Episode 223 - Transcript

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So there’s a quote from one of the members of the Kyoto School that 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 to understand exactly what was MEANT by this quote I just said…just a heads up…you’re GONNA need an understanding of the Nishitani episodes we’ve already done…episodes 216 and 217…you’re gonna need to know what is meant by Sunyata 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 that 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 of people see a duck…half of people see a rabbit when they look at it. There’s TONS of those things out there– it can be a SOUND, it can be a VIDEO…but the POINT is…ASIDE from this just being some fun optical thing on a kids 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 meaning 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…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 even will 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 hear you say all this… but I gotta 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 wanna remain OPEN here but when you start talking about religion…and then you  ALSO…start talking about the fact that 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 IMMANENT 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 that 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 this 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… and 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 that 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 these 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 people are talking about…it’s possible its 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… that this was something that was ALWAYS THERE, RIGHT in FRONT of you…you just didn’t SEE it until now, now you can’t UNSEE it. 

And coming from a dualistic FRAMING of the world…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 that’s 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 is 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 that we frame EVERY moment of our experience? 

Where 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 that they DO…the duck co-constitutes the rabbit and vice versa. 

And 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…when I am 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 Keiji 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…Nishitani doesn’t think there’s an easy ANSWER to that question. 

I mean basically everybody 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 is probably MOST of the discussion that goes on about religion these days: these days you have a GOOD amount of people who are either atheists… that 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, put in VERY little WORK into their faith, and MOSTLY use religion as something that’s USEFUL to them— where its how they secure their spot in heaven, or it’s their WAY to answer difficult questions, whatever it is.

Well the PROBLEM with this to Nishitani 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 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, and their approach to how THEY view enlightenment. Then you’d have to compare THAT… to what is 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 multidimensional way: as a source of meaning, as a mode of disciplined PRACTICE, as a political tool, as a framework for the GLUE that holds a 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’ve happened to have MET in your life so far…and then being like yeah, these people pretty much represent EVERYTHING that religion stands for. Seems about right.

NO, just think of the 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 to you that if you wanna be considered a religious person…ALL you gotta 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 behavior is ALIGNED 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 is 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 they might think its kind of silly: what I just have to BELIEVE in this thing HARD enough…and that’s what really MATTERS to you guys?

And look even MORE than this…if you 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 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.

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 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 that it was to be a Christian before this. 

And when the individualism of the Enlightenment comes along and the rise of Liberalism in the west…this notion…that my religious identity is GROUNDED in an individual belief that 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 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 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 that 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. 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 everyday.

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” 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 are not just SEPARATED from each other…but they’re OFTEN pitted as antagonistic to each other. 

I mean broadly speaking from a more European USE of these terms philosophy and religion…the RELIGION side of things… would be the PRACTICE…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 just ONE of them. Well in Zen Buddhism…there ISN’T…some strict separation between the daily PRACTICE of a follower…and the PHILOSOPHY of Sunyata that underlies it. 

I mean for THOUSANDS of years: can you imagine the idea that you’d be meditating for HOURS, and reciting koans everyday, 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 Sunyata…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 Shin’ichi, one of the big inspirations of Nishitani…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 linked more 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.

Shin’ichi talks about it more in the LONGER section of this famous quote. He says: 

“Philosophy seeks to know the ultimate; religion seeks to live it. Yet for the whole human being, the two must be nondualistically 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…”

Consider the first sentence of that: philosophy seeks to KNOW the ultimate; religion seeks to LIVE it. 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 is 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 into 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 seeing the duck on the piece of paper.

You know I think especially if you’re a really smart person…who solves most of their 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.

But there’s a certain point that reflection alone, as great as it is sometimes… you don’t AFFIRM reality and embody the truth by filtering it through an evermore complicated philosophical system, moreee philosophy!…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 Weil called in her work a “negative effort”. It’s an effort to take a break… from the otherwise CONSTANT SYSTEM building were doing…and it’s an effort to not add anything, but to REMOVE the EXISTING 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 immanent 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 anxiety…or to four X your productivity this quarter though surely this is why a lot of people get INTO it, 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…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.

Now IF you could GET there…would it be correct to CALL this…living the truth? And couldn’t we ALSO call philosophy… the attempt to KNOW the truth and conceptually articulate what we can about it? 

More than that: wouldn’t these two activities be MASSIVELY helpful to each other? I mean what person would EVER try to separate them…and to get back to Shin’ichi’s LARGER point here: you can imagine how if someone JUST tried to live their life, SOLELY in a religious dimension…and DIDN’T take the time to FRAME this religious experience in terms of KNOWLEDGE…if a religious person DOESN’T deeply engage with philosophy…then they JUST inevitably fall into ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, etc. 

