Reconfigurations of Philosophy of Religion by Kanaris Jim

Author:Kanaris, Jim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

Tanabe Hajime and Philosophy/Religion as Repentance

The philosophy of religion as a distinctive field in the Western philosophical tradition has been dominated by the rationalist approach to religion. The claim that a certain human faculty is capable of dealing with issues related to religion was the very motivation for the emergence of the field. Descartes claimed that it is a philosopher’s job, not a theologian’s, to prove the existence of God; Hegel, in his vast work of lectures on the philosophy of religion, tried to outline the evolution of religions from Asian and primitive forms to what he considered to be the most mature form of religion, which, for him, was represented by Christianity. In these figures’ discussion of religion, religious phenomena were understood as being “homogeneous,” and no serious consideration was given to the idea that there might be different ways of envisioning the ultimate being, the individual’s relation to that ultimate being, and the very meaning of a religious agent. Hegel might have wanted to consider religious traditions other than the Christian tradition, but his lectures on the philosophy of religion fell far short of acknowledging different possibilities of understanding the features of religious phenomena in different religious traditions.10 When the classical topics in the philosophy of religion were considered by Asian thinkers in the context of Asian religious and philosophical traditions, the nature of the discussions changed.

Enryō postulated that, as much as religion, philosophy required faith, and he thus challenged the fundamental assumption of philosophical investigation in modernist philosophy. Iryŏp argued that the absolute beings in religious traditions, such as the Buddha or God, are not beings who are completely different—at their ontological level—from the common practitioners of religion, but instead, they are the ones who have fully recovered the very meaning of existence and thus of their capacity and freedom. This fully recovered capacity is characterized as encompassing both extremes of dualist postulation. As Iryŏp repeatedly emphasized, nothing in the world exists as an independent entity. One extreme, when it reaches its ultimate, turns toward its opposite, and even the Buddha is the combination of the Buddha and the demon. “Demon,” in this case, is not related to a moral concept; rather, it represents the phenomenal world in which things come into being according to causes and conditions and then disappear when those causes and conditions are exhausted. The understanding that things inevitably contain both extremes within themselves became grounds for an “absolute critique” of reason for the Kyoto School thinker Tanabe Hajime.

It might not be a coincidence that the reflections on philosophy and religion of all three of the thinkers we discuss here are keenly influenced by specific social and historical realities. The introduction of the Western categories of philosophy and religion was a source of inspiration of Enryō’s philosophy; Iryŏp’s Buddhist philosophy was in some way an extension of her search for freedom, which she began as an activist in women’s issues in her pre-monastic life; and Tanabe’s philosophy of religion is explicitly related to the reality of post–World War Japan.

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