Even the senses have a history, so secular worldliness is ideological too

Evidence

One should not take this to mean that the worldliness of the secular members of modern nations is an expression of the truth revealed through the human senses, since senses themselves have a history. However unworldly medieval Christian monks and nuns may have been, they too lived in the world (where else?), but they lived differently in it from laypersons. … Benedict Anderson quite rightly represents the worldliness of secular nationalism as a specific ideological construct (no less ideological than the one it replaces) that includes in the present an imagined realm of the nation as a community with a “worldly past.” — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 944

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘senses themselves have a history’ relativizes the foundation of empirical modernity itself — every knowledge claim of the secular world is mediated by historically-formed perception. Dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Modern environmental awe of nature is secularized religious worship. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 41