Abstract
My purpose in this essay is three-fold. I wish to show, first, that the variety and complexity of projection theories of religion is so great that it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize about them; second, that any philosophically important criticism of any one of these theories must deal with the term ‘projection’ in the larger theoretical context within which it functions and acquires its meaning. Finally, I shall argue that to focus on wishful thinking in the ordinary sense of that word as though it were a fundamental element in projection theories is a strategic mistake because it rarely plays a part in the most interesting of these theories, and, to the extent that it does play a role, as in Feuerbach’s early theory, its meaning and role can only be understood in the context of the larger theory of consciousness of which it is a part.
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Notes
Quoted by David Baken in The Duality of Human Existence (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1966), pp. 38f.
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1967). Fokke Sierksma, Projection and Religion: An Anthropological and Psychological Study of the Phenomena of Projection in the Various Religions, trans. Jacob Faber, Foreword by Lee W. Bailey (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Books on Demand, University Microfilms International, 1993).
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950).
The use of the term ‘projection’ in this fashion exploits certain Iinguistic associations inherent in the classical use of the verb ‘to project’, such as ‘to cast’ and ‘to throw’. We can see a contemporary example of this in the reasoning of the English translators of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Heidegger used the German term Entururf to convey his view that the distinctive feature of Dasein is to categorize its experience in terms of its practical projects. The mind, he argued, does not apprehend essences but conceives of the world in terms of its instrumental purposes. The English translators argue that the connotations of the verb ‘entwerfen’ are best conveyed by the English verb ‘to project’ because this word has been linked not only with ‘throwing’ but with the more abstract mental process of designing or sketching, as when we say that a geometer projects a curve upon a plane. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), p. 185, n. 1.
Gordon Kaufman, The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981), pp. 32f. See Terry Godlove’s criticism of this extension of conceptual scheme to include religion in the light of his own acceptance of Donald Davidson’s rejection of an intelligible distinction between schema and content. Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 90.
See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Books, 1944), ch. VII.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1968), paras 470–93.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, selected and translated, with an introduction, preface and notes, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 483.
Marx Wartofsky, Feuerbach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Wartofsky argues that the book is so difficult for a lay reader to understand because Feuerbach, for complex reasons, decided not to spell out or develop the epistemological arguments that are so crucial to it. Consequently, the book can be read at both a popular and a more sophisticated level. At the latter there is an argument regarding how concepts are formulated in religion and philosophy. But since this is never spelled out, the reader has to reconstruct it.
Barth has written that Feuerbach’s knowledge of the Bible, the Church Fathers and Luther ‘place him above most modern philosophers’ and that ‘no philosopher of his time penetrated the contemporary theological situation as effectually as he, and few spoke with such pertinence.’ ‘An Introductory Essay’, in Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, with an introductory essay by Karl Barth and a Foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1957), p. x.
One finds the same notion in the young Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ in which the presupposition of his argument is that any system that deprives the worker of the exercise of his/her essential powers is alienation. See Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton and intro. by Lucio Colletti (New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1975).
Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 5.
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Harvey, V.A. (1996). Projection: A Metaphor in Search of a Theory?. In: Phillips, D.Z. (eds) Can Religion be Explained Away?. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24858-2_4
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