PART ONE—
ANIMAL QUAERENS:
THE QUEST AS A DIMENSION OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Chercher? pas seulement: créer.
Proust

Chapter One—
Religion and the Spiritual Quest:
From Closure to Openness

We shall not look far in search of the quest; it will meet us at every turn of the way. For this business of seeking, of setting off in determined pursuit of what we are lacking and may never attain, is no incidental theme of our literature and thought, no bypath of history, but a fundamental activity that contributes in no small measure toward defining existence as human. All life is continually going beyond its given condition, and the primal origin of the quest may very well lie in the biochemical composition that links the proud members of our sapient species with everything else that grows before decomposing.

But the quest is pre-eminently a conscious transcendence, a deliberate reaching toward a posited—if by no means an unalterable—goal; and in this purposeful overreaching of our given status we are perhaps entitled to regard humankind, among the inhabitants of our planet, as being alone. We distinguish ourselves from lowlier beasts as kindlers of fire, makers of tools, users of language, but whatever innate dispositions may have evolved to render these activities possible, each of them was and remains, like everything specifically human, not an instinctive inheritance but a cultural acquisition, a capacity that must be attained. As the animal most imperfectly programmed by nature for the period between birth and death, the animal that must seek to acquire what it characteristically lacks to begin with, and to actualize by directed effort what is potential in its being but never knowable in advance, the human species may be designated animal quaerens with at least as much right as animal rationale .

What human beings lack in genetically programmed endowments they normally make good, to be sure, by an acculturation process so routine as to seem automatic: to speak one's native language, or to

manufacture a basic artifact, requires no one to go questing afar. Here culture is very nearly a second nature, and the most ordinary effort is all but certain not to miscarry. But awareness of this process may set human beings self-consciously apart from a no longer "natural" world which they strive to regain or surpass; the concerted effort to overcome this apartness is a cardinal condition of the quest. The very term spiritual is an index of this separation; for distinction from the body places the unhoused spirit in a state of incompletion and need. Whether or not the process of self-transcendence has its inarticulate origin in the protoplasmic beginnings of life, so that evolution can be comprehended, as Bergson somewhat fancifully thought (213), "only if we view it as seeking for something beyond its reach," it achieves awareness, and hence can be fully a quest, first in man; and not until man posits a mobile dimension at least partly independent of biological need does the quest become spiritual and specifically human. It lies in the nature of spirit, which owes its existence to the separation that it continually strives to overcome, rather to seek than to find.

Two Aspects of Religious Ritual

We naturally associate the spiritual quest with religions; we emphatically cannot identify them. Like technology and language, religion is a frequently cited differentia of humanity; insofar as it too is an institution of acculturation, it appears to be a self-contained system that leaves the spirit little to ask for. In this light, religion is less a manifestation of the individual quest than an alternative to it; it says not "Seek!" but "Seek no further!" This aspect of religion has been repeatedly emphasized by those who view religious beliefs as a reflection, and religious practices as a reaffirmation, of dominant social values.

For Marx it was axiomatic that the religious sentiment "is itself a social product " and that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" (Marx and Engels, 71, 135), "real" being equivalent to "socio-economic." Nor is this perspective exclusively Marxist: "In societies such as our own," Bergson remarked (13), "the first effect of religion is to sustain and reinforce the claims of society." For Peter L. Berger (1967, 33), "religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status, that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference." Within this frame religious and social institutions (which repeatedly overlap) are viewed as immutable, and religion, by its claim to permanent status, acts as the hypostatized inertia (or "repository of sacred tradition") by which society collectively denies the potentially disruptive reality of change. It would be hard to imagine an institution more alien to the tentative in-betweenness and perpetual

movement of the spiritual quest than this stolid objectification of willed social rigidity.

The study of "primitive" religion has found this model of particular value. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life of 1912 (115), Durkheim pronounced the totemism of aboriginal Australia, as recorded by Spencer and Gillen, Strehlow, and Howitt, "the most primitive and simple religion which it is possible to find," and therefore the one in which the essential features of all religions could best be studied. Many of Durkheim's assumptions now seem preposterous. Australian religions are neither single nor simple; and the hypothesis of universal religious evolution from a vague "totemism" unattested in much of the world was flimsy then and is untenable now. But by his single-minded insistence on the interdependence of the religious and social orders Durkheim exerted immense influence on the sociology of religion. His belief that society is "the highest reality in the intellectual and moral order that we can know by observation" (29) mounts to evangelical heights when he declares it "unquestionable" that to its members society "is what a god is to his worshippers" (236–37). And in this worship of society "the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be illusory" (464): their adoration has the force of indefeasible truth.^[1] Durkheim's collectivism is thus totalitarian in the strictest sense. Society as the Absolute, unlike lesser deities, allows no exceptions and tempers the necessity of its order with no merely personal mercy. Such a monolithic religion clearly leaves no place at all for the restless spirit to quest in.

Anthropologists have by no means unanimously acquiesced in Durkheim's fervid credo—"It was Durkheim and not the savage," Evans-Pritchard tartly observed (1956, 313), "who made society into a god"—but the social perspective on religion has been central to many. Thus for Malinowski (66–67), though society is neither the author nor the self-revealed subject of religious truth, religion "standardizes the right way of thinking and acting and society takes up the verdict and repeats it in unison." And for Radcliffe-Brown (1952, 157), the principal function of religious rites is to "regulate, maintain and transmit from one generation to another sentiments on which the constitution of the society depends." We need not subscribe to the unitary correlation between society and religion propounded by Marx or Durkheim to acknowledge their intimate connection. Religion is no luxuriant excrescence upon the trunk of

[1] Bellah (1959, 458) must turn to early unpublished lectures for evidence that Durkheim "saw clearly that collective representations have a reciprocal influence on social structure." The Elementary Forms, Durkheim's last major work, whose very title has a Platonic resonance, offers little support. On the contrary, as Talcott Parsons writes (1937, 1:449), Durkheim was evidently "thinking of society as a system of eternal objects," timeless and unchanging.

society but a fundamental expression of underlying values that society can articulate in no more effective form. Insofar as such an articulation, unlike Durkheim's seamless weld, allows for variation and imperfection, however, and thus falls short of "unquestionable" authority in matters of ultimate truth, an otherwise inconceivable space for the quest may be imperceptibly but portentously opened.

Influential though orthodoxy, or "right opinion," has been in regulating social order, the orthopraxis, or "right practice," encoded in ritual has been more basic still; and ritual, which knits the social group together and validates its identity, is invariant almost by definition. The striking parallels between human and animal rituals have led to speculations concerning an instinctive disposition toward ritual behavior, even though ritual, like language, is culturally transmitted. Fundamental to its function of stabilizing social order is its repetitiousness. Every ritual must be performed over and over in essentially the same way, so that ritual has even been defined, by Kluckhohn (1942, 105), as "an obsessive repetitive activity." Since the rite re-presents a sacrosanct beginning, it must not be thought to change in any essential, however adaptable it may prove in practice (Firth 1967a, 41). Every performance is not only alike but the same; significant variation is excluded by the nature of ritual itself. What has worked before must not be altered lightly if it is reliably to work again, and again. . . .

In ritual the animal and the human indistinguishably meet and momentously diverge; ritual can no more be reduced to biology than restricted to spirit. Survival value appears fundamental to animal ritual (Lorenz 1966, 67). In addition to abating hostile tensions and cementing social bonds, human ritual often explicitly aims to assure the food supply on which survival depends; it is literally, in Hocart's phrase (37), "a cooperation for life." At the same time, while looking back toward primordial origins re-enacted ad infinitum and while sharing in the invariance of animal ceremonies, religious ritual decisively differentiates human from animal behavior by positing a goal no longer determined solely by chromosomal codes or physiological needs. By reaching consciously back toward consecrated prehuman beginnings whose distance from their ordinary condition they strive to overcome, the enactors of ritual thereby reach beyond them as well. They hypostatize ancestral animals not only as biological progenitors but as founders of the culture that distinguishes human from animal; their culturally acquired ritual effects, by its very existence, transcendence of the animal condition it celebrates. The very repetitiousness of ritual proclaims a distinctively human reality striving toward realization—a reality indeterminately in statu nascendi. Thus ritual is no mere inertial force but a potent agency of organic and social development. "Both instinctive and cultural rituals," according to Lo-

renz (1966, 77–78), "become independent motivations of behavior by creating new ends or goals toward which the organism strives for their own sake." Ritual "can have an adaptive and even creative function" (Firth 1967b, 23) in formation of the social order.

In this light, ritual seems an extension of the impulse to purposeful differentiation implicit in life; it is not stasis but regulated movement. Only after its adaptive rhythms have become mechanical does ritual assume the character of bureaucratic control assigned to it by Weber (1946, 267) and correspond only to religious "rules and regulations." Even so, the creative function recognized by Firth and others in no sense contradicts the maintenance of social equilibrium stressed by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. The dynamic aspect of ritual may be no more perceptible to its participants than the evolution of life to a species in transition; ritual participants may be conscious only of perpetuating their group by scrupulous performance of practices prescribed since their foundation. Stability takes precedence of change (even though stability may be attainable only by nearly insensible change). "Ceremonies are the bond that holds the multitudes together," Radcliffe-Brown (1952, 159) quotes the Chinese Book of Rites as saying, "and if the bond be removed, those multitudes fall into confusion." A similar view underlies Kluckhohn's contention (1942, 101) that rituals (and associated myths) provide "the maximum of fixity" in a world where social order is continually threatened by spontaneity and change. In its coercive reduction of present and future to re-enactments of a domineering past, its insulation from time and denial of the change it may be unwittingly promoting, and its exclusion of all uncertainties arising from uncontrolled variation, ritual reinforces the equilibrium that every human society strives to maintain. In this it is the antithesis of the restlessly aspiring quest which is nevertheless, perhaps, latent within it.

The inseparable link between religion and social structure postulated by Marx and Durkheim thus appears to be abundantly established. Yet we should be wary, even apart from the dogmatisms of Marx and evangelical excesses of Durkheim, of assenting uncritically to the thesis of social priority and hence of seeing religion (by simple inversion, à la Feuerbach, of the religious viewpoint itself) as the reflection of a preexistent social reality. "Durkheim's theory," Cassirer cogently observes (2: 193), "amounts to a hysteron proteron, " a placing of the cart before the horse. "For the form of society is not absolutely and immediately given any more than is the objective form of nature, the regularity of our world of perception. Just as nature comes into being through a theoretical interpretation and elaboration of sensory contents, so the structure of society is a mediated and ideally conditioned reality." To affirm the interdependence of the religious and social orders by no means justifies

us in viewing either as the simple emanation of the other; and inasmuch as ritual is a creative force we might no less plausibly view society as the offshoot of religion than religion as the outgrowth of society. The antecedence of one or the other of these coordinate constructs of human culture is a moot, if not a meaningless, question.

Such considerations caution us against viewing ritual as a wholly static reflex of the society whose stability it asserts. (If ritual is an instrument of imperceptible adaptation, its very denial of change may be its supreme defensive stratagem: plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. . . .) Nor can religion be confined to the collective and invariant aspects that permit it to be understood as a ratification of existing social order—the aspects in which it is farthest from any true quest of the mobile spirit. Bergson, who acknowledged the effectiveness of religion in sustaining society's claims, associated this dimension with a "relatively unchangeable" instinct directed toward "a closed society" (32). In contrast, the self-sufficient motion of "the open soul," far from being instinctual, "is acquired; it calls for, has always called for, an effort" (38–39). To these qualitatively distinct sources of morality and religion he respectively assigned the functions of "pressure and aspiration: the former the more perfect as it becomes more impersonal, closer to those natural forces which we call habit or even instinct, the latter the more powerful according as it is more obviously aroused in us by definite persons, and the more it apparently triumphs over nature" (50). In this second aspect individuals are no longer wholly identified with the collectivity, and no longer find their beliefs and practices adequately prescribed by social fiat in accord with biological predisposition, but must acquire them and make them their own. Here the human being, even in ritual movements which partake of both dimensions, parts company with the instinctually determined animal within as socially programmed religious behavior gives way to individually varied religious action purposefully directed toward an indeterminate outcome—religious action in which the spiritual quest has both matrix and paradigm.

The Individual and the Group: Rites of Passage

Far from being, in Whitehead's phrase, "what the individual does with his solitariness" (1926, 47), religion in most societies is a quintessentially social activity. Even so, the Durkheimian equation of religious reality with "Society divinized" led Malinowski to ask (56) if primitive religion could be "so entirely devoid of the inspiration of solitude," leading him to the contrary conclusion (58) that "the collective and the religious,

though impinging on each other, are by no means coextensive." In the solidarity of tribal society our accustomed antithesis of individual and group would no doubt be inconceivable. The very essence of the "participation" which Lévy-Bruhl associated with "primitive mentality" (and, he increasingly realized, with our own) is that "the subject is at the same time himself and the being in whom he participates" (1925, 345). Selfhood is achieved by identification with the group, not distinction from it. The religion of solitariness thought by Whitehead (1926, 35) to be the result of evolution toward more individualistic, less communal forms could have had no place (as he understood) in the unity of tribal society. Even so, the identity of individual and group has never perhaps been so complete as Lévy-Bruhl's much-disputed "mystical participation" suggests.

"Such facts as the seclusion of novices at initiation, their individual, personal struggles during the ordeal, the communion with spirits, divinities, and powers in lonely spots, all these," Malinowski reminds us (56), "show us primitive religion frequently lived through in solitude." And insofar as religion remains communal, the solidarity it ratifies is not an inheritance possessed ab initio as by the bees but a goal to be attained—often by strenuous effort—and periodically renewed. Far from affirming the undifferentiated cohesion of society, initiation ceremonies and other rites of passage suggest a relationship not of static invariance but of reciprocal transformation. Even in its tribal manifestations, then, religion presupposes (in Bergson's terms) not only instinctive "pressure" for the maintenance of a closed society but, at least in potential, the psychic "motion" of personal aspiration toward a community forever being achieved.

