Citation

Edwards, James C. “The Plain Sense of Things.” The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism, by James C. Edwards, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, pp. 195–239.

Quotes

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Collations

Religion is a tool

For us, religion is—at most—a set of values, a set of structures of interpretation employed in the hope of preserving and enhancing what we most care about.

“We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture.”

After becoming a tool, religion was devaluated

Seen in that way, as we must see them, religious values, like the other “highest values” of our civilization, have devaluated themselves.

Two dangers of religion's devaluation

there were some serious dangers connected to this loss of religion's ultimate Pathos, particularly two dangers apparently antagonistic: first, the danger of engrossing, limitless humanism; second, the danger of crushing submission to the conventional.

But what for us has that Pathos? Certainly not supernatural religion: which of us has to believe in God? My fear is that for us normal nihilists the object of our ultimate Pathos will become either the self’s addictive will to novel satisfactions or the existence of a particular historical form of life.

Traditional religion provided propriety and experiment

While traditional supernatural religion is no longer possible for us, we still need something: something to bound our temptation to eat up the earth and ourselves in pursuit of ever new, and ever more reckless, forms of self-fashioning; and-simultaneously-something to loosen our captivity to whatever particular form of life is commonsensically dominant here and now.

For that is what traditional religion has sometimes been able to do with its sacraments: to combine, on the one hand, a sense that human will—the will to the will's own splendor—is limited by something greater, by something to which it must finally answer, with, on the other hand, a call away from the ordinary pieties of "the world" toward a life that is deeper and truer and richer. We need-without the dishonesties of traditional religiousness—access to something both encompassing and prophetic. We need a reliable way to keep alive the dialectic between a recognition of what is proper to us and a readiness to indulge "experiments of living" in the hope of better things.

To counter normal nihilism nurture practices and create things that foster the dialectic of propriety and experiment

social practices shape subjectivity, not the other way round; and thus that the key to a decent religiousness for us is the description of some linguistic and social practices that can truthfully foster in us the dialectic of propriety and experiment

in the writing of his life as a narrative conditioned by imagination, and yet as a life that in its writing seeks to offer "a simple and sincere account" of itself, a life that "crave[s] only reality", 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 toes the line of the present moment, standing firmly on the earth and wedging its feet down through the muck to place them on "a hard bottom and rocks in place." And at the same time it puts itself "beside [itself] in a sane sense." It is aware of the present moment, of that "dry land" on which we live, as the meeting place of two eternities. 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.

A life or thing transparent to itself reflects its own conditions

it is a matter of finding a life transparent to itself. That is not metaphysical realism; it is the requirement that a way of life reflect as fully as it can its own conditions of appearance.

Truth happens when someone's life becomes transparent to itself.

What one wants, first and last, from oneself and from others, is the identification of those structures that give one the life one has, the various structures that condition one's life into its particular contour.

This is truth understood as aletheia, as dis-closure. That which was invisible—the bed of the stream, the conditions of the life flowing there—now appears before one as fully real.  One can now see how and why things go on as they do. In this image there is the familiar distinction between what passes (Becoming) and what endures (Being). In Western religiousness it is the founding distinction between the Sacred and the Profane.

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

"Poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal"

what Heidegger calls "poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal" is a way of realizing such transparency while fostering such a dialectic

"Measure our selves against the godhead"

In summary, I take those practices to be practices of making things, of bringing into presence before us things that allow us to, as he says, "measure our selves against the godhead."

I have taken that to mean that the things brought to presence within such practices, first, bear on their faces the manifold conditions of the life that made them (gathering the fourfold) and, second, simultaneously direct our attention to the unnamable metacondition of all such conditions (thinking die Lichtung).

Practices that foster the dialectic of propriety and experiment resist normal nihilism

It has been my conviction that a life that foregrounds such practices will be a life that can thus preserve itself from self-devaluation, from the loss of Pathos characteristic of our ordinary intellectual mood, and can thus preserve the one who lives it from the dangers of our normal nihilism.

By working over his life as he does—by making of it a sincere account: truth disciplined by imagination; imagination disciplined by truth-Thoreau makes it a thing endowed with a particular kind of Pathos.

