Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 228
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social practices take a specific turn at the civilizational level.”41 One way to
describe the limitations of the romantic and humanistic interpretations is
that they give the ideological sphere too much independence from the
political and economic spheres of the social world, by analyzing the moral
constellations in abstraction from social structures of wealth and power.
From this viewpoint of civilizational analysis, the major limitation of
sociological interpretations is, to the contrary, their tendency to see the
ideological sphere as a too passive reflection of the political and economic
spheres of the social world. Structural and functionalist perspectives of
sociological analyses tend to reduce morality to a function of social pro
cesses. As a consequence, human actions in the sagas are not interpreted in
the light of moral characteristics but as manifestations of material and soci
etal interests perpetuated by the social system.
In the conceptual framework of Jóhann Páll Árnason’s civilizational
analysis, this limitation amounts to a neglect of the ideological sphere, a
disregard of the “constellations of meaning” that play a major role in any
worldview or articulation of society. In his theory, Jóhann Páll draws upon
the implications of Castoriadis’ analysis of the imagination for social theo
ry. “At the most fundamental level, social imaginary significations set up an
ontological framework: ‘every society defines and develops an image of the
natural world of the universe in which it lives’.”42 In the words of Alfred
north Whitehead: “Without metaphysical presupposition there can be no
civilization.”43 If this is correct, one must ask which metaphysical presup
positions are behind the civilization in the Icelandic free State. Surely, “the
ideology of honour”, as vésteinn ólason has described it,44 has metaphysi
cal elements which require careful textual analysis and need to be placed in
the social context portrayed in the text. the notion of fate is a good candi
date for this.
As is to be expected, views on the role of fate in the saga narrative dif
fer radically in the different hermeneutical grids of scholars. for kristján
kristjánsson, fate serves as this metaphysical underpinning in the sagas.
kristján has been critical of interpretations of saga morality such as my
41 jóhann Páll Árnason, Civilizations in Dispute, 207.
42 Ibid., 227. jóhann quotes Castoriadis.
43 this is the motto of Árnason’s book, Civilizations in Dispute.
44 vésteinn ólason, Dialogues with the Viking Age, 226.