The "Nostalgia for Paradise" in Mircea Eliade’s quest for Homo Religiosus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines Mircea Eliade's treatment of the problem of religion and modernity. It shows how his effort to grasp the meaning of religion for modern man is a hermeneutical procedure which opposes reductionism and is essentially humanistic. It demonstrates that he aims to awaken the religious sensitivity of his contemporaries through a study of premodern religious behavior that avoids the clichés and categories of the Western rationalist tradition, This demonstration divides his thought into four areas; first, his polemic against reductionism, second, his non-reductionistic method of interpreting religious phenomena, third, his description of homo religiosus by reference to transhistorical structures, and, fourth, his plan to change modern spirituality through a recovery of archaic religious awareness. The point of this thesis is to underline a certain nostalgia for the life of archaic man in Eliade's hermeneutics, but not an unhealthy one. It is a nostalgia for the origins of man's present situation, the essential condition which precedes actual human existence. It discloses itself in Eliade's quest for homo religiosus, which does not aim to return modern man to a mode of being lived in objective archaic history, but rather seeks to initiate him into a new spiritual awareness through the rediscovery of the archaic modality in himself. This rediscovery is the starting point for a new humanism, a philosophical anthropology that can grasp the unity of the species at its highest level, which is, for Eliade, the religious level. His hermeneutics is thus a spiritual exercise itself, of which the "nostalgia for paradise" is a constituent element. An examination of this fact reveals the nature of Eliade's approach to the problem of religion and modernity, and contributes greatly to an understanding of his thought as a whole.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".