Penn State University Press Plain Sense of Things, The The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism Hardback: $55.00 0-271-01677-9 Paperback: $21.95.  James C. Edwards is Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. He is the author of Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life and The Authority of Language: Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Threat of Philosophical Nihilism."This is a book of wisdom that mines the fading of our past religious convictions to show how they might provide a way to go on in what Edwards wonderfully calls 'normal nihilism.'"-Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University

        There is what Heidegger calls 'the undifferentiated mode' of Dasein's existence, the kind of life in which Dasein is caught up in current and ordinary ways of interpreting itself and which no explicit reflection on these interpretations is occuring. Most Dasein lives this sort of life most of the time, the life of 'average everydayness'. We play out the scripts we are handed, normally without calling to mind that they are scripts. Most days I get up, go to school, carry on with my professional tasks, and so forth; and I do these things thoughtlessly and smoothly, untroubled by any sticky questions about their 'meaning'.

             "Sometimes, however, we are pricked into a disconcerting awareness of our submersions in these well-defined social roles. Perhaps one day I arrive at school only to find the adjoining office empty and dark, because my colleague----hurrying to meet an early class---has been killed in an automobile accident. I might then well think, 'Why was it so important for her to be on time?' and from that question I might be led into questioning the larger life my fiend and I shared: a life in which promptness for class is just a symbol for a more general sense of punctilious responsibility to others and to institutions. Where does this powerful sense of responsibility come from? What gives it its authority over me? Does it, in fact, have any such authority at all?

                "If in response to such reflection I were to assert [perhaps on the basis of philosophical or religous conviction] that my acceptance of my identity was defined by these rules---the prompt professor, the responsible citizen---is NECESSARY, that it is somehow grounded in a metaphysical reality that establishes permantently fixed meanings and assigns specific and eternal significances to things, then I am living as INAUTHENTIC Dasein.... In such a case I am, in a way, 'owning up to' myself and my life, but I am doing so in a way that sloughs responsibility off on some 'higher power', some 'true world' to which I must answer in my Being who I am."

              Few things are more ridiculous to me [in an essentially meaningless and absurd world----a world sans God] then to speculate about "authentic" or "inauthentic" behavior. One existential philosopher after the next [in their own way] speak of authenticity as though, once you ARE aware that your life is NOT grounded in the metaphysical, you can speak of authenticiaty in a meaningful way at all. So what if you become ensnared in an epiphany... a seminal moment in which it dawns on you how much your life is "scripted". That is simply the reality [the brutally naked facticity] of living with others in a social context. Once social interaction occurs there will always be the need for rules and roles and mores and customs and folkways... and political agendas and laws. How else could human "beings" get along from day to day in ways that are more rather than less functional? These scripts flow from biological and psychological predispositions, from history, from culture, from politcial and economic realites. Only rarely are they derived originally from philosophical speculation about Being/being.

           And then of course there is death and oblivion. However much you strive to live out that introspective "authentic script" you can't take it with you, right? You die and that is that.

         The point is most folks go to the grave without giving their "scripts" a second thought. They are, by and large, indoctrinated as children to follow The Official Script to the grave. But some, of course, get wind of this... they go to college or read some Camus and it begins to dawn on them that their lives HAVE been scripts. Again, so what? You still have to have one. Whether others make it up or you make up your own it is all just the same thing: figuring out how to make it through the days interacting with others who cannot really grasp the world the way you do and visa versa. And knowing that however you choose, in that essentially meaningless and absurd world, any and all choices are ultimately interchangable. It sure as hell doen't make any difference to Mr. Reaper how "authentically" you lived, eh?