Abstract
Meanings always refer to the relations our individual lives bear to something bigger, they have a part-whole structure. In so-called existential feelings, we are connected with our being-in-the-world as such, and these feelings play a vital role for the emergence of religions and worldviews. It is our linguistic capability which then enables us to transform felt meaningfulness into articulate meaning. Social imaginaries of the sacred, that which is taken to be of utmost importance, are of crucial importance in this process. Yet these imaginaries vary wildly, and we have to pay respect to the irreducible contingency and pluralism of religions and worldviews.
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- 1.
Cf. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The moral grammar of social conflicts, Polity Press: Cambridge, 1995.
- 2.
https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto3/ (accessed 22/10/2018).
- 3.
This seems plausible at least for the first emergence of universal religions and worldviews some millennia ago. In modern cases, it may be different and cognitive insights, albeit emotionally charged (like enthusiasm for evolutionary theory), may have played a more substantial role.
- 4.
Quite often, already the titles of his books convey a poetic air: “Unweaving the Rainbow”; “River out of Eden”; and “Climbing Mount Improbable.”
- 5.
According to Steven Pinker’s famous The Language Instinct (Pinker 1995), for example, we think in mental representations called “mentalese,” and the task of language is to transform these representational structures into acoustic or graphical signals which allow us “to get the structures out of one head and into another” (ibid., 170).
- 6.
The topic of this book are the anthropological foundations of contemporary comprehensive worldviews (both religious and secular) and their relationship to science, not on a par, but mediated via ordinary experience. Therefore, not much attention is paid to the complex and multi-branched history of religion, nor to comparative studies of the subject. This makes for an obvious shortcoming, one that I hope is balanced by a gain in terms of focus and lucid argument, but still visible. To provide just one example, in religious studies there is often distinguished between primary and secondary religions, the former emerging out of collective processes, the latter reflecting upon their results and articulating explicit insight by founders of religion, theologians or philosophers. In a more expanded version of this volume, the task would be to confront the anthropological arguments developed here with the empirical and historical findings of religious studies.
- 7.
Naturally, it is quite possible to undergo self-transcending experiences while doing scientific research. Science may enhance our sense for the “wonder of existence” (Dawkins 1998, 6) and shows us beauties undetectable by the naked eye. Nevertheless, the person having these experiences will be a human being in search for orientation and meaning.
- 8.
Cf. his A Common Faith (Dewey 1934/1962), where he conjures “passionate intelligence” (ibid., 79) in the service of a thoroughly naturalistic, “democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal” (ibid., 84).
- 9.
Cf. Ursula Goodenough’s The Sacred Depths of Nature (Goodenough 1998).
- 10.
cf. https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto3/ (accessed 6/11/2018).
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Jung, M. (2019). The Unavoidability of Worldviews. In: Science, Humanism, and Religion. Studies in Humanism and Atheism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21492-0_5
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