The importance of van Gennep's The Rites of Passage, published in 1908, four years before Durkheim's Elementary Forms, is evident from the title: ritual, the presumably immutable substratum of religious behavior, pertains not only to social stability but to transition, passage, and therefore change. The pattern underlying different rites of passage may indeed be remarkably stable—van Gennep (11) discriminated the three major phases of separation (séparation ), transition (marge ), and incorporation (agrégation ), which he otherwise (21) called the preliminal, liminal (or threshold), and postliminal stages—but the rites affirm not structural fixity, in the first instance, but processual movement; not the apathetic self-sufficiency of a divine collectivity but the sometimes hazardous adaptation of its human components (whether individuals or groups) to a larger whole which, to that extent, is of their own making.

Van Gennep emphasizes (191–92) the importance of "transitional periods which sometimes acquire a certain autonomy" and of "territorial

passage, such as the entrance into a village or house, the movement from one room to another, or the crossing of streets"; the passage defining these rites "is actually a territorial passage." It is therefore not the beginning or end points, the separation or incorporation, which these rites have in common—rites of birth, marriage, initiation, or death begin and . end in wholly different biological and social conditions—but passage itself, the critical crossing of a threshold that is not a line but a region, a temporal and spatial in-between, "autonomous" because not governed by conventions prevailing before and after the crossing. Each passage, to be sure, presupposes a goal—it is a passage to something—but no goal entirely subsumes the passage to it (autonomy cannot be subsumed under law, or movement under fixity) or finally terminates the process of crossing, since every end-point is potentially a point of departure and "there are always new thresholds to cross" (189). What the rite of passage celebrates above all is passage itself.

Victor Turner, developing van Gennep's insights, repeatedly emphasizes that society cannot be understood in terms of fixed structure alone but is always a process, in which van Gennep's transitional stage is of crucial importance. Concerning this fluid, "antistructural" condition of "liminality," and the revitalized human relationship of communitas to which it typically gives rise, he writes (1969, 95–96):

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. . . . We are presented, in such rites, with a "moment in and out of time," and in and out of secular social structure. . . . It is as though there were here two major "models" for human interrelatedness, juxtaposed and alternating. The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions . . . The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.

The "communitas" emerging from liminality, in contrast to the hierarchies enclosing it on either side of the threshold, is for Turner the quintessentially religious aspect of human existence. The totality in which the individual transcends himself is not society as an immemorial static entity but an inherently transitional community perpetually in the process of realization.

Moreover, communitas, though originating in the liminal phase of rites of passage, need not terminate with it; jesters, saints, and other outsiders who "fall in the interstices of social structure, are on its margins, or occupy its lowest rungs" (1969, 125) provide society with a

continuous (if not always welcome) reminder of communal values, and transition may even become a permanent condition when spontaneous communitas is normalized, as in the monastic orders of Christendom. Liminality is thus not simply a transient phase left behind once the ritual has accomplished its immediate object but a recurrent constituent of human culture, which it distinguishes (one might add) from the transitionless hierarchies of the ants and bees as an intrinsically unfinished process directed toward an incessantly redefined goal. The communitas fostered by this recurrent transitionality has an existential quality, as opposed to the cognitive, classificatory quality which Turner (with Lévi-Strauss) associates with structure; it has "an aspect of potentiality" and "is often in the subjunctive mood" (127).

Of the two complementary dimensions, communitas—the dynamic or potential—is therefore prior to the apparently stable configurations of the structural stasis which it is forever imperceptibly transforming. "Communitas . . . is not structure with its signs reversed, minuses instead of pluses, but rather the fons et origo of all structures and, at the same time, their critique. For its very existence puts all social structural rules in question and suggests new possibilities. Communitas strains toward universalism and openness" (1974, 202). This aspiration toward a more inclusive human community—all rites of passage, not excepting those of death, enlarge a corporate group—is one respect in which "communitas is to solidarity as Henri Bergson's 'open morality' is to his 'closed morality'" (1969, 132)—a force inherently expansive and incomplete. "Communitas is not merely instinctual," any more than Bergson's second source; rather, "it involves consciousness and volition" (188).

In major liminal situations a society "takes cognizance of itself " (1974, 239–40); for only in between obligatory fulfillment of structurally prescribed functions does the potential for purposeful change arise. The social order, for stability's sake, must therefore confine overt expressions of communitas to "interstitial" occasions and institutions. Clearly distinguished categories and relations are the essence of structure, and there is always danger in transitional states, as Douglas remarks (96), "simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable." The danger is one that the social order must strictly circumscribe, or it will soon be no order at all.

At the same time, anomaly which finds a recognized place in the social order—as in the Ndembu twinship ritual studied by Turner—may ratify that order by making it the guarantor of values seemingly antithetical to its immutable categories: by being assimilated, the anomaly is regularized and order is upheld. "Cognitively, nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as

extravagant or temporarily permitted illicit behavior" (Turner 1969, 176). Rituals of status reversal, by making the low high and the high low, reaffirm the hierarchical principle without which high and low could not be distinguished even in reverse. But to reaffirm the principle is by no means to affirm any given hierarchy's perpetuity as actually constituted; on the contrary, continuous passage through a porous hierarchy whose only divisions are thresholds makes such an affirmation meaningless. Social life, as experienced by its participants, is "a process rather than a thing" (203)—not a fixed system but a dialectic "that involves successive experience of high and low, communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality and inequality" (97). A society in stasis is a contradiction in terms, for ritual can truly affirm the social order only by continually reshaping and creating it anew.

Turner's argument is open to criticism for its excessively pliable terminology (communitas, like Lévy-Bruhl's mystical participation, is a catch-all of nearly undefinable limits) and its impressionistic use of evidence drawn from a grab-bag extending from African tribal rites to William Blake, Martin Buber, and the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. Granted that symbol and metaphor are fitter vehicles (as Turner suggests) than analysis for conveying the existential qualities of communitas, in these departments the anthropologist can hardly better the originals toward which he somewhat redundantly points us. Yet by his emphasis on ritual liminality as a formative component of a society in continual transition Turner, like van Gennep before him, fundamentally modifies the widespread view of religion (above all in its putative origins) as a passively reflective, obsessively repetitive ratification of a preexistent social order which it thereby endeavors to immunize from the virus of change.

And by associating (even at the risk of prematurely equating) liminality and communitas, Turner discerns that far from merely dissolving the structural bonds among its members, leaving them isolated during their perilous crossing, the liminal phases essential to the rhythm of social life reconstitute those bonds by creating a deeper awareness of community as a shared human need than any static system of kinship roles alone can prescribe. It is in this sense, not by its coercive injunctions, that religion, to the extent that it is "liminal" and not wholly institutional, is most profoundly (as the etymology of our word suggests) a binding together. Through continually renewed assimilation of its members into a more comprehensive community in transitional rites that provide a fluidity integral to its existence if alien to its categories, a no longer static social structure achieves the capacity for self-renovation by which it becomes, in more than a manner of speaking, social life.

Religion and Social Change

This understanding of the dynamic role of ritual sharply contrasts with that of Durkheim or Radcliffe-Brown, for whom religion was essentially an epiphenomenon reinforcing the primary social order which it reflected. Other major thinkers of the early twentieth century also assigned to religion a formative function within a society seen less as a finished structure than a work forever under construction. Max Weber's primary interest, as Talcott Parsons discerned (1963, xxx), "is in religion as a source of the dynamics of social change, not religion as a reinforcement of the stability of societies." For Weber (1946, 245), the tendency of society to congeal in bureaucratic institutions is periodically subverted by the "entirely heterogeneous" force of personal charisma. Throughout early history, "charismatic authority, which rests upon a belief in the sanctity or the value of the extraordinary, and traditionalist (patriarchal) domination, which rests upon a belief in the sanctity of everyday routines, divided the most important authoritative relations between them" (297).

Both tendencies are therefore (like Bergson's two sources or Turner's structure and communitas) fundamental to religion; nor is the traditionalist solely an inertial or the charismatic a progressive force. Both (through "revelation and the sword") can be innovative, and both are subject to institutional routinization. Yet charisma, as a force essentially extraordinary, personal, and unstable, is for Weber, in the absence of external intrusion, the primary agency working against rigidification of social structures. The charismatic attitude "is revolutionary and transvalues everything; it makes a sovereign break with all traditional or rational norms: 'It is written, but I say unto you'" (250). By its highly personal disruption of the collective, its injection of the unpredictable into the routine, and its crystallization around the charismatic individual of an intensely motivated community within the larger society, religious charisma, as Weber portrays it, is inherently a force for change—a force equally destructive and creative in potential and always, from the observer's perspective, uncertain in outcome.

For George Herbert Mead, as for Bergson and Weber, the transformative agency in religion is not the liminal rite of van Gennep's or Turner's tribal societies but the dissident individual who gives new voice to his society's deepest, if nearly forgotten, aspirations. What gives unique importance to religious geniuses, such as Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates, is their "attitude of living with reference to a larger society," a society larger than their institutional communities; though each diverges from the prejudices of his age, "in another sense he expresses the principles

of the community more completely than any other" (1934, 217). Only because society is a dialectical interchange between whole and part can any person achieve this unique importance by actuating the aspirations implicit in his social environment; he transforms his world by revealing to it, from his seemingly tangential perspective, the unsuspected novelty latent within it.

In Mead's social psychology, "the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole" (7). The individual comes into being only through social differentiation and is a product of society, not its pre-existent component. Not until he can adopt toward himself the attitude of the "generalized other" constituted by his environment does the human being become a conscious individual. Ritual contributes significantly to this developing consciousness, since the self is a process in which the conversation with others has been internalized (178); the religious cult contributes toward evolution of the self by giving expression to an ongoing conversation with the world.

In contrast to the conventional "me"—the generalized other internalized in each individual—the response of the subjective "I" is always uncertain. "It is there that novelty arises and it is there that our most important values are located. It is the realization in some sense of this self that we are continually seeking" (204). And this "I," the individual's changing response to the institutionalized attitude of the community, in turn changes the latter by introducing something not previously present (196): the unpredictably responsive "I" is thus the dynamic agency of society's transformation. A reciprocal adaptation is always taking place, not only of the self to the social environment but of that environment to the self by which it is continually being reshaped. Thinking itself is "the carrying-on of a conversation between . . . the 'I' and the 'me'" (335), and because this conversation is forever introducing new situations, it is incompatible for long with any fixed form of society. The religious genius accelerates this often-imperceptible process by acting as "I" to society's "me," thereby actualizing what was potential. Not only primitive cult but religion in general is thus the open-ended conversation of man with his world.

For Peter L. Berger, too, social reality is a construct of human consciousness in turn structured by it through internalization of its own objectified projections: "the social world . . . is not passively absorbed by the individual, but actively appropriated by him" (18). By means of this "protracted conversation" society furnishes its constituent individuals with a nomos, or meaningful order, that shields them against the blankness of its unassimilable margins—with the result, however, that "the world begins to shake in the very instant that its sustaining conversation begins to falter" (22). Religion protects man against the terror of

"anomy," or meaninglessness, by audaciously attempting to conceive of the entire cosmos as humanly significant. And although its projection of human meanings into an empty universe returns as a hauntingly alien reality, the religious enterprise "profoundly reveals the pressing urgency and intensity of man's quest for meaning" (100), which lies at the root of all his endeavors to impose order on what is beyond his control.

It follows that religion not only legitimates social institutions by bestowing ontological status on them, but relativizes these same institutions sub specie aeternitatis and hence may withdraw sanctity from them (97–98). Far from merely validating society's decrees, religion reveals the intrinsic incompleteness of all human attainments by holding out the possibility of an order transcending the approximative actual: the indispensable if unreachable goal of an all-encompassing nomos, an allembracing communitas. For this reason, religion is a force not only, as Durkheim believed, of social inertia but no less intrinsically, as Weber understood, of radical change arising from the individual's aspiration toward a more meaningful order than the emptied legitimacies his given world can supply.

A similar conception of religion as continuous transcendence finds expression in Kierkegaard, who affirms through Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "that it is not the truth but the way which is the truth, i.e. that the truth exists only in the process of becoming" (72). Existence "is precisely the opposite of finality" (107) and cannot be conceived without movement or reduced to any closed system, and reality is "an inter-esse " (273), "the dialectical moment in a trilogy, whose beginning and whose end cannot be for the existing individual" (279).

Since human life is by nature "steady striving and a continuous meanwhile" (469), then, the religious aspirant will renounce the mirage of absolute truth in this world for the road leading toward it and concur with Lessing's hard saying that "if God held all truth in his right hand, and in his left hand held the lifelong pursuit of it, he would choose the left hand" (97). The subjective thinker has no finite goal toward which he strives and which he could reach and be finished: "No, he strives infinitely, is constantly in process of becoming" (84). Religious aspiration requires a goal indeed, but requires that this goal be transcendent—attainable, if at all, only by a leap beyond the continuous meanwhile of human existence into another order of things whither neither Johannes Climacus nor we may follow. To the extent that religion pertains to the human it remains, for Kierkegaard's quixotically inward outsider no less than for the tribesmen of van Gennep or Turner, a never-completed transition.

Of the two conceptions of religion that we have examined, one is as-

sociated with passively habitual (if not "instinctive") affirmation of society as a closed structure immutably grounded in the past, the other with actively purposeful transformation of society as an open process perpetually in passage toward an unrealized future. In terms of the first, no quest is conceivable, since the answers are given in the fixed repetitions of ritual before the questions are asked. In terms of the second, the personal quest finds a collective paradigm in the liminal community's ritualized itinerary through society's margins toward an indeterminate outcome always leaving new thresholds to cross, and the individual's aspiration toward a more meaningful order may in turn become a potent instrument of social transformation.