This intimation of the unknown god (as Heidegger imagines it), this possibility of seeing the familiar invested with traces of revelatory numinosity, preserves one's life against both complacency and impropriety. The recognition that there is every hope of a new conception of one's conditions, that there is always the possibility that the water will rise to drench again the parched uplands in which we commonly dwell: such a recognition frees one, to a significant degree, from one's captivity to the conditions, and thus the life, one has hopelessly inherited and desperately is passing on.

Walden is a book about being a sojourner

Walden is, first and most literally, a book about dwelling.

It is also a book about leaving that house and moving on, about becoming “a sojourner in civilized life again.”

the book of a sojourner, of one who comes and goes, and that sense of transience, of being just about to move on again

Walden is a particular kind of thinking about building and dwelling

Walden was written in response to normal nihilism

Walden is a book written in cognizance of loss.

Walden is a book that proceeds from a keen sense of abandonment.

Walden 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.

Walden's response to normal nihilism is itself

Walden's response to its originating loss is itself. The book—its writing and its reading—is offered as the cure of the malaise that provoked it.

Walden exemplifies a practice of truth-telling about the author and his conditions

the book exemplifies a specific linguistic and behavioral practice, of a sort one may as well call religious, or philosophical. It is first of all a practice of truth-telling, of confession and of explanation. But it is truth-telling of a quite distinctive sort, since its immediate object is the truth about the teller, and in particular the truth about the conditions of the life he shares with his neighbors in New England.

Thoreau's task was a historical and personal philosophizing

Thoreau sees his task as more than journalistic or naturalistic or autobiographical. It is a task properly understood as philosophical, as transcendental: the delineation of the conditions of the life we live. Thoreau is willing to ask whether these conditions are necessary, not to argue they must be. Thoreau's philosophical practice here is essentially historical and personal, not abstract and metaphysical.

"Simple and sincere account"

What would "a simple and sincere account" of one's own life be?

A "simple and sincere account" is one that reveals to the accountant—and then, perhaps, to others as well—the conditions of the life actually being lived.

A "sincere" account of one's life is an account that has disclosed the sources of that life in the imagination.

Sincerity is truthfulness

Sincerity is of course truthfulness, or at least the conviction and intention of truthfulness.

The religious discipline of the imagination is effortful and intentional

A cheap or comfortable sincerity is not enough. As we stand in the stream of time, there must always be the attempt to "settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance"

It is not a matter of 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.

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.

In Thoreau's mouth, these words are not the philosophical thesis of Realism; no, they are phenomenological expressions of a certain kind of practice of imaginative attention. They are indications of a subjectivity formed by a particular sort of discipline, a discipline that (to use Heidegger's imagery) puts one in the measureless space between earth and sky and sets one there the task of measuring oneself against the godhead. One does that work of measuring by fronting oneself to facts, by finding in those facts (some of which are the facts of one's own conditioning imagination) the alien substance to which the god has (for a time) yielded. Such a measuring requires patience, scruple, sometimes guile, and always a willingness to walk on into futurity, leaving the enterprises of the old—the old self-"like stranded vessels". It is no wonder that Thoreau calls himself a sojourner.

Sincerity is transparency

Sincerity, then, is transparency. Such an ambition does not give up the notion of truth, since there is still the necessity to shove aside the "mud and slush" in order to get at the reality, at the stream-bed that contains and directs the flow of the self through time. The fact that the stream's bottom itself can shift does not mean that at any given instant it is not exactly somewhere. The task of sincerity is to find it out and to mark it.

Thoreau seeks to find the conditions of his life in the imagination

Thoreau is not a standard Western (and certainly not an Eastern) metaphysician. Undoubtedly his aim is to discover the conditions of (his) experience and action, but unlike Kant he does not expect to find them in the universal and eternal structures of the intellect. Rather, they are to be found in the imagination. The key to the transparency Thoreau wants to make possible is to see one's life as fundamentally and necessarily given its shape by images, by "conceptions."

Sincerity is truth disciplined by imagination and vice versa

Sincerity, one might say, is truth disciplined by the reality of imagination, and imagination disciplined by the necessity for truth.

