Comments on: Is critique secular?

By: Benjamin Bronson

Benjamin Bronson — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:36:51 +0000

A secular person saying that a religious person cannot self-critique is just as absurd as a religious person saying that a secular person will not (not that they could not) critique themselves with God’s commandments with any true conviction and intention to conform; to abide by them (especially the first commandment). These things are obvious and each type holds their own morality, master or slave, as higher than the other seeing the opposition as evil.

Secularism seeks to consume all aspects of life into its sphere: language, arts, science, etc., everything but that which is sacred. For the secular person, who has a master morality, the only thing sacred is self. Being motivated by a “will to power” the secular person’s necessary and constant self-affirmation goes against any idea that a secular person could truly critique themselves. For any flaw found would divert their attention to build up the ego in another area to remain independent and dominant; to remain sacred. Since that which is sacred, to be exact: the secular self, is outside the sphere of what is secular, how could critique be secular?

Being that the secular person cannot self critique, nor can the religious person, we find that the only One that can truly critique a person is the Sovereign Lord, God Almighty, to be exact: Christ Jesus.

By: Ben Anders

Ben Anders — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:47:15 +0000

While I am not so sure that I have ever encountered a group of “cosmopolitan secular academics” as ideologically monolithic as Mahmood seems to suggest I am somewhat sympathetic with her overall deconstruction of the scientistic materialist mythology that has infected our critical discourse. That is, many advocates of a binary struggle between “secular” and “religious” geopolitical forces actively deny (or perhaps have forgotten) the very ontological/epistemological assumptions that ground their own “secular worldview”. The rhetorical mantra of thinkers such as Dennet or Dawkins is precisely to proclaim metaphysics a dead conversation subsumed into the reductionist materialist constellation of advanced neuroscience and quantum physics. It is precisely this radical reduction of the ontological space to one where must be a materialist in order to have a seat at the table that I can enthusiastically join Mahmood in resisting.

While Mahmood is completely justified in bringing the metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological presuppositions of secular critique back into the forefront of our understanding of its various implications, I am not sure that this undermines its uniqueness in precisely the way she was searching for. If I can embrace my own “secular cosmopolitan academic” assumptions, in a way, do I not in fact engender an even more distinct binary between “religious” and “secular” than before?

The uniqueness of the secular humanist ontological/metaphysical position, conceiving of the human as the Kantian “end in himself”, is unique in its precisely epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical framework when subjected to a comparative analysis with other such religious frameworks. Any dialog between the “secular” theoretical position and its inverse religious critique (s), will over time, only make the peculiarity of secular critique as a historical phenomena more apparent. Whether that uniqueness is emancipating or threatening is a subjective matter, but to attempt to take away its unique standing as a historical event by means of over-contextualizing it as a merely “Western” or “secular academic” phenomena is intellectually disconcerting.

By: Nathan Suhr-Sytsma

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:03:22 +0000

I find intriguing your efforts to consider what, beyond argument or analysis, draws people to “the secular story.” I’m thinking specifically of what you call “the thick texture of affinities, prejudices, and attachments that tie us (cosmopolitan intellectuals and critics) to what is loosely described as a secular worldview.” I wonder how such a “texture” might be analyzed: do you suspect that there are common or overlapping aspects of this texture among “cosmopolitan intellectuals and critics”? Or, given the number and diversity of such individuals, do you mean for this “texture” to be less an object of analysis than of self-reflection? I wonder, too, about the relation of present-day intellectuals’ outlooks to the “new moral outlook” among post-Darwinian Victorians and their successors that Charles Taylor sketches in A Secular Age: “a view of our ethical predicament, namely, that we are strongly tempted, the more so, the less mature we are, to deviate from this austere principle [of believing only what is clearly demonstrated by evidence], and give assent to comforting untruths” (563). While the epistemological framework may have changed, perhaps part of that “moral outlook”—that the desire for belief is a kind of (immature) temptation—has carried over into current academic culture. Do you think that Taylor is on a parallel track here, or is your sense of a “texture” to be distinguished from a “moral outlook”?

Both you and Taylor also seem to suggest a more institutional aspect to the draw of “the secular story.” What you frame as critical reason’s “disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness” to my mind resembles Taylor’s concept of the “unthought” of much secularization theory, a set of assumptions that considers the decline of religion inevitable because it is (assumed to be) false, irrelevant, &/or authority-based (c. 427-29). While you invoke secular “self-critique” as the necessary next step, Taylor turns to “a continuing open exchange with those of different standpoints” as the best correction for the blindspots produced by his own (religiously committed) “unthought” (428). I would be curious to know whether you see his approach as promising or not for your own project.

By: Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:15:27 +0000

For years (since reading “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” as a freshman in college) I have been grateful for your efforts to push past fictional categories, tempting as they may be for making bold assertions like Gourgouris’s.

I think you are right with the direction you point to at the end, the “feeling good” of secularism, the experience of the people involved in it. This kind of attention is also what makes Asad’s Formations of the Secular so powerful: its willingness to see the phenomenon beyond social-structural conditions to a more precise cultural anthropology: How does secular culture feel?

Secularists rejoice in the experience of liberation in secularism, and it is true, this liberation comes from a critique. It can be emotionally exhilarating, filled with the thrill of unsettling old dogmas and seeing the world with fresh eyes. I give it that.

But this is not lost on so-called religion either. Much the same exhilaration, built also on a kind of critique, is part of the experience of cradle-secularists who “find religion.” I myself was one; when I was 18 years old, I converted to Catholicism from my secular upbringing. It was a thrilling experience, a liberating one, built on a critique of how secularism had fallen short. Since, I have undergone a number of pendulum-swings back and forth between secular and religious thinking. Each move has been infused with its own form of critique and its own sense of exhilarated liberation.

As you say, it is not the category of “critique” that identifies secularity. Rather, the differences are more specific. Critique, with its attendant emotional drives and payoffs, are possessed by neither imaginary civitate, that of the religious or the secular. If anything, it depends on the possibility of moving among them, of mobility among cultures.