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10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2014/QM/
The Hero in the Early Modern Period and
Beyond: An Elusive Cultural Construct and an
Indispensable Focus of Social Identity?
Ronald G. Asch
I
This introductory essay outlines some of the objectives of our collaborative research centre and the intellectual problems we are trying to ad- dress. 1 In doing so, my point of view is that of a historian, not a sociologist or a literary scholar, and my perspective is very much that of an early modernist. So my remarks, which are somewhat impressionistic, will elucidate certain aspects of our project while others may receive less atten- tion. However, as this journal has been designed to present work in progress as well as final re- sults, this may be a legitimate course to follow.
What we focus on in our research centre is not the individual figure of the hero or the heroine. Entire libraries have been written about Hercules and Alexander or Joan of Arc and similar prom- inent figures. We are more interested in how societies or social groups within societies define and negotiate their norms, values and even their identities with reference to such figures. As Stef- fen Martus put it during a panel discussion we held when we started our project, heroes are fig- ures that are important for society because they enable us to deal vicariously with norms which we accept somehow as valid but which we can never aspire to live up to in real life. Heroes in this somewhat oblique and potentially controver- sial sense often serve as symbols for what gives coherence to a social group. 2 Like other symbols, however, they remain ambiguous in their mean- ing: the meaning of a life and a deed – whether fictional or historical is at first glance of second- ary importance – cannot be spelt out in so many words. The hero belongs to the imaginaire of a society and not to the world of arguments and systematic thought; that is both his strength and a weakness. 3 The German philosopher of reli- gion Klaus Heinrich already pointed this out in the 1970s in his great series of lectures on Her- cules and his labours as a mythological subject.
Heinrich sees the hero as a semi-divine figure that can bear and sustain conflicts which would tear apart a normal human being. The hero is not constituted by rational thought or theological discourse, 4 but through the story of his (or her) life and death. It is a web of various and some- times contradictory narratives – attached to the myth or story of the fictional or historical hero – that gives meaning to this figure. The hero is in this sense a mediator, a figure that mediates, as in the case of Hercules, between untamed na- ture and civilisation, but also between conflicting values or between gods and men. He gives an example of how to live with conflicts which, at a rational level, cannot be resolved (Heinrich 8, 208–211, 218, 285–256, 307). 5
There may be cultures and periods of history that can do without the hero, like the mostly reso- lutely post-heroic societies of post-war Western Europe. In a country like Germany, the very idea that it might be possible to sacrifice one’s life for an idea is in itself seen by most people as verg- ing on fanaticism these days (Münkler 742–752; see also Klonovsky). Germany offers an extreme example of a tendency visible in other European countries today as well, but in a broader histor- ical perspective such societies are probably the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, one may perhaps say that the hero becomes a distant and even obsolete figure when imperson- al social institutions are sufficiently strong and powerful to give stability to society, to integrate conflicting interests and to defuse tensions, and when these societies do not actively have to defend themselves against serious external threats. However, when the rules a community lives by are less clear or do not find their expres- sion in stable political and legal institutions, the hero can again become an important focus for the aspirations and loyalties of an entire society or at least distinct groups within such a society. 6
II
One question which confronts our project is, of course, how to define the hero. The problem here is that each culture has its own notions in regard to what constitutes a heroic life or deed. What is clear is that in the past most Western societies have found it difficult to do entirely with- out heroic figures to define particular virtues or aspirations, in particular in moments of crisis. Despite the great diversity of such figures, in the Western tradition the examples taken from ancient mythology and history but also from the Bible have exerted for a very long time such a strong influence that we can, for the purpose of creating a working definition, assume that all heroes – at least within the European cultural tradition – have some sort of “family resem- blance”. This is an expression which Wittgen- stein employed in order to explain that certain objects could all be considered as members of a class of entities despite the fact that one cannot find a single feature which all objects invariably have in common (Wittgenstein 56–58; see also Bangu 53–73). Thus, one can identify a number of elements which constitute the hero or heroine, but they need not be manifest all at the same time and in each of a variety of different cultures; the emphasis on any one of these elements can vary considerably.
