Most of the following blog is devoted to Beatrice Otto’s excellent book on jesters and the explanatory issues it raises. But before turning to that, I should mention three things: First, it may be of some interest to readers of the Literary Universals Project that Ashmita Mukherjee and Suvendu Ghatak interviewed me, primarily on literary universals, for their valuable “Antilibrary Podcast” (see here). Second, I wish to thank Ashmita for introducing me to Otto’s book through her (Ashmita’s) dissertation on anti-colonial Indian humor. I should also apologize for this blog being a month late. My schedule of medical and physical therapy appointments finally—like the omnivorous canine of undergraduate legend–ate my homework.

I do not know how I managed to remain ignorant of Beatrice Otto’s outstanding book for so long. There are relatively few of us, in contemporary academic fields, who unabashedly advocate universalism in any area. You would think then we would all be known to one another. One mitigating factor in my ignorance is the fact that this is not a book about literary universals but about universals in real-life politics. (Otto does devote a chapter to the literary character type and its universality. We will turn to that chapter briefly at the end of the blog.) However, that only slightly limits the book’s relevance to the Literary Universals Project.

The book, as I mentioned, is about jesters. What could be more culturally embedded, you might ask. At first blush, the jester appears to be specific to European monarchial traditions. However, Otto demonstrates that this is not so. Drawing on examples from every region of the world–from not only almost every nation of Europe, but also from China, India, the Middle East, Japan, Sub-Saharan Africa, and pre-colonial America—Otto presents a compelling case that “the court jester . . . is very much a universal character, more or less interchangeable regardless of the time or culture in which he happens to cavort–the same techniques, the same functions, the same license” (xvi). Toward the end of the book, she makes an observation that is directly relevant to everyone interested in universals during this time which is dominated by what we might call “difference bullying,” the tendency for those culturalists and others who see group differences everywhere to bafflingly accuse universalists of racism and sexism, or at least eurocentrism. Specifically, Otto comments that “in observing differences of culture and era, whether to delight in or condemn, there is the risk of underestimating the similarities, which deserve as much celebration as the spice and color of the exotic” (261; her implicit criticism of culturalists as exoticizing other societies, reducing them to “spice and color,” is aptly jester-like in its apparent innocence of critical intent).

I briefly considered devoting this entire blog post to overviewing Otto’s book. However, I realized that I could not capture the richness in her analyses, based as they are on her command of the histories and literatures treated in the book. Her encyclopedic knowledge and insights—as well as humor—would be lost in summary. In the end, I decided that I would merely urge my readers to pick up her book and read it on their own. I will focus instead on what might be added to Otto’s book. There is little if anything that I could add at descriptive level.  Therefore, I will confine myself to a few suggestions for explanations of the phenomena she describes. As Otto explains, “The evidence points to [the jester] having existed across the globe and across history, in most of the major civilizations of the world and many of the minor ones. And while there was certainly cross-fertilization within, let us say, the European tradition, by and large he seems to have arisen spontaneously and independently within societies without their necessarily being aware of his existence elsewhere, suggesting that he fulfills a deep and widespread social need” (xviii). I will focus on that social need. I hope thereby not only to contribute to our understanding of jesters and the needs they fill, but also to expand the ways in which we are inclined to think about the sources of universality. However, before going on to any of that, I need to summarize a few key points from Otto’s book.

The first point that needs clarification is just what defines a jester. Toward the end of the book, Otto discusses a contemporary jester—Paul Birch, a man whose job designation was “corporate jester for British Airways.” Birch acknowledged the obvious importance of humor in his profession, but he pointed out that “the main role of the jester is to challenge. The humor is just the tool” (268). In other words, the jester functions as a sort of devil’s advocate, articulating observations and arguments that weigh against the policies advocated by the monarch or other authority. Thus, the existence of the jester is contingent on his or her criticism of authority fulfilling some need—a need whose function appears decreasingly idiosyncratic as that need turns up again and again in genetically and areally unrelated traditions (Europe, China, India, and so forth).

Whatever social need might be at issue here, the obvious way of fulfilling that need is through explicit remonstrance. Why, then, would the means be repeatedly humorous? As Otto explains, “The preconditions for the emergence of jesters are minimal–some courtlike institution in the form of a head honcho with a partly dependent entourage” (xvii). Surely, a courtlike institution could, in principle, sustain logical analysis or empirically based argument as readily as puns, spontaneous songs in doggerel, and scatological misbehavior (such as eating feces—see Otto [38-40]), with the “jester” proffering the analysis or argument. This is particularly the case when one considers that the jester was typically more or less immune to punishment from the monarch or other “head honcho”—which gives us another cross-culturally recurring feature calling for explanation.

So, to this point, we have three universal properties of jesters that need to be explained. First, there is the social need for the jester to arise as a critic of the powerful. Second, there is the social need for the jester to be granted relative immunity. Third, there is the social need for the jester to use humor as his primary means of conveying criticism. In addition, it may be worthwhile to consider some ancillary or incidental features, such as the frequency with which dwarves are preferred candidates for jesterhood, the fondness that is a recurrent characteristic of relations between ruler and jester, and the ruler awarding the jester a significant role in diplomacy or other aspects of governance (all points observed and documented by Otto).

In many ways, the social need most fundamental to the institution of jesterhood—along with its associated immunity–is obvious. Since China has the longest tradition of jesters, we might focus on that tradition for the moment. Otto stresses that, despite China’s long history of jesters, the Chinese appear to have largely forgotten about jesters. In keeping with this, they provide some exemplary instances of what happens when there is no jester. Consider Mao and the “Great Leap Forward.” The power wielded by Mao at this time was comparable to that wielded by Chinese Emperors. One result was that his subordinates did not tell him the truth about the deep and consequential failure of his policies. Instead, they told him what he wished to hear and what would give him a good impression of the tellers—of their commitment to the cause and of their personal loyalty to Mao. The result was millions of ordinary Chinese dead and a division in the Chinese Communist Party that left Mao himself marginalized, albeit temporarily. (On the Great Leap Forward and its results, see for example Roberts [256-274] and Hyun.) In short, strict social hierarchization encourages sycophancy, and sycophancy fosters the promulgation of harebrained policies, with often disastrous consequences—most tragically for ordinary people, but even for the leader himself or herself. The best response is something along the lines of a Millian free exchange of ideas. But in an authoritarian structure, this poses an obvious risk of undermining the authority of the leader; indeed, it presupposes that such authority has been undermined—a good thing, but one unlikely to be favored by an authoritarian leader himself or herself.

Another option is to allow criticism in a way that is circumscribed. Indeed, criticism circumscribed in source (who can criticize) and manner (how the criticism can be delivered) is a viable option, representing a solution to the problem, but only if a number of conditions are satisfied. First, those who are privileged to criticize the ruler must be trusted by the ruler and trustworthy in his or her regard. To say they are trustworthy in the ruler’s regard is to say that they are benevolent toward him or her and that they are competent to evaluate the matters on which they are advising. (On the twofold criteria for trustworthiness—benevolence and competence–see Hardin.) In connection with this, the “designated critic” should not fear reprisal from the group leader or anyone else. These desiderata are fulfilled by or lead to a number of cross-cultural characteristics of the jester as isolated by Otto. Most obviously, they tell us the need that is satisfied by the jester, who has the primary function of challenging the leader. Specifically, this desideratum (i.e., of challenging the leader) provides the minimal conditions that allow some degree of rational or empirical evaluation to influence royal decisions regarding both “private” acts and public policies. (I place the word, private, in scare quotes to indicate that most of a monarch’s putatively private acts have public consequences.) This also explains the need for the jester to have a reasonable degree of immunity (if he or she is not to become another sycophant). Moreover, the trustworthiness of the jester serves to explain the frequency with which he or she is given authority in diplomacy and related areas of political significance. Finally, the existence of trust begins to suggest why the leader and his or her jester would develop bonds of such intimacy.

But why is all this associated with humor? Why couldn’t the jester simply and straightforwardly articulate his or her challenges? Here, I would like to remain focused on China for the moment, in order to consider another solution to the problem of the isolated leader, as we might call it. I am referring to the practice of fushi, the allusive use of the Classic of Poetry (Shijing). As Cai explains, “Fushi (literally ‘presenting a poem’) refers to the practice whereby high officials of different states would use Shijing poems to convey their states’ political views and positions at a diplomatic encounter. Specifically, fushi practitioners attempted to steer the course of politics by translating one or more Shijing poems into an imaginative analogy for a political situation or position” (“The Cultural Role” 1). In Cai’s words, “Thanks to the subtle and indirect expressive style” of fushi and other techniques, critics could “air . . . grievances with impunity while rulers [could] discern and correct their own errors without losing face” (“Poetry and Ideology” 67). Humor had this face-saving function. Put differently, humor allowed plausible deniability by which criticism could be laughed off as “just a joke.” As Stephen Levinson writes of teasing (an apt characterization of some aspects of jester-ruler interactions—think, for example, of Lear and his fool), “It is an attack on the other’s face, but in being flagged (by smiles, laughter, and intonation) as non-serious, it is partially disarmed” (128). Note that this face-saving function makes the character of the jester an instance of the sort of politeness universals so compellingly argued for by Brown and Levinson. It may also be supplemented by the connection between mirth and childhood, which I have argued for in several publications (see, for example, chapter five of What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion) and which is an obvious parallel for the indulgence shown to jesters and the non-serious treatment of their challenges. This, in turn, suggests a possible explanation for some otherwise surprising cross-cultural patterns, such as the preference for dwarves, which Otto stresses. Indeed, Otto quotes one Chinese text comparing the companionship of dwarves—as rulers often maintained with jesters–to “keeping company with mischievous children” (23). More significantly, the sort of license given to jesters is not entirely dissimilar to the sort of license given to children. It seems at least possible that dwarfism and other factors associated jesters with children; though it was probably unselfconscious for most observers, this association made it more plausible that jesters should be treated as children along axes other than height (e.g., assuming innocence at the root of what, if uttered by adults, would certainly be taken as criticism).

