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— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) October 27, 2022
Anticipating the TPA this weekend, I went walking with an old BBC podcast episode from the Free Thinking program called Culture Wars: Secularism vs. Religion. Parts were illuminating and entertaining, notwithstanding the annoying habit of British intellectuals of talking rudely over each other and making it difficult for listeners who want to be edified by spirited dialogue to hear all of what was actually said. Do they teach that at Eton and Oxford? Seems like the radio presenter/moderators would know better. What's the point of an audio conversation that can't actually be adequately audited?
The lone American in the conversation, Dan Dennett, more than held his own. I share his view that commitment to secularism in a pluralistic democracy entails robust public dialogue but does not allow any "trump cards" to end or resolve discussion. Faith cards don't take the hand. Neither do No Faith cards. Matters of state and of public policy, though not of public dialogue, are rightly walled and separated from private and personal convictions. All can speak their views, none can properly impose or insist on them in a coercive way. President Obama was making this point when he said "the religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason, and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect." (Copson, 87) Same goes in reverse, of course. The irreligiously motivated must also translate their concerns.
Dennett affirms the non-oxymoronic reality of secular spirituality...
[T]o affirm the secular is to affirm the value of life in the world and to affirm a public discourse rooted in reason and experience rather than authority...[T]he term secularism (and its cognate secularistic) denotes a specific type of substantive worldview, namely one that affirms the meaning of existence as being wholly immanent within the world. Just as all 'isms tend to absolutize what they affirm, so too secularism absolutizes the secular’s affirmation of the value of life in the world into a full-blown philosophical absolute—one that posits that life in the world is its own ground of meaning and value. Differently stated, secularism denies any form of transcendence, including any form of theism; the ground of existence, it insists, lies wholly within the world itself. Consequently, secularism likewise has no place in public discourse for any theistic or metaphysical claims—as if the ground of existence could be anything other than the given world itself. As William Connolly puts it, “secularism strains metaphysics out of politics” (see, for example, Richard Rorty’s essay: “Religion as Conversation-stopper”). So, secularism seeks to affirm the value of life in the world by attempting to make life in the world its own basis and ground. By denying any notion of transcendence, one is inclined to say that secularism assumes that all existence is contingent—that there neither is nor can be any form of necessary existence.
That's from Meyer's TPA presentation last year, to which the session at hand will stand as sequel. The bold emphasis is mine, because I wish to challenge the claims that all 'isms necessarily "absolutize" and that secularism necessarily renounces transcendence.
Transcendence is a slippery term. Like James's tree-hugging squirrel, it eludes us until we pin it with a working definition. Mine begins with Peter Ackroyd's clever line in The Plato Papers: "transcendence or trans-end-dance: the ability to move beyond the end, otherwise called the dance of death." There's nothing more natural in the world than death, and nothing more restorative of life than the ability to come to terms with it.
My William James's "Springs of Delight": The Return to Life (VU Press, 2001) explicitly affirms the reality of a kind of naturalized transcendence that is available to the secular, pragmatic, naturalistic, and/or humanistic sensibility, and that enables the owners of such sensibilities to come to amicable terms with their mortality.
Transcendence may seem to be about God, or it may be sacredly secular and humanistic. Secular, humanistic, and sacred? Those who find "secular humanism" intrinsically profane will not grasp, as James did, the possibility of this triple yoking. Dewey also affirmed this possibility, as do many liberals, Unitarian Universalists, and other "progressive" minorities in our time. Habit and convention, not empirical perspicacity, decree that public-spirited and earth-centered secularists must disavow a spiritual life.
Transcendence may be cosmic or quotidian, reserved or refined, proselytizing or private. It may suggest supernaturalism, but it need not; indeed, one of my aims here is to strengthen the claims that, for a Jamesian, transcendence need not imply the supernatural and that strictly speaking, and in the spirit of James, it need not involve the transcendence of nature.
Transcendence may be strictly transient, momentary, and isolated, an experience discontinuous in each instance of its occurrence with the larger rhythms, patterns, and meanings of the lives it graces. Alternatively, it can compose the largest meaning in one's life, the pattern of a lifetime.
Transcendence may be a fruition, an experience of conclusion--"consummatory," in John Dewey's language--or it may be less punctuated and more persistently enduring. Dewey himself wrote a great deal about consummatory transcendence, but the latter sort, transcendence of a more stolid and stoical kind, suggests the consistent pattern and meaning of Dewey's long life's work (perhaps more than that of any other American philosopher). His gravestone paean to "the continuous human community in which we are a link" summarizes that pattern and meaning with simple but powerful eloquence.
Transcendence might strike like a bolt from the blue or be more like the almost imperceptibly accretive sands on a beach. It may be an event in life, small or staggering. It may be a dispositional attitude toward life that raises one's sea-level of happiness and the quality of experience in general, attuning the sensibilities to notice and appreciate a transcendent dimension of events that more somber natures miss. Or it may be the pessimist's prayer of salvation, his escape from an immanent existence he finds all too oppressively real.
--Springs
Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.
But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.
No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism, lecture 2
As for Rorty's conversation-stopping metaphysical strainer: yes, Rorty also has a room on the corridor. Maybe even a suite. But it's a long corridor, and we all must share it. Absolutists are among us, but they're clearly the worst tenants. And after reading and discussing his Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism in the Atheism class last winter, I'm persuaded that Rorty was not himself an absolutist with respect to secularity/'ism. Nor are most secular academics. We're far more likely to encounter absolutists among some of our students and (especially) their parents.
[W]e do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.'
Is that absolutism? Or is it simply an acknowledgement that no sane polity can sustain itself when it turns a blind eye to the intolerant racists (etc.) in its midst. Yes, they'll speak their piece in the public square and in the corridor. If we value a free and open society, we'll answer them vigorously.
The corridor is here. It contains chambers whose occupants look to the heavens for transcendence, but just across the hall we find secular sinners and saints. Nature is global. In fact it's cosmic. Transcendent spirituality of every sort, including but not limited to the supernatural, is a natural expression of human aspiration.
We'll talk about it in the 2d floor corridor of Furman Hall (and room 217, at 10) Saturday morning. Like a good pragmatist, I am indeed looking forward.
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