But it GOES the other WAY TOO for Shin’ichi. If you’re a philosopher…and all you do is try to conceptually FRAME the world instead of trying to LIVE IT and EMBODY it…then it’s very common for THIS kind of thinking to just turn into hollow intellectualism– this often ends up becoming someone who feels lost, the RESULTS of their thinking feel vacuous, they arrive at conclusions that don’t CHANGE anything about how they LIVE…and a LOT of the time this is someone that’s left feeling pretty DEAD inside. 

See these two different ways of framing our reality, like the duck-rabbit…these are NOT opposites, and they’re CERTAINLY not an either OR thing. And to Nishitani: it’s VERY important, ESPECIALLY in the kind of societies that are emerging in the modern world… for us realize the CONNECTION between philosophy and religion– it’s one of the things we’ve definitely LOST over the years, and its one of the most CRUCIAL things for us to have a daily practice to try to REMEMBER. 

And while he’d PROBABLY say that the MAIN way a modern person can benefit from understanding it is through a deep, existential engagement with BOTH of these fields… if you wanted to learn more about this OUTSIDE of the lived EXPERIENCE domain…one useful thing can be to study and reflect on the work… of one of these people that have asked the question: what is religion…and then dedicated their entire lives to studying it. 

And one of Nishitani’s FAVORITES in this department…is going to be a philosopher by the name of Friedrich Schelling. 

Now I feel the need to SAY here: Schelling is a man whose work is very complicated. His work CHANGES significantly from his earlier work into his LATER work. And even if it DIDN’T this is a man who started his career as a German Idealist, in many ways RESPONDING to problems he saw in the work of Hegel, so what that means is that he’s existing in a time that requires quite a bit of prior knowledge to even understand why he would even CARE about all the stuff he does. 

There’s NO way I can cover it all today, but I AM hoping I can show you a couple EXCITING things ABOUT his work from this line of conversation that’s the focus…as well as why Nishitani, living over 100 years AFTER Schelling, STILL draws on his work for inspiration, though ultimately thinking he was LIMITED on many of his conclusions.

See Schelling is someone who’s kind of like Dostoevksy…in that he SEES a decline of religion and institutions like the church coming, from WAY AHEAD of time before most people even realize there’s gonna be a problem. 

I saw it put one time that Friedrich Schelling is living during a time in history…where he thought it was becoming harder and harder for someone to BE a religious person…by simply just going to church and FOLLOWING the normal religious activities. 

And he SEES this as a potential CRISIS. I mean religion has served a CRITICAL FUNCTION in people’s LIVES up until this point in Europe…and again this SPARKS in Schelling… a similar line of questioning during HIS time that Nishitani would find so crucial for Japan at the beginning of the 20th century. 

What is religion…and to what extent can the conceptual analysis of philosophy DISCLOSE religion in a way that is accurate? In what ways can philosophy be a BRIDGE for people…between the world of the knowable, a world that CAN be framed and articulated…and the unknowable…the part of existence that has to be EXPERIENCED and embodied to be witnessed?

Well the first thing to maybe say trying to bring you up to speed on a complicated thinker like Schelling…is to compare him to somebody we already know. IN his LATER work…he’s DOES bear a certain kind of resemblance to Nishitani… in that he thinks when it COMES to religion …absolute NOTHINGNESS, or what he calls the UNGROUND in his work, the GROUNDLESS GROUND… is going to play a central ROLE in understanding what a religious practice is truly a reflection of. 

So when I SAY absolute nothingness…this is a NOTHINGNESS…that’s ALONG similar lines to the EMPTINESS of Sunyata. This is a No-THING-ness. And don’t get me wrong Schellings nothingness…is not the EXACT SAME, as a Buddhist take. 

But in TERMS of the comparisons I could give you here to bring you into this conversation about Schelling…it is FAR more accurate to compare this nothingness to Buddhism than basically ANYTHING you’re ever gonna find in western philosophy that we’ve TALKED about. 

See for Schelling, Absolute nothingness… is a reference to the conditions that allow existence to unfold into the future…that there IS no independent existence of people, things, nature, whatever it is…and the PART of this that makes this different than Buddhism…is that for Schelling: ALL of these things… are part of a dynamic, self-revealing PROCESS… that is CONSTANTLY moving towards SOMETHING. And this PROGRESSION TOWARDS something… is going to be a VERY important part of his work. 

Now some of the implications for this idea then is that HISTORY, for him…you know, if you’re just studying human HISTORY…well, you’re REALLY just studying the ways that human consciousness… has unfolded as one PIECE of this universal process. 

And for Schelling if we want to STUDY how this universal process is unfolding…well first things first: we can NEVER understand the TOTALITY of it…JUST through abstract concepts like the ones that are used in philosophy. That MUCH like Nishitani’s point about Sunyata: absolute nothingness RESISTS categorization and can’t BE fully captured in philosophical terms…STILL though for Schelling: human events and ideas… ARE a particularly ACCESSIBLE access point…if we ever WANTED to study a humble PIECE of this absolute nothingness. The SYMPTOMS of absolute nothingness you could say.

