Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

by Vine Deloria, Jr., Sam Scinta, Kristen Foehner

Overview

Spirit & Reason is a collection of the works of one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century—Vine Deloria, Jr. Author of such classics as Red Earth, White Lies, and God is Red, Deloria takes readers on a momentous journey through Indian country and beyond by exploring some of the most important issues of the past three decades. The essays gathered here are wide-ranging and essential and include representative pieces from some of Deloria's most influential books, some of his lesser-known articles, and ten new pieces written especially for Spirit & Reason.

Tellingly, in the course of reviewing his body of work, Deloria found much that he had written in the past remained current and compelling because "people have not made much progress in resolving issues." Whether disputing theories of religion and science, examining the problems of modern education, or expounding on our understanding of the world, Deloria consistently urges readers toward an intimate connection with the world in which we live. For those familiar with Deloria's works as well as those discovering him for the first time, this essential anthology will teach, provoke, and enlighten in equal measure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555914301
Publisher:	Fulcrum Publishing
Publication date:	08/01/1999
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	832,602
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	9 Years

About the Author

Vine Deloria Jr., is a leading Native American scholar whose research writings, and teaching have encompassed history, law, religious studies, and political science. He is the former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. Named by Time magazine as one of the eleven greatest religious thinkers of the twentieth century, he is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including God is Red, Custer Died for Your Sins, Power and Place, and Red Earth, White Lies. Mr. Deloria lives in Golden, Colorado.

Sam Scinta is president and publisher of Fulcrum Publishing and the creator of Fulcrum's best-selling Speaker's Corner series on contemporary political affairs.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

PERCEPTIONS AND MATURITY: Reflections on Feyerabend's Point of View

Among the fallacies that Alfred North Whitehead identified within the Western philosophical tradition was the belief that the principles of philosophy were "clear, obvious, and irreformable." Feyerabend's exploration of method speaks directly to this point, but it also deals with the barriers that cultures raise against foreign critical ideas to protect their central integrity. Can any philosophy transcend its cultural barriers and speak to the larger question of how we perceive and interact with the world around us? What is the potential for a philosophy to help us make sense of our lives? The West has certainly not solved that problem; it has only used its tremendous political and economic power to render the question moot.

Science and technology reign today as the practical gods of the modern age; they give us power to disrupt nature but little real insight into how it functions. We tend to dismiss what we cannot understand by the use of code words — "instinct" for example covers a plenitude of ignorance. Only when we look outside Western culture, or when someone outside looks in, do we discover the glaring inconsistencies and begin to measure the actual changes that science and technology have wrought in our lives. In 1820 George Sibley, the Indian agent for the Osages, a tribe in the Missouri region of the country, tried to convince Big Soldier, one of the more influential chiefs, of the benefits of the white man's way. After enthusiastically describing the wonders of the white man's civilization, Sibley waited expectantly for the old man's response. Big Soldier did not disappoint him:

I see and admire your manner of living, your good warm houses; your extensive fields of corn, your gardens, your cows, oxen, workhouses, wagons, and a thousand machines, that I know not the use of. I see that you are able to clothe yourselves, even from weeds and grass. In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.

If we subdue nature, we become slaves of the technology by which the task is accomplished and surrender not simply our freedom but also the luxury of reflection about our experiences that a natural relationship with the world had given us.

Western civilization seems clear, orderly, obvious, and without possibility of reform primarily because it defines the world in certain rigid categories. The product of this clarity, however, is a certain kind of insanity that can survive only by renewed efforts to refine the definitions and that, ultimately, becomes totally self-destructive. Whitehead also noted that "a system will be the product of intelligence. But when the adequate routine is established, intelligence vanishes, and the system is maintained by a coordination of conditioned responses." That condition is certainly prevalent in modern politics and economics and can be found in many fields of scientific endeavor. Western civilization seems to have a multitude of "commonsense" propositions, and as common sense is such a rarity, what we actually mean by this statement is that we have a certain set of propositions that we have agreed not to question. Further, we have arrived at these propositions through a refining process whereby we throw away the "anomalies" — the facts that do not fit into our definitional schemata. Feyerabend's major contribution to modern philosophy is to insist that these premises and principles that we accept be demythologized and then revised to present increasingly broader understandings of what we are actually doing.

