Responsibility Prompts: A Global-Critical Philosophical Approach to Ancestor Regard

Whether or not we can agree with Herbert Spencer (1877) that all religion springs from ancestor worship, it’s at least clear that relations with ancestors are important concerns in most religious cultures. But can modern philosophers of religion take ancestor regard seriously? This paper seeks to clarify the “ancestor” field of religious reference and proposes a new framing of its ideal significance.

The term “ancestor veneration” (better than “ancestor worship”) covers a wide range of prescribed practices, from obeisance at a shrine to pouring a libation whenever one takes a drink; the still broader notion of “ancestor regard” can cover all serious ways of relating to forerunners, including raising one’s voice in everyday conversation so that dead relatives can hear (rural Madagascar) and secular memorializations of past political leaders (Presidents’ Day in the U.S.). Across cultures it’s apparent that the “ancestors” category can accommodate all sorts of founders, not just genealogical forebears (Newell 1976), so that ancestor regard can provide crucial support for supratribal and supranational communities.

While ancestor regard has an emotional base in feelings for dead relatives, often the apparent purpose of ancestor reference is not to maintain a personal relationship but to make a moral or political or religious point with reference to a community’s standards or prospects. Thus a Euro-American Christian might touch base with immigrant great-grandparents in a family history context but with George Washington as “the father of our country” in another context and with "father Abraham" in yet another.

In global-critical philosophical inquiry we seek reasons that can be given for and against views (on the basis of robust description and methodical comparison of related views) and for our own positive or negative evaluation of them (Knepper 2023). Views that offer decisive life interpretation will be of prime philosophical interest. The sweet spots of reflective satisfaction that we discover in our philosophical progress will most likely be in line with what we find to be tenable general models of religious meaningfulness. So, in the present case, after reconnoitering expressions of ancestor regard in diverse cultures we might test how well an independently strong model of religious reason, like Ronald Green’s model centering on the issue of moral retribution, elucidates that field (Green 1988 - see chap. 2 especially); or we might construct a new model or models to accommodate warrants and constraints we find in the data. For instance, we might be impressed by how ancestor regard can prompt us to be considerate of all sorts of “others” (Ephirim-Donkor 2016) or to appreciate how our lives are embedded in a larger group project or a cosmic whole (Newell 1976). Or we might be impressed by how ancestor ideology can rationalize oppressive schemes of conduct and resource distribution (Hsu 1948, McAnany 2013).

How might ancestor regard make a decisive and defensible contribution to life interpretation? On the “life is a journey” model (Knepper 2019), ancestors will most relevantly figure as guides and companions who are trustworthy in a unique way, favorably combining ideal practical awareness and moral focus with realistic relatability and placement in a lineage (a dependable vehicle for long-term survival and flourishing). Inspired partly by Buber’s (1970) thesis that “all actual life is encounter,” I propose a complementary model, “life is a conference,” where the presumption is that the sharing of life is the overriding concern and the issue of who is involved in a morally sensitive discussion (whether directly or by adequate representation) and who is not can be as important as what’s being discussed. On this model, ancestors most relevantly figure as stakeholders in shared life whose supposed presence in our councils activates ethical, historical, and religious forms of responsibility in combination.

Ancestors activate ethical responsibility when their memorializing has filtered their characters so that they are ideal observers of life, especially well fitted to impose moral discipline and define personal success for the living. They activate a specifically historical-political responsibility when they are appreciated as instigators of and continuing participants in long-term cooperative endeavors (family, nation, social movement) that living members can do better or worse at sustaining or enriching. They activate a specifically religious responsibility when they are taken to be emblematic of ideal human relations with ultimate (cosmic, eternal) reality and value. All three of these activations are seen commonly (Newell 1976). Their combination is a sweet spot for ambitious moral reflection.

A virtue of the responsibility focus is that it makes sense of ancestor regard without depending on unconvincing and culturally less regulated speculation about souls or deities (although thinking about ancestors is indeed commonly entangled with thinking about souls and deities).

For a philosopher who finds this approach rewarding, religious cultures that differ in where they give emphasis to ancestor prompts of responsibility can be seen as complementary. How the types of ancestor regard fill out a range of human possibility, how they light up analogues in each other, and how they offer lessons will need to be thought through in cognizance of historical and geographical differences in the positions of cultures and the variability of individual religious experience.

For present purposes I’m setting aside the important realm of ancestor references for which ancestors are among the supernatural spirits whose help might be invited or whose malice might be neutralized. In this realm the dominant conception seems to be “spirit” rather than “ancestor,” the dominant application seems to be explaining a mysterious state of affairs or a possible magical triggering of results, and the premise of respectful or loving ancestor regard seems inapplicable.

Buber, M. (1970) I and Thou

Ephirim-Donkor, A. (2016) African Religion Defined

Green, R. M. (1988) Religion and Moral Reason

Hsu, F. L. K. (1948) Under the Ancestors’ Shadow [in China]

Knepper, T. (2019) “Using the ‘Journey Metaphor’ to Restructure Philosophy of Religion”

Knepper, T. (2023) Philosophies of Religion. A Global and Critical Introduction

McAnany, P. A. (2013) Living with the Ancestors. Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society

Newell, W. H., ed. (1976) Ancestors

Spencer, H. (1877) Principles of Sociology I