Well a very important thing that we can STUDY when it comes to human ideas…is going to be religion. 

Because RELIGION, for any given time period that it’s IN for Schelling…religion is an EXPRESSION…of humanities relationship TO this absolute nothingness…a relationship that is ALWAYS evolving and becoming MORE sophisticated…SO MUCH so that if you look at the history of RELIGIOUS practice…from the primitive mystery cults ALL the way to modern day monotheistic Christianity…ALL of this has been a PROGRESSION for Schelling…towards a greater and greater understanding of the NATURE of absolute nothingness, as framed by religious PRACTICE. 

And he’ll go into ALL sorts of EXAMPLES of this progression in his later work. 

He talks about these ancient MYSTERY religions that there used to be…the Samothracian practice, or the Eleusenian practice in Greece…where you know: FAR from these being about a BELIEF in any sort of religious OBJECT…THESE were religions that centered around trying to access the mysterious, unKNOWABLE aspects of our existence. 

Where the WHOLE experience was actually pretty crazy—people would VOLUNTEER…they would go THROUGH a secret, intense ritual PROCESS in these religions…in fact sometimes there’d be the DEATH penalty if you REVEALED what some of these secret rituals were…so they take this all VERY seriously…and from what little we know, what’s been leaked out over the years: they would apparently TAKE these people on things like a 20 mile hike, they’d have ‘em hold some giant heavy thing, like a religious artifact…and they’d put them in the elements, PSYCHEDELICS it’s believed were often a part of this process, the POINT is: these rituals would bring people…to a place they’ve NEVER BEEN before in their own mind…with the logic of the RELIGIOUS practice being that there are certain INSIGHTS into what existence is that can ONLY be EXPERIENCED, so we’re gonna GIVE you that experience…and these religions were apparently EARLY ways, to Schelling very primitive ways, of the SAME desire we have to gain ACCESS…to these DEEPER truths about absolute nothingness. That these intense experiences… would SHOW people an aspect of existence that lies BEYOND ANYTHING philosophy or WORDS could ever articulate to a sermon or a classroom. 

Another example, a bit later ON in history Schelling says…were the great Polytheistic attempts at conveying absolute nothingness. And they did this VERY effectively for their time with things like a god of the Sun…god of the sea…PATHEONS of Gods sometimes…but then EVENTUALLY… humanity’s relationship to nothingness progresses AGAIN… where upon further EXPERIENCE of this absolute nothingness, the WORK that’s being DONE…deeply religious practitioners REALIZE… that ALL of this is actually coming from a more UNIFIED place– that BEHIND the sun and the sea is the SAME source of BECOMING. 

And THIS shift in religious consciousness is gonna become: the rise of Monotheism in the western world. 

And even within monotheism…with Christianity as just one EXAMPLE of it: Schelling thinks if you DO the work…you can STILL observe various different distinct PERIODS of how Christianity is practiced… that correspond to different stages of our growing RELATIONSHIP to absolute nothingness. 

For example: he talks about EARLY Christianity… can be thought of as the era of the book of Peter. Meaning many of the most influential PASSAGES from the theology of this time are taken from the example of Peter as an apostle. Now it’s BECAUSE of this inspiration…that this is a time where Christianity largely spreads by CONQUEST…the GOAL, in part at this time, is to create a Christian EMPIRE…and ultimately for Christianity to occupy more physical SPACE…IN the world…in other words for Schelling: this is a metaphysics of our religious CONSCIOUSNESS… that prioritizes SPACE. And you can see the philosophy there being INSEPARABLE from the religious practice. 

Then later Christianity Schelling says…CHANGED. It EVENTUALLY developed into an era… that MORE centers around passages from the gospel of Paul. Now, THIS becomes an era of practice… where it ISN’T so much about spreading Christianity EXTERNALLY anymore…NOW we’re more focused on the INTERNAL experience of the religious person… especially when it comes to the importance of the concepts of faith and grace. Once again: the conceptual FRAMING of this period of religious practice is very revealing if you do the work for Schelling…and for whatever its worth: THIS, the era of Paul, WAS the period that HE thought that HE was living in. 

Now again: Schelling thinks ALL of this… is heading towards a greater and greater understanding of this absolute nothingness…so the QUESTION you can ask to him is…what’s NEXT? I mean if you got such a READ on all this that’s going ON here Schelling…what is the NEXT evolution of religious THINKING that we have to look FORWARD to? 

Well Schelling believed that ONE possible answer to that…would be an AGE of religious practice that centers more around the gospel of John. Where IN the gospel of John, when he says things like “I and the Father are one”…well relative to the other gospels: there are FAR more passages from John that align with a NEW way of imagining religious practice…that DOESN’T break our view of the world… down into so many rigid dualities. 

