The Plain Sense of Things by James C. Edwards

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Citation

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

Quotes

Collations

Literature notes

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

Main thesis

James Edwards claims that Western intellectuals have been living in a culture of normal nihilism, where a loss of pathos has been endemic. Per Edwards, "[p]athos is the impression of a profound importance, a seriousness that runs as deep as can be" (pp. 144–145, n. 25). Postmodernity, he claims, has led to this loss of seriousness where normal nihilism tends to devalue every value. Edwards, however, points to Heidegger, particularly his idea of "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal" as a way to restore pathos and a decent sense of religiousness in our current world. Heidegger's approach involves a deeply serious embracing of pathos within the familiar, ordinary, finite, and pedestrian.

Highlights and notes

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.

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

"Poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal"

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.

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:

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

Chapter 4

Chapter 5: The Plain Sense of Things

Being religious as a non-theist and non-supernaturalist in a normal nihilist culture

The question I need answering: How can I be religious if I'm a non-theist and non-supernaturalist?

Per Edwards, religion, for those living in a culture of normal nihilism (or those who are non-theists and non-supernaturalists), is "a set of structures of interpretation employed in the hope of preserving and enhancing what we most care about." It is "part of the (conceptual) gear some of us use to try to get what we are determined to want and need."

Even if I'm a non-theist and non-supernaturalist, I still need something that would prevent me from destroying the world and nature (propriety) and something that would lead me out of the conventional and into something deeper (experiment).

To establish a religion for a non-theist and non-supernaturalist like myself living in a culture of normal nihilism, I need to describe linguistic and social practices that encourage in me the dialectic of propriety and experiment.

A life transparent of itself could withstand normal nihilism

Per Edwards, a way of life that could withstand normal nihilism is a life transparent to itself.

"Poetic dwelling on earth as a mortal"

Transparency + fostering the dialectic of propriety and experiment can be achieved through "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal."

Poetic dwelling involves practices of making things (i.e., images) that:

  1. Show the manifold conditions of the life that made them.
  2. Simultaneously directs our attention to the unnamable metacondition of all such conditions (i.e., imagination)

Per Edwards, such practices could protect the person living the life from the devaluating effects of normal nihilism.

Social practices shape subjectivity, not the other way around.

Walden

Walden is a book about dwelling.

Walden is also a book about leaving the cabin and returning to civilized life.

Walden, like Fear and Trembling, or like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is a book written for normal nihilists, for those of us left behind with our values after the disappearance of the divinities those values once seemed to be.

Per Edwards, Walden is a book that, through description of specific linguistic and behavioral practice that is religious or philosophical offers a cure to normal nihilism.

Practices in Walden

"simple and sincere account" of one's own life

Sincerity through imagination

How do we find the reality that gives shape to our lives?

Let us make our lives transparent by locating (and relocating) the tracks laid for them by the images we have inherited or created.

Structures can be altered.

What has to be avoided is the assumption and claim that our particular, unique, individual imagination of reality is a necessity. This makes it a sham and a delusion.

Self-deception is to forget the fables at the foundation of the world, and thus to convert them into illusions of necessity. It is to make oneself the prisoner of a trope.

When you create your own reality through imagination, and are aware of it and don't have to push it as a necessary reality for others, you wake up every morning in joyful anticipation.

It is easy to be deluded in believing that the conditions that give shape to our lives is solid. However, underneath that solidness is fluid water—the Nothing from which all our somethings emerged.

Thoreau is always working to reimagine his life, to revision it through the irrigation of the images in which it comes to him. He is constantly working that life over in the imagination, flooding it again and again with fresh imagery, in order that something new about it be revealed.

What does Thoreau's water represent?

Don't insist in pushing through your own way of seeing.
Just be a willing witness.

Try to uncover new images for your ordinary tasks, images that will let these tasks appear to you in new ways.

Walden's ethical momentum derives from its play of images.

For Thoreau, the discipline of the poet involves "imagining the invisible in something alien to it."

Great poetry

...great poetry reminds us, even in the apparent inevitability of its particular images, of the inexhaustible power and reach of the imagination, and thus of the transience and partiality of any particular manifestation of it: namely, this one.

...great poetry proclaims its own conditionality; and it does so by letting one see poetry itself as the work of the imagination, of a particular imagination, one situated in a particular language and body and time.

always gestures at die Lichtung where poetry happens

Poetry proclaims, simultaneously, both its inevitability and its contingency: this line is true, a fixed star to light one's way; but there is more light to come.

In Walden, re-visioning is the sacrament.

To re-vision one's life is not a matter of fancy or fantasy. It is not a matter blithely taking what first comes, nor of just making up what one wants. One feels constrained—not just any image will do; not just anything goes. One struggles with the dark earth to bring something to light, just as one struggles with the maddening tendency of wet line to tangle and of bitter weeds to grow up among the beans. To pay this sort of imaginative attention to things is a practice of sincerity; it is a particular sort of truth-telling. As in prayer, one beseeches. Just as there is a way of hoeing beans in which every stroke of the hoe asks for grace and accuracy and strength, and just as there is a way of driving nails that with each blow begs the perfect combination of power and delicacy, so too there is a way of thinking and writing that hopefully submits itself to the space between earth and sky in search of just the right words to speak to and of our condition.

Thoreau's statements are phenomenological expressions of a certain kind of practice of imaginative attention.

Because of how Thoreau approaches his life, he has given it a Pathos.

When you recognize the possibility of new imagination and conception of your life, you could look beyond conventional ways of looking at your life and look for new ways to see.

Our condition is both constrained and freed by the imagination.

Our present condition, constituted as it is by our conceptions, is both inevitable but contingent.

Thoreau has made a thing—a book, a form of life, a subjectivity—that stands in the middle and looks two directions at once.

It is aware that whatever we see we are conditioned to see, and aware as well that the source of that condition can be beseeched to yield itself again and anew to our disciplined attention to the spectacle of the familiar.

Young Men and Fire

not every instance of poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal needs to be so obviously autobiographical.

Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire

Author of Young Men and Fire :: Norman Maclean

Norman Maclean died in ??? at the age of ??? :: 1990, 87

Age Norman Maclean started writing Young Men and Fire :: 74

What was Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire about? :: a fatal forest fire in Montana

How many died from the fatal forest fire in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire? :: 13

Occupation of those who died in the fatal forest fire in Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire? :: US Forest Service Smoke-jumpers

Norman Maclean grew up in Montana.

Norman Maclean was a professor of ??? at the ???. :: English, University of Chicago

Two first-hand connections of Norman Maclean to the subject of his novel Young Men and Fire. :: He saw the forest fire itself; He fought fires himself as a young man

It is a particular event, and it struggles to tell the truth about that event

The impulse of storytelling is an impulse to sanity, to finding out how things belong to one another; and that is a task for the imagination, for that "counterimpulse to the id" that puts things—words, sentences, lives—together as if they belong so.

The storyteller is under the discipline of truth, but it is always already truth disciplined by imagination. There is no other way to make sense of things. Without the synthetic work of the imagination, connecting and illuminating by means of its tropes, nothing properly "belongs" to anything else.

It is in the world of slow-time that truth and art are found as one.

The notion of truth in storytelling doesn't require an "absolute conception of reality."

accounts that try to account for their own accounting

Per Edwards, Walden and Young Men and Fire are Scripture for a way of being religious that escapes normal nihilism.

a proper attention to the imagination—and in particular to the imagination cultivated as a religious discipline—was the key to being able somehow to pass through normal nihilism

Main point of The Plain Sense of Things

Discipline of truth (disciplined by imagination).
= continually renewed asking-for, piety of thinking
Nothing in the thing is unnecessary. Everything tells.
Concern to "get it right."

But this discipline of truth does not require metaphysical Realism. Because the truth is disciplined by imagination.

The discipline is a constant dialectic between the necessity of doing things as it is proper to do them and the freedom to always try again, to listen better.

Write because you need to do it.

The practice of poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal is not the only antidote to normal nihilism.

The practice of poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal does not need an "absolute conception of reality."

these are efforts of working on oneself, of working oneself and one's situation over in the imagination, that demand from one a commitment to truthfulness, to propriety, that is absolute and overriding. Writing—and living—this way always puts one under the sway of truth, or (better) truthfulness; one cannot say or do whatever one wants, however one wants to do it. One knows there is a proper way to tell a story, or to construct the book, or to build the house, or to hoe the beans. One is aware of oneself as under discipline. The point is not one's various satisfactions, which may or may not come; the point is to get it right. One is measuring oneself against the godhead. One is continually asking for the right word or image or hammer-blow or hoe-stroke. Under such discipline, required to honor such propriety, one has access to a Pathos capable of standing against the blandishments of the mall.

poetic dwelling protects one against the temptation to identify oneself as a form of das Man.

It is not satisfaction or self-enhancement one is after; it is propriety. One wants truthfulness, sincerity; one wants to have found the story that realistically honors one's subject (which may be, but need not be, oneself). And that is never done. One starts the narrative where one is, of course, and one uses the materials ready to hand; but one always knows oneself to be under the prophetic demand to change one's life by a better account of its conditions.

Poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal is the practice of truthfulness, not a theory of truth, and for us therefore it is not a practice alongside or equal to others; it is not just another shop in the mall.

References

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