Thoreau used imagination to reveal the sublime in the present moment

Yes, there is something "sublime and noble" in the eternity-the unknowable past and future—that culminates in the present moment, in my ordinary life of "times and occasions." But we are able to apprehend that excellence, the sublimity and nobility of the familiar present, only by "instilling and drenching" the reality that surrounds us here and now. (To instill here means "to pour a liquid drop by drop," as one might instill a medicine into a beaker.) We are, Thoreau is saying, the constant (if frequently unconscious) instillers of our local reality; we drench it again and again with our staining and revealing liquid. God culminates in the present moment only if we can see him there, only if we pour onto the "now and here" a reagent capable of bringing forth hidden patterns and colors. And with what liquid do we instill and drench reality, so as to reveal its otherwise undisclosed magnificence? With our conceptions, with our imagination of that reality. "The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions." Reality shows itself-"obediently"—in our continual imagination of it. In spite of our habitual estimation, truth is not remote, not "beyond the farthest star"; it is here and now, in the "perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." Truth discloses itself in our "conceptions." "Let us spend our time in conceiving then."

Philosophical self-reflection identify life conditions and assess if they could be changed

There are transcendental structures of experience that fix and make possible a particular life, structures that, as we might say grant that life to the one who lives it ("the track is laid for us"); and it is the task of philosophical self-reflection to identify those conditions, and by identifying them also to ask whether they can be altered and improved.

Life conditions are created by dynamic imagination

But these structures, these transcendental conditions of one's experience and life, are fundamentally given by the workings of the imagination, by our faculty for "conception." They are not structures frozen for all time

Yes, reality is fabulous: it is constituted in and by our fables; it is formed into a parade of stories-images, tropes, myths, metaphors, conceptions

The reality that must be steadily observed is the reality of fable—of imagination—as the necessary condition of all truth, as that which makes any particular disclosure possible. To see that reality steadily—the constituting reality of the imagination—is a different kind of transcendentalism, and it leads one into a new and freer relationship to one's constitutive conditions.

It is ethical recognition of our condition as both constrained and freed by the imagination. It is the assertion that our present condition, constituted as it is by our conceptions, is both inevitable but contingent. We do not ourselves make our lives, but we can undertake to have them made different. We are not free to make them what we will, but what they will come to be made through our efforts is not something that can now already be known by us.

Delusion occurs when we convert fables into illusions of necessity

It is, I take it, the assumption of a particular trope's necessity that 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.

Land and water as metaphor for imagination

This is an image for the imagination itself.

So it is with our lives: they are given their form and substance, their explicit topographical features, by particular images and conceptions; such are the dry lands on which we dwell. Living there, it is easy to forget the sea that floats them; it is easy to forget that blank and restless sheet of water from which the islands of our continents emerged.

The hidden water, the stream that can always arise to floodtide once again, is the ultimate nourishment for what is new and green. That is why there must be, on our part, "the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us". Reminded of their source by the water in our neighborhood, we ourselves must drench and instill our ordinary conceptions with new liquidity, just as the rising river floods the lowlands and nourishes the crops in the spring. We must invigorate the "dry land" on which we live with new water from the reservoir that supports and nourishes us all

Thoreau used imagination repeatedly to revision his ordinary life

I have linked that water to the imagination, and in the book one can see Thoreau drenching his life again and again, baptizing himself seven-times-seven in Walden Pond. Life is given us in the images we have of it, and 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.

To try one’s life by these thousand simple tests is to try to uncover new images for one’s ordinary tasks and requirements, images that will let them appear to one in new ways.

Much of Walden is taken up with this sort of re-visioning. Some of the most familiar, and most powerful, instances have to do with reimagining the character of Thoreau’s apparently wastrel life.

All these images reveal something not otherwise able to be seen.

Our imagination is not ours

In one sense, of course, it is right for Thoreau to insist that the universe answers to our conceptions, but in another sense they are not ours at all. It's the water that does the work of unsettling and rearranging the landscape they inhabit. That water is not us, or even ours. It is Thoreau's image for what Heidegger thinks as die Lichtung, the event of opening, of spacing, of opening a space where the light can pool and shine and show. I have (weakly) called it imagination, and it is clear that as such it is not distinctly ours at all. I cannot survey the contents of my imagination as I can the contents of my sock-drawer. What appears in my imagination appears spontaneously, as unpredictably as a river floodtide in spring. I can ask for water, but I cannot make it rain. I can work and work on my lines, but I cannot add a cubit to the stature of even a single sentence. That, if it comes, is grace. The poet, as Heidegger says, is not the one who wills, but the one who is willing. Not the one who violently insists on pushing through her own way of seeing, but the one who is willing to be the necessary witness: the one willing to register, to be marked by (as with Thoreau's Nilometer), whatever flow of water may come. They are our conceptions, those that come to us here and now, the ones to which we are the essential witnesses but they are not conceptions we have at will made for ourselves. At most we can, through our willingness to be tested-to be those who are the measurers-give those conceptions a home