It is also worth noting that the type of argument I have been advancing to explain this universal is not common in literary study; indeed, it hardly occurs at all. Specifically, it is not an argument that we have been biologically (or, sometimes, “bio-socially” or “bio-culturally”) programmed to favor jesters, usually for some reason having to do with the profundity of sexual difference (here the bowerbird may be mentioned). One suggestion of the preceding argument is that, however specialized our genetically determined capacities and inclinations may be in certain respects, there are ways of thinking and feeling that have a broader scope. These ways of thinking and feeling do not need to be explained in extremely particularistic terms. Rather, they recur across parallel situations, which are themselves likely to recur frequently, perhaps for group dynamical reasons. (Sadly, we see a case of this sort in the US today, where a significant number of citizens appear to be favorable toward return to monarchy—without the foresight to advocate its partial mitigation by the presence of a jester.) In short, the appearance of jesters may readily constitute an implicational universal. This is because the conditions of the implication (having a court, etc.) are likely to recur and the reasoning that leads to the consequences of those conditions (the existence of jesters) are widely available. In short, there is no need for positing something along the lines of a jester gene. (This is an implicational universal because the jester appears only when a society has developed a court, etc., as already noted [see Otto xvii]. On implicational and other types of universals, see “What are Literary Universals?” [available here].)

The one drawback to Otto’s analysis and argument is not in any way her fault. It is, rather, the fact that, as she writes, “The court jester is not as universal a figure on stage as he is in court life” (187). She goes on to give examples of literary jesters, especially in India. The relatively greater prominence of a jester character in India is unsurprising, for India developed an indigenous dramatic theory that included a character typology, which itself included the “vidūṣaka” character, whom Otto, quite reasonably takes to be a form of the jester. However, Otto ends up talking to a great extent about characters—such as clowns–who share some qualities with jesters. But the qualities they share are largely those they share by virtue of being amusing. Put differently, all such characters have a place in regional—and, therefore, global—literature simply because the elicitation of mirth is a cross-cultural goal of some literary works in every or nearly every literary tradition. However, once that is said, it becomes obvious why jesters in literature are less common than they are in life. Jesters appear when there is a specific social problem that calls out for resolution—an isolated ruler needs realistic evaluations of his or her practices and policies from a trustworthy source, but those evaluations must be delivered in a face-saving way. In literary situations where this occurs—as it does in King Lear—the jester may be a character. But when the literary situation is simply one in which, say, the author wishes to provoke mirth in his or her audience, there is no need for a jester, rather than a clown, or a braggart soldier, or a hypocritical cleric, or any of the figures who are likely to be the butt of the jester’s jests.

In sum, Beatrice Otto’s book is a genuine scholarly achievement (though, a quarter-century after its publication, this is rather old news), and it is directly relevant to the study of universals, including literary universals. I have merely tried to add some explanatory points about jesters in life and in literature. In addition, I have tried to do so in a way that illustrates how accounts of universals in the humanities generally, and in literary studies in particular, are commonly far too narrow—often assuming that universal = innate and non-innate = vastly different, both of which are false equations.

WORKS CITED

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. Politeness: Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Cai, Zong-qi. “The Cultural Role of Chinese Poetry.” In How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity through the Tang. Ed. Zong-qi Cai. New York: Columbia UP,1-10.

Cai, Zong-qi. “Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han.” In How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity through the Tang. Ed. Zong-qi Cai. New York: Columbia UP, 65-77.

Hardin, Russell. Trust. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Hyun, Chang-Dae (2019) “The Great Leap Famine and Amartya Sen.” Grand Valley Journal of History 7.1 (2019). Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/gvjh/vol7/iss1/2 (accessed 4 November 2025).

Levinson, Stephen. The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025.

Otto, Beatrice. Fools are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2001.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

I recently read Bradley Irish’s overview of debates concerning universality in emotions. Irish’s treatment of the subject is careful, scholarly, and well-argued. However, there are necessarily some points that he could not develop adequately in a short overview of such a large body of work. Perhaps the most consequential of these concerns the ways in which the type of theory one adopts has consequences for what counts as a universal. For example, he quotes a number of linguists to the effect that “the idea of a single underlying linguistic system different only in surface realization seems increasingly unlikely” (Majid 432). Majid is here alluding to Noam Chomsky’s view of universality. One of the linguists Irish quotes as representing this “general challenge to universalism” is Stephen Levinson (from a co-authored work; see Evans and Levinson), despite the fact that Levinson is no enemy of universalism, as is shown by his (excellent)  2025 book, The Interaction Engine, which puts forth a range of universals (admittedly, very different from Chomsky’s). I do not advocate a Chomskyan account of language or of universals. Even so, I believe that both Majid and Levinson are mistaken in their contention that Chomsky-type universalism has been (almost) disproven. I say this primarily because of the way universality, as well as evidence and counter-evidence bearing on universalism, are defined in a Chomskyan or similar theory. In order to clarify some of what is at stake in different types of theories of universals, I will go through two illustrative cases—Chomsky and Joseph  Greenberg, who articulate very different types of universalistic theory.

Theories and Evidence

Unlike many authors outside of the field, linguists are aware that there are different types of universalistic theory about language. They know, for example, that Joseph Greenberg and Noam Chomsky articulated such theories and they were very different from one another. But it is often unclear that even linguists fully understand the exact nature and consequences of such differences. For example, all universalists acknowledge that candidates for universals might have apparent exceptions. How significant the exceptions are, however, is not self-evident. It is a function of the theoretical premises underlying one’s research program. For example, neither Majid’s nor Levinson’s comments, as quoted in Irish, has clear consequences for either a Chomskyan or Greenbergian universalist program in linguistics.

To most readers, it may seem that the case is straightforward: Universalists predict that all languages have property p and are falsified by even a single language that lacks this property. But, despite the popularity of (this popularization of) Popperian falsificationism, that would be very bad science, for two reasons. First, any theory that deals with statistical likelihood does not support falsification by a single disconfirming instance. (As Nigel Fabb reminded me, in some cases, this situation may occur because a language develops in such a way that two generally valid universals cannot both be instantiated in the language; in other words, the application of one universal principle may sometimes interfere with the application of another.) Second, any statistically significant deviation from random distribution requires explanation and is likely to prove relevant for understanding the field in which it occurs. For example, there is a “cross-linguistic preference for suffixing over prefixing” (Culbertson, Smolensky, and Legendre), such that test subjects “learning an artificial language with suffixes identifying word categories outperformed those learning a language with prefixes.” This is not rendered irrelevant to an account of language structure and language acquisition simply because there are languages with prefixes (though of course the account of language structure and acquisition will, in all likelihood, be different than it would have been if there were no languages of the latter sort).

We could just as easily use a universal posited by Levinson, such as regular turn taking, with a limited amount of time (as little as 200 milliseconds) between turns, indicating the extreme rapidity of the transition and thus the refined sensitivity we have to signals of turn ending (see Levinson 34-45). If we happened to find a language in which this is not the case—in which, say, any given speaker could speak as long as he or she wished, without particular justification—that would hardly render the overwhelming predominance of turn taking irrelevant to the study of language. Or consider the metaphorical mapping of time onto space (specifically, the subject-centered version of space, which is handled by parietal cortex, rather than hippocampal, objective spatial relations [see Clark, Boutros, and Mendez 43]). This yields such metaphors as “A bright future is before us,” or “Our best days are behind us.” Languages often stress a mapping which links the future with what is in front of us and the past with what is behind us. It caused a great kerfuffle a few years back when linguists noted that Aymara (a South American, First Nations’ language) apparently reverses this—as does English, when we say that “old age is creeping up on me” or, following Marvell, “at my back, I always hear,/Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” (“To His Coy Mistress,” ll.21-22). But even without the English parallels, the existence of the apparently less common pattern in Aymara hardly means there is nothing significant about the evidently more common pattern.

The Greenbergian tradition in linguistic universalism treats this issue straightforwardly. (For a fuller discussion of these points, see Comrie.) Some phenomena are statistical, while others appear to be more absolute in their conformity to laws (i.e., they exhibit more uniform behavior)—not only in linguistics, but in every field where one might seek universals (such as literature). In consequence, Greenbergians distinguish absolute from statisticaluniversals. Moreover, some patterns occur only in contexts where other patterns occur. These are implicationaluniversals. An example of an implicational universal is as follows: If a language has verb-subject-object word order, then it has prepositions, as opposed to postpositions (see Comrie 17; note that implicational universals may themselves be absolute or statistical). When a number of implicational universals cluster together, you have typological universals. Claims regarding all of these types of universals are in principle subject to a statistical significance test. Thus, they are as falsifiable—or at least as open to rational discussion, thus logical and empirical criticism and defense—just as claims are elsewhere in the social and biological sciences.

Chomsky’s approach to universals partially overlaps with that of Greenberg in that he in effect makes use of the idea of implicational universals. But he does so in such a radically different context as to give even those points of overlap a very different significance or function in the overall, theoretical system. Since Chomsky developed numerous theories in the course of his career, I will focus on one–the “Principles and Parameters” (P&P) framework–both because I find it particularly appealing and because it is adaptable to different specific theories, at least to the extent of illustrating the problems with a “simple falsificationist” view of universals. First of all, Chomskyan universals—in the sense of universals that enter into his theories–are absolute. Moreover, this is because they form the core of every language and variation in languages is confined to the periphery (as suggested in the quote from Majid). However, that core and periphery are not simply what we think of intuitively as central and marginal. For example, to a great extent, the sound-meaning pairings that define vocabulary may be categorized as peripheral. This is because the core or universal part of language is defined by a specific, explanatory function. It is, specifically, what allows us to learn language. The universals in Chomsky-type theories are just that subset of universals (in the Greenbergian sense) that form our innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Thus, the elements of that LAD are shared by all speakers of all languages. But that does not mean that they appear in all languages in the same surface form. Indeed, they could not appear in all languages because, in a P&P framework, the elements are principles with specified (i.e., specifically listed) variables. Learning a language consists largely in learning which variables to select from each list. For example, the “head directionality parameter” specifies that standard word order in a language can be head first or head last. (A “head” is “the word that a phrase is built around” [Baker 247].)

