Toward a Global Discourse on Religion in a Secular Age: Essays on Philosophical Pragmatism by Ludwig Nagl (review)

This book is not much of a forest, but its trees are quite lovely. The book comprises fifteen essays across two overall parts. The two parts are asymmetrical in length, with part one comprising three essays and part two twelve essays; section two is itself divided into two respective sections of five and seven essays. Aside from some very brief prefatory remarks before each section, everything in the book has been selected or adapted from a disparate set of previous publications and conference presentations drawn from across several decades of Nagl's career. As with the book's sections, its essays also vary widely in length, ranging from five pages (for chapter 2.1.2, "A Brief Glance at Deconstruction: Derrida's Philosophy of Religion") to thirty-six pages (for chapter 2.2.4, for "Josiah Royce's Kant- and- Hegel-Inspired Interpretation of Religion and his Interest in Asian Thought").

If this description suggests a certain disjointed quality to the book, this is not to say that the book is inconsistent. Nagl does present us with an overarching question, which is: Is it accurate to describe ours as a secular age? Even if there are questions as to how well the book coherently explores this question, or even how interesting the question itself is, there is no doubt that Nagl is interested in the question and has a clear view on how it can be discussed. The reader also gets an impression of Nagl's intellectual allies and opponents. Opponents include reductionists of all stripes, with particular ire trained at proponents of a "dogmatically anti-religious secularism/scientism" (p. 8) that seek to exclude religious insights as legitimate participants in either academic or public discourses. Allies comprise a constellation of international scholars past and present—mostly past—who resist reductionism; these include Nagl's interlocutors in China, select figures from the continental philosophical tradition, and the bulk of the pragmatic tradition.

A grand narrative is at work across the book's essays. According to this narrative, modern, Western thought made a consequential mistake in pushing secularism too dogmatically and reductively. The harm here has not just been done to theology, in which Nagl shows relatively little interest, but rather to academic commentaries on human life. Nagl laments the dominance of analytic approaches within the philosophical guild, as well as impoverished conceptions of the human within culture more broadly conceived. Thankfully, the reductionist wave is cresting, and "non-reductive discourses on the concept of human practice and its (religious/spiritual) horizon of hope" have begun to "reoccur in various ways" (p. 9). With Karl Jaspers's notion of the Axial Age as a reference point, Nagl construes the task at present as that of identifying and nourishing constructive alternatives to reductionism. Exploring and promoting connections among such options might be said to be the animating aim of the book.

Nagl identifies three areas as particularly promising. These are "American pragmatism, contemporary philosophy of religion, and the globalized exploration of (non-reductive modes of) humanism" (p. 15). The last of these involves particular engagement with Chinese thought, particularly the Neo-Confucianism of Tu Weiming; for its part, contemporary philosophy of religion is mostly represented by select figures from the continental philosophical tradition. Each of these areas receives its own section within the structure of the book, at least ostensibly. The reality as executed is a bit murkier, although the book's arrangement is clearer than it first appears. The three essays of Part 1, "The (Re)Emerging Philosophical Discourse on Religion. An Encounter Between Western and Chinese Thought," comprise material presented in China during a period between 2014 and 2019. These chapters form a microcosm of the arguments Nagl is making across the book, so it is not necessarily a problem that this section is shorter. Part 2, "Philosophy of Religion After the Criticism of Religion: Pragmatism and 'The...