Thoreau uses imaginative revisions to think of others

Not all of Thoreau’s imaginative re-visions of his life concern only himself.

the ethical momentum of the book derives from its play of images

Thoreau practiced poetry to uncover the alien in the familiar

The poet makes poetry only when he takes the measure, by saying the sights of heaven in such a way that he submits to its appearances as to the alien element to which the unknown god has "yielded." Our current name for the sight and appearance of something is "image." The nature of the image is to let something be seen. By contrast, copies and imitations are already mere variations on the genuine image which, as a sight or spectacle, lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alien to it. Because poetry takes that mysterious measure, to wit, in the face of the sky, therefore it speaks in "images." This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of what is alien. By such sights the god surprises us.

Thoreau too sees the discipline of the poet as "imagin[ing] the invisible in something alien to it." An image is a "visible [inclusion] of the alien in the sight of the familiar."

Thoreau includes in that familiar phenomenon, experiential and linguistic, a glimpse of something "alien," of something new and unfamiliar and uncanny.

Re-visioning the ordinary is an occasion of grace

The image thus becomes—always already is—a "sight or spectacle" that "lets the [ordinarily] invisible be seen," and lets it be seen right there in the familiar. The ordinary is re-visioned, and thus becomes an occasion of grace, and perhaps even of ethical witness.

In Walden it is the discipline of re-visioning that becomes the sacrament, the occasion of grace. In the book one sees Thoreau bringing to bear on his life, in all its ramifications, a particular sort of imaginative attention. One of his most characteristic activities, his detailed naturalistic descriptions of his environment, serves as a metaphor (or perhaps as a scaffold) for the discipline required by his larger task of fronting the conditioning facts of his life.

This is a discipline, an activity of thinking that teaches one to (in Wittgenstein's famous injunction) "look and see," to pay attention to what is there. Most of the time, of course, we don't see what is there. Whether doing philosophy or walking in the woods, we mostly see what we expect to see, what we have been told and taught to see

I have said that it is the discipline of re-visioning that becomes the sacrament, and it is (in Thoreau) the connection of this discipline with the more bodily practices of building, hoeing, walking, and surveying that establishes the regulative idea of reality at its heart.

The power of poetry is that it lets us see the possibility of more poetry

What is most uncanny about the work of the poet is its way of bringing one to see and feel the continual possibility of the familiar's sacramental transformation into the alien. The real power of an unexpected and revelatory image is not what it actually lets one see there and then (though in the case of a great poet like Thoreau that in itself may be powerful almost beyond all our words of praise); rather, it is the sense that there are innumerable other images where that one came from. The power of poetry is not only that it lets us see; it lets us see the seeing, and thus lets us see the possibility of even more surprises

A great poem reminds us both of its limits and the possibility of more poems

One way to say this would be to say that 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. Without devaluing itself by the admission, 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. The images of a poet are things: they wear on their faces the conditions of the life within which they came to appearance. (That is why the words of a poet are so clearly her own

But one of those conditions is a metacondition. Great poetry always invokes (what one might call, too weakly of course the imagination itself. It always invokes (though not necessarily in an explicit trope) the nameless, featureless godhead: the bright sky out of which everything appears. It always gestures at the clearing, die Lichtung, at that open and opening space—the space between luminous sky and darkening earth—within which the act of poetic inclusion, of measuring, 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 die Lichtung necessity and contingency are one.

More, it is a thing-this account, this life, the book Walden-that alludes to more than just itself and its particular conditions. In it one encounters not just the specific images through which Thoreau's life is at present flowing, and not just the surprising and unpredictable appearances of new images that will deepen and redirect that flow; one also comes to front the unnamable source of those images.

To really see conceptions, detach them momentarily from their context

In order to "look and see," one must first learn to see those conceptions, to detach them-momentarily-from the world they constitute; and that is a hard discipline.

