Postlude: Belonging To Time
Today, the durability of democracy is tied to the
pluralization of life within Euro-American states and the
reconstitution of relations between Judaeo-Christian and Islamic
traditions. One way to probe the pertinent connections is to
address perspectives that press against deep pluralism. Another
is to articulate the positive possibility itself. We have pursued
each strategy in this study. It may be timely now to shift gears
again. For we are teachers, writers, students and thinkers. Many
of us are already inclined toward pluralism. Can more be done to
deepen our feeling for it?
William James, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Talal Asad,
the Dalai Lama, and Marcel Proust, disagreeing among themselves
on several matters, concur on the importance of practice,
sensibility and ethos to thinking, judgment and courage. Each, in
his way, criticizes the sufficiency of intellectualism to
philosophy, political theory, faith, and thinking; each ponders
how to enliven the dispositions through which perception is
colored, concepts are formed, evidence is sifted, interpretation
is engaged, arguments is inflected, and faith is consolidated. In
these figures you can also hear echoes from the likes of Buddha,
Lucretius, Jesus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. The latter, too,
advance different creeds while jointly emphasizing the pertinence
of practice to the sensibility infusing a creed.
The fact that we inhabit a time when the acceleration of
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Convention