Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This.
So there's a quote from one of the members of the Kyoto School we're going to be talking about today.
He said, religion without philosophy is blind, and philosophy without religion is vacuous.
See, today we're going to be talking about the relationship between philosophy and religion, something the Kyoto School was always rethinking as they were doing their work.
And understand exactly what was meant by this quote I just said.
Just a heads up, you're going to need an understanding of the Nishitani episodes we've already done, Episodes 216 and 217.
You're going to need to know what's meant by shunyata as an experiential framing or the groundless ground, and you'll also need Nishitani's concept of realization and the double meaning in the way he uses it in his work.
From here on out, this episode is written as though you've listened to those two.
But you know what? All that said, I don't even want to start with Nishitani or any of the Kyoto School stuff today.
Today I want to start with something simple.
I want to give some long -deserved attention to a very important cartoon character that's come to be known as the duck rabbit.
Who or what is a duck rabbit, you may ask?
Well, you ever seen one of those optical illusion things where half the people see a duck, half the people see a rabbit when they look at it?
There's tons of these things out there.
It can be a sound, it can be a video.
The point is, aside from this just being some fun optical thing on a kid's menu at a restaurant, these are things that can show us something important about the way we see the world as human beings.
Wittgenstein used the duck rabbit in his work to talk about the meanings of words.
But the duck rabbit as a metaphor can actually be useful for all sorts of situations when we want to get out of seeing things in a classic, dualistic, theoretical, abstract framing of the world like we've been talking about on this show lately.
And I'd like to take this moment to empathize with a certain kind of person out there listening to this series so far.
This kind of person may say, look, I hear you, okay, where you keep talking about these different framings of our reality, where one is a rational, utilitarian framing.
We create systems out of abstractions.
I get that one. But then you start talking about this phenomenological framing.
Sometimes you say embodied framing.
Sometimes you'll even say religious framing.
Where apparently in this type of awareness, we're not breaking things down in this theoretical way anymore.
Apparently this is more of a pre -theoretical, more immediate connection to the world around us.
I mean, I hear you when you say all this, but I got to be honest, I don't see it.
Not only do I not see it, I don't know how to imagine my reality not chopping it up into abstract concepts and then making sense of it.
I mean, I want to remain open here, but when you just start talking about religion and then you also start talking about how we can't describe this framing of the world using, you know, words, my BS meter just starts going off.
I'm sorry. I mean, if this is such an imminent aspect of our experience, then why can't I see this framing of things right in front of me?
Well, consider the duck rabbit for a minute as an example.
Somebody can look at the duck rabbit for the first time and they might clearly see the thing that's drawn on the piece of paper as a duck.
And if they were never told it's possible to see this image in any other way, they might only see the duck every time they look at it.
But then once they're told that some people see a rabbit when they look at the picture, well, then they can be confused.
Like, I just don't see it.
They can strain and look really hard for how this could ever be a rabbit, but still only see a duck.
But then there's the moment where they see the rabbit for the first time and then it can be hard for them to go back to seeing the duck.
They keep practicing at this.
There could even be a point where they start to be able to freely switch between seeing it as a duck or seeing it as a rabbit.
Well, consider this as a metaphor for the different experiential framings of reality we've been talking about.
It could be that you're having a hard time seeing the rabbit.
And it's not because you're a bad person or a stupid person or too smart of a person to see this delusional rabbit that other people are talking about.
It's possible it's hard for you to see the rabbit because you live in a world where you're surrounded by ducks.
And it's a world that often incentivizes seeing the duck instead of the rabbit.
Similarly, though, there can be a moment where some other way of viewing things snaps into focus for you.
You all of a sudden see things around you in a different way.
And like that moment with the duck rabbit, it becomes evident to you.
This was something that was always there, right in front of you.
You just didn't see it until now.
And now you can't unsee it.
And coming from this dualistic framing of the world we typically do, imagine the kinds of things that people might say when they're struggling to see the rabbit.
They might say, look, there's only one reality out there, okay?
This thing either needs to be a duck or it needs to be a rabbit.
It literally cannot be both of those.
That's a logical contradiction.
You know, the limitations of this dualistic framing.
Well, the question to consider right now is, what if we're always doing this, this thing we're doing with the duck rabbit, to some extent when it comes to our framing of the world?
What if this isn't just an optical trick or some freak moment with a duck rabbit.
But what if this simple image is illustrating something important to us about the way we frame every moment of our experience?
Or if we open ourselves to see it more in this non -dualistic way?
Not only do the duck and the rabbit start to not look like contradictions of each other, but they start to look like things that actually require each other for them to exist in the way they do.
The duck co -constitutes the rabbit and vice versa.
Even more than that, you can start to wonder, what if there isn't really a formal essence of a duck or a rabbit at all.
You can ask, what is my experience of this moment I'm having when I'm not trying to frame it in terms of it being a duck or a rabbit all the time?
Maybe the biggest mystery of all here is, what could any of this have to do with the relationship between philosophy and religion?
Let's get into it. So K .G.
