The Silence of the Secular

摘要

This essay describes the secular as a kind of silence, an inability to speak of or with immanent value, and such condition is linked to the pattern of transcendence in thought and life, the positing of ultimate value at a remove from experience. This diagnosis is stimulated by Sofia Coppola's film Lost in Translation and Marcel Gauchet's book, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. A reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay ‘Oversoul’, suggests how conversation counters the silence of the secular and takes on a religious value.