I should point out that the P&P framework is much more complex than I have indicated. For example, the parameters are not set at random, but in a definite order. Only after the head directionality parameter is set can certain other parameters be set. Indeed, setting one parameter one way typically sets some other parameters, in effect preventing the child from setting them. (For a lucid treatment of some of these complexities, see Baker.) Even in this simplified form, however, I hope it is clear why the head directionality parameter counts as a universal in (this particular) Chomskyan theory, even if there seem to be exceptions to its instantiation.  Those exceptions should be handled by principles and parameters which apply later, later both logically and developmentally (as can be argued on the basis of acquisition data).

I also hope it is clear, without entering into technical details, that the P&P framework or other Chomsky-type theories of universals can result in what Imre Lakatos called a “degenerating” research program. For example, it could develop in such a way as to require an increasing number of ad hoc principles which involve no generalizations of further linguistic patterns, but serve merely to allow for individual anomalies. An extreme and unrealistic, but illustrative case would be principles which referred to single languages as exceptions—say, a disjunctive parameter, such as “Is Aymara/is not Aymara,” with a simple statement of Aymara’s unique characteristics following from the former alternative. As such ad hoc principles multiply, the theory decreases in its explanatory power. Thus, these types of theories are open to rational adjudication. However, they are not open to simple falsification by the discovery of apparently anomalous properties in a particular language. In short, the intuitive case for the simple falsification of either Greenbergian or Chomskyan universals is not valid.

Before addressing literary universals, it is worth mentioning three other differences between Greenbergian and Chomskyan universals. (For a concise representation of the key differences, see Figure 1.) Again, Chomskyan universals serve to explain language acquisition—both what children acquire and in what order they acquire it; as part of this, they are also recruited to explain recurring errors made by children in the course of language acquisition. But how might the universals be explained? As they are innate, the obvious way in which the LAD universals would be explained is by evolution, though Chomsky has himself stressed that they could have developed by other means (cf. his comments on evolution in On Nature and New Horizons). In any case, Greenbergian universals are in principle open to any sort of explanation. Most importantly for our purposes, not being innate, they may have developed through convergent social development and thus be open to “culturalist” explanations. Moreover, as such, they may serve to explain various social or cultural developments as well. (Of course, all universals to some extent rely on innate features in some respect—for example, universals that concern visible objects rely to some extent on features of the human eye. However, in itself, that reliance is trivial.)

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Another difference is that Chomsky-type universals can be articulated in part through the examination of one language—say, English. This is because the LAD is the same for all children. Insofar as one is able to formulate the principles and parameters needed to learn English, one has formulated some of the principles and parameters needed to constitute the LAD. Though Chomskyan universals cannot be fully articulated without recourse to all available language data, initial articulation can rest on one language. In contrast, Greenberg-type universals must observe the constraints of genetic and areal distinctness far more rigorously. In other words, they must draw on languages that have independent lineages (genetic distinctness) and that have not influenced one another through contact (areal distinctness).

I have drawn on a non-innatist version of P&P theory as a model for aspects of my accounts of descriptive ethics (see Literature and Moral Feeling), authorial creativity and simulation (see How Authors’ Minds Make Stories), and other phenomena. But the applicability of a Chomsky-type theory to non-linguistic problems seems limited as the initial formulation of the theory is so narrowly tailored to issues of language. Indeed, I take it to be fairly clear that Chomskyan universals as such (thus, not merely as general models) are on the whole too restrictively defined to be of much direct use in literary study (exceptions to this would include some of Paul Kiparsky’s and Nigel Fabb’s work). In contrast, the Greenbergian stress on statistical universals and the possibility of social or cultural explanation fits the interests of literary scholars much more clearly than would a stress on acquisition. Acquisition of, for example, narrative appears to come down to the understanding of particular causal sequences and distinguishing agency from efficient causality. These do not appear to be problems unique to literature, but rather appear to be the sorts of thing developmental psychologists would study. More generally, whatever one thinks of the idea that language is a modular (thus, relatively independent) function of the human brain, there is clearly much more reason to think of language as modular than to think of literature as such. Thus, when literary theorists, such as Gerald Prince, drew on Chomsky-type theories to model narrative, they had reason to consider models from linguistics, but (I believe) erred in choosing a Chomsky-type theoretical framework.  

I should mention one more thing about Chomsky and Greenberg. In distinguishing these two types of theories, I passed over what they have in common. One part of this commonality is important for discussing universals. It is also commonly misunderstood, or not considered at all. To clarify this point, I need first to draw a terminological distinction between disciplinary description and explanation on the one hand and ultimate or underlying description and explanation on the other. By “disciplinary description and explanation,” I mean description and explanation of some particular set of phenomena as they appear to us within their field of study—say, linguistics with its references to phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties. By “underlying description and explanation,” I mean description and explanation in terms of some appropriate non-disciplinary mechanisms—usually material-biological or social; for example, description and explanation in terms of particular sequences of neuronal activation in particular regions of the brain associated with identifiable functions. At some point, the disciplinary descriptions and explanations should be identifiable with some underlying material-biological description and explanation. For example, in one version of his syntactic theory, “Government and Binding” theory, Chomsky takes it as a datum that “I wanna win the race” is grammatically fine, but that *”Who do you wanna win the race” is ungrammatical (see, for example, Lectures 181 and Rules 159-160). His explanation for this is (very roughly) that, in underlying structure, the question has an earlier version, “You want who to win the race.” The “who” moves to the front, but leaves a “trace” between “want” and “to.” That trace marks any contraction of “want” and “to” as ungrammatical. What does this have to do with disciplinary and underlying explanation? Well, the trace-blocking account of wanna-contraction (a disciplinary explanation, dealing as it does with familiar elements of language, such as words) should presumably have some correlate to the trace and some correlate to the movement of “who,” along with correlates to the other familiar, language elements in the underlying explanation of “wanna”-contraction. If such correlates are lacking, either the trace-blocking account is mistaken or the underlying account is inadequate to the phenomenon of “wanna”-contraction.

Note that this means one cannot simply take up a non-disciplinary concept from neuroscience–or any other area of cognitive or social science–and use it to explain an area such as language or literature, unless there is some way of translating that nondisciplinary account into the linguistic or literary account and vice-versa. The disciplinary account constitutes our fundamental explanation of the phenomena under consideration. The material account is, so to speak, an explanation of our disciplinary explanation. Actually, the same point holds for social explanations or any other accounts we would hope to be underlying explanations. For example, it is undoubtedly the case that language has developed in such a way as to facilitate cooperation. However, saying this does not constitute an explanation of any linguistic phenomena. If we want to explain language by cooperation, we need to explain how cooperation accounts for the preference for suffixes. Similarly, our acquisition and use of language have no doubt benefited from the mirror neuron system. But saying this does not even begin to isolate syntactic, morphological, phonological, or even lexical phenomena, to identify patterns within or across languages, or to say anything at all specific to language. (For a detailed criticism of the uncritical appeal to mirror neurons, which seems particular common in literary study, see Hickok.) This is not to say that underlying explanations must cohere into the single, unified system. Again, that is what Chomsky is seeking in at least some iterations of his linguistic theory. But in a Greenbergian account, an underlying explanation could form a patchwork of unrelated “local” theories. The key point is simply that, in each theory, there must be a point at which the entities named in the underlying account map directly onto the entities named in the disciplinary account in order to guarantee that the two accounts are treating the same objects and are explaining the same phenomena. Of course, any such mapping is bound to be highly complex. For instance, a word will be mapped onto some areas of cortex governing its pronunciation, other areas governing its meaning, and so on. The point is simply that loose, general correlations may provide us with areas to explore and they may be fruitful in that regard, but as long as they remain general correlations, they tell us nothing whatsoever about universals in the disciplinary field we are studying—language, narrative, literature, or whatever.

WORKS CITED

Baker, Mark. The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Chomsky, Noam. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht, Neth: Foris, 1981.

Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Chomsky, Noam. On Nature and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Chomsky, Noam. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

Clark, David, Nashaat Boutros, and Mario Mendez. The Brain and Behavior: An Introduction to Behavioral Neuroanatomy. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Comrie, Bernard. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Culbertson, Jennifer, Paul Smolensky, and Géraldine Legendre. “Learning Biases Predict a Word Order Universal.” Cognition 122.3 (2012): 306-329.

Evans, N. and S. Levinson. “The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.5 (2009): 429–448.

Fabb, Nigel. Language and Literary Structure: The Linguistic Analysis of Form in Verse and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Fabb, Nigel. What is Poetry? Language and Memory in Poems of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. New York: Norton, 2014.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. How Authors’ Minds Make Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022

Irish, Bradley. The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025.

Kiparsky, Paul. “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry.” In Essays in Modern Stylistics. Ed. Donald C. Freeman. London: Methuen, 1981.

Kiparsky, Paul. “On Theory and Interpretation.” In The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Lakatos, Imre. “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes.” In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.

Levinson, Stephen. The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2025.

Majid, A. “Current Emotion Research in the Language Sciences.” Emotion Review 4.4 (2012): 432–443.

Prince, Gerald. A Grammar of Stories. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

In the two months since my February blog, my primary engagement with universals has been my response to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s influential argument against emotion universals. I articulated this response in a plenary talk I delivered remotely at a conference on “Predicting Emotion.” I refer interested readers to the recorded talk, which is available via Youtube at https://youtu.be/lA8TBF908PU ; the section on Barrett begins about ten minutes and fifty seconds into the talk and continues to the end.

In addition, there are two topics that I have not been able to research myself, but that perhaps one or another reader will be able to take up. The first concerns automata. In preparation for a conference on Artificial Intelligence, I was reading Artificial Intelligence For Dummies by Mueller, Massaron, and Diamond, when I came upon the following passage: “You find examples of automata in Europe throughout the ancient Greek civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modern times. . . . Automata weren’t exclusive to Europe. In the Middle East, many designs were created by the mathematician and inventor Al-Jazari (see tinyurl.com/e7yjh557 for details) and in Asia, China and Japan also developed their own versions of automata” (226-227).

