After Transcendence — A Reply

Abstract

Religion, according to Professor Schacht, has traditionally provided us with an interpretation of our lives which fitted them into a wider perspective through which we can see them as valuable and which enables us to endure and even affirm whatever happens to us. Traditional religion has done this by reference to a ‘transcendent reality beyond this life and this world’ through which our lives and world have been given sense (p. 76). But we can no longer believe in such a reality, and with such loss of belief we are threatened with a loss of meaning in our lives. Hence the importance of developing a post-transcendent form of religion which would carry out the religious function without the transcendent reference. Such a religious interpretation would require our identifying ourselves with something about life and the world which will ‘trump those features of them that one finds distressing’ (p. 87). Three possibilities are proposed. We might identify ourselves with: (a) the basic forces at work in our lives and nature generally; (b) the developmental forces at work in our lives as historical; (c) the fundamental underlying character of both nature and history as a ‘proto-art’. These interpretations he identifies with Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche respectively. But each interpretation nevertheless ‘affords the possibility of a kind of identification that can at least compete for our spiritual allegiance, affirmation and celebration’ (p. 91).