Between the two, Bergson discerned (58), lies "the whole distance between repose and movement. The first is supposed to be immutable. . . . The shape it assumes at any given time claims to be the final shape. But the second is a forward thrust, a demand for movement; it is the very essence of mobility." The difference is not, however, as Bergson elsewhere implies,^[2] a qualitative one that precludes interaction between them. On the contrary, the static and the kinetic, the closed and the open, the structured and the liminal dimensions of religion, neither of which can exist in isolation for long, are inseparable aspects of one another, through whose dialectical interplay the religious life of society comes into being and continues insensibly to evolve.

These aspects, though both essential, are nevertheless not equal; the primacy of the second derives, for Bergson, from the fact that "movement includes immobility" (58). Stasis is the temporary equilibrium that results from the variation in tempo intrinsic to motion; it is not an autonomous reality but a pulsation or pause in the movement that repeatedly creates and annuls it. The real is not only mobile but movement itself; and if we persist in regarding as real the momentary halts which are only the simultaneity of movements, and in fallaciously viewing rest as anterior to motion, this error reflects our deeply ingrained reluctance to accept the ineluctable mutability of a condition which suggests to our dissatisfied minds "a deficiency, a lack, a quest of the unchanging form" (244). To exist with irrepressible consciousness of impermanence, of the in-betweenness intrinsic to the transitional process of life, and to confront in perpetuity an openness offering no prospect of termination, is to be always aware of a lack—the lack of that very closure and fixity we so insistently affirm—fundamental to our existence.

Yet if the permanence we inherently lack and incessantly strive to

[2] "But between the society in which we live and humanity in general there is, we repeat, the same contrast as between the closed and the open; the difference between the two objects is one of kind and not simply one of degree" (32). Bergson's "vitalism" rests, very shakily, on a similar dualism.

achieve should be a chimera incompatible with the mutability that defines and propels us as living and questing beings, it will be not only a will-o'-the-wisp forever beyond attainment but an object finally alien to our aspirations themselves—an ultimate goal of our quest, but a goal that can only provide fulfillment so long as we continue to lack and continue to seek it. For just as rest is a phase of the movement that includes it, finding can be no more than a momentary pause in the continuous process of seeking which has, by its nature, no end.

Chapter Two—
Biological and Psychological Foundations of the Quest

Religion as process is one source of the spiritual quest, suggesting that the individual's search, idiosyncratic though it may sometimes seem, gives intensified direction to an impetus shared in some measure with society as a whole. The outcast could not so frequently return as hero or savior if the needs to which she gives voice were not latent in those who initially cast her out. But if the human being is truly animal quaerens, a similar latency will be found in the biological, psychological, and linguistic conditions of human life and culture without which society and religion would themselves be inconceivable.

Biology and Purpose: The Evolution of Openness

The quest, far from being an incidental activity, gives specifically human shape to processes basic to life. Distinctive of both is direction, or even, in some sense, purpose. Unlike modern physicists, who have rigorously rejected the notion of telos, many biologists find function or purpose a concept fundamental to understanding life. Thus for Simpson (86–87) "the purposeful aspect of organisms is incontrovertible"; for Bernstejn^[*] (in Jakobson 1973, 56) purposiveness is "a manifest, perhaps even decisive, difference of living systems"; and for Ayala (12) teleological explanations in biology are "indispensable."^[1]

[1] Ayala (8–9) distinguishes "three categories of biological phenomena where teleological explanations are appropriate," namely activity directed toward a consciously anticipated goal; "self-regulating or teleonomic systems"; and "structures anatomically and physiologically designed to perform a certain function" by the directive process of natural selection. See also the distinctions in E. Nagel, 275–316, and Mayr 1988, 38–66. Ayala further notes (14) that "Final Causes, for Aristotle, are principles of intelligibility; they are not in any sense active agents in their own realization." The "Aristotelian" teleology against which modern science reacted is a distortion of Aristotle's final cause, which he clearly discriminated from the efficient cause (the only cause normally signified by our word) with which a debased Aristotelian tradition confounded it.

Yet the nature and origin of this biological purposiveness remain intensely problematic. The ancient Aristotelian teleology, "the doctrine of final cause, of the end's determining the means," which widely prevailed among biologists well into the nineteenth century, is one which Simpson (85) and all of modern science can easily dismiss as "anthropomorphic in a truly primitive way"; in its cruder forms this doctrine prodigally ascribed to everything in creation a purpose determined by its utility to man. So uncritical a teleology was demolished in principle by Kant's "Critique of the Teleological Judgment" of 1790, which both restricted the concept of natural purposiveness to the organism—in which "every part is reciprocally purpose and means" (222)—and argued that this concept is "not susceptible of proof through reason as regards its objective reality" (244). But Kant's scrupulous critique left open the very large loophole that subjectively, in his view (247), natural processes can only be understood by positing "a designing causality of a highest cause," since no human reason "can hope to understand the production of even a blade of grass by mere mechanical causes" (258).

This subjective conviction of a First Cause, which allowed Kant, after all his critiques of reason and judgment, to see in man "the final purpose of creation" (286), depended on the lack of any rationally convincing explanation of biological design—until Darwin dramatically supplied one in natural selection. Natural selection may not, as Darwin's horrified contemporaries too hastily concluded, wholly eliminate all question of purpose from the workings of nature expounded in The Origin of Species . Indeed, Darwin's language reveals the persistence of seemingly teleological and even anthropomorphic patterns in his thought. "Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends" (132), and Nature's productions "plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship. . . . It may be said," therefore, "that natural selection is . . . silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being" (133).

But the "purposes" we metaphorically or retrospectively ascribe to Darwin's selective Nature differ profoundly from those of Platonic demiurge, Stoic artificer, or Judaeo-Christian creator in accruing eventually, through reproductive selection of favored traits, not to the expendable individual but to the evolving species—and to man as a species like any other—and in unfolding in accord not with a predetermined plan or

"designing causality" but solely with the unforeseeable opportunities provided by random mutations or "sports." Nor of course does the process of evolution lead inevitably to greater adaptation, fitness, or survival: extinction, in the long run, is its normal outcome. Purpose survived The Origin of Species, if at all, in fundamentally altered form; behavior of individual organisms may no doubt be goal-directed, but evolutionary directionality seems purposive only when we deem it, in hindsight, successful.

To a great extent twentieth-century molecular biology has confirmed Darwin by explaining the mechanism of inheritance which he could only ascribe to a reproductive system of which he confessed to be "profoundly ignorant" (174). Insofar as this mechanism functions with nearly flawless efficiency, however, the directionality supposedly distinctive of life might seem inexplicable: for how do organisms mechanically reproducing their kind by invariable biochemical processes display more purposive direction than stars or planets whirled about by impersonal gravitational forces? To such questions Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity of 1970 atempted to respond from the perspective of modern genetics in an "orthodox" neo-Darwinian form taken to a controversial extreme.

Monod reaffirms the characteristic "common to all living beings without exception . . . of being objects endowed with a purpose or project " (9). He calls this internal purposiveness teleonomy —a term drawn from cybernetics, which recognizes no essential difference between living and nonliving systems—and considers it, along with autonomous morphogenesis and reproductive invariance, one of the three general properties distinctive of living beings. The very fact of teleonomy, however, constitutes an epistemological problem in that it seems to violate the ironclad postulate of the scientific method ("consubstantial" with modern science) that "objective" nature must be understood without reference to final causes. For Monod (21–22), "the central problem of biology lies with this very contradiction."^[2]

The only solution he considers acceptable to modern science is "that invariance necessarily precedes teleonomy," preserving the effects of chance by submitting them "to the play of natural selection" (23–24). Invariance (encoded in the gene) is both precondition and end of teleonomy, whose project is "the transmission from generation to generation of the invariance content characteristic of the species" (14). Yet more complex forms of purposive behavior (which presuppose response to alternatives presented by variation) could surely never arise if invariance were absolute; rather, in the course of adaptation, purpose itself

[2] On the term teleonomy, introduced by Pittendrigh in 1958, see Ayala (13–14) and Mayr (1988, 44–50). Ayala prefers "internal teleology" as a biologically appropriate term.

evolves —insofar as metaphorical extension of a term strictly applicable, as Kant already discerned, only to the individual organism can describe the blindly directional processes of evolution—as a cumulative consequence of the random perturbations that introduce variation into the resistantly invariant gene and gradually produce, through survival of the fittest mutations, developments of increasing complexity and refinement. Evolutionary directionality, without itself being purposive, is the indispensable condition for the genesis of truly purposeful goal-directed behavior, which is not the motor of evolution, as in Lamarck, but one of its products—an experiment whose end is not known. For the "goals" of Darwinian evolution are forever being determined by incremental preservation of advantageous mutations introduced through countless "choices" given by chance and winnowed by the "strictly . . . a posteriori process," in Mayr's words (1988, 43), of natural selection.

For Monod, to be sure, the organic system is "utterly impervious to any 'hints' from the outside world" (110–11) in a one-way relationship that is "thoroughly Cartesian: the cell is indeed a machine ." This contention even leads him to the provocative assertion (116) that "evolution is not a property of living beings, since it stems from the very imperfections of the conservative mechanism"—as if imperfection were less a property of living beings than invariance. (For Darwin, in contrast, Gould remarks [1987a, 84], "The primary proofs of evolution are oddities and imperfections.") Others, however, have argued that the biological mechanism, even at the molecular or cellular level, is a system by no means closed to all influences from an outside world with which its relationships are not entirely one-way but reciprocal, even dialectical.

Thus for Piaget (1971, 81), investigating the biological basis of knowledge as an outgrowth of the process of life, "phylogenesis [is] dependent in part on ontogenesis" (evolution of the species on development of the individual), and not only the reverse, so that information supplied by genes "is not only transmitted but also transformed in the course of all this development." Since the genome contains a system of autoregulation, it is "a contradiction in terms to suppose that all connection with the soma or the environment can be cut off" (113) in a process excluding interaction between them,^[3] for if everything were immutably programmed, there could be nothing to regulate.

[3] The suggestion of interaction between genome and environment is the point at which Piaget's speculations most departed from orthodox genetics (for which the gene was a closed system and mutations random "mistakes" in conveying its messages) and became most hypothetical, for lack both of experimental verification and of any convincingly demonstrated mechanism of interaction. "For modern biology," Jacob writes (16), "there is no molecular mechanism enabling instructions from the environment to be imprinted into DNA directly, that is, without the roundabout route of natural selection. Not that such a mechanism is theoretically impossible. Simply it does not exist." Yet recent developments make such categorical assertions less sure. As Gould remarks (1987b, 157–59), the "central dogma" of Francis Crick, "that DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein, in a one-way flow of information, a unidirectional process of mechanical construction," has been breached, in large part by the work of Barbara McClintock. In this new model, "the genome is fluid and mobile," and "a set of new themes—mobility, rearrangement, regulation, and interaction—has transformed our view of genomes from stable and linear arrays, altered piece by piece and shielded from any interaction with their products, to fluid systems with potential for rapid reorganization and extensive feedback."

Given this hypothesized responsiveness of the genome to environmental stimuli, evolutionary selection becomes a reciprocal process at every level: organisms not only adapt to given environments but actively adapt environments to their own uses. Such dynamic activity continually produces new forms of equilibrium by interaction within a changing environment; it involves not only random mistakes in genetic transmission but endless readjustment through trial and error. For to Piaget—who rejects the "perpetual vicious circle" of attributing biological organization "to chances which are already partly organized and to selections which are themselves controlled" (276)—1ife inevitably entails purposeful modification of biological organization in response to a shaping environment which it in turn contributes toward shaping.

Piaget's speculations corroborate Bertalanffy's conception of the organism as an open system in continuous interchange with the environment. A permanent equilibrium would be contrary to life, which involves, for Bertalanffy as for Piaget, perpetual re-equilibration of the disequilibria continually introduced by the organism's interaction with the world; this progressive re-equilibration is one more formulation of biological purposiveness. The process is by no means one of aimless fluctuation, since organs or structures tend to become increasingly "mechanized" through progressive differentiation to suit the organism's overall purpose, thereby becoming decreasingly autonomous and adaptable in themselves. For Bertalanffy, as for Bergson, the open system or process is therefore prior to the closed system or structure, its temporarily equilibrated state: "Structures are slow processes of long duration, functions are quick processes of short duration" (1952, 134). The organism is accordingly "not a passive but a basically active system" (18), and its attributes necessarily include both individual and evolutionary history (109). Because life is process, and evolution (Monod notwithstanding) is its property par excellence, to study it as a structure abstracted from growth is to falsify it in essence.

Granted that the organism is an open autoregulatory system, the "purpose" inherent in the process of life will be not only self-preservation through genetically invariant reproduction but self-transcendence

in the direction of increasingly adequate adaptation to changing circumstances and, beyond this, to the incessant challenge of change itself. Biological purposiveness, in yet another formulation, is active resistance to the entropy that measures the degradation of energy, according to the second law of thermodynamics, in any closed system. In an open system responsively interacting with its environment, "the entropy balance," Bertalanffy asserts (1968, 48), "may well be negative, that is, the system may develop toward states of higher improbability, order and differentiation (although, of course, entropy increases in the larger system consisting of the organism and its environment)."^[4] Only through the progressive differentiation characteristic, for Piaget, of all biological (and all cognitive) organizations can an open system of advanced complexity continue to live and to grow, thus achieving an always precarious negation of entropy and temporary postponement of extinction.