I suspect that every cultural tradition has included at least some people—often, the majority—who have drawn a conceptual distinction between the body and the soul, positing an immaterial being that constitutes the “self” in addition to the material being that is somehow housing that immaterial self and in some manner expressing its intentions. Moreover, as injury and death apply most clearly to the body, I would imagine that all cultures also include some people who view the immaterial self as immortal, and therefore as separable from the body. If this is true, then it should not be surprising that both the immaterial and material components of the person can appear and exist on their own. In other words, once it is possible to have ghosts, it ought to be possible to have zombies also.

Of course, automata are not precisely zombies, though both are purely material beings, lacking a soul. I take it that the difference is that zombies are bodies that have arisen naturally (i.e., through human sexual reproduction), though the continuation of some degree of animacy (however minimal) without a soul is definitely unnatural. Automata, in contrast, are inventions, mechanical imitations of humans, created by humans. (They may also require empirically ascertainable, physicalistic causal sequences explaining their behavior, if we wish to exclude magically animated human creations—such as Golems—from the class of automata.) Logically speaking, automata may imitate human souls as well as human bodies, which is to say, they can apparently manifest intentions (such as trying to be helpful) as well as more obviously (merely) mechanical—or robotic–behaviors (such as walking). In other words, they may be taken to manifest a soul (i.e., a subjective self—think HAL in 2001).

In connection with the last point, Lalita Hogan reminds me that, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud quotes the “undoubtedly . . . correct” observation by Jentsch that “In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for creating uncanny effects is to leave  the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton” (132). Freud goes on to stress, instead, the castration complex and, what is more promising, the idea of the “double” (the topic of an earlier blog at this site, available here), as well as other, standard psychoanalytic motifs, and residual, childhood attitudes to death. In addition to the doubtful character of psychoanalytic explanation, a problem with Freud’s essay is that he relies so heavily on his own intuitions as to what counts as uncanny. I see this as a problem because I am unsure that Freud has isolated a genuinely singular or unified phenomenon. Despite this, some of his inferences are quite plausible, even illuminating—for example, the idea that we have an “uncanny” feeling when we encounter some coincidence that appears to verify a childhood superstition that we think of ourselves as having outgrown (but are still inclined to accept), or the observation that even when we are certain that a story has elicited a specific emotion for us, we do not automatically and infallibly know just what aspects of the story gave rise to that emotion.

It is striking that, decades after Freud’s essay, Masahiro Mori published some informal observations and hypotheses on automata, maintaining that people’s sense of affinity with an automaton increases with increases in the human-like appearance of the automaton—until a point when the resemblance becomes “uncanny.” (Mori was writing in Japanese and presumably did not intend to allude to Freud.) At this point, people’s sense of affinity plummets. It then increases again as the automaton becomes virtually indistinguishable from a living person. Mori conjectures that this entire phenomenon is due to the uncanny automata resembling the dead rather than the living, our affinity for a corpse normally being much less than our affinity for a living person. Mori maintains that this reduction is intensified when the corpse (or some non-living part of a body, such as a prosthetic hand) moves in a way that we expect only living beings to move. In keeping with these points, Mori identifies automata with zombies at the nadir of the “uncanny valley” (as he christens the decline in affinity). There is an extensive literature on the “uncanny valley” hypothesis, both theoretical and empirical, with some writers supporting the claim and others disputing or modifying it. On the whole, however, the evidence for an effect along these lines seems strong and some version of the hypothesis appears to be widely accepted.

The cross-cultural interest inspired not only by souls, but by zombies and automata, raises several empirical questions about the distribution of these properties, which some reader may wish to explore, possibly setting out his or her findings on this website. These questions would include the following (confining ourselves to genetically and areally distinct traditions, though also allowing for the qualifications enumerated in the article on “Areal Distinctness,” available here): 

1) How widely attested is a belief in soul-body dualism?

2) How widely attested is a belief in ghosts?

3) How widely attested are zombies (in the sense given above)?

4) How widely attested are automata (also in the sense given above)? (This may be split into two questions if the automaton/golem distinction seems significant in light of the data.)

 5) In traditions where ghosts and/or zombies and/or automata (and/or golems) appear, do they regularly appear in a certain order historically (e.g., ghosts, then zombies, then automata) or with characteristic frequency (e.g., a lot of ghosts, but few zombies and very rare automata)?

6) Are there particular historical or social conditions that increase the likelihood that one or more will appear in the relevant cultural tradition?

7) What sorts of stories are told about each group (e.g., are zombies always threatening and automata routinely ambiguous as to whether or not they have inner, subjective experience)?

These and other questions could potentially serve as the basis for an engaging and informative research paper or even part of a dissertation, if only there were some students and faculty in relevant disciplines who had some interest in what makes people similar, instead of focusing all their attention on how groups (putatively) differ.

After reading an earlier version of this blog, Nigel Fabb reminded me that Pascal Boyer had addressed the issue of ghosts and zombies. As Boyer points out, “Zombies are animated corpses,” who do not have “intentions and goals” (Minds Make Societies 94-95). Boyer’s particular focus is on how such imaginative creations preserve all the default properties of the corresponding real objects, except for the one that is explicitly denied. Thus, zombies have all the properties of people—they are solid objects, located in a single place at any one time; they walk in (about) the way people walk, and so on—except they do not “control their own actions” (Religion Explained 73). These points are certainly valid and interesting. But they leave aside the issue of the relative frequency of such imaginative creations as zombies. They also do not touch on the issue of whether the narratives in which such imaginations appear diverge in some systematic way, telling different types of stories. In short, Boyer’s insights raise questions about the functional significance of zombies—as well as ghosts and automata—questions that, like the questions raised by Freud, Mori, and others, may be clarified and perhaps even answered, at least in a preliminary way, through literary study.

A second topic for possible research is the Medea revenge motif, where a mother kills her children to punish their father—a motif most famously associated with Euripides, but which has fascinated later European artists from Seneca to Lars von Trier, as well as postcolonial and minority writers such as Cherríe Moraga (see her 1995 The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea). I was intrigued to read of the motif recurring in Chikamatsu’s Kagekiyo Victorious, despite the fact that “Chikamatsu never read a foreign play, and he knew nothing of the theater outside his country [Japan]” (Keene 1). Does this motif turn up elsewhere? If so, what might explain this?

When we first put together the Literary Universals Project, I had hoped that the website would foster these sorts of suggestions for future research. Finally, I decided that instead of complaining—okay, in addition to complaining–that no one was posting possible topics for research, I would post a couple of possibilities myself.

Works Cited

Boyer, Pascal. Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2018.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion. Ed. Benjamin Nelson. New York: Harper& Row, 1958, 122-161.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. “Emotion Elicitation, Prediction, and Anti-Universalism: Some Prolegomena to Emotional AI.” Plenary presentation for the Conference on Predicting Feeling: Literature, Neuroscience, and AI. Claremont McKenna College, 21 February 2025. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA8TBF908PU .

Keene, Donald. “Introduction.” Major Plays of Chikamatsu. Trans., Donald Keene. New York: Columbis UP, 1990.

Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley.” Trans. Karl MacDorman and Norri Kageki.  IEEE Spectrum (12 June 2012). Available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-uncanny-valley .

Mueller, John, Luca Massaron, and Stephanie Diamond. Artificial Intelligence For Dummies. 3^rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2025. Kindle Edition.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

In previous writing, I have taken pains to stress that the Literary Universals Project concerns descriptive, not normative universals. Thus, articles on the site may discuss universals of ethics. But those universals concern the description of norms, and do not have prescriptive force—just as the articles on religion (e.g., my last blog) address features common to religions, not which God or gods are the right ones. Consistent with these points, in Literature and Moral Feeling, I maintained that different ethical attitudes may be understood first of all as the setting of parameters, regarding some fundamental ethical principles. For example, the “scope parameter” governs who our ethical concerns favor. Basically, there are two values for this parameter. They are, roughly, a setting which prioritizes ethical obligation based or not based on the target’s social proximity to us—due either to a personal bond or to an identity category (usually with a further hierarchization of the former [affection-based relations] over the latter [identity-based relations]). In other words, one fundamental orientation given by this principle would prioritize the interests of relatives and friends over those of strangers, perhaps even excluding strangers from one’s ethical universe. Alternatively, one might not have any such prioritization, treating everyone as having the same ethical worth independent of one’s own emotional or identity-based relation to them. (Insofar as one cannot benefit everyone in the world one might prioritize cases based on such criteria as the urgency of a target’s need or the degree to which one’s aid is likely to be beneficial, but I count these as pragmatic decisions, not as part of one’s fundamental, ethical orientation.) Given the set of fundamental, orientational ethical principles (given by parameter settings), one may further concretize one’s ethical beliefs by specifying those orientational principles through narrative prototypes, such as heroic or romantic narratives. These narrative prototypes include predominant emotions. These emotions also serve to specify the orientational principles and to characterize different “styles” of ethical behavior.

For example, it seems clear then my own style of ethical evaluation is attachment-based, oriented toward romantic and familial narrative prototypes (both of which centrally involve attachment bonds). I am not certain exactly how to categorize Peter Singer’s ethical orientation–either fundamentally, emotionally, or in terms of narrative prototypes. (Given the frequency with which he recurs to cases of famine, hunger may be the motivational impulse that dominates his style of ethical thought, though it may also be grief or grief avoidance, as his examples commonly concern fatalities. Both are associated with narrative prototypes.) But it is fairly clear that it differs from my own. Consider for example Singer’s discussion of what I term the scope parameter. I agree with Singer that within limits we have greater moral obligations to some of those who are close to us than to people who are comparably situated in life but who are not close to us. For example, we have greater obligations to feed our own children than to feed hungry children elsewhere who are strangers to us. Moreover, I largely agree with Singer’s reasoning on this issue. However, some years ago when I discussed this issue in What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion, I relied centrally on a rather different reason (see 236).

The point will be clearer if I return to the example that I used at the time. It’s a standard sort of ethical conundrum used by philosophers in discussing ethical issues. As such, it has the usual problems of such philosophical fictions or anecdotes (e.g., it asks us to assume certainty about outcomes when in real life we would never have such certainty–a point that renders problematic virtually all our intuitions about suitable responses in such circumstances; I have discussed this in Literature and Moral Feeling [see 16 and 53]). Specifically, I took Mengzi’s example of a child who is about to fall into a well and drown an example also taken up by Peter Singer. The dilemma in this case is that by an unfortunate coincidence my own child has fallen into a well at the same time. It is simply stipulated as part of the dilemma that I cannot save both children. The question is–which should I save? (Note that this question arises no matter how one set one’s scope parameter. I have set mine to the egalitarian value, but would favor saving one’s own child in this scenario.) The first thing to say here is that the crucial point is that one needs to save one of the children, not waste time reflecting on fine points of ethical theory. As one’s preference will lie with one’s own child it seems likely that one will be more diligent in pursuing the rescue of one’s own child and thus the one will be more likely to succeed in rescuing one’s own child. In contrast, attempting to rescue the other child may lead one to feel distracted and double-minded, which may in turn inhibit one’s efforts and result in one becoming more likely to fail. The second thing to say here is that whichever choice is better by the lights of some absolute moral theory, we should presumably not blame the parent who rescues his or her own child, especially given the division of labor that assigns the role—of protecting this particular child–to the parent. This is not to say that there are no circumstances in which a parent who saves his or her own child would be blameworthy. For example, having saved one’s own child, one should immediately try to save the other child, even if that appears impossible. A parent who did not do this would be blameworthy. (This is one place where the certainty posited in the “thought experiment” may lead us astray, for we are very unlikely to have absolute certainty that saving both children is impossible.)

Though Singer invokes only the second reason (in an admittedly very different form of the division of labor argument, drawn from Goodin in his case), both seem to me to be the same sort of general, rational reason that Singer does invoke. In contrast, perhaps the most compelling reason for me to favor saving one’s own child in this scenario is very different. Specifically, I imagine the final moments of the two children before they drown. Both are overwhelmed with panic. But one’s own child would also feel a sort of grief at being abandoned by one of his or her primary attachment objects (i.e., his or her parents), thus a sense of rejection bordering on betrayal. When I find this concern the most compelling reason for saving one’s own child, it is an instance of my stylistic preference for attachment-based ethical reasoning. I should also point out that my reasons for preferring one’s own child in cases of this sort is generalizable and does not rely on prioritizing the near and dear over strangers, as such. Rather the reasons I have given–that one is more likely to succeed in saving one’s own child, that the social division of labor assigns one that role implicitly, and that one’s own child is likely to suffer more if one does not try to rescue him or her–do not presuppose that it is in general a superior policy to favor Individuals one likes or with whom one shares an identity category. Indeed, in other situations the same principles could favor the stranger over one’s own child.

In Literature and Moral Feeling, I draw on a range of areally and genetically unrelated literatures in making my arguments about fundamental, ethical orientation, etc. In consequence, I believe these points constitute plausible universals—first, ethical, then literary (due to the presence of ethical concerns in the literatures of various traditions). But note that they are descriptive and not normative universals. In other words, the universal principle is only that people’s moral attitudes evidence these sorts of inclination—specifically, a fundamental orientation, further specified through a preferred emotion and a prototypical narrative structure. Nothing in what I have said implies that my particular ethical preferences are right. Indeed, even if they are shared in great detail across cultures, they do not constitute a normative universal in that it would be possible for a given attitude to be shared even by all people yet still have no moral force. This can be seen by the simple fact that if Nazi propaganda had succeeded and literally everyone adopted fascist beliefs that would not make such beliefs normatively valid.

Of course, to some extent this conclusion is trivial given my contention that there are no objective facts about norms—ethical, aesthetic, or otherwise. If I’m correct, then no maxim has moral force per se. Beliefs only have motivational force for the individuals who hold those beliefs. But we can have rational dialogue about these beliefs, disputing for example the degree to which they are coherent, the degree to which they adopt factual presuppositions that are or are not plausible, and so on. Given this, it does seem possible to marshal evidence of descriptive universality toward the goal of defending a particular normative belief not as correct in and of itself but as common, as shared, across different traditions or cultures. Again, this does not give the belief in question normative force. However, it does give us a way of arguing that “cultural difference” does not constitute a definitive reason for disallowing one’s belief in a particular norm or one’s commitment to that norm. In short, it disables the cultural relativist claim that one’s ethically normative beliefs are rendered invalid by vast differences in culture. The point holds–perhaps even more strongly–if one does indeed accept the objective existence of moral norms, as does Singer (see, for example, “How”). I say this because if norms do indeed have an objective existence, then it seems plausible that there would be some way in which we could find out what those norms are. It also seems plausible that people from different traditions and cultures would all have access to those norms. Thus, the objective norms would be likely to appear among individuals—perhaps a minority of such individuals–in a variety of cultures.

In keeping with these points, then, it seems that literary, ethical, and other universals though descriptive can indeed have bearing on normative principles, whether one holds that moral norms have an objective existence or rejects that belief. Indeed, in One World, Singer does make a case for the normative value of reciprocity based in part on the cross-cultural recurrence of beliefs in the ethical value of reciprocity. Singer notes that “Some aspects of ethics can fairly be claimed to be universal, or very nearly so.” Specifically, he writes that “Reciprocity, at least, seems to be common to ethical systems everywhere” (citing Gouldner 171). He goes on to point out that “the notion of reciprocity may have served as the basis for the “Golden Rule”–treat others as you would like them to treat you [or, alternatively, do not treat others as you would not like them to treat you].” He then points out that, in the decade that preceded his writing of One World, there was “an attempt to draw up a ‘Declaration of a Global Ethic,’ a statement of principles that are universally accepted across all cultures.” As eventually approved, that declaration includes the Golden Rule, identified as “the irrevocable, unconditional [ethical] norm for all areas of life” (quoting from Swidler). This is in keeping with the fact that “the Golden Rule can be found, in differing formulations, in a wide variety of cultures and religious teachings, including, in roughly chronological order, those of Zoroaster, Confucius, Mahavira (the founder of Jainism), the Buddha, the Hindu epic Mahabharata, the Book of Leviticus, Hillel, Jesus, Mohammed, Kant, and many others” (Singer, citing Swidler 19-21).

Something along the lines of the golden rule does then appear to be at least a statistical universal. To have this status it must be in some degree convincing to a range of people across traditions. It does not seem to me however that this convincing quality is a matter of reciprocity. To my ear reciprocity recalls tit for tat behavior–doing unto others as they have done unto you whether that doing is good or ill. Indeed, it seems to me that the golden rule is directly opposed to reciprocity in this sense. (Singer briefly suggests this, when he writes that, by the golden rule, one’s behavior is “not necessarily related to how someone actually has treated you in the past.” But in the same sentence he refers to this as a form of “reciprocity,” which seems to me inconsistent with the qualification just quoted, even allowing for the weakening of that qualification via the phrase, “not necessarily.”) Rather the golden rule seems to me consistent with three inclinations that I see as fundamental to our moral sensibilities—again, across cultures. These are 1) our inclination to form ethical norms which we see as universalizable and exceptionless (ethical conflicts are a problem because both alternatives retain their moral force, so that one must act unethically, no matter what one does); 2) our inclination to empathize with others particularly in their suffering and for that empathy to give rise to motivations, specifically motivations to ameliorate that suffering (I call these “non-egocentric motivations”); 3) our inclination to identify a subset of those non-egocentric, empathic motivations with the ethical norms (of #1) at least insofar as they satisfy further cognitively specified principles of consistency, etc. (e.g., insofar as they satisfy utilitarian or Kantian requirements, depending on our preferred method of determining ethical norms).

I should emphasize once again however that this does not provide evidence for the validity of a particular ethical norm. It merely tells us that advocates of a particular norm–the norm embodied in the golden rule—are likely to find allies in a range of other traditions. Indeed, even if one does not find allies already formed in another society, the ubiquity of the golden rule suggests that some members of other societies are likely to be open to the idea of the golden rule, to be convinced by its arguments in its favor, and so on. Finally, I should say that this does not mean that something like the golden rule is innate. Something like the notion of a moral norm–a universalizable norm that is also exceptionless (in the sense just mentioned)—may be innate, though it may be derivable from principles of rule abstraction and generalization, along with the non-egocentric, but motivated nature of ethics, which I take to be definitional; a type of act (e.g., eating an orange) may be perfectly fine, but it just is not ethics if we act out of self-interest or act randomly. I am more inclined to think that the capacity to empathize spontaneously or effortfully—indeed, the regular practice of empathizing in both ways– is part of of our innate nature. Given these two components however it seems to me that their synthesis–making ethical norms into instances of non-egocentric—thus, empathic–motivation is virtually inevitable in a certain number of cases. The fact that it does not occur in all cases is evidence that the golden rule is not innate per se. However, the components are there and are likely to be synthesized when appropriate circumstances

Future Directions

The implications of the preceding comments for a future study seem straightforward. We should seek other commonalities across genetically and aerially unrelated ethical traditions. This task was facilitated in the case of the golden rule by some close parallels in phrasing which made the commonalities more obvious. Other cases are likely to be more concealed, discoverable only after interpretation of superficially different phrases. This interpretation is almost necessarily culturally nuanced. It seems to be a common belief in culture studies today that culturally sensitive interpretation is virtually guaranteed to show great differences between cultures. I seem to be almost alone in my experience that the more I learned about a culture the more similarities I see between us and them and the fewer significant or “deep” differences I can discern. In any case, acquiring such cultural knowledge and sensitivity should not discourage us. Not only is it instrumentally valuable in revealing ethical universals; it also constitutes a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

I suspect that there are many different ethically normative tendencies that re-appear (with variations) across traditions, just as there are different ethically normative tendencies that appear in Western ethical tradition. But I should stress once again that, though the content of these will be normative–that is after all the point–they will nonetheless be descriptive universals. Indeed, insofar as they are incompatible with one another we could not take them all to be normative as that would lead us to commit ourselves to contradictory “ethical” behaviors. I rather suspect that we will find for the most part the usual alternatives for moral adjudication that we find in our own culture. Of course these will be formulated differently, just as different forms of consequentialism or deontology are formulated differently in the West. Moreover, those differences in formulation are likely to be significant and indeed valuable, for they are likely to give us different perspectives on fundamental issues in ethics—again, as we find with different theories in the West. But at the same time recognizing the universality of at least some fundamental beliefs about normative ethics (and, again, I suspect that “some” greatly understates the case) will reassure us that it is indeed possible to engage in productive, rational dialogue across and not only within cultural traditions. Indeed, I suspect that, if we are able to set aside our (largely content-neutral) biases derived from in- versus out-group divisions, we will find that we are no less likely to reach fundamental agreement with members of alien cultures than with members of our own. Indeed, this may ultimately lead us to realize that, in many ways, we are not  justified in our unreflective categorization of one culture as “alien” and another as “our own.”

See also Peter Singer’s response.

WORKS CITED

Goodin, Robert. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Gouldner, Alvin. “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement.” American Sociological Review 25.2 (1960): 161-178.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative, and Empathy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2022

Hogan, Patrick Colm. What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Singer, Peter. “How I Changed My Mind About Objective Morality.” Interview from The Institute of Art and Ideas. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn2dT9Lrko4&t=16s .

Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Unpaginated Kindle Edition.

Swidler, Leonard, ed. For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. Ashland, OR: White Cloud P, 1999.

LITERARY UNIVERSALS WEBLOG: A series of informal observations and conjectures aimed at fostering more reflection on and discussion about cross-cultural patterns in literature. 

Patrick Colm Hogan, University of Connecticut

Since we revived the Literary Universals Project in 2016, I’ve been expecting, and hoping, to receive an article on literature and religion. This is not only because the topic is intrinsically interesting, but also because the data are complicated in a way that I believe illustrates some of the challenges that face the study of literary universals. I am very far from an expert in the field. However, cognizant of the relative informality allowed by a blog post, I finally decided that I should just go ahead and treat some of the material that I am familiar with, in the hope that this will inspire other writers, with greater depth and breadth of knowledge, to extend or correct my comments. To give a rough idea of what should be included here, I count something as literary if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients in part for the experience of emotions, whether those be suspense, wonder at beauty, empathic love, or something else. I count something as religious if it is read, watched, or listened to by a significant body of recipients because they believe that it communicates truths—including moral truths–that transcend mundane, human life.

To Start: A Small Point About Starting Points

Writers who argue that there are literary universals are often accused of Eurocentrism. That is probably often the case, though not necessarily in the morally objectionable sense of “Eurocentrism.” For example, writers raised and educated in Western societies often start out making use of the emotion concepts of their native language. I don’t see this as a problem, as long as emotion concepts from other languages are also included in the research program eventually and as long as researchers are sensitive to contravening evidence regarding their own-language concepts. My assumption would be that, if an emotion concept names an emotion that people in one culture experience, then it is probably an emotion that some people in other cultures do—or at least could–also experience. Conversely, if the concept is problematic when a researcher seeks to apply it to other societies, that probably suggests a problem with its application to his or her own society as well. For example, a common view of romantic love in the U.S. appears to be that it is “true love” only if it is eternal. In some other societies, researchers might have difficulty finding cases of true love, conceived in this way, as common conceptions of romantic love view it as ephemeral and those conceptions are likely to affect the ways in which people report their emotions. But it would actually be difficult to find “true love” in the U.S. also. Attachment or companionate love can be enduring, and seems to occur everywhere in an enduring form (e.g., parents do not stop loving their children after a certain interval). But “romantic love lasts between twelve and eighteen months” (Fisher 100) “True love” is as non-existent in the U.S. as elsewhere. We learn this when we begin to research “true love,” rather than assuming, for culturalist reasons, that we have it and other people don’t. In this way, having multiple, (temporarily) culture-“centric” starting points should only enrich our study of universals, rather than limiting it.

In any event, whatever my unself-conscious presuppositions may be, and however European they may be, this issue does not usually arise with my self-conscious adoption of models. Specifically, my explicit model for a given form of cross-cultural literary study is more likely to be Indian than European. This is in part a result of personal interest, and in part a matter of having learned about Indian literature through explicit study, rather than implicit assimilation. What is most important, however, is that in many respects, Indian literature and Indian religion—or, perhaps, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion—seem often more finely differentiated and more comprehensive than the parallel cultural forms in other traditions.

By “finely differentiated,” I mean having clear, systematic definitions for key concepts. By “comprehensive,” I mean having a logically complete set of key concepts. For example, in religious philosophy, Indic traditions of ontology may be organized by reference to a few basic principles, which are subjected to systematic variation, yielding a set of logical alternatives. If we begin with the distinction between spirit and matter (puruṣa and prakṛti in Sanskrit), and that between monism and dualism, the logical possibilities are as follows: Dualism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist; in the Indian tradition, this is the Sāṃkhya school (see Grimes 282-283). Monism: only puruṣa exists; this is Advaita Vedānta (see Grimes 15). Monism: only praṛkti exists; this is Cārvāka (see Grimes 102). Monism: both puruṣa and prakṛti exist, but they are not distinct from one another (e.g., to use current philosophical terminology, they are two aspects of the same [single] reality); this is “Absolute Monism” (see Pandit 45; see also Dmitrieva). The only remaining possibility is that neither exists. I am not sure that I know what such a claim means. But it is very reminiscent of the Buddhist idea that everything is śūnyatā or the void (see Grimes 305).  In effect, this covers all the schools of early Indic metaphysics, and indeed all possible schools defined by these premises. That breadth is what makes Indian metaphysics perhaps uniquely “comprehensive,” as I just put it. The explicit, well-specified definitions of each school are what make it “finely differentiated.”

Comprehensiveness and fine differentiation as found in Indian traditions here have two consequences that are worth drawing out. First, all societies that have some practice of the relevant kind (here, they all have an ontology, or several—disputed–ontologies). As such, they must take up at least one of the possibilities set out in the early Indian scheme. Second, the existence of all the logical possibilities in India entails that there is not some general principle of cultural uniformity that prevents different people in a given society from believing distinct metaphysics or any one person from changing his or her mind. (On common assumptions about cultural uniformity, and some reasons why they are misguided–see Moody-Adams).

Actually, there is one significant aspect of ontology that is not explicitly separated out in Indian metaphysics, at least not early on. That is just where one should locate the mind. In Sāṃkhya, the mind is prakṛti. In the West, it has more usually fallen under the category of puruṣa. This is the sort of difference that can be very productive intellectually for both groups when they interact with one another and are thereby faced with contradictions between their assumptions and those common in the other society. Of course, our topic here is religious literature, not ontology, but the same basic principles apply.

From the Vedas to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇas

The most ancient, sacred texts of Hinduism are the Vedas. The first part of the Vedas, called “Saṃhitā,” meaning “collection” (Feuerstein 254), includes a range of hymns or poems. Within the Indian tradition, these are exemplary cases of religious literature. As such they have a number of characteristics that suggest possible candidates for universals of religious literature. Here are some:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural).
• These scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals.
• Such works frequently include allusions to myths, legends, and/or historical events.
• These canonical literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which some verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals.
• The collection of such works includes praise of deities and petition for benefits from them (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall; see 5.83, pp. 172-174 of O’Flaherty).

Of these, petitionary prayer and hymns of praise are the functionally-defined categories of religious verse or, more broadly, religious literature that are most obviously candidates for universality. They are both pervasive in Christianity. Thus, we find both in such standardized prayers as the “Our Father.” Poems of praise are to be found throughout the psalms, which are Jewish in origin, but have become part of Christian religious literature as well. These functions are clearly not confined to the verses that are themselves part of the religion’s textual canon (parallel to the Vedic hymns). They appear also in works written by later authors in a literary context that is not specifically religious. For example, John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” is a (highly innovative) petitionary verse. As to presence in ritual, even a cursory look at the Catholic mass shows the presence of both types of literary speech (i.e., celebratory and petitionary). There has certainly been interpretive and scholarly commentary on the parts of the bible that we are likely to count as literature, though such attention is hardly confined to the poetic parts of that book.

Beyond Hinduism and Christianity, Gerstenberger discusses the presence of both forms of poetry in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hebrew verse. Moreover, he connects these functions with religious ritual (see 86-87). In addition, he isolates further characteristics of some religious literature, such as “confession of guilt” (83). This is of course an important feature of Christian tradition, and appears as part of the sacrificial story structure (see “Story”), which I will leave aside, having discussed story genres at length elsewhere (see chapter six of The Mind and Its Stories and chapter three of Affective Narratology). Gerstenberger goes on to refer to ritually-embedded petitionary prayer in the Americas as well, citing Navajo practice (85).

In Orthodox Islam, the Qur’ān is seen not only as the divinely revealed truth, but as the ne plus ultra of aesthetic excellence–thus, in effect, the greatest poetry (though believers would not phrase it this way). For example, Allen notes that “miraculous qualities” were “attributed to its style” (52). Despite this, for historical reasons, one of its surahs (the twenty-sixth) treats poets as deceptive and dangerous enemies of Islam. This makes the nature and use of poetry in Islam particularly complex. At the same time, however, I believe the aestheric status of the Qur’ān gives us license to count virtually any part of it as literature, as marked by the aesthetic qualities of verbal art. This, in turn, suggests a small but significant revision of the first candidate universal, which should now read as follows:

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works—often, poems—as central, canonical texts (thus as scriptural). Sacred texts may also incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse.

This makes sense in part because there is no clear reason why, as a general rule, religions would canonize a particular body of verse. The revised version indicates that a spiritually elevated text would be associated with various sorts of excellence, including aesthetic excellence, and that there are different ways of accomplishing this—through a focally aestheticized part or through a more diffusely aestheticized whole. This also suggests a revision of our second possible universal, which might now read as follows:

• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.

Here, too, the most obvious reason for the connection is that ritual—like canonical texts—is pre-eminent for its spiritual and moral excellence. As the most excellent of all excellences (from the religious point of view), one might reasonably view it as subsuming other excellences, including those that are aesthetic.

Continuing for the moment with Islam, it is unsurprising that praise of Allāh is pervasive in the Qur’ān. Petitionary appeals seem to be infrequent, perhaps due to the philosophical problems with petitionary prayer in monotheisms (see, for example, Davison). Even so, requests aimed at God are not absent. The Qur’ān begins “Praise be to Allāh, the Lord of the worlds” (Ali 1.1). It continues, “Thee do we beseech for help/Guide us on the right path” (Ali 1.4-5). Given that the Qur’ān, even more than the Vedic hymns, constitutes the centerpiece of its religion, it is unsurprising that it has been subjected to widespread analysis. This prominently includes the presentation of background, completing stories that are presented in only fragmentary, elliptical, allusive fashion, as with the Vedic hymns. It is also unsurprising that the Qur’ān figures in Islamic ritual—most obviously in the profession of faith and in the daily prayers required of Muslims (though, again, it is not so much the specific text as the broader aestheticization that seems crucial here).

Of the major written traditions, I have not yet mentioned those in China. China is an unusual case as the dominant belief systems in the society have downplayed ideas of divinity, relying principally on the relatively abstract and impersonal ideas, such as Tiān or Heaven. In some ways, Heaven has the same functions as the concept of God in the monotheistic religions. For example, the Tiāndào or Way of Heaven is the morally right path. That morally right path underwrites the sorts of social hierarchy that are often underwritten by “divine command” elsewhere, as when the Tiāndào is invoked to support filial piety (xiào), just as divine command is invoked to support “Honor[ing] thy father and thy mother” in the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments.

More precisely, the dominant religious orientations in China have been, first, Rú Jiā (“Confucianism”), associated with the sage, Kǒngzǐ (“Confucius”), followed by Dàoism, associated with the sage, Lǎozǐ. These are later joined by Buddhism. The foundational text of Dàoism is the Dàodéjīng, a highly poetic work, which certainly satisfies our aesthetic hypothesis (#1). It has also generated a sizable set of explications, along the lines suggested by other traditions. (For example, influential commentaries by Heshang Gong [2^nd Century C.E.] and Cheng Xuanying [7^th Century C.E.] are readily available in English.)

As to petitionary prayer, the different religious schools are not so mutually exclusive as the Middle Eastern monotheisms. In consequence, “According to individual needs and circumstances, lay persons may . . . address prayers and petitions indifferently to Dàoist, Buddhist, or popular deities” (Pregadio). On the other hand, neither petitionary prayer nor praise of a deity appears to be a common use of Dàoist or Confucian literature. Indeed, it does not appear to be a common use of religious literature in much of Buddhism either. This relative paucity of both genres seems likely to be a function of the degree to which the religions teach that important goals can—indeed, must–be achieved by the efforts of individual aspirants alone, as opposed to those that assert the centrality of something along the lines of divine grace. The Chinese religious philosophies tend to stress individual effort. Something like divine grace does become more prominent with Mahāyāna Buddhism, where the need for the beneficence of a bodhisattva is evident. This is particularly salient in Pure Land Buddhism, which is important for us as it guides a number of Chinese and Japanese literary works that are religious in their themes, though they are not themselves scriptural. A striking example is Zeami’s Atsumori in which the main character calls on the Amida Buddha to bring him and his enemy into the Pure Land where they may overcome their antipathy and reach enlightenment together. Even so, Mahāyāna Buddhism does generally maintain a commitment to personal effort as a key factor in achieving enlightenment. Perhaps in consequence, it seems fairly common for Buddhist literary works to suggest the benefits of Buddhist equanimity—rather than, say, appealing to a bodhisattva for spiritual aid. For example, a Buddhist poet, such as Wáng Wéi (8^th-Century China), may seek to convey the emotional results of a Buddhist sensibility through the depiction of the peacefulness of the speaker’s relation to nature. Other prominent examples of this sort may be found in the poetry of Bashō (17^th-Century Japan).

Of the East Asian religions, perhaps the most interesting, for our purposes, is Rú Jiā, due to the unusual way in which it conforms to these cross-cultural patterns. First, it does develop a central canon of religious poetry. Indeed, the Classic of Poetry (Shījīng) is so important to Rú Jiā that Confucian scholars were expected to memorize the 305 poems it contains. What is surprising here is that so many of the poems evidently deal with secular matters, such as love affairs. These are recruited to religious purposes through the extensive commentaries that turn evidently irreligious or at least non-religious poems into coded treatments of religious topics, principally morals. Thus, the Classic of Poetry includes the features we have been considering. However, it shapes this collection of poetry into a religious canon, not only—perhaps not even primarily–through the straightforward, intuitive meanings of the poems, but through self-consciously counter-intuitive reinterpretations of these poems.

As to the genres of the poetry, praise appears often enough. However, it is not praise of Heaven, but praise of morally exemplary individuals. This is what one would expect from a tradition that depersonalizes the usual, anthropomorphic divine beings. Tiān is, after all, a somewhat odd target for eulogizing. On the other hand, the narratives of exemplary individuals constitute another cross-cultural pattern in religious literature. We might then formulate a sixth candidate universal as follows:

• Stories of morally exemplary figures, often life stories, are frequently part of the set of sacred writings or at least have a sort of semi-canonical status for the religion. (In referring to “semi-canonical” works, I have in mind the model of śruti and smṛti in Hinduism; the former comprises eternal, revealed works, while the latter includes the most highly regarded, but still corrigible texts that originated at a particular time and place as the product of a human author.)

When possible, the morally exemplary subjects of such biographies are both divine and human or, if only human, are uniquely associated with the divine world. Thus, another Hindu scripture—more popular and more widely revered than the Vedas—is the Rāmāyaṇa, the exemplary life of the incarnation of the god, Viṣṇu, as Rāma. The point is no less obvious in the case of Christianity, where each gospel is a life of the morally exemplary divine incarnation, Jesus. The attention to the culminating prophet, Muḥammad, in Islam is similar. While not divine, Muḥammad is as close as a human comes to that status. For believers, his life represents the Sunnah or correct path; it stands as “the authoritative example of the way a Muslim should live” (Waines 288). This path (of Muḥammad’s life) appears somewhat elliptically in the canonical Ḥadîth and more fully in ibn Isḥâq’s (8^th-Century C.E.) Life of God’s Messenger, a work of nearly scriptural status. The life of the Buddha is exemplary also, without there being any particularly canonized or near canonized version, as far as I am aware—though there are works esteemed as part of the relevant literary canons, such as Aśvaghoṣa’s Sanskrit drama, The Life of the Buddha. We also find exemplar-defining works recounting the lives of the Christian saints and lives of the Jain Elders (e.g., by Hemacandra).

It seems to be the case that the exemplary biographies must frequently resolve moral inconsistencies, conflicts between the way people act—or even the way gods are imagined to act—and the moral idealization demanded by the genre. As Barrett points out, we imagine gods  in much the same way we imagine people, though we may deny this when asked (see chapter eight of Barrett). Barrett does not extend this to our moral imagination, but the stories themselves would seem to suggest that such an extension is warranted. Consider the Fall of humankind. Referring to Paradise Lost, the esteemed literary critic, William Empson, observed that God “kills Adam and Eve and all their descendants for eating an apple,” which is the sort of behavior we would expect from “a merciless tyrant” (Leonard xxv, summarizing Empson), not the morally ideal agent. Of course, Milton’s poem is non-canonical (i.e., not part of scripture). But parallel points apply to many acts in canonical scriptures as well. Religious authorities must in some way deal with this problem. Sometimes, the canonical version just eliminates the offensive act (though we can know this only if an original including the act has been preserved). In narratological terms, this would involve rectifying the ethics of the work at the level of the story. When present in the story, the problematic act may be backgrounded, perhaps recounted diffusely, so that it requires effortful, self-conscious inference. In this way, a sort of ethical resolution is produced through discourse, the way the story is told. The Confucian approach accomplishes its purposes a bit differently, altering the standard interpretation rather than the story or the discourse (for examples, see Cai; actually all traditions adopt a number of strategies, but in varying proportions). Hindu traditions offer yet another another form of this ethical rectification by in effect placing an interpretation of the act in the story (through a character) or by way of discourse (through a narrator). For example, this occurs with some of Rāma’s more morally objectionable acts, such as abandoning his wife. In the context of the Rāmāyaṇa itself, it is clear that the mistreatment of Sītā has its source in patriarchal structure. In consequence,  the ethical contradictions that concern this mistreatment are not simply character flaws in Rāma, but are a reflection of the patriarchal structure and associated sexism and misogyny of the society. In this way, the ethical contradictions in any religious literature may derive from the politics of the society, rather than the psychology of the hero or heroine.

Leaving aside Gerstenberger’s reference to Navajo religion, the preceding comments have been confined to major world religions. Nonetheless, the cases we have considered do suggest the plausibility of a claim that the following tendencies are at least statistical universals of religious literature.

• A religion will frequently include a body of literary works (often, poems) as central, canonical—thus scriptural–texts (oral or written). Sacred texts also tend to incorporate the sorts of aesthetic features that are prominent in verse. (These scriptural works of verbal art should be distinguished from religious works of verbal art that have no scriptural status.)
• Scriptural literary works typically are or come to be part of religious rituals. Alternatively, rituals adopt some of the same aesthetic principles, thereby producing further scriptural literary works.
• Religious literary works frequently allude to myths, legends, or historical events, in effect presupposing the reader’s or listener’s familiarity with those works.
• Canonical, literary works become the objects of extensive interpretation. Such interpretations sometimes involve scholarly background (e.g., filling in mythological stories to which verses allude elliptically), sometimes textual explication, sometimes explanation of the rituals. In other words, the scriptural works of verbal art come to be embedded in traditions of commentary. Moreover, the commentaries may be incompatible with one another and with the most obvious, literal interpretation of the texts.
• Scriptural, literary works—and, to a great extent, non-canonized religious literary works also—often praise deities and petition them for benefits (e.g., adequate, but not excessive rainfall). While the praise is usually explicit, the petitionary purpose may be expressed indirectly, unless it is aimed at specifically spiritual or moral benefit (thus, some version of grace).
• Canonical religious story literature commonly recounts a religion’s myths.
• One particularly important genre of scriptural or near-scriptural story literature recounts the life of some moral exemplar.
• The fashioning of morally exemplary lives often involves reconciling human fallibility with the idealization that is required by the genre. In addition, it is likely to require the reconciliation of an unethical, ideological bias with moral or religious principles that contradict it (see, for example, the arguments used in the Bhagavad Gita in support of war). Such reconciliation may be achieved by changing (bowdlerizing) the relevant texts, changing the interpretation of those texts, or rationalizing the moral failings of the exemplar.

I imagine that some of these points (e.g., the importance of praise and petition) carry over to a range of orally transmitted religions, while others (e.g., the expanding corpus of commentaries) might be confined to highly literate societies. But I will have to leave those issues for another time (and probably another author).

Bhakti

It is important to turn now to a form of religious feeling that has been highly productive and is one source of much literature that has been both popular for spiritual reasons and esteemed for its aesthetic accomplishments. In an Indian context, this is referred to as literature of “bhakti,” which is usually translated as “devotion.” Bhakti is not the emotion of the poet who petitions Indra, an anthropomorphic deity who rules over the anthropomorphic Hindu pantheon and who might be prevailed upon to produce rain. Rather, it is a feeling of intense longing, a feeling that one’s well-being is wholly dependent on achieving and sustaining a close connection with the object of devotion—whether Viṣṇu as the warrior Rāma, or Viṣṇu as baby Kṛṣṇa, or the Goddess as a protective slayer of demons. In short, it is love. The bhakta or devotee may love the deity as one loves a romantic partner—as is most common in literature–or as one loves a parent, or one’s child, or a dear friend.  We find examples of each sort in Indian literature.

This is not unique to South Asia, though the emphasis on romantic love is even more pronounced in other traditions. Most obviously, we find it in the mystical poets of Christianity and Islam. The former include such figures as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Lamenting the relative neglect of these writers today, Housden pleads that “we [Christians] too have our great love songs to God, our cries of longing, our sorrows of separation, our bliss of union” (xvii; see Housden for a selection of Christian mystical poetry also). In the mystical branch of Islam, Ṣūfī writers sometimes employed allegory to convey their unorthodox views. The allegory was regularly one of romantic love. For example, Nizami’s great narrative poem, Layla and Majnun, represents Majnun’s passionate longing for spiritual union with Allāh indirectly as Majnun’s passionate longing for romantic union with Layla.

But there is a difficulty here. The clear cases of religious bhakti literature are found almost entirely in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Perhaps the earliest examples of such poetry are to be found in Judaism (“The Song of Songs”) and Hinduism (e.g., in the Kṛṣṇabhakti sections of the Bhagavad Gītā). Ṣūfism was influenced by Hinduism, and Christian mysticism was influenced by Ṣūfism. Due to such influence (“areal contamination,” as it is sometimes called), we cannot feel confident that these three cases point to a universal feature of religious literature (in the technical sense of universal). On the other hand, we almost certainly need to loosen this linguistic criterion in the case of literature (see the section on areal contact in “What are Literary Universals?”). In any event, given the degree of contact between these three religions and other religious traditions, we are left to wonder why a form of sacred poetry so enthusiastically embraced from India to Spain seems not to have inspired similar devotion on the part of Confucians, Buddhists, and others.

One possible explanation begins with the nature of the emotion at issue. No matter which analogy best fits the poet’s feelings—spousal, parental, or filial love or close friendship—a central component of those feelings is attachment care. Though prototypically associated with the bonding of parents and small children, attachment is a key component of romantic love and deep, enduring friendship as well. One peculiarity of attachment as an emotion system is that it takes individual persons as its targets. Most emotions are elicited by any member of a class of objects. While it is possible to be afraid of one particular wolf and not others, we are usually wary of all wolves. In contrast, a toddler is likely to be attached to his or her own mother, not everyone who shares the property of being a mother, and similarly the mother is attached to her own child.

Understanding this fact about attachment might lead us to hypothesize that attachment relations to a deity would be marked by two features. First, the attachment object should be singular. Second, that target should be distinguished by individuating characteristics. After all, the toddler identifies his or her mother, and rejects substitutes; he or she must be able to distinguish one from the other—by scent, voice, and so on. These two features of attachment would seem to suggest that the members of monotheistic religions might be more open to a bhakti orientation, at least insofar as that religion imagines the deity to be distinctively personified. In the technical terminology of the study of universals, this would constitute an hypothesis of a typological and statistical universal (see “What are Literary Universals?”), an hypothesis that literatures of a certain type—here, religious literatures associated with a monotheistic religion–are (statistically) more likely to develop works expressing a bhakti-like passionate emotion for God, modeled particularly on romantic love.

At least, as a simple, first approximation, this seems to fit the data reasonably well. Various forms of Christianity clearly share these characteristics. In consequence, it is unsurprising to find an emphasis on devotional love in some of its literature and at least lip service to love in its general teaching. Islam too fits here in being monotheistic. In orthodox Islam, Allāh is rather minimally personified, but He is given a voice and some traits through the Qur’ān. On the other hand, Ṣūfī mysticism—often considered heretical in orthodox Islam—is perhaps the form of bhakti-based religious poetry and prose that involves the most elaborate creation of individual characters to allegorize the mystic’s relation to God. We see this in, for example, Niẓāmī’s development of the spiritual allegory of Laila and Majnun, or in some elements of ‘Aṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds (also mystical allegories), and in the dense metaphors of Rūmī’s poetry. We find a similar situation in Judaism—a monotheism with a rather minimally personified deity. Jewish tradition does include the early “Song of Songs,” a love poem commonly interpreted as an allegory for the relation between the Jewish people and God (see Jerusalem 991). In keeping with this, Harold Bloom sees the poem as influencing St. John of the Cross (see 221-222). Still, given the way in which Ṣūfī mystical poetry  developed, we might expect to find more bhakti-like literary work in unorthodox writings of Judaism—perhaps, for example, those influenced by Kabbalah.

Given that the other clear cases are all monotheisms, one might wonder how India became such an important source of bhakti-based literature. But, in fact, Hinduism has a monotheistic structure, albeit of an unusual type. It refers to an array of “gods.” However, the anthropomorphic court of Indra is not of the same ontological type as the “Trinity” of Brahma, Viṣṇu, and Śiva. Moreover, for many Hindu theologians—indeed, virtually all those who follow the Vedāntic principles of the Upaniṣads—the supreme deity (e.g., Mahāviṣṇu) encompasses even the Trinity. Finally, in the case of Vaiṣṇavites (devotees of Viṣṇu), this supreme deity has been incarnated and thus given a wealth of personifying characteristics, as both a child and an adult. On the other hand, the ultimate unity of the divine in philosophical Hinduism is not so much a monotheism of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sort as monism, an assertion that every soul is ultimately one in that divine being (who is, in this respect, commonly referred to as brahman). This division in personification is given a name in Hinduism—that between devotion to a deity “with properties” (saguna) or as absolute, thus “without properties” (nirguna; see Feuerstein 201-202 and 247-248).

This may at first appear to pose a problem. However, it fits the mystical analogy with romantic love perfectly. The longing of the bhakta for God in both Hindu and non-Hindu religious literature is not a longing to set up a home and have children, or to enjoy any worldly benefit. It is, rather, a longing to be one with the beloved, to be united in such a way as to overcome the sometimes unbearable isolation of being a conscious self. Mysticism could be conceived of as a sort of therapy for the existential loneliness of consciousness (a point I have discussed elsewhere; see chapter six of Personal Identity and Literature, and “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of Consciousness”). As such, it is certainly not confined to monotheisms. However, the development of a carefully personified single, potentially all-encompassing deity may facilitate the literary development of mysticism.

Future Directions

The implications of all this for future research on universals of religious literature are fairly straightforward. Here are a few possible directives, based on the preceding analyses.

• Evaluate hypotheses 1-8 by reference to as wide a range of orally (as opposed to chirographically) maintained and local (as opposed to world) religions as possible. This may include further specifications of the hypotheses (e.g., as to whether the same sorts of goods are requested in petitionary prayer across cultures and whether there is any pattern when they diverge).
• Consider historical factors as well. I have treated the world religions almost as if they were timeless. That may work well enough for petition and praise (of which human beings never seem to tire). But the bhakti-based literature was not always a prominent part of religious literature; its proliferation occurred during certain periods. Why was that?
• Systematically examine the division between an emphasis on grace and an emphasis on individual effort, addressing its implications for the features and purposes of religious literature.
• Systematically consider if there is any necessary connection between bhakti-based literature and the sort of religious counterculture that is so evident in certain forms of Ṣūfism. More generally, we need further exploration of the political dimensions of bhakti and mysticism.
• Systematically explore the relation between religion and attachment, which seems to be virtually unconsidered. This might include such specific sub-topics as the place of bhakti-like literature in the Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah, which the preceding analysis suggests would be likely to include such literature.

Addendum. Rather on a whim, I decided I would take maybe an hour to see what I could find that bears on the final point about Kabbalah. Within about five minutes, I came upon a virtual treasure trove of mystical poetry of eros, due to Cole’s valuable collection. Like Christian, Muslim, and Hindu writers, many poets of this tradition do indeed draw on the model of romantic love to express and convey the poet’s devotion to God.

Works Cited

Abhinavagupta. Tantrasāra. Translation and commentaries by B. N. Pandit. Varanasi, India: Indian Mind, 2020.

Ali, Maulana Muḥammad. The Holy Qur’ān: Arabic Text, English Translation and Commentary. 2^nd ed. Columbus, OH Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, Inc., 1995.

Allen, Roger. An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Barrett, Justin. Cognitive Science, Religion, and Philosophy: From Human Minds to Divine Minds. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton P, 2011.

Bloom, Harold. The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2011.

Cai, Zong-qi. “Poetry and Ideology: The Canonization of the Book of Poetry (Shijing) During the Han.” How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Poetic Culture from Antiquity Through the Tang. Ed. Zong-qi Cai.New York: Columbia UP, 2018, 65-77. Kindle Edition.

Cole, Peter, ed. and trans. The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse of the Jewish Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012.

Davison, Scott A. “Petitionary Prayer.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Available online at https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/petitionary-prayer/ .

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