The Plain Sense of Things by James C. Edwards

A wonderful book that heavily influenced Andrew J. Brown’s personal studies and religious trajectory.

Christian faith is the attempt to unify the subjective and the objective (i.e., the eternal) into one through a subject’s passion—absurd passion, which is faith. Edwards differentiates this from the “pagan” way of approaching the eternal, which is by using reason.

Notes

How to be religious without explicit religion

The prevailing view: Every system of belief is only contingently useful, a set of values assumed to be true to gain more power as it preserves and enhances itself.

Given the prevailing view, how can a belief or way of living become sufficiently powerful to check both our tendency for individualist self-magnification and totalitarian, fundamentalist rigidity?

Values

• Conservative definition: Enforce ahistorical ways of life from which there is no proper escape
• Radical (Nietzschean) definition: Hardened provocations to an endless self-invention.

“Poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal”

• Per Heidegger
• Linguistic and behavioral practices of “building dwelling thinking” that preserve and extend the dialectical energies for liberation and limitation formerly comprised in religion.
• Illustrated by Thoreau’s Walden and Maclean’s Young Men and Fire

Three large questions:

1. What does it now mean for us to be religious? → What does it now mean for Filipinos to be religious?
2. What might it now mean for us to be religious? → What might it now mean for Filipinos to be religious?
3. What should it now mean for us to be religious? → What should it now mean for Filipinos to be religious?

Total rejection of religion is costly because religion is part of our personal and cultural history (Bildung) and present.

• Per Heidegger, we are immer schon (“always already”) religious.
• Even our current impatience with religion has a religious root.
• We may choose not to remain religious, but given our history, we are now religious whether fully or privately

Because we can’t totally reject religion, we need to find out what being religious means for us

It is better to know what being religious means especially when we plan on not remaining so

end-of-century, Western intellectuals

It is better for thinkers to stay closer to home where the chance of giving offense is less.

You can escape all presumption by doing just memoir (i.e., sticking to first-person singular). But philosophy, even when done locally, requires one to talk about “us.”

Three structural features (not essence) of Western religiousness

1. The binary division of reality into the sacred and the profane.
   1. The division is ontological.
   2. Reality is not one piece.
   3. Profane: a world of need, lack, and change
   4. Sacred: the true world of wholeness, haleness, and permanence
   5. Present in: the Bible, Koran, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Luther, and Kant
   6. Dualist, not monist
2. The sacred and the profane are hierarchically ordered.
   1. Sacred: primary, self-supporting, empowering, original, self-same, creator
   2. Profane: secondary, dependent, created
   3. The profane is always grounded by the sacred
   4. Sacred ground = subject, subiectum, hypokeimenon (“that which stands under and supports”)
      1. The sacred ground produces and nourishes the profane.
      2. The sacred ground makes the profane intelligible.
   5. Examples
      1. Creation of this world by a god or gods
      2. Platonic notion of Form as the perfect exemplar of the imperfect material thing
      3. Cartesian conviction on “clear and distinct” insights as foundation of knowledge
      4. Kant’s Laws of Freedom
   6. See “The Age of the World Picture” by Martin Heidegger.
3. Since the proper relationship between the sacred and profane was or could be breached, religion’s role is to maintain or restore it.
   1. Religion is a form of a life, a doing.
   2. Religious practices restores the proper connection of the sacred and profane.
   3. Early Greek religion: aims to maintain the harmony between sacred and profane, avoiding pitfalls that would upset the existing harmony
   4. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: original sin → aims to restore and redeem the profane

The three structural features of Western religiousness are present in:

• Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
• early Greek religion
• some cultural phenomena

Among end-of-century, Western intellectuals, to be religious means to have a life in which these three features show themselves in some basic way.

Four epochs of Western religiousness:

1. the age of the gods
2. the age of the Forms (Idealism)
3. the age of Cartesian ego-subjectivity
4. the age of transvalued values

See “The World of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead’” by Martin Heidegger

Each epoch has a particular and distinctive instantiation of the three structural features of Western religiousness.

The epochs overlap.

Mood

• an attunement to things, a way of vibrating in relation to being struck by them (resonance)
• not a set of beliefs but beliefs could help construct or maintain it.
• the way one receives particular beliefs; how one takes things through actions and reactions
• influences how beliefs are framed into one’s life
• not mental
• a way of acting, responding, and inhabiting one’s life

References

Edwards, James C. The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.