三題話by Ernest Gellner（メモ）

偶々http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20110911/1315709969で Ernest Gellnerに言及したのだが。

“Religion and the profane” http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2000-08-28-gellner-en.html

ゲルナー晩年の講演。1995年10月ハイデルベルクにて。彼はこの講演の直後（11月５日）に急死している。Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie（1/1996）に掲載された。イスラーム、ナショナリズム、マルクス主義の三題話。ゲルナーは晩年において啓蒙的合理主義、相対主義、宗教的原理主義という三題話を行ってもいるが（Postmodernism, Reason and Religion）、それとはちょっと重心がずれているようだ。概要は

Ernest Gellner looks for the cause of some surprising developments in the twentieth century: the rising strength of Islam (in particular, Muslim fundamentalism); the upsurge in nationalism; and the unexpected and total collapse of Marxism. Behind both Muslim fundamentalism and nationalism, Gellner sees a break from local communities and hierarchies. And the main fault in Marxism, says Gellner, was the abolition of the profane. The big success stories today, he writes, "are the plural, liberal societies – what I call the unholy alliance of consumerist unbelievers."

この中で最も興味深いのは（宗教としての）マルクス主義の衰退についての話であるが、イスラームに関して、イスラームにおける「カトリック」的極と「プロテスタント」的極の話（See “A pendulum swing theory of Islam”）も語られている；

(…) I shall begin by offering a model of what traditional Islam was like (without going into the early History of Islam). To put it simply, Islam, at least that of the arid zone between the Hindu Kush and the Atlantic and the Niger bend, was divided between a high culture and a low culture – a high Islam and a low Islam – and these two coexisted in an unstable way. Most of the time they were peaceful, but nevertheless had conflicts at fairly regular intervals. The chief difference between the two is that high Islam does not permit mediators (it has a special name for the sin of mediation: shirk), while the world of low Islam is full of them. High Islam encourages a direct relationship between a unique deity and the individual believer; it is not attached to ritual, contains little magic and supernatural belief, and is heavily moralistic, scripturalist, puritan, monotheistic, and individualistic. It is the Islam of the scholars – the high Islam recognized as valid by the believers but not practiced by them. It is not practiced because it does not correspond to the needs of the lower classes and above all the rural Muslims, who for obvious reasons require a much more Durkheimian religion – in other words, a religion in which the sacred has its mediators, its incarnation, and which mirrors the social structure. Most of the rural Muslims were encadrés, incorporated in rural autonomous or semi-autonomous congregations, village lineages, tribes, clans, and the like. For their internal organization and life, they had a Durkheimian religion where the sacred is incarnated in periodic rituals, in sacred objects, sacred practices, sacred persons. One can say that an upper-class, urban, individualistic, puritan, "protestant" Islam (which is strangely united by the theologians and jurists who are its main carriers, despite the lack of a central organization and any kind of central secretariats and hierarchy) coexisted with a fragmented, "Catholic" Islam which had the "Catholic" characteristics of hierarchy, ritualization, employment of the sensuous forms of religion, of mystical exercises, and so on. One can see how this fits well with Durkheim's theories of religion having the function of underwriting, rendering visible, and legitimating the communal organization in which Muslims lived. During periodic attempts at self-reformation, these two forms came into conflict, but most of the time they coexisted harmoniously. On this issue I agree with the theory best formulated by David Hume about the oscillation in the religious life of mankind between Protestant-type and Catholic-type religions. In periodic outbursts of zeal and self-reformation, the puritans would temporarily prevail, but the exigence and the demands of social life would again lead to a swing-back to a personalized, hierarchical, ritualized, non-scriptural religion with an ethic of loyalty rather than an ethic of rules. Thus Islam existed in a permanent oscillation between unsuccessful reformations and reversions to the old cultural habits. And, of course, there is a specific difference between Islam and western European Christianity in this matter: in western Europe, the hierarchical, ritualized loyalty-ethics is at the centre and carried by an institution rather than by abstract doctrine, while the individualist, scripturalist, puritan version is fragmented and relatively marginal. In Islam, it is the other way around; the central tradition is individualist and scriptural, and the fragmented deviationists are hierarchical, ritualistic, and so on – a kind of mirror image.

Postmodernism, Reason and Religion

Robertson Roland Ed. : Sociology of Religion (Pelican)

今引用した部分にもあるように、「カトリック」／「プロテスタント」という極はゲルナーの独創ではなく、デヴィッド･ヒュームからもってきたもの。というわけで、ヒュームについてもお勉強しなければならない；

William Edward Morris “David Hume”(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
James Fieser “David Hume (1711-1776)” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume/
The Hume Society http://www.humesociety.org/
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

また、アーネスト・ゲルナーを巡っては、

Chris Hann “A Gellner Biography” http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/Bio.html
John Davis “Ernest Gellner” http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Gellner/JDavis.html
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Gellner