Monod speculates (167) that "the profound disquiet which goads us to search out the meaning of existence" through religious rites is an evolutionary inheritance of humanity. If so, it may be a quality selected not only for its advantage to tribal cohesion during our specifically human (and therefore recent) evolution, but still more fundamentally the highly intensified—because at least partly conscious—expression of the unstable organism's perpetual search for an equilibrium compatible with the always destabilizing process of transformation through growth. For if "both instinctive and cultural rituals," to quote Lorenz once again (1966, 77–78), "become independent motivations of behavior by creating new ends or goals toward which the organism strives for their own sakes," the profoundly unquiet search for stability expressed in the elaborate rituals of human religious behavior can be seen as a rudimentary property of living beings long antedating the upstart genus homo .

Which conception of evolution ultimately proves more nearly correct, the random mutationism of Darwin espoused by Monod, or Bertalanffy's and Piaget's dialectical interaction between an open system and its environment, will of course be decided by continuing observation and experimentation. For the present, few leading biologists would find the evidence for the latter sufficient to warrant serious questioning of orthodox Darwinism buttressed by modern genetics. The despotism of

[4] Cf. Bertalanffy 1952, 127, and N. A. Bernstejn^[*] as quoted in Jakobson 1973, 56: "The organism . . . strives for the maximum of negentropy compatible with its vital stability." But increasing differentiation must not itself be seen as a purposeful evolutionary development, since, as Gould cautions (1993, 322–23), "life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense—only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple. . . . Increasing complexity is not a purposeful trend of an unbroken lineage but only the upper limit of an expanding distribution as overall diversity increases."

chance deduced by Monod is far from being, however, a universally accepted consequence of his neo-Darwinian premises. For Dobzhansky (1974, 317–18), natural selection, as "the antichance factor in evolution," makes evolution directional by increasing the adaptedness of populations to their environments; Darwinian fitness is "not an intrinsic property of genetic mutation, but an emergent product of its interactions with the environment" (320). Evolution of an organism can therefore no more be attributed solely to chance than construction of the Parthenon can: evolution is essentially not a random but "a creative process, in precisely the same sense in which composing a poem or a symphony, carving a statue, or painting a picture are creative acts," and what it creates by bringing into being "living systems that would otherwise be infinitely improbable" is above all "order out of randomness" (1970, 430, 431).

There is of course in this impersonal creation no agent to which purpose in any usual sense can be ascribed; yet the undeniably purposeful activity evident in the search of advanced animal organisms for food, reproduction, and survival is itself the product of a blindly formative evolutionary process, "self-maintaining, self-transforming, and self-transcendent," in Julian Huxley's words (Hallpike 1988, 30), "directional in time and therefore irreversible, which in its course generates ever fresh novelty, greater variety, more complex organization, higher levels of awareness, and increasingly conscious mental activity." The a posteriori process of evolution through natural selection is not purposeful in itself (though hypothetical interaction between genome and environment leaves even this possibility open at a rudimentary level), but through its openness to the world, its responsiveness to change, its opportunistic creativity, and its continual formation of new if always provisional forms permitting survival in a constantly changing world, it enables the successfully adaptive organism to pursue the primary "purpose" or "meaning" of its existence. For the meaning in living creatures, Dobzhansky affirms (1974, 323), "is as simple as it is basic—it is life instead of death." In its restless pursuit of this forever variable goal (life being an order that can never be final), every organism created by the long random processes of evolution is inherently a quest in the making.

The Quest of Consciousness

Biologists may speak metaphorically of a "search" even on the molecular level. But the quest is a search that is aware of itself and able to articulate its own goals; for its specifically human foundations, then, we must turn

to psychology and linguistics. The fundamental distinction of psycho-analytical theory, as developed in Freud's last two decades, is not between unconscious and conscious but between id and ego. The id is the undifferentiated region of the psyche shut off (though never entirely) from consciousness and the outer world. Here "contradictions and antitheses persist side by side" (1959c, 20), the laws of logic are suspended, and time has no place. Though a source of vast psychic energy and potential conflict for the ego, to which it is "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations" (1965, 73), the id impassively resists disruption of its self-contained equilibrium by any external disturbance. The only ordered movement evident in its inarticulate turbulence is an endless repetition manifested in the compulsive "ceremonial" of the neurotic which Freud compared to a religious rite, describing religion itself as "a universal obsessional neurosis" (1959a, 2:34)—a judgment to which he held firm throughout his long life.

The message cryptically communicated by the id in dreams and neuroses stems, as Freud especially emphasizes in his late writings, from "the archaic heritage which a child brings with him into the world, before any experience of his own"—a "phylogenetic" heritage (1949, 124; cf. 1939, 128) corresponding to instinct in animals. Instinct is not only conservative but regressive, "an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things " embodying the inherent inertia of organic life (1928, 67–68), so that "the aim of all life is death " (70). In this turbid sediment of the mind ruled by the past and repetitively asserting its sameness while slipping backward toward primal nonentity the quest for an indeterminate future has clearly no possibility of coming into being.

The ego of Freud's late writings is "the organized portion of the id" (1959b, 23), somewhat as life is the organized portion of matter. It is quintessentially an open system, since it "owes its origin as well as the most important of its acquired characteristics to its relation to the real external world" (1949, 58). Freud stresses no quality of the ego more than this openness to the world, without which the id "could not escape destruction" (1965, 75). In contrast to the automatism of the id, blind to the impediments of reality, the ego must be flexibly responsive to contrary needs which it continually strives to balance. Despite its relative weakness, it is the truly active component of the mind which, by its "freely mobile function" (1959b, 79), counteracts the id's obsessive compulsion to repeat what has already been. It not only bridles and guides the powerful id, substituting the reality principle for the id's pleasure principle, but inventively mediates between the conflicting demands of those unreconciled principles and strives to pacify the unpredictable conflicts to which they recurrently give rise.

It follows that the ego's pathological states result from disruption of this openness to the external world (1949, 58) by which the ego maintains its precarious balance. Neurosis derives from conflict between ego and id, and psychosis from "a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world)" (1959a, 2:250–51). Neurosis tries to ignore reality whereas "psychosis denies it and tries to substitute something else for it": the healthy ego, in contrast, mediates between id and reality by seeking active achievement in the outer world. "It is no longer," Freud succinctly concludes (2:279–80), "auto-plastic but alloplastic ." Because it shapes not itself alone but the other, the balanced ego escapes the repetitious monologue of the ritualized id and enters into conversation with an unpredictable interlocutor; it is not only open to the external world but actively engaged in transforming a reality of which, through its openness, it is inextricably part.

In sharp contrast to the id, the ego—to the extent that it can resist submitting to its overawing attendant—is capable of development in a purposeful direction "from obeying instincts to inhibiting them" in the "progressive conquest of the id" (1960, 45–46) to which psychoanalysis, by redirecting the ego toward reality, importantly contributes. Freud repeatedly returned in his later writings to the implications of his early hypothesis that progressive renunciation of instincts "appears to be one of the foundations of human civilization" (1959a, 2:34; cf. 1961b, 7; 1961a, 44); and even though the specter of an unappeasable guilt ominously rising from the depths of a repressive civilization lurked like a beast in the jungle (or an Unbehagen in der Kultur) in the darkening light of Freud's final decades, he remained convinced that civilization can only have arisen, and can only be sustained (if at all), by sublimation of the sexual instincts "through the mediation of the ego" (1960, 20).

To the development of the ego humanity owes the history of which that development is an integral part, for no more than biological life can the ego be understood apart from its history. In certain individuals this progressive ego-differentiation through the always imperfect repression of instinct becomes a restless drive toward an always unreachable future goal—a drive to which not only the individual psyche but human civilization owes its growth and its margin of freedom. "What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization." In these few, Freud writes (1928, 76–77), the difference between satisfaction demanded and achieved "will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, 'ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt '. . . . So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in

which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to conclusion or of being able to reach the goal."^[5]

The mobile ego thus redirects the potent energy of repressed instinct from regressive inertia to aspiration toward an unattainable future—an aspiration that Freud associated not with the childish illusion of religion but with science. The ego "represents what may be called reason and common sense" (1960, 15), and Freud, an Aufklärer in dürftiger Zeit , held fast despite his worst forebodings to the belief, reaffirmed at the very time Hitler was seizing power, that "our best hope for the future is that intellect—the scientific spirit, reason—may in process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man" (1965, 171). Only an Eros guided by the rational ego can draw the mind progressively further from threatened subjection to the death-devoted id, and this supremely purposeful work is the work of human culture itself, "not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee." For the id is the changeless past, the ego the indeterminate future, the id what is reified and alien to us as evolving rational beings, the ego our essential self, and Wo es war , this most pessimistic of realists never ceased to hope, soll ich sein: "Where id was, there ego shall be" (1965, 80).

For Freud, not only was the human id a phylogenetic inheritance but its differentiation from the ego already existed in simpler organisms. Only the extent of its development was unique to the human species, and the task of psychoanalysis was to foster that development. Nor was Freudian psychoanalysis alone in this emphasis; Jung, though far more sympathetic to the archetypal and therefore inheritable unconscious (which for him was not a menacing "it" but a beckoning mother), knew that the human being could no more return to that universal matrix than leave it wholly behind. He too stressed that it is "man's turning away from instinct—his opposing himself to instinct—that creates consciousness" (1971, 4). Only active assimilation by the conscious mind can avert disruption of the psyche by the chaotic prima materia from which it is increasingly differentiated.

Man only discovers the world, Jung writes (1956, 2:417), "when he sacrifices his containment in the primal mother, the original state of unconsciousness"; therefore the libido must not stick fast like Theseus and Peirithous to the underworld but "tear itself loose from the maternal embrace and return to the surface with new possibilities of life" (2:420). In this emphasis on purposeful differentiation of consciousness from the unconscious, Jung and Freud are fundamentally one—though for Jung,

[5] The German words ("presses ever forward unsubdued") are spoken by Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One, scene 4.

in total contrast to Freud, "the great psychotherapeutic systems which we know as the religions" (2:356) have consistently opposed the regressive tendency against which both repeatedly warned.

Despite the "discovery of the unconscious" widely regarded as the signal accomplishment of modern psychoanalysis, then—or rather in consequence of that discovery—for both Freud and Jung it is the organized activity of the \conscious mind formed through interchange with external reality that most fully distinguishes the human species. The phylogenetic unconscious of psychoanalysis is all but impermeably self-enclosed, but consciousness is a process that continually opens toward a reality that transcends, includes, and reacts back upon it. The unconscious is inherited, but consciousness develops through interaction with others. By its purposeful differentiation from the repetitive unconscious, and its engagement with an unpredictable and changing world, consciousness is by nature incessantly in quest of the unknown.

No psychologist has contributed more to understanding the human mind's interactions with the world than Piaget. In early infancy the absorption of reality into the undifferentiated self, which Piaget designates "narcissism" or "absolute egocentricity," is nearly complete. The origins of this condition are biological, since the organism and its environment are at first a continuum. The child can engage in no true dialogue because she lacks "the art of seeking and finding in the other's mind some basis on which to build anew" (1932a, 133). No quest is possible so long as she fails to differentiate any object from herself or to conceive of any need born of its lack. "Objective" thought requires the subject to posit an object distinct from yet in continuing relation to itself: "the objectivity of thought is closely bound up with its communicability" (137). This process is eminently dynamic, and developing awareness of purposeful movement, "introducing a progressive differentiation within the primitive continuum of life and purpose" (1929, 236), is essential to its realization.

During the first phase of this process (250–51), self and things are confused in "participation between all and everything, and desire can exert a magical activity over reality." In the second phase, differentiation begins; in the third, thoughts and words are no longer "conceived as adherent in things" but are "situated in the head." The condition of separation in which the quest (like van Gennep's rites of passage) always begins is not, Piaget thus suggests, the sudden outcome of any one event such as the trauma of birth or weaning from the mother's breast but results from the gradual differentiation by which each individual becomes conscious of a world distinct from herself and of a self potentially deprived of its object. The same development of consciousness that gives

rise to objective and thence to logical thought gives rise, by the separation it entails, to the possibility of unfulfilled desire and of a quest by the alienated self to overcome its lack of the global object from which it has been intrinsically but not incommunicably severed.

Two factors contributing to differentiation of consciousness as Piaget portrays it are especially important preconditions of the quest. One is emergence, at about a year and a half to two years, of "the capacity to represent something with something else, which is known as the symbolical function," manifested not only in speech but in play, postponed imitation through gestures, and mental pictures or interiorized imitations (1973, 16–17). Symbolism is a crucial step in development of consciousness because it entails relation between two initially differentiated "somethings," and because it exhibits intentionality independent of immediate need by evoking "the not actually perceived intended" (117). The development of increasingly adaptable symbolisms enables intention to be articulated and action to be oriented toward a goal represented in advance. As Bertalanffy affirms (1968, 20, 17), symbolism, the "differentia specifica of Homo sapiens ," "makes true or Aristotelian purposiveness possible" by anticipating a future goal that may determine present action.

The second differentiating factor is the child's insistent asking of "why," reflecting a more advanced distinction of subject and object. The interrogative mood expresses heightened uncertainty about a world no longer at the subject's command, and the question "why?" evinces nascent awareness of the possibility that purposes in that unfathomable world might reveal "discord between desire and its realization" (Piaget 1932a, 235). Here in the obstinate questionings of the child is an embryonic quest both purposefully directed toward an indeterminate future goal (the answer sought but not known) and urgently concerned with purpose or meaning itself. To the extent that the mind chooses to undertake this effort, its development from egocentric self-absorption to objective and communicable knowledge is both precondition and prototype of the spiritual quest as a conscious human activity.