Really see conceptions by avoiding thinking and engaging with something practical

It must be learned, and one way it is learned is practically. "Don't think, but look!" said Wittgenstein. The danger in thinking is that one will do nothing but trace round and round again the dimensions of one's comfortable cell, while all the time believing oneself to be striding through open fields. One needs a discipline, a way of training one's attention toward a particular sort of goal. For Thoreau, that discipline is variously practical

The point of those activities is not just themselves and their characteristic pleasures, nor even the "products" they lead to. They are ways to learn to pay a particular sort of attention.

See the difference between convention and possibility then re-vision

But such fronting of facts is not a simple matter of holding one's eyes open. It isn't a matter of keeping a journal or of merely wanting to get things right. It demands practices, disciplines, that reinforce the reality of the Wittgensteinian distinction between what we ordinarily think and what we can come to see about them. And once we have learned to make that distinction, it becomes possible to see them in a new way.

The point of disciplining oneself in some practical task is not (per impossibile) decisively to free one’s vision from the enabling constraints of imagination; it is to become aware of all the unnoticed ways that “we belong to the community” in what we see and think.

To learn to "look and see" is not to learn to dispense with all conceptions. It is, first, to learn to see the ordinarily invisible conceptions always already there in our seeing, to learn to see them by having them highlighted by the ways in which our concrete practices of, say, building, farming, and writing cast up phenomena (sagging rafters, poor yields, stillborn sentences) that put the lie to those conceptions.

True, the universe reliably answers to our conceptions but, as Heidegger insisted, there is also a darkness in the earth that resists all our conceptual attempts to illuminate it. There is a constant struggle between lighted world and dark earth, a struggle to which our self-concealing technological practices normally blind us. We need to put ourselves into that space in between, where the struggle is going on and where we can become aware-through their failure—of the presence of those pictures that silently condition our experience. And that awareness can develop in us the "poetic faculty" of the singing birds, a faculty that can solicit new images to reveal to us our condition.

To live "sincerely" is to discipline oneself to self-reliance. It is to have paid attention to the ways in which one belongs to the community, to the ways in which one's thinking and living is common. Ordinarily, our condition is the common one; no wonder it is so poor. But one's steady attention to the common can transform it, setting the stage for new communities, built on new "conceptions" to which the universe will (for a time) "answer". Discipline in self-reliance can awaken the "poetic faculty."

Thoreau's life is a transparent thing filled with Pathos

It is a thing that carries on its face the conditions of its own making. It does not pretend to speak for and to everyone; it intends only to show the conditions of the life it knows in New England. It tries to be transparent to itself, to front its own constitutive facts, to notch on its stick its own present moment.

When a thing is transparent and reflects its own conditions it resist being zeug

And both are books that gather the fourfold; they are books that carry on their faces the conditions of the life that brought them to appearance. Partly they do that through the autobiographical testimony they contain; but they do it more through their spiky and arresting language. Neither allows itself to recede into some easy use we might make of it.

Both are books redeemed for us by their particular kind of awkwardness: philosophical; linguistic; spiritual. Neither has the smooth surface and ready availability that marks the anonymous products of die Technik

Walden and Young Men and Fire are Scriptures

in both cases their refusal to submit is connected to a notion of truth that doesn't separate itself from the workings of imagination. Such recalcitrance is rare, in books or in people; and it is the best indication of the justice—I think—in claiming for them the status of Scripture in a way of being religious that escapes our normal nihilism.

Imagination as religious discipline is our key against normal nihilism

a proper attention to the imagination—and in particular to the imagination cultivated as a religious discipline—was the key to our being able somehow and sometime to pass through this mood and into our next.

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 and equal to others; it is not just another shop in the mall.

Normal nihilism's plain sense of things is itself imagined

But even our normal nihilist view of "the plain sense of things"—the necessary absence for us of any credible theological or metaphysical imagination, the deflating triumph of the age of values and its pragmatism—is just as much imagined as is any practice or thing that might answer to our need for more than that plainness. One does not suddenly start (or stop) measuring oneself against the godhead; one has been doing that all along, if only one could have imagined it so. The philosophical and cultural movement from the Yahwist to Plato to Descartes to Nietzsche and then to us, which in its broad sweep now seems utterly unavoidable, "had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge."

