Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture

8. Event

8 EVENT Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. . . . There lies the essential grace. —simone weil, gravity and grace In the midst of a cultural environment typically deemed secular, the question of how value happens is (thankfully) an open one. What does it take to say that something matters? Even more, what does it take to realize that life itself matters? If one is caught in a traditionally religious environment, then such questions are sometimes not so pressing. Value is determined by the deity, the sacred—whatever that may be—often from the outside. If one experiences the secular, however, as a withdrawal of god, or the gods (as Martin Heidegger might describe it), and not simply the privatization of traditional religion (as Charles Taylor would have it),1 then the experience of value is likely an enigma for at least two reasons. First, the secular does not necessarily bring nihilism with it. Those without religion are not necessarily those without values. And, furthermore, secular values need not be exclusively tied to the satisfaction of self or the fulfillment of its many ideals. (To put it another way, capitalism or the various versions of humanism are not the only options.) There is, strangely enough, the occasional sense one can get that, without divine justification or the satisfaction of human dreams, life is good, even in the midst of significant suffering. What is happening when without expla- 143 E V E NT nation life elicits its own affirmation and sweeps us along with it? Perhaps just that—a happening is happening. What I want to suggest in this chapter is that one way value emerges into experience (experience understood not as the consciousness of strictly private selves, but as the basis for articulating any epistemology or ontology , as in William James’s radical empiricism2) is as something like an event. That is, life becomes worthy (escapes nihilistic drift) through our attention to things that happen. Value grows out this intermingling of event and attention. So far as I can tell, the term or concept “event” has been in the vocabulary of certain strands of philosophy at least since Heidegger , who in his later work insisted that being (Sein) comes to presence as an event (Ereignis). Since him, many have taken on the concept, including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou. But I don’t intend a survey here (though my inclination toward Deleuze’s notion of the event will become clear). Instead, I want to consider a version of this concept that addresses the secular as a problem of thought. Not a problem to be overcome, but one that invites and cultivates thought—the secular as the co-mingling of thinking and value. To do this, I must begin by committing something of a cultural sin: I am going to reveal the climax of a compelling film. * * * As Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) approaches its third hour, its characters appear to reach the end of their psychological and spiritual tethers: an adulterous wife attempts suicide as her sick, elderly husband lies on his deathbed; a sexually predatory inspirational speaker confronts his dying father, who abandoned him and his mother years ago; a terminally ill children’s quizshow host reveals to his wife that he molested their daughter; a former quiz-kid champion desperately robs his workplace to get money for braces that will, hopefully, impress a man he secretly loves; a current quiz-kid champion wets his pants during his most important game-show performance; a cop humiliatingly loses his 144 E N C O U NTE R I N G TH E S E C U L A R weapon on a routine call. Then, with no warning, frogs begin to pour from the sky, creating a weather calamity that interrupts the desperation surging through these characters and their interweaving stories. A bit of surrealistic redemption. What might seem like an unnecessary weirdness here is, more carefully observed, an urge to philosophical thought. The most likely reflective response to the downpour of frogs is to connect it with its biblical counterpart in Exodus 8:2, especially since the film is peppered with references to that passage. Such a reading would go something like this: God really does save us (seeing as how the film’s characters appear to achieve some kind of psychological , if not spiritual, relief after the shower of frogs), just like he...