Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion

A Possible Future

Jim Kanaris, Jim Kanaris

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438469102
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

This collection addresses, as it exemplifies, an identity crisis in contemporary philosophy of religion. It represents a unique two-way dialogue between philosophers of religion and scholars of religion and broaches issues pertaining to the philosophy of religion and the philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and religious studies, theology, and the modern academy on the other. While each author manages the current challenges in philosophy of religion differently, one can nonetheless discern a polyphony of interests surrounding a postcritical, postsecular appreciation of religion. In part 1, contributors ask how philosophy of religion can accommodate both the strengths and weaknesses of Western analytic and continental traditions; incorporate developments in ideology critique, gender studies, and Asian philosophies; and negotiate the perceived stalemate in philosophy of religion. Part 2 addresses these questions in terms of a philosophy of religion that is postcolonial in intention and multidisciplinary in orientation and features scholarship from the fields of both religion and theology. An underlying theme is the importance of ushering philosophy of religion into a postphenomenological era of religious studies and theology. This is a neglected dimension in many laudable discussions about philosophy of religion that this volume hopes to emend.

PART I

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION

1

Re-envisioning Philosophy of Religion

MORNY JOY

The way in which the philosophy of religion as conventionally practised acts as a technology of powers stands out clearly in relation to the disciplinary boundaries that are drawn around it, the ways in which the topics which comprise it are disciplined. The same topics come up with predictable regularity: as Brian Davies says, philosophy of religion is about what philosophers of religion usually do! There is no indication in his work … that the discipline has a history, that it is a social construction which has not always been constructed in the way that it is at present, and that what counts as philosophy of religion (and indeed as religion itself) is closely related to who is doing the counting.

—Grace Jantzen (1998)

[T]he entire narrative of philosophy of religion in the modern West needs rethinking and retelling if both the “roots” and “fruits” of that curious modern invention, philosophy of religion, is one day to play a properly interdisciplinary and intercultural role.

—David Tracy (1990, 29)

Religious studies as a discipline has been much criticized in recent years for its continued adherence to outdated methods and a predominantly Eurocentric orientation. Philosophy of religion, a subfield of religious studies, as a post-Kantian and mainly Protestant endeavor, is indeed a product of modernity that suffers from a similar syndrome. In the twentieth century, in the United Kingdom and North America particularly, it became mainly associated with Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It appeals to a distinctly rationalist approach that focuses principally on logical arguments and is concerned with proofs and truths. During the past two decades, I have been involved in a number of projects that have attempted to revise the ways in which philosophy of religion can be studied. These activities have resulted in two books that I have edited: Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (2011) and After Appropriation: Explorations in Intercultural Philosophy and Religion (2012a), as well as numerous articles on women and religion (see bibliography). In this chapter, I will explore the different ways in which my own attitudes to philosophy of religion have changed so that my preference now is to refer to the study of “philosophy and religious studies” until some more palatable term arises. My chapter divides into three sections:

1.The contribution that the approach of continental philosophy can make to rethinking the tasks of philosophy and religion; this will involve looking specifically at the influence of Paul Ricoeur.

2.The impact that non-Western philosophies and religions can have when they are not analyzed in a way that proceeds solely by means of a reductionist comparative method; this will survey the influence of a different approach, that of intercultural philosophy, which takes guidance from the criticisms of postcolonial theory.

3.The feminist criticism of conventional philosophy of religion, which has also been predominantly a male-dominated enterprise; this will appeal to the work of Pamela Sue Anderson and Grace Jantzen as they indicate the problems of the dominant “masculinist” orientation that has dominated the field.

In these explorations, I will attempt to avoid interpretations of other philosophies and religions where they are described unilaterally in terms of Western rational concepts. I will investigate approaches that are compatible with an affirmation of life in this world. As a result, they are not preoccupied with proofs of the existence of God, with speculations about life after death, or with theodicies that defend the existence of a good and omnipotent God in the face of evil. In this way, I plan to propose other approaches whereby philosophy of religion can move beyond the parameters that have thus far largely determined its reductive definitions and methodology.

