10/06/2021 – What is Religious Philosophy?
What is religious philosophy? What should it be? Multidisciplinary? Comparative? Pragmatic inquiry? Let’s talk about a scholar who thinks it should be all three of these. Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.
Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. This video is closed-captioned here on YouTube and the transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com. If you like religion and philosophy content one quick thing I need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. Okay today’s episode is based on Wesley Wildman’s 2010 book, Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry. Wesley Wildman, originally from Australia, is a professor at Boston University. He’s a nice guy, with a wee bit of a sarcastic wit – just the way we like it here at TenOnReligion. Now pretty much all academic books like this are written to address a problem. So, what is the problem? The issue is traditional philosophy of religion has too much internal diversity and this creates a ridiculous number of disagreements – far more than occur in other fields of study like the natural sciences. Philosophers of religion would rather argue that their way is the better way rather than work together to solve the big questions. What is needed is a field of diverse but related inquiries which more or less work together. In addition, the academic study of religion needs philosophy and philosophy needs the academic study of religion, but they have slowly drifted apart to the detriment of both. We’re going to mention a little bit of background to further set up the issue and then highlight what Wildman means by multidisciplinary, comparative, and inquiry, before summing up some of the ideas presented in the book along with some categories for religious philosophy investigation.
Let’s just cut to the chase here, the goal of religious studies is to understand religion as a whole, not just what one discipline or one religion can fully comprehend. Why? Because people need to be informed about religion so as to increase mutual understanding which generates important practical effects like global security, guiding diplomacy, and advising political policy decisions. Now it’s not so easy to do this because philosophical and theological approaches in academics are under this false cloud of a widespread misperception that they are not objective enough. Take the academic study of religion, for example, which uses a conglomeration of other fields of study such as history, sociology, and anthropology. But if that’s all it is, then why not just send the religion scholars back into those departments? This poses a serious problem because it would mark the end of religious studies as a discipline as we know it today.
There’s a big difference between confessional and philosophical approaches to studying religion. When it stresses the social location of religious institutions, the purpose of maintaining or reforming religious identity on behalf of such religious institutions along with the authoritative sacred texts and traditions – it tends towards the confessional. When its social location is chiefly the intellectual and literary history of religions, when its purpose is inquiry into ultimacy, and when its resources are description, comparison, analysis, and multidisciplinary theory building refusing to treat the sacred texts and traditions of any particular religion as decisively authoritative – it tends toward the philosophical.
The thing is, religious interpretation is always marked by interests. What we all need help with is coming to terms with the consequences of these facts of human life because human interactions are perpetually power laden. Thus, we need both partially submerged frameworks for social orientation, and efficient mechanisms for correcting those frameworks when they produce undesirable or unjust effects. There’s been this huge civilizational battle between modernity and postmodernity that concerns how one understands and approaches religious philosophy. It’s a multifaceted fight. On the one side is generality and justice, driven by awareness of cultural and religious pluralism. On the other side is the need for security and identity which needs a memorable narrative interpretation of reality for the purpose of minimizing complexities. Wildman suggests the best approach to religious philosophy is through a pragmatic theory of inquiry. The pragmatic argument has a better outlook due to the idea that feedback potential corrects some of our hypotheses with enough force to create consensus among qualified experts despite being a part of a socially contextualized tradition. It’s a little bit more like science. So, let’s talk about why this should be a multidisciplinary comparative inquiry.
So why multidisciplinary? Well, when one formulates monodisciplinary inquiries in religious philosophy the degree of abstraction needed is typically so high that it distorts the subject matter under investigation. One of Wildman’s examples is the existence of God because through the course of the conversation it’s often not clear who or what God even is. You see, there’s a difference between specialized knowledge which is specific and detailed based on one tradition vs. integrated knowledge from multiple traditions. Multidisciplinarity is a compromise between the two. It is a problem-oriented approach to research drawing on the insights of multiple specialized disciplines to gain understanding of a problem and strive for a solution. In the middle of focusing on particularity – the details – and generality – the big picture – is the ever-changing social character of human thinking in all acts of questioning. We all are conditioned with socially formed expectations about how the world operates and how people ought to behave. But, some people argue, not all disciplines can speak to each other. They’re too different. They have different languages, in the sense of different ways of thinking, and so on. In a word, they are incommensurable. Yet, when we focus our creative resources on generating new and better forms of communication, our skill set broadens, and our mastery increases. Incommensurability should not be viewed as a dead end but an invitation – a challenge to figure out how to overcome an obstacle. And humans like challenges. This is why religious philosophy needs to be multidisciplinary.