There’s TONS of dualistic ways that Christians will break DOWN their experience of reality: you have good and evil, being and non-being, and probably one of the most INFLUENTIAL of these at least in the everyday LIFE of how a Christian views things…is this distinction they make between the Sacred… and the Profane. 

What I’m saying is: Schelling thinks it’s possible, and even LIKELY…that we are moving into a direction in the world when it comes to religion…where the distinction between God and the world, is NOT a valid distinction anymore, that the two of these will be reimagined as co-constituting one another, NOT unlike our example of the duck-rabbit.   

See this IDEA…that GOD, DIVINITY, is something that exists OUT THERE, NOT of this WORLD…and the idea that THIS world…THIS world is in many ways the PROBLEM…THIS world in need of SAVING– it’s the realm of the profane…and DIVINITY is the realm of the SACRED.

Well this whole DUALITY of the religious experience of an average Christian…is something that Schelling thinks might not always BE there. That again there are PLENTY of passages in the Bible ESPECIALLY surrounding the apostle John that can move this religious practice into a direction where the SACRED, or the groundless ground…is actually PART OF the experience of what we call the profane. 

In other words this would be an era of Christianity for Schelling…where the metaphysics are MORE along the lines that God…is immanently… all around you. That there’s no TRUE separation between the sacred and the profane…and where the path to the sacred…is NOT through CONQUEST or though some INTERNAL BELIEF you have…but by OPENING your awareness to SEE the sacred that’s AMONG us…see, THAT is ALSO something Christianity has the potential to look like to Schelling, maybe one day in the future this will be a more core focus. 

And if you’re someone who was BORN into this world where you feel like the religious options you HAVE ALWAYS seem like an ancient relic of the PAST, outdated, tribalistic, painfully simple in terms of framing this connection to the unfolding of reality…well hearing this from Schelling, that you MAY just be someone who’s born during a big transition period between a SHIFT in religious consciousness…well I’d imagine it can almost feel to SOME people… like you’ve been ROBBED of a religious connection to the world that was possible for you. 

Now this MIGHT be where its useful to bring Nishitani back into the episode. See, as interesting as all this IS from Schelling…how would Nishitani be thinking as a fellow scholar of religion about what he’s saying here? Well obviously he thinks Schelling is an absolutely brilliant thinker in general…I mean this is CLEARLY someone who’s sensing the importance of deeply examining religion. But ultimately for Nishitani…Schelling is living during a time…where he can’t HELP but to smuggle IN all SORTS of things from the way people used to do philosophy during the time he lived. 

For example: Nishitani thinks ALL of this from Schelling is a BIT too human centric… in a way that he just doesn’t think is correct… coming from a more Mahayana Buddhist background where just a more equal level of consideration would be given to non-human animals and non-sentient beings as well. 

He also has a problem…with how Schelling brings in this grand TELEOLOGY that all the EVENTS of the universe are apparently MOVING towards…that ALSO is something he thinks there’s no reason to assume, but UNDERSTANDABLE for his time. 

MORE than that he doesn’t like… how Schelling grounds all this in HISTORY…as though religious development and revelation is something where we’re just waiting around for it to be REVEALED to us at some unknown FUTURE point in history. I mean, of COURSE Nishitani wouldn’t agree with that piece of it…he thought religious insight… was something that was immanently available to EVERYONE…and that if you REALLY ARE someone who sees human history as slowly uncovering a truth about the nature of how existence unfolds…well to Nishitani…that says a whole lot more about the filters that YOU still have ON in your own experiential FRAMING of the world. No, Sunyata is immanent, and all around you. This is MORE a matter of committing to a daily practice…that might allow you to REMOVE something from the way you USUALLY see the world…and might OPEN you in new ways to these OTHER experiential framings. 

And look: studying the HISTORY of these religious practices like Schelling did…MAY BE an important STEP for a lot of people in becoming more aware of this other way of framing things. It may the equivalent of saying hey, SOME people out there look at the duck and see a rabbit instead. 

But I hope this conversation brings AT LEAST some proper context to the project of the Kyoto School: when you HEAR SOMEONE SAY about the Kyoto School. That these were Japanese thinkers, that engaged with existentialism and german idealism, where then by noticing the LIMITATIONS in them as well as the limitations in their OWN ideas… they then tried to REIMAGINE ALL of this…to create something TOTALLY new moving forward…I hope this clarifies why JUST studying HISTORY…will NEVER be able to give you the full PICTURE of any of these things. And on that SAME note I hope it’s clear that from Nishitani’s perspective: religion and philosophy NEED each other, they RELY on each other…not unlike our friend from the beginning of the episode, the duck-rabbit. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this. Patreon.com/philosophizethis if you value the show as an educational resource. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.