Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture

4. Presence

4 PRESENCE A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger, an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or perfect delicate works of signification. —jean-luc nancy, the birth to presence When I cruise the forty-three television channels available to me (and that’s basic cable), simultaneously being enchanted and disgusted by much that I see (similar to Kant’s description of the sublime), I cannot help but think that the culture in which I find myself is less articulate than ever. Such a diagnosis of the low standard of my culture’s literacy might be too easy to make. For it is the case that America’s traditional anti-intellectualism reaches new heights in our current, hypermediated milieu: we now have more venues than ever to disseminate undisciplined, uncreative thought (think, for example, of all the burgeoning blogs). On the other hand, such hypermediation amounts to an explosion of symbolization. Language is everywhere, and hence there is the demand to use it instrumentally well. One emblem for this situation could be the standard academic paper where a writer has masterfully summarized and explained the words of another thinker, rendering them more accessible but probably not more desirable. Paradoxically, it seems the moment when concern for the quality of language seems lowest is also the moment when the demand for controlling language is highest. Beyond such dialectics , however, I take the demand for absolute articulation as a 73 P R E S E N C E jumping-off point for considering an idea that might appear to have nothing to do with this implicit yet persistent demand—the concept of presence. More specifically, I want to consider how a particular rendering of this concept affects what we might call the divine and its relationship to an ostensibly secular culture, and I also want to consider some lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson and how they can lead one to think of the divine as presence, a presence that requires an absence, a presence that to some extent is an absence. According to this encounter with Emerson, thinking about the presence and absence of the divine has to do with the way one takes up writing. * * * How this chapter itself takes up writing deserves some comment. First of all, the sentences here are intended to participate in the chapter’s argument rather than to be solely vehicles for the delivery of that argument. Such a distinction might seem pedantic or overly refined, but I mean it to imply that the immanent qualities ofthewords(theirsounds,arrangements,shapes,andconnections to one another) embody a kind of importance that parallels the importance of a signified message. Not that philosophy should become literature, but a sharp awareness of its medium can give philosophy a power that pushes beyond the pedantic (something especially warranted in Anglophone academia). Along such lines, consider also how one can use the words of another thinker. One approach would be to build a consistent and authoritative picture of a thinker from her words. Another would be to allow the words to push one into compelling thoughts that might not otherwise occur, ones that might not even be recognizable by the source of their inspiration (or by oneself or one’s own colleagues). I prefer this latter approach (though I am thankful the former exists), because it encourages contemporary philosophy to be moving instead of simply being informative or correct, something that has the potential to strike one dumb in addition to securing one’s intelligence.1 Philosophy written in this manner 74 E N C O U NTE R I N G TH E S E C U L A R cannot really strive to be appropriate to any particular standard or situation, but it might hope to be seductive to any given reader. * * * Death can make one write and think differently. This sounds melodramatic. An anxious awareness of death is, of course, a mark of consciousness. But for some writers, some thinkers, death is an even closer companion than normal. Not only does it become a dancing partner, as Kierkegaard might say,2 but for such thinkers an awareness of death is the well from which their words emerge; it is a presence that influences the effect of one’s language—a presence that marks their words with...