Bridging the two cultures or re-rectifying incommensurability? A commentary on Ariel Gluklich’s The Joy of Religion

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Notes

1 Gluklich does not differentiate between emotion and feeling or affect and emotion to distinguish the unconscious biotic element from the acknowledgement of it as an act of conscious awareness. See LeDoux, 1998, pp. 282–283; and Damasio, 2004, pp. 49–57.

2 For a comparison with our last common ancestor with the other extant apes and for the distinct niche-construction determined sociocultural evolution of hominins, see Maryanski, 2019.

3 This is the fragility inherent in ultrasociality, see Turchin, 2016.

4 This question latches on to the greater and moot issue of group selection and its possible level of operation. See Wilson, 2015. If one does not limit evolution to something that can only be grasped from a biological perspective in terms of genomic models or gene transmission-based ones, but grants the existence of other selection mechanisms operating differently and at the sociocultural level, the problem is overcome. See Turner et al., 2018. For different hereditary systems, see Jablonka & Lamb, 2005.

5 The distinction between the symbolic system and its institutional counterpart is important, since institutionalization serves within the cultural hereditary system to endow the symbolic level with a stronger foundation. See Turner & Geertz, 2020.

6 Culture is notoriously difficult to define, but I use it to designate all non-genetically transmitted learning between individuals and across generations. The definition has the breadth to encompass other animals with culture as well. The evolutionary specificity of hominins does not lie in their cultural use, but in the accelerating and changing character of it, i.e., its cumulative nature. See Henrich, 2016; and Laland, 2017.

7 When Gluklich writes about his experience of standing in the synagogue dining hall with cup in hand subsequent to the Shabbat service, he could hardly come closer to what Durkheim referred to by effervescence: “ … there is a joy that resonates in the mutual interactions within this small gathering and shaped in a temporal aesthetic by the consciousness of singing together. The two – community and song – are intertwined as enjoyment” (204, cf. 193; 202).

8 See Petersen et al., 2021.

9 Presumably, this takes place sometime from three to six years of age. See Tomasello, 2019, pp. 151–53.

10 Since Gluklich relates this to Axial Age religions, it would have been obvious for him to discuss Pierre Hadot, who talks about philosophy as a way of life, i.e., life transformed into a continuous cognitive training program enabling the philosopher to see the world in a new way. See Hadot, 2001. For the importance of this for the Hellenistic philosophical schools with far more emphasis placed on the practical, behavioral dimension, see Nussbaum, 1994.

11 Gluklich is unaware of the German philosopher Sloterdijk, 2009, who turns asceticism into the prime characteristic of humans from the emergence of Axial Age until the present and similarly – in continuity of Richard Dawkins’ 1996 monograph Climbing Mount Improbable – uses the mountain metaphor to refer to humans’ perpetual striving for new heights. For asceticism as a universal phenomenon, see my discussion of Durkheim in Petersen (2019, pp. 465–498, 473–477).