In my introduction to the Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (2011), I nominated a number of markers that I viewed as distinctive influences in contemporary continental philosophy in relation to religion. These were:

1.The “death of God,” specifically the God of modernity as it was postulated according to rational concepts. This move was initiated irrevocably by Friedrich Nietzsche. The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze can both be identified as contemporary reworkings, albeit in distinct ways, of Nietzsche’s radical project.

2.The secular theories of Marx and Freud, which put into question both the proclaimed autonomy of the subject and the related reliability of consciousness. The work of Paul Ricoeur, especially his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” continues this task, though Ricoeur will also attempt to reclaim a more modest mode of subjectivity and attestation.

3.The phenomenological approach, as it was introduced in the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This approach placed an emphasis on understanding a human being’s lived experience and the nature of existence, rather than maintaining a reliance on definitions dependent on abstract reasoning. Such a perspective puts into question what Heidegger calls “onto-theology,” and consequently sounded the death-knell of conventional metaphysics. More recent postmodern developments, however, have criticized both the privileged transcendental subjectivity that characterized the Husserlian approach and the new ontology that informed Heidegger’s project of Dasein and Ereignis.

4.The breakdown of confidence in the absolutist certainties of modern rationality and of Western Christian values, which were unable to prevent the two world wars. It is Emmanuel Levinas who interrogates this failure, specifically the aftermath of the Holocaust, and proposes an alternative approach, which promotes the primordiality of ethics instead of epistemology. Charles Taylor’s work also provides pertinent observations of this development.

5.The deception of an ideological bias, masquerading as truth, that has been exposed by members of the Frankfurt school, or the disclosure of vested interests in power and control disclosed by the genealogical investigations of Michel Foucault. (Joy 2011, 2)

All of these developments have dealt a severe blow to the former presumptions of unbiased objectivity on the part of the individual rational thinker who presided over such pronouncements. Cartesian absolute certainty is no longer guaranteed. Instead, a more chastened awareness of the limitations of human knowledge has resulted. From this perspective, neither philosophy nor religion can make claims to prerogatives of special knowledge and/or treatment. As a result, philosophy and religion could begin to be reconceived in drastically different ways.

In this chapter, rather than recapitulate these positions, which can be read in Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion (2011), I will investigate the building blocks that have informed my own approach, examining carefully the works that have inspired me. I will turn first to Paul Ricoeur, who did not regard himself as a postmodern thinker. Nor did he regard himself as constrained by the tenets and methods of metaphysics or modernity. Instead, he forged a new approach, expanding and developing his own mode of a phenomenological hermeneutics that fostered a dynamic interchange between “oneself and another.” This was informed by an attitude of openness and awareness that did not demand rigid adherence to doctrinal truth but supported a mode of human flourishing that did not need to be confined to any specific religion.

Paul Ricoeur

Ricoeur’s approach to philosophy was influenced by a profound humility and generosity. There is a theme that pervades his philosophy from the beginning. This is his concern for the “other.” Over the course of his career, this developed in diverse directions, but he remained primarily concerned that a philosopher should learn to leave behind what he called a “narcissistic and imperialistic ego” in favor of an openness to learn from any encounter with what might seem alien or different. This has at times been misinterpreted as an encouragement to passivity or an uncritical acceptance of ideas or systems that are hostile or intolerant. But this was not his intention. Ricoeur was distressed by what he perceived as human intolerance and the violence that is often indiscriminately inflicted on fellow human beings. He worried that such conduct appeared as virtually endemic to humanity. His career could be appreciated as a valiant attempt to minimize such suffering and to formulate conditions that could help to alleviate, if not eliminate, its effects. This became particularly evident in Ricoeur’s (2002) later work on recognition and justice.

