By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
There is a striking convergence between Geertz's talk of religion as involving a "fusion" of "ethos" and "world view," on the one hand, and Whitehead's characterization of religion as "an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone," on the other (PRc: 16). In fact when Whitehead argues that the two sides of the higher organism, i.e., human being, require a "fusion," or "reconciliation," in which "emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration," there seem to be only verbal differences from Geertz's argument that "ethos is made intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life implied by the actual state of affairs which the world view describes, and the world view is made emotionally acceptable by being presented as an image of an actual state of affairs of which such a way of life is an authentic expression" (quoted in The Point of Christology: 32).
16 October 2000
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