Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture

Prologue: Encounter

PROLOGUE * ENCOUNTER Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence, until after a long time. —ralph waldo emerson, “nature” Think of what happens in an encounter. Someone or something is seen, perceived, sensed, maybe even confronted. And to merit the word encounter such a meeting could not be an ordinary one, one part of a routine or set of conventional expectations. Perhaps it is a surprise, or especially intense. When awaking in the morning, I do not encounter my spouse; I greet her with happy recognition. As I walk to my office, I pass a colleague and exchange a few words that do not distract me from my planned work. I would never think to use the word encounter to describe the exchange. Even more, an encounter draws attention into lucid focus, giving perception the feeling of novelty. So the thing encountered does not appear as if from nowhere, but the interest in it does. Through an encounter, experience becomes more complex. Perhaps this is disconcerting, but another word for complexity is texture. Undoubtedly it sounds strange to speak of encountering the secular. For as in the examples above, the experience of the secular has settled into routine and confirmed expectation. Even for those who are traditionally religious, the modern world greets us at our doors with the face of the secular. This means that when we leave our private worlds of value and meaning, the larger world offers 2 E N C O U NTE R I N G TH E S E C U L A R no obvious presentation of the real, no powerful and domineering figurations of a reality not within the grasp of humans. The secular world is the world we enter in order to work and survive—the economic order composed of exchange mingled with need, desire, and desperation—and if traditional religion does not entangle us, the secular is the world we venture into for meaning hopefully adequate enough so that we continue our attachment to life and its necessary work. Within the secular, religion appears as a choice or an arbitrary circumstance. A person can be Christian because she was raised that way and/or because she has seen the light; a person can be Buddhist because he comes from a Buddhist country and/or because he desires enlightenment. In a manner of speaking, religion comes through the secular as an opportunity to engage an ultimate reality not recognized by everyone else—a lack of recognition that can bring resentment or the confidence that comes from being special. In other words, there is no escape from the secular: we always meet it, but we don’t always encounter it. To encounter it would be to see it as strange, interesting, compelling , in the sense that its reasons for being are not within some kind of natural order that purely corresponds to sense or logic. It would be to see the secular not as a problem to be solved, but as something whose value grows out of the attention given to it. Such an encounter comes through thought—not simply thinking about the secular as a social condition, but taking on the secular as a concept that instigates a practice of thought, seeing it as a structure at work in the way value and meaning get laid out—divvied up, as it were. I want to describe the chapters in this book as philosophical encounters with the secular, not only because they present the secular as an object of examination, but even more because it is the concept whose presence brings about their activity. That is, the very notion that there exists a condition in which the meaning religion promises is parceled into recognized traditions and can 3 P R O L O G U E* E N C O U NTE R be avoided altogether (sometimes for the better) is a force that moves the inquiries of this book. This is not a typical approach to philosophical thinking where a concept is a generalization to be filled in by one’s words; an empty concept being the start of one’s thought, and a full one being...