Imagination is a discipline of truthfulness

In the normal run of things, as we all know, it is not possible for us to think or to believe whatever we wish: reality rarely gives us that free a hand. It is equally impossible that we should "[imagine] as an inevitable knowledge" whatever just happens to come to mind when we open ourselves to fantasy. Imagination contains its own hard discipline of truthfulness, of getting it right,

Outside supernatural religion, we imagine the necessity of certain thoughts

We are in an odd bind, therefore. We cannot help thinking what we now think, if we have thought about it at all; yet in the next moment we recognize that whatever it is we now think, it’s just one way of thinking among many, one to which we are susceptible for causes-images, tropes-we ourselves (perhaps) can actually recount, along with their history. The Pathos of our thinking at present what actually we do think, resides in our sense of its proper inevitability; yet that inevitability now seems to us post-Nietzscheans to be of a quite particular kind: an imagined necessity, a particular and contingent way of seeing that has been "imagined as an inevitable knowledge"-and that insight (the contingency of what I see and think) seems so to us in virtue of another inevitability (crudely put, the inevitable replacement of Plato by Nietzsche), itself equally imagined.

When a thing has imagined necessity, its Pathos diminish

In that iteration of imagined necessity, in that alternation of the moment of truth and the moment of another truth (a truth now about the conditions of that first truth: and so on up the ladder to exhaustion), some of the Pathos of the particular vision, of any particular vision, leaks away, leaving room (I have argued) for some dangerous substitutes. Truth devalues itself in our scrupulously truthful imagination of truth's conditions in the imagination.

In lieu of supernatural necessity, intellectual or artistic inevitability

Dewey was right: in our time the problem with supernatural religion is belief." However lovely and powerful the stories of the gods and their minions are, there's just no way that for us they are "required, as a necessity requires." To say that we can't really believe in them is just to say that we aren't now forced to; they are not any more for us "an inevitable knowledge." There are plausible—more plausible—alternative accounts of the phenomena upon which the supernatural has based its claims on us: in the public square, or at least in the college quad, genes now compete with gods, and win. For us, full Pathos, full belief, comes only with an intellectual or artistic inevitability. Having put myself to the question with all the scruple I can muster, it's only what I cannot help saying that seems genuinely true, and therefore capable of being believed and acted upon with a clean heart.

Absence of metaphysical ground does not mean loss of Pathos

The loss of metaphysical ground does not mean the loss of the Pathos of inevitability. It just means something else has been substituted as the object of that Pathos, and as the source of that necessity.

Poetically dwelling on earth as a mortal is a capable substitute to supernatural religion

I have been arguing that for us the only thing capable of taking the place of supernatural religion is a life that takes as central to itself a particular kind of social practice. If Dewey wanted to erect the scientist as a figure proof against our cynicism or gluttony or abandon, I have (following Heidegger, of course) wanted to raise up instead a poet like Thoreau or Maclean.

In their kind of writing, and that is to say in their kind of thinking and building, there is still the full Pathos of inevitability. Both know themselves to be working under the discipline of truth. Sentence must follow sentence, board must follow board, thought must follow thought, "as a necessity requires." Nothing in the thing is accidental or excessive or ornamental or invisible; everything—every word, every action, every stroke of the chisel shaping a farmhouse windowsill or every sweep of a scythe through a field of grass—tells.

The work of writers like these shows a constant and overriding concern to "get it right," to "tell the truth," to offer "a simple and sincere account," to "stand right fronting and face to face to a fact"; so much so that it is not an exaggeration to see their lives, as recounted in their books and things, as something like prayer: beseeching the godhead to invest itself in "the alien," hoping to be surprised as the clearing opens before one and one is struck by seeing there the ordinarily invisible. That is the discipline of truth; that sort of questioning, that sort of continually renewed asking-for, is the piety of thinking. What comes as the result of such petition must come "as an inevitable knowledge." It must come with the force of a revelation.

But why call this practice of poetic dwelling a way of being religious? I keep that word for two reasons. First, I think each of the three structural features of Western religiousness deployed in Chapter 1 has its significant analogue in the practices of writing and living I have recounted. There is the binary division between die Lichtung and whatever appears in it: between, on the one hand, the imagination (that weak but inevitable word) as the ultimately conditioning source of whatever we see and, on the other, whatever in particular we do see, ourselves included.

What should it mean for us to be religious? To dwell poetically on the earth as a mortal..

Poetic dwelling does not require metaphysical realism

Yet for all its rigor, for all its recognition of being under the discipline of truth, the practice of thinkers like Thoreau or Maclean in no way requires a metaphysical Realism to support it. It is truth they seek, certainly, but truth disciplined by imagination. There is no hope in them of transcending the conditions of appearance; indeed, no sense for them in such a hope.

in the practices I have been valorizing there is no mythical or metaphysical construal of these structural features. Neither Thoreau or Maclean feels any great need to construct a "true world" over and above this one in order to account for their need and ability to "measure themselves against the godhead," nor do they try to give a philosophical representation of the dialectic of necessity and freedom they discover within their practices of building/dwelling/thinking. They are, on the whole, content to take their practices as they come to know them, without reaching for any justification outside their own demands. How is that possible? How can they have not succumbed to the need, so familiar to us, to account in a particularly philosophical way for the lives we are living? I believe it is because, the Pathos of inevitability they discovered in the imagination was great enough to displace any need for more than that. If one has felt the inevitable rightness of a sentence or a hoe-stroke, if one has known the inescapable demand for a "simple and sincere account" of one's own life, and if one has recognized the possibility of answering to that demand by the making of true things, then one does not need the (as it will then seem) secondary satisfaction of "justifying" all that.

The practice of poetic dwelling on the earth as a mortal offers an antidote (I don’t say the only antidote) to those dangers. It is a practice that, without any need for an “absolute conception of reality,” puts one under a discipline as absolute as any that can be imagined.

In poetic dwelling, imagination provides all inevitability and necessity

(They do not doubt their particular perspectives, although they do recognize them as such.) They do not anxiously fear or regret the imagination, and I think that's because each of them found in it all the inevitability, all the necessity, that metaphysics or religion had promised and failed to deliver.

In poetic dwelling, imagination allows us to measure ourselves against it

In the imagination and its requirements they have found a way to measure themselves against the godhead, a way that offers both the satisfactions of occasional achievement-"By such sights the god surprises us"-and the humility of more frequent failure.

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 the 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.

In poetic dwelling, imagination allows us to engage in a discipline of experiment

In the same way, the practice of poetic dwelling offers effective defense against the temptation to identify oneself with some particular form of das Man. To recognize that whatever life one is living is conditioned by tropes and images given to one by the disciplined activity of measuring oneself against the godhead, and further to recognize that those tropes and images, no matter how truthful, no matter how "required, as a necessity requires," are capable of being supplanted by truer—more inevitable—ones, is to recognize the impossibility of being contented with what one has. It is to know oneself to be under the discipline of experiment; it is to know that the act of measuring is never done once for all.

In poetic dwelling, a discipline of imagination allows us to foster the dialectic of propriety and experiment

In this discipline there is the constant dialectic between the necessity of doing things as it is proper to do them (imagination's own discipline of truth, I have called it) and the freedom—the need—always to try again, to listen better, to front the fact more directly.

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.

Poetry's dynamism qualifies it as a religious discipline of the imagination

However good and true a poem may be, there is always call for more such poems. Poetry is a practice that destroys both idolatry and anomie. There is, after all, the right word to speak, the one properly required for this sentence (if only I can hear it, but it is a word properly required only for this sentence, not for the next or the next. It is the right word, the only right word; but it is not the Word of the Lord, nor of any of the Philosophical Fathers.

Write because you need it

And finally there is the sense that our proper relation to die Lichtung has been compromised, and that our health depends upon righting it. Both Thoreau and Maclean are moved to their writing by a sense of neediness.

by working on the book, they are in fact working on themselves. The account they give of things is finally an account of themselves, and in their disciplined submission to the necessities they discover in their imagination of their materials, they also discover (not once for all, of course) the haleness that marks a proper relation to things.

Notes

A writing practice allows one to try, to succeed, to fail, and to try again. This is enough of a religious practice.

Unsorted

to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is the present moment; to toe that line

In all these ways he is a faithful keeper of neglected accounts, disciplined by the need to do the job well

Thoreau sees himself as necessary to keeping the colors of the world alive, preventing through his imagination the world from bleaching into various shades of grey

such diminishment is the common inheritance of normal nihilists like us, who realize that the best we can hope for are contingent and transient “values”—structures of interpretation, ways of reckoning—to guide us on our way.

Dewey thought that science itself, natural and social, could take up the slack left by the gods’ departure, and that the dedicated, tolerant, truthful, democratic scientist could become for us a moral paradigm comparable in impressiveness to the religious and metaphysical visionaries of our past. That hope now seems dated.

Literature notes

Prompts