If one looks at older, historical attempts to define the hero and his place in ethics, one is admitted- ly already confronted by a certain ambiguity in most definitions. Thus, a run-of-the-mill seven- teenth-century German dissertation comes to the conclusion: “Heros est persona divinitus ex- citata, et donis singularibus commune hominum sortem excedentibus donata, actiones edens mirabiles, caeterisque hominibus inimitabiles, cumque successu longe felicissimo conjunc- tas” – “The hero is a person called forth by God and one who possesses extraordinary gifts ex- ceeding the common condition of men. He ac- complishes miraculous deeds that other mortals cannot imitate, deeds which produce the most triumphant success” (Matthiae and Pfankuch 210, my translation). According to the author of this thesis, no hero is conceivable without some kind of divine inspiration. The “afflatus divinus” is indispensable for real heroic virtue. At the same time, heroes are not to be judged by the same rules as other human beings; their actions often infringe on rules which other mortals need to respect and obey (Matthiae/Pfankuch 210– 221; see also Schottelius 585–595, Disselkamp 24–47 and, for the Catholic tradition, Hof- mann). Thus, heroic greatness has an element
of transgression; it transcends everyday moral rules. If heroes are difficult to envisage without this potential for transgression, this is also due to the fact that great passions are the material heroes are made of; that, at least, was the re- ceived wisdom among early-modern writers and poets, but it is a position which is prevalent in other ages as well. Even those who tried to de- sign the model of a specifically Christian hero, such as the seventeenth-century French Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne, pointed out that without strong passions, and, notably, an excess of love and rage, the heroes which a writer depicts and cele- brates would remain “des heros insensibles, des braves stoiques” and in one word, “des souches revetuës de fer” – “wooden stumps covered with iron”. To Le Moyne, virtue should control the pas- sions, but these passions should still remain vis- ible (sign. O vi verso, see also O ii verso). Such notions of heroic virtue ultimately went back to Aristotle. They could be employed as important elements in a discourse of heroism which freed both the heroic monarch and the aristocrat from the restraints which the prevailing moral code forced other human beings to respect. They thus established a hierarchy between the mediocre virtues fit for ordinary people and the heroic, magnanimous ones fit only for the exalted few (Scodel 168–169).
It remained somewhat unclear, however, whether mere stoic fortitude in resisting the vicissitudes of fate or in suffering physical or mental torments or, even more questionably, the contemplative virtue of the sage were enough to constitute a claim to heroism, or whether some visible spec- tacular action was required to give substance to such a claim. 7 Thus, even in the early-modern period, an age where one would expect to find a much more homogeneous system of values than in contemporary pluralistic societies, there were conflicting models of the hero and of hero- ism as a pattern of behaviour competing against each other. Nevertheless, as long as we find some sort of continuity between the – admittedly multi-layered – ideas which antiquity had asso- ciated with the character of the hero and later models and concepts (that is, in Western soci- eties, probably at least until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), certain topoi and commonplaces emerge in the various discours- es delineating the semantic field of the heroic and of human heroism which we can take as the foundation for a working definition of the heroic – always bearing in mind the frequently changing semantics of the idea of the hero and the ever present internal tensions of the concept: 8
be rooted in an urge to debunk all kinds of history which in the past managed to give substance to political or cultural identities, and such an urge is the manifestation of an ideology just like any other ideology. Or, as the great intellectual his- torian John Pocock once put it: “There are forces in our world that do not wish us to say ‘we’ or act on that basis – since to do so might impede their selling us a new ‘identity’ tomorrow – and since saying ‘we’ and saying ‘I’ are intimately linked, they discourage the Self from believing it can manage its own history, just as they discourage the society from believing it can manage its own history” (Pocock, “Conclusion” 310). 13
Such an approach might be seen as inherent- ly hostile to the idea that a heroic vision of life could ever have had any deeper legitimacy or foundation outside the realm of discourse, under any circumstances whatsoever. The rejection of such a vision of life is perhaps reinforced today by the tendency to give priority to the victims and their fate and not to the agency of figures who could plausibly be seen as heroes fighting for a common cause; and of course somebody who would argue today that the fate and predicament of the victims of history is equally a mere cultural construct would immediately tread on very dan- gerous ground indeed, in particular – and rightly so – if such an approach were applied to phe- nomena such as the early-modern Atlantic slave trade or ethnic cleansing and extermination in the twentieth century. 14 However, perhaps for the very reason that, in the past, heroic narratives or images of one kind or another played such a crucial role in constituting the “we” one wants to dissolve, they are today rejected or at least seen as part of an exotic, alien past, a mental world of signs which no longer have any real meaning for us. Moreover, the figure of the hero is possibly the strongest expression of the sovereign Self, the autonomous individual. And this idea of the sovereign Self as such may be seen by many contemporaries as a dangerous obstacle to the construction of new, post-modern, sufficiently malleable identities. 15
The historian is undoubtedly in deep water when he is confronted by the implications his research may have for present-day societies, and even more so when he takes sides in debates which may have a political impact. Nevertheless, if one is inclined to resist the idea that there is no reali- ty outside discourse for the very reason that this idea is itself the expression of a distinct ideology (and the present author is inclined to do so), one will be likely to say that, in the same way in which it may be helpful to have some kind of a nation-
al past already if you want to construct one, it may be helpful if you have a figure at hand which already possesses some sort of charisma and some particular aura based on great victories or achievements if you want to create a hero.
