There has always been ‘religion’ I have read somewhere though it makes me wonder if that has indeed been the case. ‘What is religion?’ This is not a serious question for me – the word is just a label, like ‘Occasionalism’, the Ontological Argument and the like. What comes under this label might bind us together though as often it succeeds in dividing us. But Before Philosophy is the title of an actual book published some time ago. Mythological thinking was an attempt to make better sense of things, it claims – until Philosophy. And religion, one might add.
Arabic has the word falsafa which is clearly derived from Greek but increasingly it began to be used in a dismissive sense – it caused nothing but trouble for the powers that be: they wanted a single framework of thought for their subjects, as more or less did Constantine earlier. Just over 200 years later Philosophy was subsumed under Theology – the new intellectual defence of religion; Christianity was too philosophical a religion to drop Philosophy altogether. This would have been impossible with St Paul leading the way and St John bringing up the rear. Other religions wish, at least from time to time, that they could dispense with philosophical questions but these keep rising unwontedly. That is just an aspect of being human which is always under threat. Now we have the new putative threat of AI; it may take Philosophy with it. Some no doubt think that would be no bad thing. They might find ammunition in Quine – for him sound Philosophy had to be something like scientific knowledge.
Although I am unable to argue against (Willard Van Orman) Quine – said to be the greatest logician after Russell – it is clear to me that he is/was simply mistaken! Kierkegaard, for example, did not argue against Hegel; he simply went about doing things his own way. More recently, Mary Midgley tried to turn the tide along with Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch; these four are being studied afresh as The Quartet. There have been other neglected Philosophers such as Susan Stebbing; I used her book A Modern Introduction to Logic for my ‘A’ level Logic. There are others steering Philosophy away from the scientific-mathematical model – John Cottingham calls his approach humane Philosophy. Bernard Williams, talking to us students, said he didn’t know how to write Moral Philosophy – just after he’d been appointed Knightbridge Professor in the subject. And then he went on to write some wonderful stuff.
When revolutionaries take over a place, it is the philosophers they detain early on; these theoretical people are seen as dangerous. They talk – about anything and everything under the sun. Nothing is taboo for them, nothing is sacrosanct but they do it all within the parameters of politeness. They don’t, though, go for ‘style’ but for forthrightness which may appear rude to some others. Some of their comments may sound trivial but there is usually a serious purpose behind them – intellectual clarification; they are not trying to find a practical answer to a particular question such as ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ The underlying issue is: do angels ever occupy physical space? How miniscule can that be? What exactly is the ‘physical’? (Later Berkeley would ask: what is this thing called matter?) The Ancient Greeks raised that question; and the Ancient Indians: what is the spiritual? That’s what really matters.
Just as Greek developed a wide-ranging philosophical vocabulary, Sanskrit developed a spiritual one. The Greek world continued making further distinctions, the Indian continued holistically; the first approach led, in the modern world, to experimental science. Here follows a sample of the other line of thought.
I have adapted most of the following from Man and Time by J.B. Priestly – the text itself is a bit dated now. ‘Passing time’, he says, fails to reveal the self; he turns to Ancient Indian thought for help. There is Atman and Brahman. The idea floated is that we are truly free when these two come together.
Sanskrit developed a whole new vocabulary to talk about such things. Those seasoned seers, called rishis, begin, quite acceptably, with the senses and their objects. Then they take off. Did they get lost in their abstractions? Objects, senses and observing the world. But that is not all, there is also manas, mind – this works through the senses. The senses register the impressions, the mind interprets. There is yet more – or are they beginning to invent now instead of discovering? Buddhi is the discerning intellect which is distinguished from reason; this is pure intelligence which opens us to the source of reality. This takes us not only beyond the senses but beyond the ordinary functioning of the mind and opens us to transcendence.
Now give your imagination free rein and you will find yourself, beyond buddhi, in mahat; this is ‘great world’, the world of gods and cosmic powers. We have already gone beyond the higher self – here we become aware of the world of spirits; this is the psychic world to which we belong. Each of us is a member of this Great Self.
But hang in there – there is more. There is the unmanifest. Obviously! Gods, angels, etc. are the manifestation of this – the source from which they all come. But the resting point is not even here – we have purusha or pramatma; this translates as Person, the Supreme from which all comes. Beyond this there is – nothing. And that is the goal; we have now reached the ultimate. The Absolute noths nothing being perfectly still; it is the unstruck chord – just listen! The sound of silence. As Paul Scott says in his The Raj Quartet, Indian music is the only music in the world that is aware of breaking the silence.
We have progression – from the senses, through the mind, though each stage has to be consolidated with the next one otherwise we cannot move along. Take your pick – where do you want to rest on the journey? At the senses? That suffices for worldly affairs – but Ancient Indian thought continued to develop other levels of consciousness, etc.
The question we can ask is: is this philosophy or religion? Let’s give it a different name: soteriology. The motivation is soteriological, not philosophical even though it is still, here, in embryonic form. There is nothing like the Socratic elenchus here, for example. Historically such thinking went on to develop the religion of Brahmanism, an unashamedly elitist account of human life that persists to this day. When it encountered Greek thought, there was a mismatch. In a Venn diagram, the two circles don’t quite overlap. In How the World Thinks, Julian Baggini suggests we should not define ‘philosophy’ that precisely; I disagree. Philosophy is essentially an activity, not a body of knowledge. It proceeds by questioning.
But it cannot replace religion – nor can anything else. And nor can religion replace philosophy; Wittgenstein remarked on how peculiar a subject it was – what exactly is one doing in philosophising? Of his one-time note-taker, Professor G.E. Moore, he said – if he really knows that he has two hands, as he claimed, we will grant him everything. This is in On Certainty, his last and perhaps best book. (In one episode of Columbo, he says: I know he did it. The smart lawyer-culprit challenges the claim: he knows I did it?)
Such thinking, philosophy, is not to be found east of Istanbul. No doubt there are individuals who cogitate and worry like that but it is not a general characteristic – that is more spiritual and religious for good or bad for the world. T.S. Eliot, for one, worried about becoming too Eastern in his thinking. Om Shanti. That is a direction to move towards – and a pious hope though it is not philosophy. Please don’t ask ‘what is philosophy?’