Abstract
Atheists are rarely associated with holiness, yet they can have deeply spiritual experiences. Once such experience of the author exemplified ‘the holy’ as defined by Otto. However, the subjectivism of Otto’s Kantianism undermines Otto’s otherwise fruitful approach. While the work of Hegel overcomes this, it is too rationalistic to account for mortal life. Seeking to avoid these shortcomings, this paper places ‘holiness’ within a self-differentiating ontological unity, the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’. This unity can only be experienced by confronting groundless finite mortality, and the resulting existential disposition is characterized as ‘reverence’. Reverence is gratitude for mortal existence, and existence itself. Moreover, it is as much political as it is ontological, atheistic as it is theistic.
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Endnotes
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I am grateful to Paul Ashton, Terry Eyssens, Pete Moore and Ruth Quibell for their thoughts on this experience.
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Ibid., pp.68–71.
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This was the premise of the 1981 film,The Gods Must Be Crazy. See Uys, Jamie,The Gods Must Be Crazy (Marina Del Rey: Trimark, 1981).
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On the unity of local and global, see: Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘The Politics of Chaos: Local Knowledge Versus Global Theory’, inChaos Bound (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp.202–235. On the ambivalence of non-systematicity in Foucault, see: Berstein, 'Foucault: Critique as a PhilosophicalEthos, pp.142–171. On the creative mutuality between agency and structure, see Clegg, Stewart R.,Frameworks of Power (London: Sage, 1989), pp.l–20, pp.149–186.
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Castoriadis, Cornelius, ‘Institution and Autonomy’, inA Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 1996), p.12; Castoriadis, Cornelius, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, trans. David Ames Curtis,Constellations 4 1 (1997): 2–3. Here Castoriadis positions himself against Heidegger, emphasizing the distinctness and complexity of each word, rather than the ontological structure of the worldper se. However, it is difficult to see how the two are incompatible, considering that the development of each particular world can be well-characterized by the articulation of ‘world’ in Heidegger. On the various meanings of ‘world’ in Heidegger’s works, see Dreyfus,Being-in-the-World, pp.89–91. On the world as the specific history of a people, see Heidegger, Martin, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, inMartin Heidegger: Basic Writings, p. 174..
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This is summarized in Castoriadis, Cornelius,The Imaginary Constitution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp.369–373.
Heidegger,Parmenides, pp.95–96; Castoriadis, Cornelius, ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’, inThe Castoriadis Reader, ed. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp.267–289. Castoriadis takes issue with the idea, implied in Heideggerian terminology, that disclosure entails something pre-existing the act itself; that there is a concrete possibility prior to its unveiling. See Castoriadis,The Imaginary Constitution of Society, pp. 198–199.
Castoriadis, ‘The Retreat From Autonomy: Post-Modernism as Generalized Conformism’, pp.21–24.
Adams, Suzi, ‘Castoriadis’ Shill TowardsPhysis, Thesis Eleven 74 (2003): 105–112. If Adams’ interpretation of Castoriadis is correct, Castoriadis not only recognized the relevance ofphysis to process-oriented philosophy, but also appreciated developments in the fields of complex processes research, hierarchy theory and biosemiotics. On the relationships between these and society, see Gare, Arran, ‘Human Ecology and Public Policy: Overcoming the Hegemony of Economics’,Democracy and Nature 8 1 (2002): 131–141.
This is most concisely expressed in Castoriadis, ‘The GreekPolis and the Creation of Democracy’.
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Foucault, ‘Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, pp.288–289. Of course, Foucault does not phrase this in Heideggerian terms.
Heidegger,Being and Time, pp.296–299ff, p.308ff, p.344, p.394.
Young, '‘The Mortal Blessings of Narrative’.
Heidegger,Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 178.
Ibid., pp.149–151, pp.178–179.
Ibid., p.150, p.178.
Kazantzakis, op. cit., p.550.
I am using ‘structure’ tentatively, as the word lends the fourfold’s mirroring play more solidity than it warrants. Without drawing on the kind of poetic language Heidegger adores, it is difficult to find a word for Being that does justice to it.
Rosa, Hartmut, ‘On defining the Good Life: Liberal Freedom and Capitalist Necessity’,Constellations 5 2 (1998): 201–214.
Heidegger, Martin,Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), p.88.
Arendt, Hannah,The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), pp.178–186.
Castoriadis, ‘The GreekPolis and the Creation of Democracy’, pp. 273–275.
Young, Damon A., ‘The Democratic Chorus: Culture, Dialogue and PolyphonicPaideia’,Democracy and Nature 9 2 (2003): 221–235.
Castoriadis, ‘Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime’, pp.l–5.
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Young, D.A. Being grateful for being: Being, reverence and finitude. SOPHIA 44, 31–53 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02912429
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02912429