Embodiment and Religion

Susan Babbitt’s Humanism and Embodiment isn’t a book of theology. Babbitt draws on Marxist and feminist sources as much as on Eastern religion and Christianity. But she does think that religion offers unique resources for philosophy. Secularists, she thinks, are wrong to reject religion, because religion can become an ally of humanism. “Philosophical liberalism,” not religion, should be recognized as the threat to reason (163).

Babbitt isolates four contributions that religious thinkers can make to philosophy. First, “religious philosophers are much better, in theory at least, at recognizing human reality for what it is, namely, insecure.” Buddhists thinkers recognize that “Death is part of our reality, at every moment,” a reality that secular thinkers tend to push from consciousness (163).

Further, “religious thinkers are often more comfortable with self-dispossession as the inevitable feature of humanist knowledge than non-religious analytic philosophers” (166). Religious thinkers recognize the incompleteness of human identity and individuality, and can rest in that incompleteness.

Third, “religious thinkers, more than academic philosophers, emphasize silence and solitude.” In mystic stillness, religious thinkers refuse to classify and categorize and thus, as Thomas Merton put it, resist superimposing something on being rather than experiencing being. Religion puts us in touch with reality, as opposed to our systems of classifying reality (167).

Finally, religion emphasizes transcendence. This is important because proper individuation and an accurate view of reality can be blocked by “a particular conception of oneself and one’s importance.” Knowledge is “radically contingent upon circumstances and conditions, including personal ones,” and a recognition of transcendence helps to evade the anxiety that might arise from recognizing the contingency of knowledge (168).

Babbitt, as I say, isn’t writing theology, but she has grasped some important dimensions of how religious experience and thought counter the worst tendencies of secularism. Far from being illusion, religion functions as a reality principle.