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Sciborg_S_Patel
Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
The question I have in mind is not, of course, “Is there a god?” Rather it is a general question about the relation of individual human life to the universe as a whole. The question is pointed to by its religious answer: namely that our lives are in some way expressions or parts of the spiritual sense of the universe as a whole, and that we must try to live them in light of this, and not only from the point of view of our local purely individual nature. I believe that the question to which this is one possible response remains to be asked even if a religious response is not available, and it is this: How can one bring into one’s individual life a recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole, whatever that relation is?
It is important to distinguish this question from the pure desire for understanding of the universe and one’s place in it. It is not an expression of curiosity, however large. And it is not the general intellectual problem of how to combine an objective conception of the universe with the local perspective of one creature within it. It is rather a question of attitude: Is there a way to live in harmony with the universe, and not just in it?
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