This is not to deny the fact that achievements which in one culture are perfectly serviceable as material for a heroic narrative may be seen as far too flimsy in another culture and under changed circumstances. Nevertheless, to give just one example, Elizabeth I of England was promoted in the later sixteenth century as a heroic figure despite the fact that her generals and admi- rals lost so many battles both in Ireland and in their fight against Spain abroad or committed unforgivable blunders which led to an enormous waste of lives and military resources. People bought into this hero worship because it was, in different ways, in their interest to do so (Mon- trose 113). 16 Elizabeth’s ability to gain the loyal support of both moderate and, for a time, rad- ical Protestants and even some “church Papists” as well as her later victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588, however, were indispensable preconditions for the renown she enjoyed in her own time and in later ages as a heroic monarch. And this victory was real enough although it was perhaps brought about more by bad weather than by courage and military superiority and al- though it did by no means end the threat of a Spanish invasion as people have sometimes as- sumed. Had the English been defeated in 1588, Elizabeth could at best have become a heroic victim and martyr like Mary Queen of Scots but not a David-like figure as she did become in the end for so many of her subjects and for militant Protestants in later ages. 17
IV
I have already mentioned the fact that there are cycles of hero worship and of the rejection of the heroic, a sort of continuous boom and bust of heroic values and patterns of behaviour. The military hero in particular easily becomes a fig- ure of controversy in times which see their ideal not in conquest and military glory but in peace and prosperity. Thus, the eighteenth century is a period when in many countries the great men (benefactors more than warriors) and, much more rarely and controversially, some great women replace the hero in the pantheon of virtue (Bonnet; see also Bell 107–139). But criticism of the hero and his rejection as a moral paradigm cannot be reduced to a mere aversion to warfare
- if only for the reason that even for aristocratic cultures the military hero is only one example of the heroic in the broader sense. What is at stake in debates about the role of the hero is often the place of the exceptional, the life which cannot be subjected to the normal rules of society, in the moral universe as such. Is there a place in soci- ety for human beings who through their actions, their way of life or even their mere suffering fun- damentally transcend the norms which are valid for everybody else and who embody some ex- traordinary zeal which is unattainable, perhaps unimaginable to most people? The idea of the hero is not easily compatible, for example, with an anthropological approach which sees human actions as motivated exclusively by fear and self-interest. Thus, in the seventeenth century both materialists such as Hobbes and radical Christian moralists such as the Jansenists found it difficult to see men and women as being cap- able of truly heroic feelings and actions, though the Jansenists may have made a – reluctant – exception for those inspired and guided imme- diately by God’s grace (Zarka 41–44; Strauss 65–75; Bénichou 97–111; Chaline, “Port Royale” 163–175 and “De la gloire” 95–108).
