Abstract
An organic limiting principle is long overdue, but it won’t come unless we acknowledge the excesses of thought and at the same time deign to learn about “inner” processes and make the inquiry a systematic part of our education. One must be in continual preparation for the sudden jolt that might break the chain of causation that we have come to know as social reality. It is perhaps the same jolt that saved the Ancient Mariner from purgatory. After all, ontological praxis is not an easy thing. It is certainly not about convictions; rather, it is about aligning the microcosm with the macrocosm.
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Notes
- 1.
See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). In laying out his thesis, Dawkins makes the following elementary errors: (1) He dismisses as “delusion” the source event of his own culture, namely, the Incarnation of the Christ, assuming that the discourse he uses, namely, science, is somehow independent of the source. (2) He does this without a proper and impartial investigation, directly engaging those who have inquired into the domain (there is no evidence in his arguments of ever having done so). This is akin to those who dismiss astrology as hocus-pocus without ever having studied astrology. This is not in the scientific spirit and smacks of bigotry. (3) Unlike say William James (Varieties of Religious Experience), or Gregory Bateson (Mind and Nature), he does not seem to realize that “God” is often a certain way of talking about experiences that lack a proper language in everyday consciousness. In Discontents of Civilization Freud acknowledges such experiences among his patients even as he says that he has not had such an experience. Just as there are a million ways of misunderstanding and misrepresenting science, there are equal number of ways of doing the same with the Transcendental domain without making it into a mere delusion. (4) The senses can never reveal all that is, that is, the sum total of the world and hence reason can never say “it must be this way.” That is, as Kant observed in the first Critique, our investigation of the world, no matter how scientific, may only reveal contingent facts: it cannot demonstrate that such-and-such must be the case. (5) If theism can be falsified on grounds of non-verifiability, atheism (the professed stance of Dawkins once it appears as a positivity) must also be falsifiable. In attitude-toward-being, atheism and theism are counterpoints and neither can be admitted as an exclusive picture of the world.
- 2.
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, Trans. Luca D’lsanto (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 80.
- 3.
James Baldwin, Speech at the University of California, Berkeley, 1979.
- 4.
It is therefore that I have taken up for consideration mainly those who have lived, and been mainly concerned with, ordinary and peripheral lives.
- 5.
Vine Deloria, God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003).
- 6.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” In Martin Gardner, The Annotated Ancient Mariner (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1965).
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Roy, K. (2017). Epilogue. In: Limits of the Secular. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_8
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