So why comparison? We usually compare in respects that interest us, often neglecting respects that do not. The respect in which we compare constitutes a comparative category for the comparison. Every comparative category, however, must be vague enough so that the law of non-contradiction does not apply to what falls within it. Take the example of how one can compare fruit. Size, taste, color, texture and so forth. Vague categories about fruit seem simple enough, but what about religion? Aren’t such categories quite hard to come up with? Maybe, but it is simply not possible for students of religion, including religious philosophers, to avoid the use of comparative categories. Comparative categories are inevitable and important so long as philosophers self-consciously attend to the way they use them. We need to minimize distortion and optimize understanding. Comparisons are true in the dyadic sense. Interpretation associates a claim with a subject matter in a particular respect while simultaneously locating the act of interpretation itself in a concrete social and political context. It goes without saying that religious ideas have a lot of symbolism. [It goes without saying…even though I just said it…] These symbolic representations have both historical and social-cultural influences, and these influences need to be explicit. For example, human beings appreciate stories that are minimally counterintuitive, that is, stories that conform to the intuitions of popular psychology and common physics, save for a few colorful details. These stories are preferred to stories that are either too counterintuitive (as in ridiculous), or too conforming (as in boring). In a battle for story space within human cultures, minimally counterintuitive stories tend to win out. We need to learn how to be aware of contexts and learn how to create categories for comparison.
So why a pragmatic theory of inquiry? This is where things get really interesting. Wildman describes three types of processes. An efficient rational process is one in which consensus arises because proposals for norms and procedures can compete, creating agreement about winners and losers. An inefficient rational process is one in which competing proposals for norms and procedures of inquiry do not produce widely accepted winners and losers. An irrational process is one in which resources of the correction of hypotheses are arbitrarily neglected. Why is this distinction important? Because the intellectual wing of religion is often governed more by the expediency of providing credible accounts of beliefs vital to religious institutions than by serious interest in rationally resolving conflicting truth claims about religious topics using all available resources. The pragmatic theory of inquiry is radically empiricist in that it takes all of experience seriously.
So, I had an earlier video this past summer on Paul Tillich. He referred to big questions about the meaning of life and death as questions of ultimate concern. Partly because they are of such definitive subjective importance for us, and partly because their answers appear to lie at the far reaches of our cognitive and emotional capacities, Tillich and the others that followed him have labeled such questions as ultimate concern. Tillich liked the name because of the pun: according to him, questions of subjective ultimate concern find their proper answers only in objective ultimate concern, which is to say ultimate reality, which Tillich called the “ground of being.” The emergence of such ultimate questions is profoundly shaped by participation in a religious community. Religions nurture narratives and doctrines that furnish concepts and categories for expressing existentially loaded questions, as well as answering them. Religions also provide ways of tolerating the destabilizing effects of such questions. For example, these resources include rituals and communal meals, which reinforce feelings of belonging and help participants internalize patterns of behavior that have proved healthy according to the norms of their religious community. Beyond the borders of religious communities, these orienting benefits of religious traditions are probably not very functional. The same goes for religious narratives that structure self-understanding in relation to these ultimate questions.
So, if that is the case, then to what degree is impartiality possible? The question then becomes whether investigation and research into ultimate questions can be pursued without attachment to either hidden or exposed religious ideologies. The most extreme response to this difficulty is that impartiality is impossible, and therefore religious philosophy is impossible. A less extreme response is to acknowledge as legitimate only those styles of investigation that are supposedly easiest to pursue objectively – which means the historical and analytical styles, and perhaps comparative styles, but especially not the literary, theoretical, or evaluation styles. The solution lies in the social organization of inquiry among religious philosophers, and in a less defensive attitude to the problem itself. If objectivity is the main goal that is to be valued, then one should look for objectivity that involves a deep understanding of the actual existential power of ultimate questions along with a wide appreciation for the diversity of ways such questions are framed and answered. These two abilities to understand deeply and to appreciate widely are difficult to acquire but should be pursued as much as possible.
In the last chapter, Wildman describes six categories which he thinks are legitimate categories for religious philosophy investigation. He argues that these are both robust and flexible enough to register what is happening in a variety of traditions without undue distortion. These categories are:
- Ontotheological – or being
- Cosmotheological – or causation
- Physicotheological – relating to physical nature
- Psychotheological – relating to the psyche
- Axiotheological – or value
- Mysticotheological – meaning cognitive breakdown, or the mystical aspects of religion.
These categories provide good candidates for multidisciplinary comparative inquiry into religion.
And there you have it. So, are you convinced multidisciplinary comparative inquiry is the best way for religious philosophy to move forward? Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.