Furthermore, institutions such as forms of gov- ernment or religious communities like to ap- peal to heroes as founding figures in the past, but consider them and their personal charisma as dangerous in the present and therefore re- ject them. To give just one example: In France after the end of the Wars of Religion there was a marked reaction against any sort of heroic fight for religious objectives which could be seen as overzealous because it had been exactly such a zeal which had destabilised both the country and the monarchy before 1598. This led to a redefini- tion of the place both martyrs and mystics held in society, as Antoinette Gimaret has demonstrated recently in her book Extraordinaire et ordinaire des croix. Saintliness was now to be demon- strated by performing works of charity and by displaying all those virtues which even ordinary Christians were deemed to possess, only to a greater degree. In fact, saintliness now seemed more accessible for women than for men. The more masculine militant piety the warriors of the Catholic League had displayed was replaced by the internalised heroism of ascetic piety and charity of the nuns of Port Royal, one might say. The heroic self-sacrifice of the martyrs suffering physical torments was no longer seen as appro- priate and was in fact suspected to be inherently subversive of the traditional established order (Gimaret 9–28, 120–128, 799–803).
One should not forget that the heroic figure al- ways had considerable subversive potential. In comparison to a heroic leader, a hereditary mon- arch who had to rely on the charisma of his office could all too easily be seen as lacking in heroic virtue; more generally, it remained dangerous to praise the monarch him- or herself too much as a hero. “To celebrate the monarch as military hero would be to invite the possibility of celebrating a military hero as monarch”, as James Garrison put it many years ago in his book on Dryden, the English Restoration poet (115).
In England, figures such as the 2nd Earl of Es- sex, who was executed in 1601, and much more starkly Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 50s, had demonstrated sufficiently the tensions which could emerge between a charismatic leader in the fight against the country’s enemies and popery on the one hand and a monarch who could rely on a sacral aura bestowed on him by tradition and hereditary right but who lacked any credible heroic achievements on the other ( Gajda; Hammer; Knoppers). Historians have often argued that early-modern monarchy owed its real success to its ability to emasculate aris- tocratic heroism and have interpreted the poems and plays of the seventeenth century in particu- lar as a reflection on this death of the aristocrat- ic hero, at least in France, where the names of Corneille and Racine spring to mind (Cornette, 9–42; Bannister, Condé in Context ; Stegmann). In the seemingly absolute monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there ap- pears to have been no place any longer for the heroic warrior of noble descent who pursued the quest of honour and glory on the battlefield. In fact, it seems that with the advent of modern standing armies, made up as they were of sol- diers systematically recruited among the rural and urban poor and commanded by officers to whom war had become a profession and was no longer primarily a rite de passage on the way to honour, the time for the flamboyant display of heroic courage was over; both chivalry and a particular mode of heroic warlike masculinity were now in terminal decline, or so we are told. 18
However, as Hervé Drévillon has pointed out, while noble military heroism was indeed trans- formed over the course of the seventeenth cen- tury, it became by no means obsolete. In one of his more recent books, Drévillon has drawn our attention to the figure of d’Artagnan, one of the heroes of Alexandre Dumas’s cloak-and- dagger narratives but also a real historical fig- ure: Charles d’Artagnan de Batz-Castelmore, a nobleman from Gascony. The real d’Artagnan
to indulge in these days. The constructionism of sociological analysis or of cultural studies, men- tioned earlier, is in some ways internalised by the very men and women who identify with mod- ern-day heroes. It is implicitly accepted that they are only symbolic figures, mere social and cul- tural constructs, and that the story of their lives is, if not devoid of any real cognitive content, at least free of much significance for the real world of power and profit. They are worshipped all the same because their status as idols is seen as serving a social function or because of the emotional surplus value such worship has, some kind of feel-good factor, in the same way in which people consider religion these days often as a useful ingredient in a wellness treatment for their psyche without taking the doctrines of such a religion in any way for real. 21
Nevertheless, even in this diluted, half-ironic and possibly self-conscious form, hero worship can provide models not just for actions and behav- iour but also for the management of emotions, though perhaps not to the same extent as in the past. Let us assume with William Reddy that cultures and society all have their particular emotional regime, or perhaps more often than not several competing emotional regimes. Such regimes provide individuals with a language not just to express but to define and evoke emotional responses to particular events and challenges. Reddy uses the word emotives in this context. What he means is it that there are certain set formulae which we use not just to express but to explore our own emotions. Such formulae have a certain performative potential in that they can evoke what they are describing and give shape to an otherwise very diffuse bundle of emo- tional impulses (Reddy, Navigation of Feelings 63–111). However, according to Reddy, who is a cultural anthropologist, the world is more than mere discourse or text. There has to be some raw material, some resources which can be formed and shaped; otherwise the words which we utter remain just that and we notice that we are not able to evoke the emotions in ourselves which we perhaps try to demonstrate by using certain formulae or gestures (108–110; see also Reddy’s “Against Constructionism”, 327–351).