Piaget consistently emphasized the continuity of biology and cognition as assimilative open systems characterized by differentiation and growth. The most advanced instrument of this open-ended developmental process is the intelligence, characterized, in opposition to habituated training, by "a reversible mobility constantly widening in scope" (1971, 253). Intelligence not only reflects but constructs "objective" reality, since objectivity is "a process and not a state" (64), and intelligence, by its distinctive mobility, is the cognitive process par excellence. Only by organizing itself through evolution of its categories

can intelligence organize the world it is perpetually constructing, and this progressive organization, which presupposes both initial differentiation and continual interaction of self and things, is the goal of the mobile equilibration that constitutes intelligence itself.^[6] Otherwise put, the goal of the developing consciousness in Piaget's "genetic epistemology" is meaning and truth—not as subjective projections or hypostatized absolutes, but meaning (in Mead's words) as "something objectively there as a relation" (1934, 76) and truth (in Piaget's) as "an organization of the real world" (1971, 361–62). Without the discrimination of things from self in which the development of adult consciousness originates, no quest would come into being (for there would be no object to seek); but without the interaction between self and things by which intelligence organizes an objectively meaningful world, none could possibly be accomplished.

In contrast, then, to the inertial self-absorption of both Freud's id and Piaget's egocentric infantile consciousness, the adult consciousness, or ego, is for both an open-ended process continually organizing itself and its world in response to external reality and advancing toward provisional conquests of coherent meaning from inner and outer chaos alike. Such a restlessly forward-moving psyche has a precursor in the "Faustian" consciousness inherited from the Renaissance. "The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward," Bacon wrote (37; Novum Organum 48), "but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit of the world; but always of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond." But the consciousness of Freud or Piaget, as distinct from that of Bruno or Bacon, is rooted in the biological constitution of the human animal, which tempers the no longer limitless dynamism to which it gives rise and guides its choice of directions by genetically transmitted impulses and restraints.

Because the goal of so dynamic a consciousness is in the process of evolving (like consciousness and like the organism itself), it can never be predetermined or finally attained. Unlike the unconscious, which is "the principle of all regressions and all stagnations," consciousness, Ricoeur remarks (1974, 113), "is a movement which continually annihilates its starting point and can guarantee itself only at the end" toward which it incessantly advances but never fully arrives. And because it is reflexively

[6] For Piaget (1967, 4), "the higher functions of intelligence and affectivity tend toward a 'mobile equilibrium.' The more mobile it is, the more stable it is." And equilibrium (151) is not passive but essentially active. The concept is central to his view of structure in biology, psychology, and linguistics.

aware of its own self-transcendent and self-creative activity, which thus becomes fully purposeful, "consciousness is not a given," Ricoeur affirms (108), "but a task ." Through its awareness of forward movement toward a contingent goal in the unforeseeable future as the task it has purposefully taken upon itself and cannot abandon, human consciousness becomes, in its innermost nature, a perpetual quest.

Chapter Three—
Linguistic Foundations of the Quest

The self-transcendence inherent in life and intensified by consciousness can attain full expression only through the exclusively human medium of speech, which gives the inchoate questing impulse flexibly structured communicable form. Even though its object may be finally inexpressible (for how express what remains to be found?), the fully human quest presupposes the creative agency of the word—or sentence—that allows the always potential future to become the goal of present actions.

From Collective Inertia to Rule-Governed Creativity

That language might be essential to the search for an indeterminate future is barely conceivable in the structuralist linguistics of Saussure and his school dominant throughout much of the twentieth century. The fundamental distinction of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (13–14) is between the collective system of conventions designated langue ("language") and the individual execution called parole ("speech"), grouped together as langage .^[1] Only langue , as a homogeneous system capable of being isolated from the idiosyncrasies of human speech, can constitute the subject matter of a scientific linguistics. As a superpersonal "collective representation," langue (in contrast to parole ) is "the product that the individual passively registers" (14), and it remains "external to the individual, who by himself can neither create nor modify it." It is

[1] Saussure's English translator translates parole as "speaking" and confusingly reserves "speech" for Saussure's comprehensive langage . I shall employ the French terms in my citations, referring to the pagination of the English translation.

(73–74) of all social institutions "the least susceptible to initiatives," and like society as a whole, "being by nature inert, is pre-eminently a conservative force." Even more than religious ritual for Durkheim, langue is a "collective inertia" resisting all innovation.

Not that Saussure was unaware of the historical evolution of languages; he contributed, in the major work published in his lifetime, to the study of phonetic change, and one section of the posthumously assembled Course is devoted to "diachronic" linguistics. But the very dominance of historical concerns in the Indo-European philology of his time led Saussure to give firm priority to its "synchronic" aspect, to "static" rather than "evolutionary" linguistics. In his conception, "the opposition between these two points of view—synchronic and diachronic—is absolute and allows no compromise." The linguist who wishes to understand langue must ignore diachronic development, for if langue is a self-sufficient relational system it must be studied without reference to historical genesis. Whatever changes occur pertain to isolated components, not to the system of relations in which langue consists. Changes, like verbal signs themselves, are arbitrary, and langue as system remains unmodified by them: "In itself it is immutable; only certain elements are altered without regard to the solidarity that binds them to the whole" (84).

Above all—and from this both arbitrariness and immutability follow—langue is a self-contained and hence a closed system cut off from the external world. It is not a nomenclature, "a list of terms corresponding to the same number of things" (which would suppose fixed ideas preexisting the words that named them); rather, the linguistic sign unites "not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image" (65–66). Both sound and concept are purely mental, sealed by their common closure from all connection with any reality beyond their reference to one another. The relation between the two components of the sign—"signifier" and "signified" as Saussure named them, reviving a terminology descending from St. Augustine and the Stoics (Jakobson 1971, 2:345)—is therefore wholly internal, and either or both may change (since in isolation both must be arbitrary) without in any way altering their permanently constitutive relation.

The inherently relational signs composing langue operate not by any intrinsic value (an arbitrary sign can have none) but by the differences among them that constitute the rules determining their function in the system. The components of langue are thus like chessmen, whose material form could be entirely altered without affecting their role in the system of rules which defines them. But in one crucial respect chess differs from langue , for "the chessplayer has the intention of making a move and exercising an action on the system, whereas langue premeditates

nothing; its pieces are moved—or rather modified—spontaneously and by chance" (89). As a self-contained system of arbitrary components deriving significance solely from differences among themselves, langue is impervious to the intentions of its users.

In several key respects Chomsky's theories are akin to Saussure's, as Chomsky, who reacted against the American Structuralist school, has noted. For him, too, the object of linguistics cannot be the chaotic interplay of disparate factors in the performance of language—Saussure's parole —but the competence embodied in a speaker-hearer's implicit knowledge of grammar as a system of interrelated rules corresponding (in this regard) to Saussure's langue . Ever since Syntactic Structures , Chomsky has maintained that "grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning" (1957, 17)—a tightly organized system ideally isolable from other components of language. Great though his departures from structuralism may otherwise be, for Chomsky, "the classical Saussurian assumption of the logical priority of the study of langue. . .seems quite inescapable" (1964, 11).

Moreover, Saussure's assumption that langue is collective and immutable is reinforced by Chomsky's emphasis on linguistic universals as species-specific, indeed genetically programmed, properties of the human mind, so that "universal grammar" is the invariant "system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages not merely by accident but by necessity—of course, I mean biological, not logical, necessity" (1975, 29). Such a system, being insusceptible to all but phylogenetic change, is impervious, like Saussure's, to individual variations, and Chomsky concludes (1965, 59) that the structure of particular languages, reflecting innate ideas and principles, "may very well be largely determined by factors over which the individual has no conscious control and concerning which society may have little choice or freedom." Thus Chomsky forcefully rejects the "commonsense" view that intentionality plays a central role in language. For if the genetically programmed language learner "does not choose to learn and cannot fail to learn under normal conditions, any more than he chooses (or can fail) to organize visual space in a certain way" (1975, 71), then purpose, at least in the sense of conscious intention, is strictly subsidiary if not wholly irrelevant. The question we must ask of language, Chomsky maintains (1972a, 70), is "what it is, not how or for what purposes it is used."

Yet the important affinities between Chomsky's thought and Saussure's should not conceal the still profounder differences between them. For Chomsky's structures, unlike the differentiated verbal signs of Saussurian semiology, are syntactic , and this distinction is of enormous consequence. Saussure limited the syntactic component of langue to linear combinations of signs, called syntagms. (With this syntagmatic relation

he contrasted the associative—later called the paradigmatic—relation of possible substitutions for a given sign by others similar to it.) To langue belong only a few ready-made syntagms; others, including sentences, belong to parole , whose freedom of combination is not subject to rule. Thus syntax, in the dynamic sense of sentence formation, does not belong to langue and falls outside linguistics. For Chomsky this crucial distinction is the principal difference between his approach and that of structuralism in its various forms. Saussure, in Chomsky's view (1964, 23), "appears to regard sentence formation as a matter of parole rather than langue , of free and voluntary creation rather than systematic rule (or perhaps, in some obscure way, as on the border between langue and parole )." His view of syntax as a mere inventory is an "impoverished and thoroughly inadequate conception" which Chomsky (1965, 4) decisively repudiates.

In his own conception of linguistic competence, syntactic structures are not linear arrangements of signs but processes creating infinite possibilities through finite rules and constraints. A generative grammar, as Chomsky describes it in his once "standard theory"—later significantly modified—is the internalized system of rules comprising the speaker-hearer's "tacit knowledge" that generates both the set of sentences intuitively recognized as grammatical that constitute a language and—in a "stronger" sense—the structural descriptions of these (and no other) sentences that constitute an explicit theory of the language. The central syntactic component of this grammar "must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation" (1965, 8–9). The syntactic component connects the deep structure of a sentence—approximating to its simple active declarative form—with the surface structure it finally assumes "by repeated application of certain formal operations called 'grammatical transformations"'; the semantic and phonological components determining the sense and the sound of the sentence are by contrast "purely interpretive" (16). In this "transformational generative grammar" the autonomous syntactic structures both generate and transform.

Chomsky's theories will stand or fall, as he has always affirmed, to the extent that empirical evidence sustains them. But his evolving conception differs from that of structural linguistics, despite their affinities, not in details but essentials. Above all, though Chomsky's competence like Saussure's langue may be a closed system—immunized from variation and change by being genetically programmed—it is also a generative process . What grammar—and specifically its syntactic component—generates is language itself, not as a sequence of self-enclosed signs but as an open-ended creative activity. Among Chomsky's central objections to

Saussure is that langue as "an inventory of elements" rather than a system of rules leaves no place for the "rule-governed creativity" of everyday language use (1964, 23). In contrast, the retrospectively defined tradition he calls Cartesian linguistics, stemming obliquely from Descartes and including the seventeenth-century Port-Royal grammarians and Wilhelm von Humboldt—who asserted (1972, 27) that "language is not work (ergon ) but an activity (energeia )"—gave forceful expression to the essential creativity of language (Chomsky 1966, 19; cf. 1964, 17).^[2]

In this conception, as developed by Chomsky, "the limitless possibilities of thought and imagination are reflected in the creative aspect of language use. The language provides finite means but infinite possibilities of expression constrained only by rules of concept formation and sentence formation" (1966, 29). Everyday language use is a creative and "mysterious ability" by which expressions new to experience are incessantly engendered (1972a, 100). The contradiction between this emphasis on open-ended creativity in language use and the seemingly deterministic insistence that linguistic structure is a biologically encoded system insusceptible to conscious choice is a contradiction in appearance only. For Chomsky's "rule-governed" creativity, if superficially paradoxical, places him firmly in an intellectual (and moral) tradition for which freedom itself, as opposed to license, is made possible by the laws defining it. Constrictions on attainable language allow a language to be attained; its innate schematism "makes possible the acquisition of a rich and highly specific system on the basis of limited data" (1972a, 174). A transformational generative grammar, by syntactically organizing the channels through which semantic categories find phonetic expression, creates the "infinite possibilities" constituting the nearly unrestricted freedom of linguistic performance—the creative use of language which remains, unlike the theoretically definable mechanism of competence, "a mystery that eludes our intellectual grasp" (1980, 222).

Unlike the unproductive Saussurian system, then, in which langue and parole are "absolutely distinct," and langue is imprinted on a passively receptive brain, the linguistic competence enabling creative performance reflects for Chomsky not "a 'passive' system of incremental data processing, habit formation, and induction" as in behaviorist learning theory, but an active potentiality like that of Leibniz in the rationalist tradition "for which external stimuli serve only as occasions for activating what is already dispositionally contained in the mind's own structure" (1975, 216). Indeed, despite Chomsky's reluctance to attribute purpose to language, performance is clearly the goal toward which the

[2] For a critique of Chomsky's conception of a "Cartesian" tradition of linguistics, see Aarsleff, 100–119.

generative process of linguistic competence is directed. "There is, of course, no doubt," he asserts with uncharacteristically forthright acknowledgment of a broadened teleology, "that language is designed for use" (1972b, 199).

Among the most cogent objections to structural linguistics is that langue remains a closed system without essential connection either with speech through which it is realized or with the extralinguistic world. Under the "rule of the closure of the universe of signs," Ricoeur writes (1974, 83–84), "the act of speaking is excluded not only as . . . individual performance, but as free combination, as producing new utterances," though this "is the essential aspect of language—properly speaking, its goal." And language so understood "does not refer to anything outside of itself, it constitutes a world for itself" (1978, 90).

By his emphasis on open-ended creativity as essential to language Chomsky escapes the first of these objections. But his insistence, since his earliest work, that an autonomous grammar is "independent of meaning" (1957, 17) and that "semantic notions are of no use in grammar" (100) might make transformational generative grammar no less than Saussurian semiology seem "a world for itself" independent of all external reference. Some twenty years after Syntactic Structures Chomsky still "found nothing to challenge the absolute thesis of autonomy of syntax" (1977, 52), which remains a cardinal postulate of his theory of language.

Yet Chomsky does not identify this autonomous system with "language." On the contrary, he has tried to delimit as precisely as possible the role of syntax among the components of grammar and of grammar (including syntax) among the systems comprising language. Syntax, and grammatical competence in general, are the language system par excellence, since they alone are a structure-dependent, species-specific subsystem (or "organ") of the human mind whose only function is generation of language. But autonomy does not imply that no correspondences exist between grammar and meaning. On the contrary, the undeniable fact of such correspondences suggested to Chomsky in his earliest writings the need for a more general theory of language including a theory both of linguistic form and of language use (1957, 102), since the latter "obviously involves a complex interplay of many factors of the most disparate sort, of which the grammatical processes constitute only one" (1964, 10). Chomsky has always recognized the importance of such factors, even if he has sometimes described them as "extralinguistic" components of performance and considered them (like memory restrictions) "not, properly speaking, aspects of language" (1972a, 116). Increasingly, however, he acknowledges that the linguistic competence virtually identified in earlier writings with implicit knowledge of generative gram-

mar comprehends also a "pragmatic competence" which (though not "language-specific" like grammatical competence) "underlies the ability to use such knowledge along with the conceptual system to achieve certain ends or purposes" (1980, 59; cf. 224–25).

Indeed, although Chomsky firmly rejects behaviorist learning theory and the doctrine that a vaguely defined general intelligence can account for language acquisition, he believes that several interacting components may be involved in knowing a language, including, besides the language-specific "computational" system of grammar, a more general "conceptual" system of object reference involving such relations as agent, goal, and instrument, so that knowledge of language "might consist of quite different cognitive systems that interweave in normal cognitive development" (54–55, 58). The fact that in Chomsky's view grammar alone and not language (of which it is only the central of several interacting systems) is autonomous, and that the less specialized "conceptual" system likewise integral to knowledge of language entails "object reference" and other potentially extralinguistic relations, sharply differentiates his conception from Saussure's self-enclosed system of internal values. "The idealization of 'grammar' will thus be entirely legitimate, but the theory of grammar will be in part 'open'" (1977, 37). The very fact of interaction with other components requires that grammatical competence be a less than hermetically closed system, and thus dictates that it can never constitute "a world for itself."

Reference to the external world, neglected if not precluded in Saussure's conception of langue , is one important function of the interdependent systems that comprise language for Chomsky. In this perspective, the autonomy of syntax (and its independence from determination by semantic categories) is what makes it possible for language to refer to extralinguistic reality and escape the huis clos of a solipsistic structuralism. For if semantic categories were themselves (as the short-lived theories of "generative semantics" supposed) intrinsic—thus "generative"— components of grammatical competence, "meaning" would be, as in structuralism, a predetermined, wholly intralinguistic affair.

Far from countenancing such tendencies, Chomsky, in developing his "extended standard theory" since the 1970s, has moved decisively away from any association of semantics with deep structure, suggesting "that perhaps all semantic information is determined by a somewhat enriched notion of surface structure" (1975, 82; cf. 1972b, 1977). "I doubt that one can separate semantic representation from beliefs and knowledge about the world," he writes (1979, 142–43). Such nonlinguistic systems of belief as expectations about three-dimensional space, human behavior, and so on, are crucial to an understanding of semantics, in which

"there are many mental organs in interaction."^[3] It follows that although semantic reference is an undeniable function of language, meaning is not a subject to be defined (much less prescribed) in terms of linguistic theory alone.

Far from being a "return to structuralism" (1979, 175–77), Chomsky's association of semantics with surface structure and extra-linguistic beliefs confirms his radical departure from Saussure's purely relational linguistics. For Saussure (1959, 114–17), both "signification" (the relation, within a sign, between signifier and signified) and "value" (the relation of signs to one another by which the signification of each is determined) are internal to langue . Meaning can only be an intralinguistic relation among signs or between their components, for in langue nothing else enters, and outside it all is freedom or chaos, not meaning. In Chomsky's theory, on the contrary, semantic representation incorporates beliefs about the real world which enter language through the openness of the lexicon and, in the strictly linguistic "logical form" mapped onto sentence structure by a generative grammar, constitute meaning.

This distinction between logical form and semantic representation recalls not Saussure's distinction between valeur and signification but that of Saussure's older contemporary Frege between Sinn and Bedeutung , "sense" and "meaning"; for Frege's Bedeutung , in contrast to Saussure's signification , designates an extralinguistic reference to a "thing meant," a truth-value established by correspondence with an objective state. Only the sense of a sentence, not its meaning (for which a knowledge of external conditions is necessary by definition) can be ascertained by exclusively linguistic analysis, and in grasping a sense, Frege observes, "one is not certainly assured of meaning anything" (61). Whereas Saussure's verbal sign relates only a sound-image and a mental concept so that external reference has no place, for Frege (61) "when we say 'the Moon,' we do not intend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfied with the sense alone, but presuppose a meaning" with reference to the external world.^[4]

[3] In affirming that our concepts "involve belief about the real world," Chomsky allies himself with Wittgenstein and Quine (and Frege). See Quine, 36: "It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact." And cf. Austin's endorsement (108, 110) of Ayer's argument, against Carnap, that "there have to be some things we say the truth (or falsehood) of which is determined by non-verbal reality. . . . The idea that nothing at all comes in but the consistency of sentences with each other is, indeed, perfectly wild." As Cherry remarks (226), "Pilate did not jest about syntactical truth."

[4] Cf. Dummett, 198: "The referent of an expression is its extra-linguistic correlate in the real world: it is precisely because the expressions we use have such extra-linguistic correlates that we succeed in talking about the real world, and in saying things about it which are true or false in virtue of how things are in that world." In this position, Dummett remarks, Frege was "defying the whole idealist tradition" of contemporary German philosophy, to say nothing of the positivist and structuralist traditions that would later restrict truth or meaning to logical or linguistic relations alone. My quotations from Frege are from "On Sense and Meaning" (1892). Frege's "Bedeutung" is often translated "reference," as in earlier versions of Geach and Black's translations, and by Dummett. Dummett can even argue, as a result, that "reference is not an ingredient in meaning" (91)!

The linguistic sense—which Frege (60) associates not only with individual signs but with the "thought" imparted by their combination into sentences—thus mediates not between a signifier and a signified internal to the sign but between the subjective idea and "the object itself"; and if we remain unsatisfied with the sense of a sentence alone and inquire also as to its meaning, this is because "the striving for truth . . . drives us always to advance from the sense to the thing meant" (63).^[5] Toward the ascertainment of meaning as understood by Frege, then, sense (or in Chomskyan terms, logical form), though essential, can never be sufficient, since all sorts of considerations, Chomsky remarks (1979, 144), "determine the truth conditions of a statement, and these go well beyond the scope of grammar." Grammar (like the genome) may be a relatively closed system, but language (like life) is not; to the extent that it is open, through the multiplicity of its systems, to the larger reality which it makes accessible in the logical form imposed by its generative grammar, language may lead beyond internal sense to objective meaning.

Thus language is not a static system closed to the world beyond it but an activity constantly engaged in assimilating reality to consciousness. The apparent determinism of Chomsky's insistence on the innateness of universal grammar is deceptive, since only the constraints of grammar enable the creativity of language. Whether Chomsky proves to be right or wrong about the innateness of specific grammatical properties and the transformations posited by his evolving theory, the consequence of a generative grammar in which syntactic but not semantic categories are universal is not linguistic determination but freedom. For Chomsky (1973, 402; cf. Lenneberg, 377) as for Humboldt, "Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.

[5] The "thing meant" can be a concept as well as an object, Dummett observes (203); therefore sentences as well as singular terms ("proper names") may have objective meaning as well as linguistically determined sense. On language as mediation between subject and object and thus as an opening of the self toward a world interpreted by language, see also Cassirer, 1:93 (language "effects a new mediation, a particular reciprocal relation " between subject and object); and Ricoeur 1974, 256 (language "is a mediation; it is the medium , the 'milieu,' in which and through which the subject posits himself and the world shows itself").

Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation."

This creativity never ceases to be rule-bound, however; and because semantic representation entails correspondences between the systems comprising language and extralinguistic reality, the freedom of language is limited—and given direction—not only by the internal constraints of grammar that determine its logical form but by the multiple conditions of reference that determine its meaning, or truth. To the extent that the former are given and the latter are not—the extent that syntax is closed and invariant but semantics open and indeterminate—language itself, as a biologically conditioned extension of consciousness into a limitless (and thus far meaningless) world which it seeks to appropriate to cognition through its infinitely varied combinations, is essentially, as Whorf (73) said of linguistics, "the quest of Meaning."

Language Acquisition and the Enlargement of Freedom

Intensive research in recent decades strongly suggests that Chomsky's conception of an innately programmed "language acquisition device" needing only to be "triggered" by external stimulus is a greatly simplified account of the process by which the child constructs a language. To say that "language grows in the child through mere exposure to an unorganized linguistic environment" (Chomsky 1980, 240) no more allows for an active role in language development than Saussure's conception of langue as a social product passively registered by the individual. Any adequately specified language acquisition device, Bruner writes (1978a, 202), must include not only syntactic structures but "some knowledge of the world, some dialogue routines, and some sense of 'what is to be accomplished' by communication." For Bruner, as for Piaget and others, linguistic knowledge (competence) cannot be divorced from action (performance), nor action from the interaction of which it is part. Language cannot be acquired solely by triggering an autonomous grammatical program in the brain but only through the overall development of child praxis.

"All speech rests on dialogue," Humboldt wrote in 1827 (137–38), " . . . and the possibility of speech is itself contingent on address and response"; recent research has corroborated the central role of active interchange in its earliest development. The interchange between infant and mother (or other caretaker) begins long before the child can speak as an "action dialogue" (Bruner, 1974–75, 284) of initially random but increasingly directed gestures on the child's part, such as grasping and

pointing, verbally interpreted by the mother, which emerges as the foundation of a verbal language acquired not by passive absorption but by participation in the interaction of imitation and play.

For Bruner and others Chomsky's belief in the primacy of an innate syntactic component in language acquisition is "grossly wrong" (1978b, 245). Linguistic competence, far from being given, develops out of linguistic (indeed prelinguistic) performance; it is not an externally triggered genetic program nor (as in behaviorist learning theory) a habit inculcated by repeated imitation but a construct built up by activation of the child's innate cognitive abilities through continuous interaction with others. Primacy belongs not to the syntactic but to the pragmatic or semantic aspects of language, which are initially inseparable since meaning first arises through action. It is "inconceivable that syntax leads the way developmentally" (1978a, 211).

Yet to conclude from the temporal priority of pragmatic or semantic components of language development that syntax is a secondary and derivative system seems unwarranted. The prerequisite development of cognitive categories need not exclude the possibility, even necessity, of an autonomous grammatical component, such as Chomsky postulates, in the acquisition of language. Both deliberate sensorimotor gestures and patterned vocal utterances are common properties of widely varied animal species, and the young of many birds and mammals, as well as human children, learn structured behavior by imitation or play; "proto-semantic" categories such as cause and effect have been experimentally verified in chimpanzees and are difficult to rule out altogether, given the vagueness of the concept, in any animal capable of learning from experience of the world. Yet no animal but man, as Chomsky stresses, acquires anything approximating to human language in complexity of structure or in creativity of use.

Granted the importance of prelinguistic sensorimotor categories in the child's acquisition of language, it "remains as great a mystery as ever," Bruner acknowledges (1978a, 211), "how he gets from this early semantic and pragmatic mastery . . . to an appreciation of syntax." For the moment, Chomsky's hypothesis of an autonomous generative grammar provides the most satisfactory explanation; in contrast, the "interactionist-constructivist model," embracing both linguistic performance and preverbal actions, is for Chomsky "difficult to assess, because it remains at the level of metaphor" (1980, 235–36).^[6] Since Chomsky has never claimed that language is autonomous, but only the grammatical

[6] Yet Chomsky acknowledges (1979, 85) that Piaget and his group have "opened up entirely new perspectives in the study of human knowledge." See the discussions in Piattelli-Palmarini.

component that permits its rule-governed creativity, his theory is compatible with the research of Piaget, Bruner, and others that has called its more rigid interpretations into question. Indeed, by allowing for multiple systems pertaining to language (including "conceptual" as well as "computational" components), and admitting "pragmatic" as well as "grammatical" competence into linguistic theory, Chomsky has conceded that language acquisition might be a more complex, active, and participatory process than he has often claimed—even conceivably that pragmatic activation of proto-semantic categories through interactive interpretation, and not mere passive exposure to random linguistic "input," might be prerequisite to the "triggering" of syntactic structures which would otherwise be a combinatory mechanism with nothing to combine.

In this conception, syntax, though developmentally secondary, retains its primacy, since without the potential for indefinite creativity which only a generative grammar allows, the language of the human being could never transcend the proto-semantic gestural and verbal signals of other mammals or of the human infant. Properly understood, then, recent research has not proved Chomsky's theory of linguistic competence "grossly wrong" but has placed it in the fuller context of cognitive development through interaction to which (for all its language-specific autonomy) it belongs, thereby enlarging the concept of linguistic creativity to embrace not only the uses of language but its acquisition through "an active search," as Cromer writes (in Bruner 1972, 50), ". . . for new forms." Syntactic structures may be genetically given in the structure of the brain, but within their constraints language must be discovered and rediscovered anew. It is "an achievement of cognition," Jason Brown writes (1977, 25), not a given but "something toward which the organism must strive." Because of the infinite productivity of grammar and the openness of the lexicon to a changing world, this quest, too, can never be completed; for there is no terminus short of death or aphasia to the continuously creative acquisition of language.

