaries between birth, death, and rebirth that occurs within these structures engenders the regeneration of the social order through the renewal of the cosmic energies of the kratophany (politicized hierophany).
Because there has been no scholarship directly attempting to classify Eliade’s work by its ontological dimensions, the current essay does constitute a small contribution to the philosophical literature. However, the general trend of philosophical re-interpretation of the methodological underpinnings of texts hitherto classified as anthropological and sociological is in full swing; as a consequence, the methodology of philosophy has profited immensely. Western methodological archetypes can be found throughout the world of sociological literature, and as such, some sociology should be seen as a methodological twin of classical social philosophy (much as Berger & Luckmann argued in their classic texts).
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