In the beginning, however, Ricoeur did not seem to be headed in this particular direction. The personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and the existential disposition of Gabriel Marcel informed his early work. It was his encounters with the work of both Husserl and Heidegger, however, that altered his priorities. These influences resulted first in Ricoeur’s phenomenological interpretation in the Husserlian manner in his book Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1966). The Symbolism of Evil (1967), which followed, demonstrated a growing dissatisfaction with phenomenology as it was then being practiced and a move toward hermeneutics. This became particularly evident in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970). At this stage of his work, it was text that provided Ricoeur’s “other.” He was primarily concerned with interpreting a text in a manner that did not distort its meaning, so that the reader did not impose his or her own unreflective views in determining the meaning of a text. Ricoeur cautioned that such a presumption needed careful qualification. He issued a caution that encouraged a less controlling attitude on the part of a hermeneutically inclined reader: “By Self I mean a non-egotistic, non-narcissistic, non-imperialistic mode of subjectivity which responds and corresponds to the power of a work to display a world” (1975, 30). This was one of his first articulations of a growing awareness not only of the possibilities of reader interference, but also of the inevitable conflict that could result from a conflict of interpretations (Ricoeur 1974). Such a development marked his departure from a strict Husserlian phenomenology to a hermeneutic approach, specifically in its rejection of an absolutist self. It was replaced by a less controlling attitude: “There is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms. In passing from one to the other, Ricoeur’s form of hermeneutics gradually freed itself from the idealism with which Husserl had identified phenomenology” (1987, 374). Ricoeur did not dismiss phenomenology totally but qualified its apodictic tendencies.

A phenomenological hermeneutics, on Ricoeur’s account, remained linked to self-understanding, but the notion of self has assumed a different aspect from that in Husserl’s approach. Ricoeur (in Reagan 1996, 124) explains the change that hermeneutics introduces: “Hermeneutics remains fundamentally an understanding of the self. Thus, it is reflective. But, on the other hand, the means of understanding are no longer those of a transcendental or eidetic reflection but require understanding, interpretation and thus a mode of intelligibility other than that of the immediate and intuitive grasping of the essence of mental phenomena.” Ricoeur never deviated from this modified appreciation of the self and its relation to one’s reflective capabilities. He acknowledged that in hermeneutics:

The most important consequence of all this is that an end is put once and for all to the Cartesian and Fichtean—and to an extent Husserlian—ideal of the subject’s transparence to itself. To understand oneself is to understand oneself as one confronts the text and to receive from it the conditions for a self, other than that which first undertakes the reading. Neither that of the two subjectivities … neither that of the author nor that of the reader; is thus primary in the sense of an originary presence of the self to itself. (Ricoeur 1987, 376)

One further qualification of hermeneutics on Ricoeur’s part was the introduction of what came to be called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” In his book, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay of Interpretation, Ricoeur refers to Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx as “masters” of the “school of suspicion” (1970, 17). It was Freud who first alerted him to latent archaic and obsessive tendencies that could distort interpretations as well as reinforce defense mechanisms against being open to alternative meanings suggested by the text. For Ricoeur, the three “masters of suspicion” draw attention to the possibility that we may not be fully in control of our processes of cognition because of either unconscious or external influences. The adoption of such a critical attitude to claims of consciousness thus put into question any pretension to an attainment of a universal truth.1

There were additional features that were also initiated by Ricoeur with this move. He recommended that no reader should immediately affirm what appeared as the self-evident meaning of a text. Self-reflexivity as well as critical distanciation from the text were required.

This was necessary to detect whether there was manipulation or deception involved. In his lecture course on Ideology and Utopia at the University of Chicago, which was published in 1986, Ricoeur cautioned that no text was to be regarded as exempt from what he termed these two “pathologies of imagination.” While he supported imaginative explorations of alternative “worlds that I might inhabit,” Ricoeur was extremely vigilant in discouraging distortions or misrepresentations.

In this connection, Ricoeur also made some dramatic observations about his hermeneutic stance in relation to religion. This was in keeping with his attitude that philosophical hermeneutics was distinct from theological advocacy. He observed:

I am very committed to the autonomy of philosophy and I think that in none of my works do I use any arguments borrowed from the domain of Jewish or Christian biblical writings. And, if one does use these writings, it is not an argument from authority. I mean that, for example, I put them on the same plane as Greek tragedy or the histories of Israel, neo-Platonic metaphysical speculations or the patristic interpretations of biblical writing. As a consequence, there is no privileged place for religion in general, or for the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in philosophical argumen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophy of Religion and the Philosophical Tradition
• Part II Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies, Theology, and the Modern Academy
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover