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8 Conclusion
I have been trying in this book to follow a course of thinking which relates a philosophical self-reflection, and accordingly a certain philosophical positioning, with the task
of understanding religion. The professed point of view has been, from the beginning,
that religion cannot be determined as something independent of how we relate to ‘it’.
Rather, a philosophical concept of religion emerges from the engagement itself (and
philosophy’s engagement with itself). Inasmuch as this engagement involves, among
other things, an estrangement owing to the passing of time, many aspects of religion
are inevitably drawn into a picture of something fundamentally ‘other’. It stands to
reason that one cannot but adopt an alienated stance when approaching myth and
religion from a point of view that no longer springs from their own source. It does
not mean, however, that there are no channels left. Part of the present investigation
has thus been to locate points of convergence in the flow of cultural manifestations
between religious and philosophical attitudes and proclivities. The terminologically
self-imposing distinction between religion and non-religion may, in fact, be deceptive. I acknowledge that in order to speak about religion, one need to speak of it as if it
exists as such. I have, therefore, spoken about myth and religion throughout as if they
exist as self-identical entities. This doesn’t change the fact that religion is thereby
construed as something by and through which we recognize how, and in what sense,
the philosophical engagement with it is no longer religious. It should not imply, of
course, that religion is, thereby, represented arbitrarily, but it is indeed re-presented.
Its presence, if such there is, is in this book’s line of thought a derived and suppressed
presence, which is exactly what a representation in general is. By this I don’t want to
imply that there is, after all, something essentially religious which is just out of reach
as a Ding an Sich, but merely that an ongoing transformation inevitably takes place.
What I claim is that the presence of what once was is no longer the same presence.
Yet, culture changes gradually, and nothing of what a religion might have been, in its
formative phase, have been substituted by something else overnight. To put it differently, religion becomes religion again and again, reinvented, reinterpreted, never the
same, though probably never something completely different either. The concept of
‘religion’ is meaningful as there are only so many ways in which the term can be used.
Part of the changes by which religion turns into something else, as Cassirer, for
instance, has noted, is the recognition of conceptuality. If religion is a birthplace,
at least in theology and philosophical mysticism, of recognizing a split between the
expressible and the inexpressible (reflecting the split between being and beings, transcendence and immanence), then concepts become, in principle, inadequate, and
the texture of religion’s relation to myth is loosened by its very threads. In contexts
where concepts even become abstractions, religion and philosophy are joined in
metaphysics (and have thus been bedfellows for centuries). At the dawn of modernity,
it seemed that philosophy was the one to grow out of this longstanding fellowship as
the adult guardian: as if human reasoning reached maturity, taking over from God!
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Yet a shadow of myth followed closely in the footsteps of this development, divulging a ‘truth’ which has been with us for a while, namely that the changes, gaining
momentum in Romanticism and onwards, were anything but one-directed, and that
they, therefore, resulted in a fragmentation of reason rather than in a self-preserving
autonomy. It took a pragmatic turn, however, undertaken by the later Wittgenstein, to
point out the mythical character of our accustomed use of language and the magical
traits clinging to metaphysical reifications; it took a revision of Kant, carried out by
Benjamin and Cassirer, for instance, to realize the profundity of symbolic imagination, and it took a fundamental ontology, by Heidegger, to renew the question of being
as addressing the basic conditionality of mortal existence.