Where do heroes and heroines come in here? They can clearly provide us with a model for exploring and for defining our own feelings, but also for bringing them under control. This applies in particular to feelings such as fear and pain but also rage, pride and shame. The hero as a figure in works of art and literature but also as a figure in historical narratives is meant to show that cer-
tain emotions can be mastered and controlled, can in fact be transformed into moral sentiments which form a framework for our actions. Express- ing emotions is to some extent the acting out of a role in a play, and our culture provides us with such roles complete with the pertinent emotives which we can act out in moments of particular emotional stress. Members of the French social elite may not necessary have felt the same emo- tions that the heroes and heroines of Corneille’s and Racine’s tragedies displayed on stage, but their works provided them with a language they could use to explore and control their own feelings, and the chivalrous novels or the bio- graphies of great soldiers such as the life of the Chevalier Bayard, which were still reprinted in the seventeenth century, may have had a similar effect (Drévillon, Batailles 138–140 and Rubel 83–108; see also Bannister, Privileged Mortals ).
The space is not sufficient here to pursue this line any further, but I hope to have shown that at least as an object for research the hero or heroine is by no means an obsolete figure, even in a society so passionately post-hero- ic and anti-heroic as the modern German one (for Britain the description as post-heroic would perhaps be much less convincing). This holds even more true given the fact that such societies are these days confronted with the moral codes of other cultures which have never abandoned older, more aggressive models of masculinty and the ethos associated with the cult of mar- tial heroes. It may well be the case that Islamic ideas of Holy War and heroic, possibly suicidal death in the battle against the infidels are in their present form much more deeply influenced by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western ideas and ideologies such as radical nihilism or unbridled ethnic and cultural nationalism than we care to admit (Gray), but they nevertheless pose a fundamental challenge to societies that in general leave very little space for the heroic individual in the real world as opposed to that of the media. Such challenges certainly demon- strate that heroes, even if they are mere cultural constructs from a certain scholarly perspective, remain very real and an important focus of col- lective identity to some people. But that is an- other subject, which may perhaps be addressed at a future workshop.
Ronald G. Asch is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Freiburg and a mem- ber of Collaborative Research Centre 948.
1 This introduction is a modified and extended version of the short lecture I gave at our symposium. The original form of an improvised outline of our research agenda – instead of a more systematic approach – has been largely retained. 2 Martus, 80: “Der Held reflektiert die Möglichkeiten des ‚Menschlichen‘ und operiert in diesem Sinn grenzwertig. […] Vielleicht dient dies der Verwaltung unlebbarer Normen und Werte, die gleichwohl lebensleitend sind.“ 3 See also Lucien Braun’s comments on the figure of the hero: “Il n’est plus question ici d’image en tant que réalité représentative, mais du travail imaginaire lui-même, trans- formant le spectaculaire, lui conférant sa dimension sym- bolique. C’est pourqoui il n’y a pas à proprement parler de pensée héroïque mais plutôt un imaginaire héroïque, c’est- a-dire un dynamisme héroïco-politique, échappant à toute détermination, agissant selon des voies simples, mais incon- scientes et jamais nommées” (Braun 26). 4 In Heinrich’s opinion, there is an important difference between the heroes of ancient mythology and the Christian Saviour. Here it is the word, the logos , the message of God’s revelation that is at the centre and which promises to resolve all conflicts. In the story of the pagan hero, by contrast, these conflicts remain alive but are held in suspense; they are made bearable through retelling the story of the hero’s deeds (Heinrich 319). 5 See in particular the following statement by Heinrich: “Daß Herakles widersprüchliche Funktionen, Positionen und Rollen zugemutet werden, und er dennoch diese eine Figur bleibt, zeigt, daß in ihm ein Konfliktzusammenhang, den er halten soll, vorgestellt wird […]. Wenn die Beschäftigung mit der Figur des Heros einen Sinn haben soll, dann den, daß das in ihr konzentrierte, scheinbar zeitlich entfernte Konflikt- potential als noch immer virulent erkannt […] werden kann” (208–209) Following Hegel, Heinrich notes further: “Für den Begriffsdialektiker Hegel – ich sage es kurz und knapp – war die figürliche Dialektik die große Methode der Vergegen- wärtigung von Spannungen und Konflikten; und in der Tat repräsentieren Figuren der Dialektik Spannungsverhältnisse und Konfliktzustände bis auf den heutigen Tag” (209). 6 Thus already Hegel, 243–45; see also Giesen: “Although