Nishitani, as we know, thought a lot about religion in his work, and he's somebody that no doubt, if he could see the modern world and the state of the discussion that often goes on among people about religion, he'd no doubt be pretty disappointed.
Because like we talked about on one of the earlier episodes, when you ask a question like, what is religion?
Shaitani doesn't think there's an easy answer to that question.
I mean, basically everyone out there has thoughts on what religion is, if you ask them, but how many of those people have really examined it closely?
And if we're trying to get a more full picture of what religion is, we can't just stop short with what's probably most of the discussion that goes on about religion these days.
You know, these days you have a good amount of people who are either atheists, who will write off religion entirely as just being a bunch of nonsense, or there's also a good amount of people who call themselves religious, putting very little work into their faith, and mostly just use religion as something
that's useful to them, where it's how they secure their spot in heaven, or it's their way to answer difficult questions, whatever it is.
Well, the problem with this Tanishitani, as we know, is that both of these manage to completely avoid the deeper and more interesting lines of thought that are possible when you take religion actually seriously.
See, to Nishitani, to even begin to start answering the question, what is religion in a remotely detailed way?
Well, to start, you'd have to at least do a philosophical analysis of religion, not to mention an analysis of the history of religion and what it's actually been to people in their lived experience for thousands of years.
You'd have to take seriously what was meant when, for example, a 4th century Christian mystic describes their communion with God.
Like, what do they really mean when they say that?
Then you'd have to compare that to maybe the experience of a Zen monk, their daily practice, their approach to how they view enlightenment.
Then you'd have to compare that to what's meant by a Sufi when they claim to have annihilated their own ego in the presence of divine love.
What I mean is you'd have to consider religion in a multi -dimensional way, as a source of meaning, as a mode of disciplined practice, as a political tool, as a framework for the glue that holds society together.
In other words, if you want to respect the question, what is religion truly?
well this whole thing would be a very big job for someone to do something some people have dedicated their entire lives to and the point is coming up with an answer to what is religion is not just looking around you at a handful of religious people that you happen to have met in your life so far and then
being like yeah these people basically represent everything religion stands for seems about right no just think of what kind of mistakes you could be making there like would you ever feel like you knew everything there was to know about constructing things just because you met a couple douchey construction workers
in your life? I mean, if you're born into the modern United States, for example, something you might see around you a lot are people that say that if you want to be considered a religious person, all you got to do is believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.
In other words, a core component of this type of religious experience, some would say the most important component, is belief in something.
As long as up in your head somewhere, you are assenting to a belief in the correct religious object, That's the thing that matters to the point where it's not uncommon to see people in the United States who act like very good people.
Their behaviors align with a religious community like this.
But if they haven't been saved by Jesus yet, if they don't believe, well, they're met with skepticism, where at the same time, somebody can be treating people around them in very bad ways.
But as long as they believe in the right thing, well, that's just one of our fellow Christians who's struggling right now.
I mean, if it was possible to reduce religion down to this, It's no wonder so many people would look at religion and think it lacks anything to do with moral accountability.
It's also no wonder why they might think it's a bit silly.
Like, what, I just believe in this thing hard enough and that's what really matters to you people?
And look, even more than this, if you've only met people like this throughout your life and you concluded that this is mostly what religion has to offer, well, you might be surprised to find out that this is actually nothing like what most religious experiences have been over the course of human history.
that this is actually a very modern, post -Enlightenment, post -Protestant Reformation, really, version of a religious experience.
See, for anyone unaware, during the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther writes his 95 Theses, sends these corrections to the church, shakes up the whole Western religious world, that was an event that would start a multi -century shift of what it was to have a run -of -the -mill religious experience
in European and then later American Christianity.
What was once a situation where most people didn't speak Latin and were unable to even read the scripture they were following.
Luther talked about creating what he called a priesthood of all believers.
And what this led to is that more so than ever before in the world after this, people began to think of their religious experience as a personal connection that they have to a God.
It started to become more common to speak to God directly during this time, to interpret the Bible personally when deciding what your relationship to God is.
But this was not the common way it was to be a Christian before this.
And when the individualism of the Enlightenment comes along, the rise of liberalism in the West, this notion that my religious identity is grounded in an individual belief I have as a subject about some religious object, well, you can just see the Enlightenment written all over this kind of thinking,
as well as how it mirrors other conversations about identity that would come out of Enlightenment -style thinking as well.
The idea is that my religion is really an aspect of my individual identity, and that religious identity is ultimately something that's decided by my choice to be it up in my head.
And this becomes more and more pronounced as a core piece of what it is to be this type of Christian as the years go on.
And for whatever it's worth, Dostoevsky, who we've been talking about lately, thought that the Protestant Reformation was a huge step in the wrong direction for Christianity.
Hence his commitment to orthodox Christianity.
Because the fact is, for most people who have ever considered themselves religious on this planet, religion has not primarily been about a belief in something.
In fact, as far as we can tell, for most of human history, whether or not you really believed in the God status of something, didn't really matter as much as how you treated people.
In other words, daily practice was more of what mattered.
Religion was more defined by how you engaged in the roles of your community and the religious traditions and the rituals around you.
