Towards a Postsecular Society

Postmodernism

Amongst postmodern philosophers the hospitality to the spiritual is mixed. In general the postmoderns, while rejecting most of the Enlightenment project - including the remnants of religious thinking - created small intellectual spaces where the spiritual could flourish. This is because they also rejected the modernist insistence on a scientific description of a ‘given’ rational universe. These lacunae were permitted as long as they did not arrogate themselves to the status of a system, and as long as any central spiritual discourse was near-buried under the weight of postmodern terminology. We can better understand this phenomenon if we look back to the 17th century. At its dawn stood the sobering spectacle of Giordano Bruno’s murder by the Church, a warning to the thinkers of that age. Descartes’s ideas were banned, Newton kept his heretical Arianism a secret, and Spinoza was unable to publish at all. It is perhaps Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ that best demonstrates the lengths that these thinkers had to go to in order to hide their ideas. They firstly avoided any direct expression of their religious insights, and secondly were seduced into using the emerging language of maths, physics and reason. As a result the postmoderns inherited an intellectual tradition of extreme circumlocution - Derrida is one of its most eloquent practitioners. The phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas offers many opportunities for spiritual discourse, and the exchanges between Levinas and Derrida are a unique encapsulation of an ancient creative tension between the Hebraic and the Hellenic in Western culture and spiritual thought.