Feyerabend's work is critically important for non-Western and post-Western peoples because he stands within the Western tradition yet has mastered many of its social and political barriers so that he can speak meaningfully and critically to its less intelligent proponents. He is a threat to the routine operation of philosophy, science, and the process of accumulating human knowledge because he asks penetrating and embarrassing questions in fields that most people feel have been laid to rest. Feyerabend is one of the few voices that sees that the body of human knowledge is not merely an instance of adding insights of non-Western peoples to the already constructed edifice of Western knowledge but that the full content of human knowledge must be a discontinuous arrangement of smaller bodies of knowledge derived from the many human traditions represented in planetary history.

It is exceedingly difficult at the present time to break through the mind-set of the West and engage in dialogue and conversation with Western thinkers. The reception that the non-Western thinker receives is frequently one of paternalism, more often a chiding ridicule that a native would presume to enter the lists of educated people, occasionally a deep jealousy and resentment when the non-Westerner appears to have something important to say to the Western scheme of things. Some years ago I wrote a book that sought to take dissident and discredited Western thinkers and show that their ideas, synthesized properly, could produce a pattern suggesting a consistent alternative explanation of what we know about the world. This pattern, moreover, suggested that perception could be a fundamental epistemological principle and that it could produce a knowledge capable of providing a context for human maturity and personality formation.

Unfortunately, I had the word "metaphysics" in the title of the book and was told by the publicity department of Harper and Row, my publishers at the time, that nothing would be done to give the book publicity "because no one will buy a book on metaphysics written by an Indian." Other minority writers have told me of their similar experiences. Thus the potential for engaging in serious philosophical debate between and among the diverse cultures of the world is exceedingly remote, and it is only people such as Feyer-abend who are willing to look at the anomalies and inconsistencies of Western philosophy and who are keeping the door open for any future possible discussions.

Of course, there are many ways to pierce the Western intellectual curtain. I could rephrase these same ideas, pass them off in the format of ancient teachings of American Indians, and have Harper's publicity department declare that they were being revealed for the first time. Harper and Row, incidentally, is not averse to publishing any amount of nonsense as long as it is packaged properly. But in adopting that format I would then be attracting hundreds of hippies, disgruntled ex-Christians, and the usual scattering of affluent white youths whose most philosophical moments occurred while backpacking the Continental Divide under the influence of the herbs of the Cannabis genus. The ensuing attention would not be philosophical dialogue even though it might qualify/condemn me to appear in the pages of People magazine. It is not difficult to manipulate the emotions of Western peoples because their routine lives make them vulnerable to such tactics. It is exceedingly difficult to converse with them because they guard their minds and beliefs rigorously. Thus it is people such as Paul Feyerabend who will prove critical in opening enough breaches in the walls of Western intellectual chauvinism so that some exchange of ideas can occur.

Being more political than philosophical in nature, I have my own agenda for Feyerabend's future writing that originates in the manner in which I discovered his writing and saw its potential. It fits perfectly with my own agenda for raising issues of an ultracultural nature, issues that, with the present ecological breakdown of the planet, have become more pressing with the passage of the years. So my own emotional and intellectual responses to Feyerabend's work bear mentioning. My first encounter was with Science in a Free Society. A fellow admirer of Immanuel Velikovsky finished reading the book and called me to recommend it, pointing out that it spoke directly to the problem of allowing dissident and alternative philosophies to flourish. Finishing that work, I set out to master Against Method and became an enthusiastic Feyerabend student. My enthusiasm for Feyerabend disturbed some staid academic friends who told me with a certain undertone of chastisement that Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was much more respectable, Feyerabend having some rough edges that many academics didn't like.

My rule of thumb in these cases is to rush to embrace the heretical because the rank and file of academia is usually a generation behind the original thinkers within its peer group. Anyone who can raise the eyebrows of academics and evoke that "tut-tut" casual disapproval usually is a serious thinker with a great deal to say. In comparing the two men, I find Feyerabend a much more daring and fundamental thinker than Kuhn. Not only does he reach conclusions similar to those I reached in The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, that perceptions are the primary mode of receiving information and that maturity is the ultimate goal of human existence, but I also feel that Feyerabend wrestles with the angels in areas where Kuhn fears to read. A comparison of the two thinkers will indicate that Feyerabend, in advocating anarchism, is in fact asking us to show some intellectual courage. I find this missing in Kuhn and in most of the other writers trying to deal with the same or similar problems.

Both Feyerabend and Kuhn agree that the best advances in science and philosophy are made by the outsider, a conclusion not difficult to reach but exceedingly difficult to accept emotionally. Even the best minds trained in the mythology of Western science, in which the use of numbers, sincerity, and a tenured position in the university equal science, miss the nuances when they compare the two thinkers. Kuhn phrases his analysis as follows: "Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change." Feyerabend suggests that "science is advanced by outsiders, or by scientists with an unusual background."

There is a considerable difference here. Kuhn's agent of change is presumed to be approved by the establishment; his creators of the new paradigm presuppose the uniform march of orthodox science with a few exciting changes in perspective. Feyerabend frankly admits that outsiders count. And they certainly do. Albert Einstein was a mere patent clerk, Michael Ventris was an architect when he deciphered Linear B, Heinrich Schliemann was a funny little German merchant who believed in the mythology of ancient Greece. Without the outsider it is difficult to imagine what science and philosophy would have been able to accomplish. Although Kuhn seems to be talking about scientific history, the message he conveys is not precise and not useful. Basically it reinforces the old mythology that we are, after all, the priests of a noble tradition and occasionally, by golly, we are shook up by a few youngsters as well we should be.

Feyerabend raises the whole question of what the scientific endeavor really is. And it is the offbeat character who does not pander to his colleagues and has his own perspective of the world who is not always consonant with the respectable people of his time. He is canonized only after his death in many instances and quickly becomes a paradigm figure with virtually no rough edges. It becomes difficult for us to remember that Newton and Kepler were basically astrologers whose by-products were very successful. Alfred North Whitehead pointed out, "The great thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were singularly detached from universities. Erasmus wanted printers, and Bacon, Harvey, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, wanted governmental patronage or protection, more than university colleagues." If Kuhn recognizes this dimension of scientific history, he disguises it so completely that he endorses the very situation that he has promised to criticize and explain.

This failure of nerve appears so consistently in Kuhn's work that I suspect his purpose is not discussion of scientific methodology but baby-sitting a generation of minds that need to be reassured that Faustus and Strangelove were not really lurking in their unconscious. We see the radical difference in the two men again when we examine how they believe ideas originate. Feyerabend takes a radical and honest approach:

The first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen.

For Feyerabend, ideas should be judged by the potential for making a contribution to understanding, not on their origin, former use, or relationship to accepted symbols of contemporary authority. Or, as Alfred North Whitehead observed, "If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced."

Kuhn seems unable to deal with the question of the origin of ideas. He approaches the problem from the perspective of the traditional scientist: "Scientists ... often speak of the 'scales falling from the eyes' or of the 'lightning flash' that 'inundates' a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution." This condition is a psychological process to be sure, and the comparison with Feyerabend is not precise. But Kuhn leads us down a particular road and then tells us that he has not misled us: "No ordinary sense of the term 'interpretation' fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born. Though such intuitions depend upon the experience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the old paradigm, they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular items of that experience as an interpretation would be." So ideas come in an intuitional flash — no one can quarrel with that description, and indeed stories about the intuitional grasping of new concepts abound in science.