And your identity was not something that was determined by some belief you had about yourself or some divine object.
Identity was something that exuded out of you as you lived a religious practice every day.
In fact, just to contrast this dynamic with something, you know, how removed this approach to religion is from a daily religious practice, consider the world of Keiji Nishitani and how different it was.
You know, early 20th century Japan is a place where Japan's facing an enormous amount of pressure internally to modernize and catch up, quote unquote, with the rest of the world.
And as they're doing this, they're looking at every way that Japanese culture functions and comparing it to the way that European culture functions as they try to take stuff from it.
Well, when they do this comparison, Nishitani realizes on his end that when it comes to the word religion, at least in the way that the word religion is being used by Europeans, the Japanese language doesn't even have a word at this point to describe exactly what these Europeans are talking about.
See, there's so much historical baggage that's connected to their word religion, not the least of which is this Enlightenment era baggage where faith and reason, religion and philosophy, these are not just separated from each other, but these are often pitted as antagonistic to each other.
I mean, broadly speaking, from a more European use of these terms philosophy and religion at the time, the religion side of things would be the practice, you know, the meeting up in church, rituals, the confessional, daily prayer, whatever it was, and the philosophy side of it would be more the metaphysics
that underlied the religious practice, the conceptual analysis of the world.
Philosophy is the deep reflection some thinkers do on the nature of what is.
But again, compare this to some of the traditions of Nishitani's Japan, Zen Buddhism as one example of them.
Well, in Zen Buddhism, there isn't some strict separation between the daily practice of a follower and the philosophy of Shunyata that underlies it.
I mean, for thousands of years, can you imagine the idea that you'd be meditating for hours, reciting koens every day, questioning the nature of the self, deepening your experiential understanding of the groundless ground of reality.
And the idea that that's the religious practice.
Oh, and then there's this totally separate thing that we call the philosophy of shunyata.
It's like, no. To Nishitani, whatever the Europeans have been calling separately philosophy and religion for so many years, he realizes that for the Japanese, this has been more of a unified tradition.
A tradition where it feels pretty impossible for these two to be seen as totally separate from each other.
And this brings us to the quote that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, said by the great philosopher and scholar of Zen Buddhism, Hisamatsu Shinichi, one of the big inspirations of Nishitani, it should be said, he said that religion without philosophy is blind, and philosophy without
religion is vacuous.
Now, of course, this is alluding to how these two things are more linked than we typically realize in the West, but it's also speaking to the point that either of these two, if they were isolated and without the other one, kind of like the duck rabbit, they would just be missing something deeply important
about the very process that makes them what they are.
Shinichi talks about it more in the longer section of this famous quote.
He says, quote, philosophy seeks to know the ultimate, religion seeks to live it.
Yet for the whole human being, the two must be non -dualistically of one body and cannot be divided.
If religion is isolated from philosophy, it falls into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, or dogmatics.
If philosophy is alienated from religion, it loses nothing less than its life, end quote.
Consider the first sentence of that.
Philosophy seeks to know the ultimate, religion seeks to live it.
Well, sounds a lot like the line of thinking we've been talking about in Dostoevsky lately, doesn't it?
I mean, if philosophy, as it's traditionally been done in the West, is a type of conceptual engineering, where it creates concepts, analyzes the connections between concepts, all in an attempt to capture truth in whatever way words are capable of, well then look, that may be one of the most important
things we can possibly do.
And it may be something that underlies all other fields of study, but it still is something that's limited to concepts.
Or in other words, it's something that's limited to a theoretical abstract framing of our reality and how those pieces connect together within a larger system.
But consider how necessary it is to not just spend your life constantly system building, to not just spend your life only looking at the duck on the piece of paper.
You know, I think especially if you're a really smart person who solves most of your problems in life by being really good at this system building.
It can feel like, look, anything I need to know about the world, well, I can get there by just reflecting on the world more.
That's how you solve problems in life.
But there's a certain point that reflection alone, as great as it is sometimes, you don't affirm reality and embody the truth just by filtering it through an ever more complicated philosophical system.
More philosophy now.
No, at a certain point, you have to stop doing philosophy and start with what many people throughout history have called a religious practice.
And I know the word may make you cringe out there, but just think of how necessary it is to do something along the lines of what Simone Veil called in her work a negative effort.
It's an effort to take a break from the otherwise constant system building that we're doing.
And it's an effort to not add anything, but to remove the existing set of filters we typically have on.
It's an effort to learn to receive a less abstract framing of our reality, to make space for the imminent nature of reality to shine through more clearly and you know this is why so many contemplative practices focus on the quieting of the mind as a key starting point it's not necessarily to rid you of your
anxiety or to 4x your productivity this quarter though surely that is why a lot of people get into this stuff but this is about getting used to receiving reality and affirming it as it is rather than the otherwise constant cycle of idealizing the world or demonizing it or rationalizing about the things
we have to do. See, it's not until the mind is quiet, they will say, that anyone can ever understand this connection to what's often called the eternal now, where the present moment is literally all there is in this framing.
And just so we don't gotta interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today.
For an ad -free experience, patreon .com slash philosophize this.
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