Reflections on Arthur Danto's Commentary

A RTHUR DANTO provides a striking application of a modern/ classical distinction between causes and reasons. He suggests that religion recommends if not dictates giving up on the causes and settling for a systematic meaning of suffering. Here Danto exploits a conception of causality as antecedent efficient agency. Thus teleological explanation is excluded; the question Why? in application to any phenomenon is ruled invalid from the outset. Finality, it appears, goes into exile carrying with it the heart of religious construals of human good and evil. I note in passing that Danto here offers no defense-no explanation-for this reading of causality. True, it is backed by a formidable consensus; it comes near to being a hallmark of modernity. Is that a good and sufficient reason for accepting it? Also in passing I note that the Bible itself offers several powerful indictments of the sentential construal of suffering. One of these is so obvious I am puzzled by Danto's failure to note it: The Book of Job. In an odd way Job's positive recommendation, to accept the impenetrable mystery of divine creative power, is analogous to the posture of philosophical naturalisms, ancient and modern. The bind comes in determining what, if anything, counts as the irreducible and intractable Given

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