The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c5.6

c5.6

However, tradition cannot be only flexible and situational, for its essential mission is still to deal in a structured way with the insoluble life-death problem in all its situational manifestations. It must, therefore, also offer a plan or order independent of and above the actual situation. It is this transcendent order that provides man with the fixed orientation for legitimizing his actions in the middle of the situational flux. In other words, tradition has to be both immanent in the actual situation so as to keep up with shifting reality and transcendent so as to fulfill its orientating and legitimizing function. Thus, we can understand the paradoxical but traditionally common idea that transcendent law is all the time there, suspended as it were in midair, and that it can be "found" by agonistic procedures, verbal or otherwise.⁴ Here also seems to lie the meaning of the urge for consensus. In this way, truth and law are at the same time transcendent and immanent in society. Obviously this is a tour de force, but it can work as long as truth and law are not explicitly codified.