09/09/2020 – Who Was Raimon Panikkar?

Who? Raimon Panikkar? Why was he so important? Check ‘dis out. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. Raimon Panikkar was a fascinating figure in the academic field of religion combining world religions with theology and philosophy. His main contribution was the concept of intrareligious dialogue which falls underneath the broader subfield of interreligious hermeneutics. Now don’t be afraid about all of this academic jargon, we’re going to try to break it down in a simpler way.

Raimon Panikkar was born in Barcelona in 1918 from a Spanish Catholic mother and an Indian Hindu father. From 1972 until his retirement he was a religious studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the course of his career he published at least 30 books and wrote hundreds of articles and essays over a five-decade period and was conversant in nearly a dozen languages. Let’s get into some of his main ideas.

First, a little background on the word hermeneutics. The ancient Greek god Hermes, or Mercury in the Roman pantheon, was a sort of a mediator between one of the gods, Zeus, and humans. His function was that of the messenger. This is where the word hermeneutics comes from. It became an important subject for philosophy through the work of Gadamer, who wrote the foundational book on philosophical hermeneutics in Germany in 1960 titled Truth and Method. This is an excellent work which one needs a little background in German philosophy before reading it. Basically, it explains how hermeneutics is resolving the tension (bridging the gap) between familiarity and strangeness, or between what we know and what we don’t know. Hermeneutics became known as the philosophy of interpretation and understanding. When applied to religion, this is where Panikkar enters the picture. Interreligious hermeneutics is bridging the gap externally while intrareligious hermeneutics is bridging the gap internally. Let’s get into it.

Panikkar’s starting point is that all religions must be allowed to speak from their respective locations of religious thinking. He referred to this as topoi, or places of understanding. Dialogue is sharing, but it also means keeping the religious differences intact. He said we cannot combine all colors into one supercolor. Even though blue or green are colors they do not represent the entire concept of color in themselves or by themselves. In the same way, each religion’s instantiation of religion is different and is not easily combinable with the others. They are all based on a mythic understanding of reality. Religious symbols are the building blocks of myths. The messiah symbol means one thing for Judaism and a different thing for Christianity. Brahman in Hinduism is not the same thing as Allah for Muslims. The problem is, when two parties attempt to understand each other, they often do not share the same myth. What does that mean? For Panikkar, a religious myth is everything you take for granted without realizing that’s what you take for granted. It is sort of this background of your religious understanding. But when trying to learn about the religious experience of another person, there will be no understanding unless one “stands under” to some extent the other person’s myth. I’m not sure this is the best image to illustrate the concept, but I like the umbrella analogy. How do we share an umbrella? Or another way to think about the issue is rather than coming to eat at “your” table or “my” table, we must create “our” table together. How is this accomplished?

When what one understands, or “stands under” in some way becomes challenged or problematical, a gap appears and that’s when hermeneutics takes place. We understand the space underneath our umbrella but the not the space underneath the other person’s umbrella. The issue that quickly arises, however, is that when uses the categories of one’s own religion to learn about another religion, a power relationship ensues and creates a colonial paradigm. Person from religion A uses their understanding of their religious symbols to interpret the religious symbols of person from religion B. To overcome this inherent limitation in the gap of understanding, Panikkar proposed that what is needed is an intrareligious dialogue.

Panikkar preempts the discussion by stating that this involves risk. When one knows in advance the outcome of a detective story, the tension is completely absent. In the same way, intrareligious dialogue is an open process – the end result is not predetermined. The religious person whom we’re trying to understand is not some-thing else, but some-one else. The goal is to learn about each other’s understanding of their respective religious symbols to arrive at a mutual experiential understanding. It is a reciprocal relationship and not one of domination. There is no neutral ground. There is only the conversation between you and I learning from each other. Again, the concept of color is not exhausted in a single color. What can one learn from another’s religious experience? Just as a translator must make the foreign culture her own in order to be a meeting point between two languages, one must truly begin to engage another religion. That is why the intrareligious dialogue that Panikkar refers to is ultimately an internal process, a conversation with myself. One can love a neighbor as an object, but true acceptance involves identification. It’s not “who are you?” but “who am I?” after my encounter with you. One must be challenged on a much deeper level.

When religious symbols no longer have meaning, they have lost their innocence and that innocence can never be recovered: it can only be made new again. This begins first with an intrareligious dialogue, and second, with an interreligious dialogue, a dialogical dialogue with another. This “other” represents a new source of understanding whereby I am not telling you, nor are you telling me, but we are sharing and creating our own myth together. For Panikkar, this is the new state of innocence, a new way of understanding. Great stuff!

Well I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.