This broadened conception of language as a construct created through pragmatic dialogue, in accord with underlying cognitive categories and the transformations of generative grammar, emphasizes—in contrast to the conceptions of positivist philosophy, behaviorist psychology, and structural linguistics—its openness, adaptability, and freedom. The language generated by the combinatory creativity of this grammatical system in interaction with others cannot be sealed off from the extralinguistic reality to which it gives semantic representation consistent with logical form. Because language is learned not by habituated repetition or conditioned reflex (on the behaviorist model) but through creative imitation, play, and dialogue, it shares in the responsiveness of imitation to its models, the openness to the world characteristic of play, and

the unpredictable give-and-take of conversation with others. The curiosity distinctive of the human being from infancy is nowhere more evident than in the inventive uses of language, especially in childhood; and inasmuch as the mind is characterized, as Goodman suggests (1971, 143), by "groping and grasping, . . . seeking and finding," language becomes its principal way of exploring a world subjected to its importunate scrutinies. Since languages, Humboldt long ago noted (in Cassirer 1955, 1:159), "are not really means of representing the truth that has already been ascertained, but far more, means of discovering a truth not previously known," the heuristic function of language evidenced in the child's insatiable questioning is among its prime characteristics. By its endless probings language is not only open to reality but is the principal means by which reality is opened to the inquisitive human mind. In Heidegger's terms (1971, 3), language "not only puts forth in words and statements what is overtly or covertly intended to be communicated; language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time."

In contrast again to Saussure's static view, an enlarged post-Chomskyan conception would concur with Humboldt (1972, 5) in seeing language as "continuously dynamic"—never an "accomplished fact," Ortega y Gasset writes (242), but always "in the process of being made, hence in statu nascendi ." Language does play a fundamental role, by its largely standardized lexicon and underlying grammatical structure, in reinforcing the stability of prelinguistically acquired concepts; without this regularity there could be no language but only a meaningless babble. Yet by his emphasis on linguistic stasis and his "absolute" distinction of synchronic from diachronic, Saussure falsified language (and even langue ), ignoring, as Jakobson objected (1962, 220), the cardinal fact that "changes enter into synchrony," so that the static and dynamic dimensions of langue are inseparably linked. As Jakobson and Waugh (171) later wrote, stability and mutability necessarily interact in any linguistic code; hence "permanent variability . . . is the main universal of language" (234). Change—especially phonetic change—is not arbitrary but systematic, and a changeless linguistic system is a contradiction in terms.

The dynamic aspects of language are not confined to internal changes but pertain no less essentially to its acquisition and use. Not only the interaction through which words first acquire meanings but the meanings themselves "are dynamic rather than static formations," Vygotsky notes (1962, 124), which "change as the child develops"; they are never given but must be invented and found. In contrast to the fixed behavioral patterns of "lower" animals, moreover, play is a "special form of violating fixity" (Bruner 1972, 31), which promotes, in both its motor and verbal forms, inventiveness, variation, and flexibility; and so strong is the child's linguistic originality, Taine long ago remarked (257), "that

if it learns our language from us, we learn its from the child." Because language learning is reciprocal between generations as well as individuals, the striking inventive variation of children never entirely ends,^[7] and the dialectic of stability and change is at least potentially continuous in individual language development no less than in the linguistic system.

In consequence, normal use of language, Chomsky repeatedly stresses, is "innovative, free from control by external stimuli, and appropriate to new and ever changing situations" (1972a, 100). Being in essence activity, energeia , it is the most versatile human instrument for structuring an unpredictably changing world; through its inherently transformational processes it is a means, Bruner writes, "not only for representing experience, but also for transforming it" (1973, 330). The extension long past infancy of exploratory curiosity and playful inventiveness fostered by prolonged immaturity makes neurologically hypertrophied homo sapiens the opportunist (Bruner 1972, 47), the "great amateur" (Medawar and Medawar, 170), the "generalist par excellence" (Mayr 1976, 21), among more specialized animals; homo sapiens is programmed to learn from uncertainty and constrained to seek (and by seeking create) the adaptations to reality given in advance to less flexible, if possibly more contented, fellow creatures. Beyond all else it is language—as much the cause, perhaps, as the effect of his phylogenetic neurological development—which by its intrinsic responsiveness transforms naked and ill-adapted man into animal quaerens, the most astoundingly adaptive inhabitant of the earth.

Language is thus the furthest extension yet attained of the open biological program increasingly distinctive of higher animals, and in this openness lies the "creative freedom" ascribed to it by Humboldt and Chomsky. Its indeterminacy derives not only from absence of a rigidly pre-established program, like that of the genome, for its development, but from absence of any fixed goal marking a terminus for its uses. The structure of language embodies a progression from units compulsorily coded in accord with inviolable laws to a relatively unconstrained (though never unconditioned) freedom. In the hierarchy of linguistic units Jakobson (1971, 242–43) finds "an ascending scale of freedom" from combination of distinctive features into phonemes, where "the freedom of the individual speaker is zero," to the limited freedom of combining phonemes into words, the far less circumscribed formation of sentences, and finally the combination of sentences into utterances, where "the action of compulsory syntactical rules ceases, and the free-

[7] No trace may seem to survive in the eight-year-old, Chukovsky laments (7), of the younger child's linguistic genius, but as Nelson and Nelson remark (272), "the periods of overlearning, repetition, and even rigidity that rightly are called 'closed' establish the best basis for new periods of flexibility."

dom of any individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially." At this level—the level of parole or performance which is an activation of the properties inherent in competence or langue —conscious choice plays a potentially determinative role in language, which in turn immeasurably enlarges its scope.

And since this structural hierarchy is also, to begin with, a developmental sequence (the child distinguishes phonemes before enunciating words, and combines words into sentences before formulating complex utterances), the process of language acquisition enlarges freedom and choice. Evolution of language is characterized, Grace de Laguna writes, "by a progressive freeing of speech from dependence on the perceived conditions under which it is uttered and heard, and from the behavior which accompanies it" (107). It is above all the "progressive release from immediacy" (Bruner 1973, 349) achieved by this structured development of language from closure to openness, inflexibility to indeterminacy, that permits otherwise ill-programmed man to articulate and respond to the endless choices that confront us in our ineluctable search for what no longer is (and can never again be) given.

Language and the Creation of a Purposeful Future

Inasmuch as biological organization is goal-directed and language an outgrowth of the open program emergent in consciousness, language is the furthest extension of the purposiveness inherent in life. Its biological determination is not a denial but a condition of its teleological orientation. An inchoate purposiveness is already evident in the child's early sensorimotor praxis, defined by Piaget (1973, 63) as "a system of coordinated movements functioning for a result or an intention"; in observing such behavior, Bruner (1973, 250) was struck by the extent to which "intentionality precedes skill." In play, too, Vygotsky (1976, 55) discerned "a movement towards the conscious realization of its purpose,"^[8] which finds expression in progressive codification of rules and is nowhere more important than in the syntactically structured development of language out of apparently aimless verbal interaction and play.

The inarticulate intentionality guiding skilled praxis takes on increasingly structured direction through play and gestural dialogue, but becomes fully conscious only in language. For purpose is not accidental but essential to language, at once its indispensable condition and most mo-

[8] Sylva et al. (250) found that "children given a prior chance to play are significantly more goal-directed." See the classic account of the development of rules in the game of marbles in the opening chapter of Piaget 1932b.

mentous result. Since language (even for Chomsky) "is designed for use," and performance is the goal of linguistic competence, speaking is an intrinsically purposeful action which cannot be understood without reference to its object. Language "cannot be analyzed," Jakobson insisted from the time of his earliest phonological writings (1962, 1; cf. 1978, 25), in opposition both to the neogrammarians of the age and to Saussure, "without taking into account the purpose which that system serves." Without this activating purpose language would remain a potentiality incapable of realization, a competence with nothing to do. Communicative intention brings language from latency into being by giving boundaries to its openness, stability to its adaptiveness, and direction to its freedom. Without it language would be (if not cataleptic silence or compulsive repetition) a random logorrhea, syntactically structured perhaps, but semantically a disconnected raving, a machinelike grammatical "creativity" running endlessly amok in a nightmarish world where colorless green ideas sleep furiously amid bloated sentences that drag recursively on forever.

If intentionality motivates the acquisition of language, fully conscious purpose results from it. Goal-directed behavior is an evolving characteristic of life from its beginnings, but only at the most advanced and specifically human "symbolic" level of brain development is there, according to Jason Brown (1977, 22), "a progression from purposive to volitional action," which "is bound up with language development." Even the single-word utterance (like the gesture) can indicate intention by designating a desired object; but only syntactic connection can express the progressively refined development of a hitherto largely latent purpose. Thus "it is not until predication is developed in the complete sentence," de Laguna observes (301; cf. 304), "that behavior becomes purposive in the full sense of the term. . . . The language of complete predication permits both end and acts to be specifically denoted and hence distinguished ."

This capacity of syntactically structured language to distinguish goals and acts is one that Piaget (1973, 73) finds at the origin of all symbols, which, when differentiated from their immediate significations, make it "possible to evoke objects and situations actually non-perceived, forming the beginnings of representation." Once the intended object can be evoked in its absence by precise and communicable linguistic designation, the possibility of fully conscious purpose arises for the first time and begins to orient human action away from preoccupation solely with the given and toward the premeditated quest of what, being absent and yet intended, remains to be found.

The most significant absence evoked by symbolism and in particular by language is the future—what will, or may be, but is not yet; for only then can the intended object now absent become present, and this pos-

sibility is the precondition of the purposeful quest. Symbolism, to quote Bertalanffy once again, "makes true or Aristotelian purposiveness possible. The future goal is anticipated in its symbolic image and so may determine present action" (1968, 17). Awareness of futurity as a time when what is will be other brings homo sapiens not only foreknowledge of death but the still more characteristically promethean opportunity of seeking in the indefinite interim what we now lack and of striving purposefully to become something other (or something more) than what we now are.

This future dimension, like the purposefulness that attends it, is again implicit in organic life from its beginnings, since one of the most general functions of living organisms, Jacob observes (66), "is to look ahead, to produce future as Paul Valéry put it. There is not a single movement, a single posture that does not imply a later on, a passage to the next moment. . . . An organism is living insofar as it is going to live, even if only for a short while." It is the nervous system which "ultimately became able to invent the future" as a conscious dimension (54). Indeed, according to Soviet neurological research cited by Jakobson (1980, 35), the left and right hemispheres of the distinctively bilateral human brain may demonstrate (like Freud's ego and id) "different temporal orientations," the left turned toward the future, the right toward the past; the left hemisphere is of course normally the locus of symbolic thought and speech. Futurity is implicit in life, emergent in consciousness, but fully apprehended as an essential determinant of action only through the specifically human symbolism of language.

For by its very nature the symbol, as distinguished by Peirce from both icon and index, is "a law, or regularity of the indefinite future" (2:166). Among Peirce's three classes of signs or "representamens," the icon is an immediate image evoking a direct analogy (as a portrait does) with its object; the index is connected with its object as a matter of fact or physical contiguity (as smoke signals fire). But the symbol, in contrast to both—and for Peirce all verbal utterances are symbols—is a purely conventional sign which refers to an object "by virtue of the idea of the symbolising mind, without which no such connection would exist" (2: 168–69). Thus the symbol's "mode of being" is different from that of the icon and index. "An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of present experience" (4:447). Whatever is truly general, however, "refers to the indefinite future," and its mode of being is "esse in futuro " (2:79).^[9]

[9] Cf. 2:46–47 ("To say that the future does not influence the present is untenable doctrine"); 4:361 ("The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to predict the future"); and 8:19 (letter to William James: "The true idealism, the pragmatistic idealism, is that reality consists in the future").

The symbol intrinsically pertains to the future, which can be effective on human action only by its means.

If, as Peirce believed, "the future alone has primary reality" (8:152), only symbolic reference brings that reality into being, and this always provisional creation of futurity is the distinctive purpose of human activity. In syntactically ordered predication, moreover, language provides not only "anticipation of the end to be reached" but also, as de Laguna discerned (301), an organized though conditional series of intermediate acts leading purposefully toward that end, each stage of which "forms a new starting point for a fresh determination of the remaining stages" (302). This goal-oriented serial organization can be described, in Jason Brown's happy phrase (1972, 283), as a "continuous penultimacy, in that language development always incorporates into itself the meaning that is sought after in expectation of a coming stage," so that the development of speech out of thought is essentially "a pressure towards the future." Language not only frees man from the immediacy of the actual by its openness to diversity and adaptability to change, but gives direction to our freedom by evoking an indeterminate future goal for our actions and guiding us conditionally in quest of its forever penultimate realization.

Chapter Four—
The Questing Animal

Without language social institutions would be as inconceivable as language without society; their interdependence is a primary condition of human existence. Our examination of language thus brings us back to consideration of society as the matrix both of communal religious experience and of the individual quest that can never leave this primal model and source far behind.

Saussure's conception of langue as a superpersonal, passively registered "collective inertia" immune to individual variation closely accords with Durkheim's exaltation of society as a transcendent entity to which its submissive constituents pay homage. No elementary religious form could work more pervasively toward the summum bonum of maintaining social stasis than the supremely autonomous language system postulated by Saussure, as absolute (and as arbitrary) in its dictates as any divinity. The more dynamic, open-ended, and purposefully creative conception of language that we have adopted more nearly corresponds, on the contrary, to society as conceived by van Gennep or Turner, Berger or Mead—not a given entity serenely pre-existing and impassively surviving its ephemeral members, who pay it the tribute of worship en route to personal extinction, but a perpetually transitional reality forever being formed and transformed by those who compose it. This is a dialogic and indeed a dialectic reality in passage (like the language with whose development its own is interdependent) toward self-created, always provisional goals that direct its continuous adaptation to a changing world and give it the flexible equilibrium that no closed system can long maintain.

Of Bergson's two sources of religion and morality, one was a closed

and static structure upheld by habitual if not instinctive "pressure" to repeat an immutable past, the other an open and dynamic process impelled by the "forward movement" of purposeful aspiration toward an uncertain future; the second may be considered a cardinal source of the personal quest. The opposition between them—and the transformative potentiality their interaction fosters—is rooted in the biological, psychological, and linguistic preconditions of society and religion themselves and thus, we may safely surmise, in human nature.

This duality can be creative only because its apparently antithetical poles continuously interact in a dialectic embracing both. The instructions encoded in the closed genetic program of each organism, whose molecular structures obey the statistically invariable laws of physics, engender a system open to the environment to which it must adapt in order to survive, and the resultant interaction between organism and environment impels the contingent evolution of accidentally variant forms "selected" for reproductive success. Structure and process, closure and openness, are thus interdependent aspects of life, whose advanced forms are increasingly distinguished by an "open program" capable of acquiring information not only from genetically coded instructions but in response to the environment—capable, that is, of profiting from experience. "On the whole, and certainly among the higher vertebrates," Mayr writes (1976, 24), "there has been a tendency to replace rigidly closed programs by open ones," enlarging the organism's scope for purposive choice; expanded flexibility would thus appear to be an evolutionary product of the genetically "invariant" reproduction of life as an open system. (In the heterodox biology of Piaget, this interactive duality originates within the genome, so that even mutation involves an inchoate interplay of closure and openness.) Only if "system" and "program" are thought of as imperviously self-enclosed do the concepts "open system" and "open program," or the progressive expansion of genetically programmed openness, seem contradictions in terms rather than essential characteristics of life.

This dialectic of fixity and movement, structure and process, characterizes not only life in general but its extensions in human consciousness, language, and society. The structured psychological equilibrium achieved in normal development through assimilation of and accommodation to external reality is a "mobile equilibrium," Piaget emphasizes (1967, 151), which is "essentially active." In language, Chomsky's transformational generative grammar incorporates process in the very heart of a linguistic structure that must be activated, moreover (whatever its neurological foundations), by open-ended dialogue. And society, in Turner's words (1969, 203), is "a dialectical process with successive phases of

structure and communitas" continually interacting to preserve stability while adapting to change. At every level structure and process are not antithetical but interdependent phases without whose perpetual interchange there could be no society, no language, no consciousness, and no life.

The question of primacy need not detain us; the structures of open systems are by nature processual and their processes inherently structured. What matters is the crucial role of transition . In organic structures process is continuous; there can be equilibrium, stability, rest in an open system, but no final stasis, for cessation is death. Such structures can incorporate regular change without disruption, but extreme or sudden change may upset their mobile equilibrium and result (if not in death or extinction) in intensified adaptation and re-equilibration eventually stabilized as a new structure evolved from the old.

Evolution, in Gould's words (1980, 213), "does not imply . . . that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction." Such transitions between stable states—not only biological but psychological, linguistic, and social as well—are of course restricted as to possible outcomes by the initial state: they are structured, not random changes. But because of the great internal complexity of these systems and their constituent openness to the most varied external influences, the outcome of any major transition between structures must be unpredictable: the emergent structure cannot be known in advance but will be essentially indeterminate.

Organic structures are thus repeatedly subject to transformation by their very adaptability to a mutable world, their constant need for an increasingly adequate if always provisional equilibrium. Thus "the idea of structure as a system of transformations becomes continuous," Piaget writes (1970, 34), "with that of construction as continual transformation." Every structure originates in another and is a beginning as much as an end; the passage between them is the phase of maximum openness and vulnerability when everything remains to be determined—the phase of recurrent genesis defined by Piaget (141) as a "formative" transition between a weaker and a stronger structure.

Transitions between no longer adequately adapted structures and others in the process of emergence are times of heightened responsiveness to the surrounding world. Conscious awareness of both the dangers and the transformative possibilities of such transitions—an awareness seemingly unique to our promethean species—impels the communal or individual quest for a future goal that can neither be fully known nor

finally attained, but must (as in ritual) be repeatedly sought. Only by virtue of its provisional terminus, indeed, can purposefully pursued structural transition become truly a quest: a deliberate but uncertain passage no less intrinsically unending, and no less creative of its own perpetually transcended object, than the processes of life, thought, and speech from which it arose and continually arises.

In the spiritual quest the indeterminate self-transcendence of living things as open systems culminates in deliberate transformation of what Bergson called the "open soul" drawn beyond itself—hence beyond the previously given human condition—by the forward movement of aspiration toward an unforeseeable future. To persevere in this unending process with full awareness of its dangers—and full awareness, too, that the alternative to the movement of life is stagnation and death—distinguishes restless man among more fully adapted inhabitants of our earth as (at least in potential) the questing animal: animal quaerens . Our perpetual searching derives from the very extremity of conscious openness to an unpredictably changing world and is hence both the consequence and the cost of our precariously marginal freedom.

Rites of passage, which commemorate the hazardous crossing of an uncertain threshold, provide a communal paradigm for the individual quest. Insofar as they define a terminal (if temporary) condition attained by all celebrants alike, however, they differ from the true quest whose goal can never be prescribed in advance or by others but must be engendered through the process of searching itself. The quest thus characterizes the emergent individual no longer wholly defined by social role or wholly content with inherited structures. For him, or for her, the passage from one stage to another institutionalized in communal rites is often a solitary journey into unexplored terrain in search of what no other has found before and—possible failure being one hallmark of the quest—what none may find even now.

The quest resembles a pilgrimage in the high purpose that differentiates both from random wandering or haphazard exploration. But the pilgrimage is generally more communal and traditional (it may be repeated without essential change), and its terminus, whether Mecca or Jerusalem, Canterbury or Rome, is normally well established: only to the extent that it is unique and its goal (or the significance of attaining its goal) is in doubt will this rite of passage, like any other, become truly a quest.

Still more significant is the intrinsic connection of the quest and the question. Both derive from Latin quaerere, "to seek," and their meanings are closely linked. "Every asking," Heidegger writes (1953, 5), "is a seeking," and asking is indispensable to seeking because, in Gadamer's words (266), it "is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities" without

which seeking would soon halt if it ever began. The child's earliest, unanswerable questionings are themselves an embryonic quest for resolution of the newly discovered discord, in Piaget's words (1932a, 235), "between desire and its realization" that lies at the origin of all questing. Only persistence into adulthood of our paedomorphic questioning, our childlike need to interrogate every provisional answer and rest satisfied with none, propels us to undertake the quest: for to search effectually, Claparède observes (Piaget 1932a, 230), "one must know what one is searching for, one must have asked oneself a question." And if a question incites the quest, another—or perhaps the same one transmuted past recognition—will be waiting at its end to lead us beyond what we thought was ourselves to further quests and questions potentially without end. Such is the promise of futurity, or the burden of incompletion, that the questing animal, man, receives as a birthright and cannot forswear without abandoning what makes us most human.

Insofar as "spiritual" is more than a vague honorific it indicates the transcendent potentiality of the unknown: a true quest, Auden remarks (81), "means to look for something of which one has, as yet, no experience." Spirit, far from being opposed to the biological (as in the Cartesian dualism of body and mind), is the potentiality of human life—through conscious positing of future goals—for purposeful creation and growth. It is the possibility of structural self-transcendence made incipiently conscious in man, the capacity of neurologically advanced life "to invent the future"; it is not an existent reality but the aggregate of possible realities open to unprogrammed human development. The spiritual quest is man's uncompletable endeavor to actualize, in some small part, the future which largely defines him, and thus to be fully himself by becoming continually more.

Spirit (like Aristotle's form ) is distinct from matter not by difference of substance but as potential actualization from given condition, future from present, indeterminate from determined; the very term indicates man's separation from a condition in which he is no longer fully at home. Only when it is consciously represented does the futurity inherent in life become spirit; it therefore partakes of the differentiation of subject and object, self and world, in which consciousness is grounded. Spirit arises, like consciousness, out of a separation which it strives to overcome by purposeful orientation toward a future in which the contradictions that bring it into being and propel its forward movement would be resolved—a resolution, were it to be attained, that Would entail its extinction. To the extent that this goal proves to be unattainable, the quest will, of course, be unending.

Its close connection with consciousness precludes exclusive linking of spirit with the irrational. French esprit, like German Geist and analogous

terms in other languages, embraces "spirit" and "mind" in a single concept; hence the spiritual quest can include both the intellectual and scientific search for truth and the religious pursuit of salvation, which are fundamentally akin. Between the inductionist view of science as systematic progress by experimental verification toward establishment of manifest truth and the relativistic conception of shifting scientific paradigms not as "a process of evolution toward anything" (Kuhn 1970, 170–71) but as a "gestalt switch" (150) with "no coherent direction of ontological development" (206)—poles equally alien to the quest—is a science born of the recognition "that all we can do," in Popper's words (1965, 29–30), "is to grope for truth even though it be beyond our reach," since without the positing of a transcendent if never attainable truth "there can be no objective standards of inquiry; no criticism of our conjectures; no groping for the unknown; no quest for knowledge." The truth toward which science, in this conception, can provisionally lead, always subject to the refutations by which knowledge accrues, is uncertain and incomplete even in physics and mathematics (not to mention biology), as Heisenberg and Gödel amply demonstrated. Yet the ultimate indeterminacy of scientific truth need not entail a directionless relativism. On the contrary, an indeterminate goal engendered through purposive trial and error is a prime criterion for the spiritual quest (as for its biological and psychological antecedents), which thus attains in scientific inquiry one of its fullest expressions.

Intellectual pursuit of a finally undefinable truth is only one aspect, however, of the spiritual quest, since spirit comprehends but cannot be delimited by intellect. Our word derives from Latin spiritus, originally breath or breeze—one of many words, including Greek psychê and pneuma, Latin animus and anima, Sanskrit atman, and Hebrew ruach —associating breath or wind with the animating power of life. This association, which Tylor pointed out in his pioneering work in the anthropology of religion (16–17), is by no means limited to the Indo-European or Mediterranean cultural spheres but recurs among countless peoples as unrelated as the Nuer of the Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1956, 1) and the Navajo of western North America (McNeley, 35). Spirit pertains most immediately, then, not to consciousness, by which it becomes self-aware, but to air as the force sustaining life.

The primitive association with breath and life is one hallmark of spirit; another, equally fundamental, is the wholeness by which it transcends or mediates divisions. For spirit, like the life-sustaining air, is both within and without, an embracing power connecting man with the world around him in the reciprocal bond of a truly open system. And because spirit connects with all living things, it counteracts the individual's potential isolation both from fellow-human beings and from other forms of

life. By uniting inner with outer, self with others, present with future, spirit is a continuous mediation between the constricted actualities of our given individual existence and the transcendent though never limitless potentiality of our superpersonal being, the perpetual possibility of becoming more than we are. For the restless spirit, the Platonic thymos called by Ricoeur (1978, 32–33) "the mediating function par excellence," is an essence forever within and forever beyond us, reflecting "the fact that the self is never guaranteed," and that its search for itself "is in a certain sense without end."

The spiritual quest is thus a continuous questioning on the subject of life itself as an open system or structured process defined most fundamentally by the transcendent potentiality of its indeterminate future, which gives it direction and purpose. Insofar as human life is purposeful it will be an inchoate spiritual quest. For consciously goal-directed activity presupposes deliberate orientation toward a potentiality significantly different from the given: the quest is an effort to bring a fragment of that uncircumscribed future into being. Only man the forethinker, so far as we know from our hardly unprejudiced standpoint, can apprehend his incompleteness and look upon it as promise, consciously directing his self-transformation, and for this reason he remains uniquely animal quaerens .

There can be no certainty that the spiritual quest distinctive of the human species will continue; evolution most often eventuates in extinction, and the very foresight that enables man to pursue a transcendent goal also empowers him to engineer his destruction. Even short of that final quietus, the imperfectly anticipated goal of every quest will always be more elusive than the restrictive actualities that impel yet threaten to abort it through apathetic indifference or helpless perplexity, acedia or aporia. But though the former, the deadly sin of spiritual sloth, is potentially mortal, the latter condition, the "resourcelessness" of finding no way out of a seemingly hopeless dilemma, is not—as Plato, unlike the Sophists of his own day and later, well understood—a terminus but the possibility of a recurrent beginning; for only the soul that knows its own impasse searches, Ricoeur reminds us (1978, 22), to go beyond it and escape from the cave in which it is imprisoned: aporei kai zêtei .^[1] The very remoteness of an intrinsically future, hence perpetually absent goal in

[1] The phrase is from Plato's Republic 7, 524e. Aristotle, too, links searching with aporia in Metaphysics 1028b (cited by Heidegger 1962b, 255; cf. 1968, 212), where he calls the question ti to on ("what is being?") to palai te kai nyn kai aei zêtoumenon kai aei aporoumenon ("what was sought long ago and now and always, and always with no way out"). The aporia is an incentive, even a condition, of the quest, for if the quest is inherently without terminus, every unachievable goal is not an end but a provisional impasse that is always a potential new beginning, pointing beyond itself to another yet to be sought.

contrast to an actuality without prospect is the impetus without which no quest could begin; its elusively deferred attainment is at the same time its promise of incessant renewal.

In this way the spiritual quest is the creative process par excellence, the process by which human beings continually remake themselves in accord with goals forever beyond them: to search, Proust's narrator perceives at the outset of his immense exploration, is to create, and what searching creates is above all the self continually surpassed in another. In questing, therefore, is our essential humanity, our fidelity to our unfinished selves; and perhaps the wisdom by which we presumptuously distinguish our species in spite of all evidence of our folly is itself best conceived as a goal toward which we advance, if at all, only by continuing to hold it before us. We are at best homo sapiens not in the flesh but in spirit, that is, in unrealized potentiality; but inasmuch as our aspirations define us, the unachieved goal is itself the token of an incipient wisdom evinced in not wholly abandoning its pursuit. Sapience escapes us for now as a differentia specifica and will no doubt continue to escape us (as our highest goals always will); but in the "continuous meanwhile" of our contingent existence we are, if not homo sapiens in accomplishment, at least—or is it more, or even the same?—homo quaerens sapientiam , and in this more modest yet more promising title we may surely take justified and not inconsiderable pride.