The Land of Unlikeness

“How does it stand with philosophy, if we are open to the ultimate claim that being religious may make on us? I am not countering philosophical reason with an opposing irrationalistic fideism. My purpose is to pose a question to philosophical thinking at certain limits. While I will make assertions and even suggestions about the direction the question points us, the main difficulty is to hear this question, for some of our characteristic ways of thinking deafen us to it. How deafen? We philosophers think we have already heard and answered the question. My argument will be that there is another question that has not been heard, or only rarrely or sporadically, and that this further question solicits a new origination of philosophy: a post-philosophical reverence that yet is philosophical through and through; a reverence that perhaps some philosophers once knew, maybe sometimes in a taken for granted way, when religious reverence was also taken for granted.”

William Desmond, “Religion and the Poverty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism (2004).

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