- as we have stressed – heroism itself is immortal, the places for heroes are fading away with the expansion of money, law and science. If rationalization drives the modern world, the sacred becomes, indeed, an impersonal order which is less embodied in persons than in principles that have no special place anymore but are everywhere” (42). 7 On this debate in seventeenth-century France see Fu- maroli 323–348. For the model of the “heroic soul” as being compatible with the vita contemplative see Steadman on “Bacon and the Scientist as Hero” (60–108, esp. 64–74). For the non-martial hero, Odysseus, the great sufferer, could serve as a model. If one followed this model, artists such as Michelangelo or scientists such as Bacon or Galileo could claim heroic greatness in the same way in which an aristo- cratic warrior could. 8 For what follows, see also the research agenda of SFB 948, as summarised in von den Hoff et al. 9 Yuval Harari argued in his 2008 study that from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the torment – both phys- ical and psychological – a soldier suffered in war could be constructed as part of a process whereby he discovered his “true self” and how this process was now seen as an almost indispensable part of true military heroism. 10 Lutheran authors in Germany often tried to show that the leader of the Protestant Reformation was himself a quintes- sential hero. Kaufmann points this out for publications of the early reformation, but see also later texts such as Bürger’s De Virtute Heroica Lutheri... (1683) and also Matthiae and Pfankuch (212).
11 Kirchner (333–94) discusses the impact which a crisis of traditional models of heroic greatness during the seven- teenth century had on poetry and the visual arts, albeit in quite different ways. 12 For the debate on this tension in the seventeenth century see West (in particular 218) and also Owen, who comes to the following conclusion: “However much moral and politi- cal force the idea of absolute loyalty is felt to have, there is something unconvincing about the spectacle of ‘quiet’ her- oes.” (200). 13 For Pocock’s own position see his “New British History”: “I am prepared to assert that there can be no sovereignty without a history. I see identity, history, sovereignty and poli- tics as under attack, on a front probably global and certainly European, and I oppose the project of multipolitical history to the project of absorbing states and their histories into a global culture of commodification enforced by its attendant bureaucracies” (300). 14 See Apostolidès. His book, which identifies Christianity in a somewhat narrow perspective with the cult of the victim, may be overstating its case, but all the same it is an impor- tant contribution to the debate on the role of the heroic in present-day societies. 15 For the hero as a model for the autonomous self see Gehlen. See also Frevert on the rise and fall of heroism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thiele discusses a spe- cific variety of the cult of the heroic individual in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche is also considered by Früchtl in “Sci- ence Pulp Fiction” and Das Unverschämte Ich. 16 Or, as Louis Montrose puts it: “I construe the cultural phenomenon of Elizabethan royal pageantry and iconogra- phy primarily as an ideological apparatus operated by those who constituted the political nation” (113). 17 On Elizabeth as heroine see Hackett; Doran and Free- man; Levin; and Stump, Shenk and Levin, among many other studies. 18 See Drévillon, L’Impot du sang , 338–339 and 324– on the changing models of military heroism to which the French nobility subscribed; see also Brioist, Drévillon and Serna 264–273 as well as Wrede. 19 A good example for this is, of course, Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes; see also Calder. 20 St. Paul’s Cathedral London, The Order of Service for the Funeral of Baroness Thatcher. 21 On the post-modern predicament of separating the sym- bolic realm from the world of cognitive judgements (“decog- nitivisation”) while validating cultural constructs – which are now recognised as such – because of their social functiona- lity or psychological usefulness, see Gellner, in particular his remark on autofunctionalism: “Autofunctionalism consists, as the name implies, of a kind of turning in upon oneself of the functionalist insight. The functionalist looks at strange beliefs and institutions and notices, that, notwithstanding their sur- face oddity, or even absurdity, they are in their context highly functional, or even ideal. He concludes that […] they should be accorded a kind of functional validity, a validity in virtue of function (rather than in virtue of overt message, which would not warrant it)” (160).
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