Taking my own view in the aftermath of these lines of thought, I have laid out a
perspective in which religion is summoned as a stranger in the twilight of being friend
as well as foe, a partner as well as an adversary, within a self-reflecting stance of philosophy. My thesis is that ‘truth’, ‘name’, and ‘habitation’ emerge as nodes of existential importance in religion seen from the angle of thinking initiated in the Twentieth
Century and that this perspective not only structures a certain view of religion but
is also a theme in its own right in contemporary philosophy as exemplified in the
thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy. However, the respects in which these confluences appear
differ. What may be glimpsed from the pragmatic view of truth, for instance, as so
many uses of the word (challenging the notion of a single concept of truth), does not
find a parallel in myth or religion. Instead, myth and religion seem to be recognizable instances of this pragmatic ‘truth’ contrary to their own view. Thus, the appearance of a translatable concept of truth in the context of myth and religion (namely as
subject rather than predicate, unquestionable rather than questionable) is fostered
by its own ‘other’, that is, determined by an alienating, pragmatic view of truth that it
does not share. In this case, the philosophical thought of the present study does, not
coincidentally, go against religion, since what makes religion speak of truth as that
which gives the sense of things has an undeniable connection with what has made
philosophy commit itself to metaphysics. With respect to the topic of ‘the name’, indicating a non-conceptual dimension of language, the case seems to be the opposite. If
Benjamin, for instance, is right in discerning a pure language, expressed by the name,
in the ineffable furrows of our conceptual and habitual thinking, my point would be
that only myth and (to some degree) religion can express this without the philosophical conceptuality that is the ‘other’ of this naming. According to Benjamin the gist of
undisturbed correspondences are most likely, today, to be picked up by art rather than
by philosophy (whose critical obligation to truth inhibits it), and thus philosophy can
never substitute that which is proclaimed in religion (that is, a Messianic redemption,
in the optics of Benjamin). Contrary to this ‘hope-inclined’ negativism or defeatism
(which appears to be shared by Nancy), an attempt to positively embrace that which
speaks from the depth of language is found in Heidegger’s attempt to listen to Being
and let things and words be thought, rather than to think – conceptually – about
them. In this attempt we sense a mystical gesture which, in Benjamin’s and Cassirer’s
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view, might be partly reminiscent of Goethe’s retreat into the thicket of myth. In this
respect, Benjamin and Cassirer behold myth and religion through the lens of departure, whereas Heidegger, who loathes any kind of self-securing objectification, strives
to dig deeper, being touched, as it seems, by a strain of nostalgia. Benjamin, on the
other hand, who finds himself dialectically engaged with the ruins of the past, looks
upon it in melancholia.
The lens through which Wittgenstein looks upon the past is neither that of nostalgia nor melancholia, but rather a philosophical disturbance of realizing the strangeness of a human form of life (which puts him somewhat in line with Borges, Cavell,
Flood, and Nancy). There is neither any veneration for ancient religion, nor any faith
in philosophical truth, in the later Wittgenstein, for whom the practice that makes us
social beings can be gleaned from science as well as from religion and philosophy.
All distinctions have a practical use, though we are confused, or confuse ourselves,
us into believing that they are also independently true. Instead of regarding myth
and religion as closed entities or things of the past, however, we might learn something about ourselves by seeing – and recognizing – both ‘phenomena’ as aspects
of a human form of life. Thus, by discovering a mythical tendency in our use of language, we might be able to sense that what flows through myth and religion may also
flow through concepts which, so to speak, regard themselves as other. Inasmuch as
the estrangement of such recognition may reopen channels between philosophy and
religion, we should take care not to embrace too willingly the philosophical pitfalls of
mysticism. On the one hand, I think we will have to ‘secure’ or stand in philosophy as
being a strictly conceptual engagement; on the other hand, I shall be the first to admit
that this ‘self-sheltering retreat’ is but one way of securing a residence, a habitation
in the world. But philosophers are no gods. Thus, one of the pertinent elements that
science and philosophy share with religion is the attempt to find a home in mortal
existence, to locate or constitute a pertinence in that which forgoes, to weave a thread
over the abyss of nothingness. Whereas science deals with the strangeness of the
world by demystifying it in the attempt to secure a safe haven for human lives (suspending the implications of future costs), religion embraces the strange by naming
it, by familiarizing itself with the source of our angst, the nothingness in the heart of
being. By drawing a seasonal circle around it, it honors the future in ways that science
will, at some point, be forced to realize in its own way, but that is only an implicit thematic of this book. What I have focused on is a certain transition in the style of habitation from religion to philosophy (though viewed in retrospect), namely, that the home
we have absconded, the totality of the world, including the duality of worldly and otherworldly being, has left a trace of something uncanny, unhomely (Unheimlich), an
angst related to what now appears uninhabitable. The veil which modernity believes
to have been lifted from the face of religious belief reveals nothing, or nothing but
Nothing. In this disclosure, which is another word for the relationship between philosophy and religion, we might get a glimpse of the non-conceptual ‘truth’ or ‘presence’ of religion. In the eyes of a post-metaphysical philosophy, religion names itself,
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its own reality, by the name of Nothing, which is but a conceptual reflection of the
emptiness gleaned from a philosophical mirror, a modern emptiness through which
human thought stands the risk of losing foothold in the world, eating from its own
non-existing flesh, as it were. A current philosopher such as Jean Luc-Nancy dares
to face this predicament, this current state of being, and yet continue to grabble with
what is left, estranged, and yet reopening, in a historical world of tradition which
speaks through our immediate, and universal, conditionality. Perhaps religion can
still keep philosophy thinking, so that philosophy can keep up its critical engagement
with religion.
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