What does Kuhn do with his insight? He promptly recants and panders to the old boy network by closing the doors of intuition. "Some readers have felt that I was trying to make science rest on unanalyzable individual intuitions rather than on logic and law," he says. "But that interpretation goes astray in two essential respects. First, if I am talking at all about intuitions, they are not individual. Rather they are the tested and shared possessions of the members of a successful group, and the novice acquires them through training as a part of his preparation for group-membership."

WHAT?

I delight in these little surrenders because the scenarios that they invoke in the mind are too precious to let escape. GROUP INTUITIONS? INTUITIONS ACQUIRED IN A NOVICE'S TRAINING? How now? And where? In the oral examination for the Ph.D.? In writing up the proposal to the National Science Foundation for a research grant? In attending faculty meetings as junior visiting professor? At professional meetings? If science and philosophy advanced via group intuitions for which a person could be trained, why haven't we solved all of our remaining problems? I was under the impression that Descartes was alone that winter evening, that Newton was not in an auditorium but a garden when the apple hit his head, and that Einstein was busy with his office files as he was thinking out the implications of his theory. The scenario that Kuhn invokes is most prominently found in the Acts of the Apostles where the Holy Spirit appears to the disciples in the upper room at Whitsuntide. THAT is group intuition.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Spirit & Reason"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Vine Deloria, Jr..
Excerpted by permission of Fulcrum Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1. Other Books by Vine Deloria, Jr.,
2. Foreword by Wilma P. Mankiller,
3. Part I: Philosophy,
4. 1. Perceptions and Maturity,
5. 2. The Trickster and the Messiah,
6. 3. Relativity, Relatedness, and Reality,
7. 4. If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True,
8. Part II: Social science,
9. 5. Ethnoscience and Indian Realities,
10. 6. Indians, Archaeologists, and the Future,
11. 7. Low Bridge — Everybody Cross,
12. 8. At The Beginning,
13. 9. A Flock of Anthros,
14. Part III: Education,
15. 10. Traditional Technology,
16. 11. Knowing and Understanding: Traditional Education in the Modern World,
17. 12. Higher education and Self-Determination,
18. 13. The Turmoil of Ethnic Studies,
19. 14. The Burden of Indian Education,
20. Part IV: Indians,
21. 15. Indian Affairs 1973: Hebrews 13:8,
22. 16. Why Indians Aren't Celebrating the Bicentennial,
23. 17. The American Revolution and the American Indian,
24. 18. Kinship With the World,
25. 19. The Popularity of Being Indian: A New Trend in Contemporary American Society,
26. 20. Alcatraz, Activism, and Accommodation,
27. 21. More Others,
28. 22. The Indian Population,
29. V. Religion,
30. 23. The Religious Challenge,
31. 24. The Concept of History,
32. 25. Tribal Religions and Contemporary American Culture,
33. 26. Sacred Places and Moral Responsibility,
34. 27 Myth and the Origin of Religion,
35. 28. Tribal Religious Realities,
36. 29. The Religious Challenge: Freedom of Religion in Scalia's America,
37. Credits and Permissions,
Landmarks,
1. Cover,

Editorial Reviews

"No writer has more clearly articulated the unspoken emotions, dreams, and lifeways of contemporary Native people than Vine Deloria... With flawless logic and adroit use of language, Deloria examines the way many traditional Native people look at the universe, the connectedness of all living things, and our own insignificance in the totality of things compared to the objective, segmented way scientists in the academy view the universe." —From the forward by Wilma P. Mankiller, Former Principal Chief of the Chrokee Nation of Oklahoma

From the Publisher

Clearly a major and frequently highly controversial thinker of our time, Deloria reveals essential insights into Native history, psychology, modern activism, and spiritual identity.

Napra ReView

A collection of 29 essays from Native American writer Deloria written over the course of his career and treating an array of topics. Included in the articles, grouped loosely into sections on philosophy, social science, education, Indians, and religion, are a comparison of the Indian trickster figure and the Western messiah, an exploration of the thought of scientific philosopher Paul Feyerabend, and a critique of anthropologists' Bering Strait migration theory. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews