Traditions and Transitions*

This is a time, it would seem, when whirl is king. The vast complexity of the world overwhelms us not because it is so ponderous but because it changes so rapidly. Now this, now that: baffling us by its unprecedented surprises, confusing our purposes by constantly undermining our assumptions and scattering our efforts into a thousand unconnected gestures. We are no longer sure who we are nor why. Or so it often seems, and the more so the more we find ourselves struggling with the fundamentals of life, with matters of birth and development and death, of the meaning of our dreams and the significance of our deeds.

Let me explore these questions in the pages that follow.

I

The traditional role of a cultural tradition is to provide us with the resources we need to stave off the rule of whirl. It provides us with a way of taking things so that they do not surprise or overwhelm. It tells us what to expect and why, even when what is to be expected is some overwhelming surprise, some fundamental challenge to our hopes, our purposes, our havings, and our doings. Our tradition wraps us in a world that discloses itself for us in ways we can comprehend and with which we can therefore cope.

We never experience things; we always experience them as something. We take the distant patch of dark as trees, the whispered words as a friend's advice, the lump as cancerous, the war as a vindication of our national destiny. This structure is triune: a given, something else able to serve as a sign of it, an interpreter who takes the sign as meaning that given. The philosopher C. S. Peirce (1934/1960) calls this “thirdness” and says it is the necessary condition